Less than two years after Russia penetrated state election systems, the White House has eliminated the cybersecurity coordinator position on the National Security Council.
A memorandum circulated by an aide to the new national security adviser, John R. Bolton, said the post was no longer considered necessary because lower-level officials had already made cybersecurity issues a “core function” of the president’s national security team.
Can someone please ask John Bolton if he’s eliminating all the other top-level jobs overseeing things that are also done by lower-level officials? Including the things he thinks are important, like, uh, bombing countries? I didn’t think so. Bolton appears to think he’s still living in the George W. Bush years, the last time he was in government:
Mr. Bolton has virtually no cyber-related experience. When he was last in government, as ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, cybersecurity was not formally considered a national threat. It is now listed as the No. 1 threat in the annual assessment that the director of national intelligence sends to Congress.
Mr. Bolton has talked about “streamlining” the N.S.C., and so far that appears to have involved reducing many of the new positions created over the past decade.
It’s awfully convenient for Donald Trump to have a national security adviser who isn’t worried about Russian hacking efforts, isn’t it?