With no central command from the White House, intelligence agencies have been left on their own to cobble together protections for the midterm elections. Under any competent and concerned West Wing, the National Security Council would play a lead role in providing guidance to coordinate the effort. But not under the Trump regime, writes CNN.
"There's no overall strategy, there is no one in charge. You have a lot of disconnected, discombobulated efforts that are quite frankly dysfunctional," said Brett Bruen, the former White House director of global engagement in the Obama administration who had also criticized that administration for not taking the threat posed by disinformation seriously enough.
Trump was said to be convening an NSC meeting Friday to address the issue but few details were available on it. The Department of Homeland Security, charged with election security, claims a coordinated effort is taking place but many officials have reportedly contradicted that assessment.
The confusion has not only left the intelligence community in the dark but also stranded social media companies without a game plan for combatting possible Russian election attacks this fall.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats has even drawn comparisons between the country's current infrastructure vulnerabilities to cyber attacks and those before September 11, 2001, due to miscommunication between intelligence agencies.
"I'm here to say, the warning lights are blinking red again," he said during a talk at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.
While both Coats and FBI Director Christopher Wray have both said there's no present indication Russia will act as aggressively and broadly as it did in 2016, the consensus seems to be that the country certainly isn't prepared to fend off such an effort if Russia did.