The next Russian hack

Whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice is a crucial question, the answer to which special counsel Robert Mueller III implied but did not state clearly.

What is crystal clear in his 448-page report is a conclusion that Trump, charged with making the highest-level national security decisions, has routinely denied: “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”

One reaction from Congress must be to weigh the evidence of obstruction. The other must be to ensure that Russia—and any other hostile actor—does not succeed in interfering again.

There are two approaches to defending against further intrusions. First is deterrence, which relies on making hostile actors think twice about trying to meddle. Congress passed a raft of retaliatory sanctions over Trump’s objections

following the 2016 affair, which was a start, and the president later issued an executive order promising other retaliatory measures that would harm the economy of any government that tried in the future to interfere.

The other strategy is hardening the country’s democratic infrastructure against any attempted intrusion. Trump should have made this a high priority when he entered office.

There is no reason to expect the Russians would stop at what they did before; Moscow can be expected to exploit other vulnerabilities its hackers identified.

Counties and states must continue tightening up their systems, which means buying new voting equipment that leaves paper trails, shoring up security around electronic voter rolls, insisting on statistically valid post-election audits of paper records and checking on contractors’ security measures. That will all take money—which Congress should give them.