Democracy in the ‘crosshairs,’ top U.S. security official says
WASHINGTON — The White House put five top national security officials in the briefing room Thursday to stress how seriously the administration is taking the threat of Russia’s ongoing interference in U.S. elections.
“We continue to see a pervasive messaging campaign by Russia to try to weaken and divide the United States,” said the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, speaking just three months before balloting that will determine control of Congress.
The rare joint appearance by Coats, FBI director Christopher Wray, Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, White House national security adviser John Bolton and National Security Agency director Paul Nakasone came amid ongoing criticism that the administration isn’t taking the threat of Russian interference seriously.
Such bipartisan talk has escalated in the nearly three weeks since Trump, at the summit in Helsinki, Finland, publicly accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denial of meddling in the 2016 election over the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusions to the con- trary. In recent days, senators from both parties have said they’ve been the targets of cyberattacks — and criticized Trump’s seeming inattention.
“The intelligence community has been very active on this,” Sen. James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, said on CNN on Thursday, but the president “has been the only one in the government that hasn’t been paying attention to this.”
Lankford, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, also said he “would be shocked if there’s a senator that hasn’t been targeted.”
The White House’s latest damage-control effort occurred a week after the president for the first time convened a meeting of his National Security Council on the subject of election interference. The session lasted less than an hour before Trump departed for his golf club in New Jersey and did not produce any new initiatives.
Bolton also released a letter responding to an inquiry about last week’s meeting from five Democratic senators, in which he said that it was the second such meeting focused on foreign election interference and that “extensive, historic” measures have been taken. Many of those are classified, he said.
The officials spoke at the lectern from which White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who introduced them, often has echoed the president in calling the federal investigation of Russia’s 2016 actions a “witch hunt.” They did not describe any new programs and spoke mostly in broad terms about the threat from Russia and other, unnamed countries.
But they did attempt to signal an awareness of what’s at stake.
“Our democracy itself is in the crosshairs,” Nielsen said. “It’s become clear [elections] have become the target of our adversaries.”
Several officials credited the president for guiding their efforts. Bolton praised Trump for having taken “decisive action” since the start of his term. Coats said that the president “has specifically directed us to make the matter of election meddling and securing our election process a top priority.”
Asked why the public would believe them when the president so often espouses a muddled message about Russian interference, they had no answer.
“I’m not in a position to either understand fully or talk about what happened at Helsinki,” Coats said.