Capitol Hill hearings focus on Russian election hacking efforts
WASHINGTON — U.S. officials sought yesterday to underscore for lawmakers the threat Russia posed to the 2016 vote for the White House, outlining efforts to hack into election systems in 21 states and to fill the internet with misinformation during a divisive campaign season.
Officials also revealed what appeared to be a breakdown in communications about how severe the threat appeared, and they reported tensions the Obama administration faced in trying to publicly warn of meddling in the face of a skeptical then-candidate Donald Trump.
“One of the candidates, as you’ll recall, was predicting that the election was going to be rigged in some way. And so we were concerned that, by making the statement, we might in and of itself be challenging the integrity of the — of the election process itself,” Jeh Johnson, the former head of the Homeland Security Department, told members of the House intelligence committee.
The testimony came during a morning of double-barreled intelligence committee hearings — one in the House and one in the Senate — that underscored the U.S. intelligence community’s months-old determination that Russia attempted to meddle in the election.
A day earlier, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said he still has yet to know the president’s thoughts on whether Russia interfered.
Johnson said Russian hacking didn’t change election totals, but he can’t be sure other meddling didn’t influence public opinion.
Virginia U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, the committee’s ranking Democrat, noted that the FBI has confirmed intrusions into voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois, and said Americans need to know the identities of the other 19 states where meddling was detected.
Johnson said he doesn’t know whether the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails and other Moscow-directed interference “did in fact alter public opinion, and thereby alter the outcome of the presidential election.” He said he was frustrated DHS learned of the hack into the DNC late in the game and said the committee refused help because it was using a private cybersecurity firm.