RUSSIA ROLE in elections not a topic for Trump, ex-Homeland Security chief told.
Officials say she faced roadblocks in attempts to focus on ’20 meddling
WASHINGTON — In the months before Kirstjen Nielsen resigned, she tried to focus the White House on one of her highest priorities as homeland security secretary: preparing for new and different Russian forms of interference in the 2020 election.
President Donald Trump’s chief of staff told her not to bring it up in front of the president.
Nielsen left the Department of Homeland Security this month after a tumultuous 16-month tenure and tensions with the White House. Officials said she had become increasingly concerned about Russia’s continued activity in the United States during and after the 2018 midterm elections — ranging from its search for new techniques to divide Americans using social media, to experiments by hackers, to rerouting Internet traffic and infiltrating power grids.
But in a meeting this year, Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff, made clear that Trump still equated any public discussion of malign Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his victory.
Nielsen eventually gave up on her effort to organize a White House meeting of Cabinet secretaries to coordinate a strategy to protect next year’s elections.
As a result, the issue did not gain the urgency or widespread attention that a president can command. And it meant that many Americans remain unaware of the latest versions of Russian interference.
This account of Nielsen’s frustrations was described by three senior Trump administration officials and one former senior administration official, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Before she resigned April 7, Nielsen and other officials looked for other ways to raise the alarm.
The opening page of the Worldwide Threat Assessment, a public document compiled by government intelligence agencies that was delivered to Congress in late January, warned that “the threat landscape could look very different in 2020 and future elections.”
“Russia’s social media efforts will continue to focus on aggravating social and racial tensions, undermining trust in authorities and criticizing perceived anti-Russia politicians,” the report noted. It also predicted that “Moscow may employ additional influence tool kits — such as spreading disinformation, conducting hack-and-leak operations or manipulating data — in a more targeted fashion to influence U.S. policy, actions and elections.”
Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, eliminated the position of cybersecurity coordinator at the White House last year, leaving junior aides to deal with the issue. In January, Nielsen fumed when 45 percent of her cyberdefense workforce was furloughed during the government shutdown.
Nielsen grew so frustrated with White House reluctance to convene top-level officials to come up with a governmentwide strategy that she twice pulled together her own meetings of Cabinet secretaries and agency leaders. They included top Justice Department, FBI and intelligence officials, many of whom later periodically issued public warnings about indicators that Russia was both looking for new ways to interfere and experimenting with techniques in Ukraine and Europe.
One senior official described Homeland Security officials as adamant that the U.S. government needed to significantly step up its efforts to urge the American public and companies to block foreign influence campaigns. But the department was stymied by the White House’s refusal to discuss it, the official said.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said there was a “very real risk” of Russian interference in future elections. “We are woefully unprepared because even raising this issue is met with hostility by a president who views any discussion of election security as a threat to his legitimacy,” Schiff said in a statement Wednesday.
A second senior administration official said Nielsen began pushing after the November midterms for the governmentwide efforts to protect the 2020 elections, but only after it became increasingly clear that she had fallen out of Trump’s favor for not taking a harder line against immigration.
That official said Nielsen wanted to make election security a top priority at meetings of Trump’s principal national security aides, who resisted making it a focus of the discussions given that the 2020 vote was, at the time, nearly two years away.
On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Trump administration would continue to confront Moscow on its attempts to meddle in the 2020 elections.
“Russia interferes in a number of places,” Pompeo said. “I don’t think there’s been a discussion between a senior U.S. official and Russians in this administration where we have not raised this issue about our concern about Russia’s interference in our elections.
“We will make very clear to them this is unacceptable behavior,” he said.