Trump: China may have role in breach
WASHINGTON – Contradicting his secretary of state and other top officials, President Donald Trump on Saturday suggested that China, not Russia, might be behind the cyberattack against the United States and tried to minimized its impact.
In his first comments on the breach, Trump scoffed at the focus on the Kremlin and downplayed the intrusions, which the nation’s cybersecurity agency has warned posed a “grave” risk to government and private networks.
“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control,” Trump tweeted.
He also claimed the media are “petrified” of “discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!).”
There is no evidence to suggest that is the case. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday that Russia was “pretty clearly” behind the cyberattack.
“This was a very significant effort and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,” Pompeo told radio talk-show host Mark Levin.
Officials at the White House were prepared to put out a statement Friday that accused Russia of being “the main actor” in the hack, but were told at the last minute to stand down, according to a U.S. official familiar with the conversations, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
It’s clear if Pompeo got that message before his radio interview, but officials are now scrambling to figure out how to square the disparate accounts.
The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the statement or the basis of Trump’s claims.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has refused to blame Russia for welldocumented hostilities, including its interference in the 2016 election. He blamed his predecessor, Barack Obama, for Russia’s annexation of Crimea, has endorsed allowing Russia to return to the G-7 group of nations and has never taken the country to task over allegations that it put bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Pompeo in the interview said the government was still “unpacking” the cyberattack and some of it would likely remain classified.
“But suffice it to say there was a significant effort to use a piece of thirdparty software to essentially embed code inside of U.S. government systems and it now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as well,” Pompeo said.
What makes this hacking campaign extraordinary is its scale: 18,000 organizations were infected from March to June by malicious code that piggybacked on popular network-management software from an Austin, Texas, company called Solarwinds.
Though Pompeo was the first Trump administration official to publicly blame Russia for the attacks, cybersecurity experts and other U.S. officials have been clear that the operation appears to be the work of Russia. There has been no credible suggestion that any other country, including China, is responsible.
Russia has said it had “nothing to do” with the hacking.