NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers stated under oath that he has not received the authority from Trump for US Cyber Command to battle Russian and other foreign attacks on their own home field.
In testimony before a Senate committee, Rogers was asked by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) about the Department of Defense’s ability to respond to cyber attacks from Russia “against our forthcoming elections.”
“We have been attacked and there are a lot of us that feel like we are still being attacked and that we’re going to be attacked particularly with regard to our elections,” Nelson explained. “So, what’s the holdup?”
“The challenge for us is right now we have this thing called the law,” Rogers replied. “And the legal framework shapes what DOD can and cannot do.”
“What do you need as the commander to say go after and punish these guys that are trying to tear apart our critical infrastructure?” Nelson pressed.
“I need a policy decision that indicates that there’s specific direction to do that,” Rogers said. “The secretary [of defense] would ultimately make a recommendation to the president… and then based on that, we’d be given specific direction and specific authority.”
“So you need a direction and specific authority from the White House?” Nelson remarked.
“The president ultimately would make this decision,” Rogers stated.
And so far Trump hasn’t made that decision. He doesn’t even admit that he needs to make that decision.
He instead has been on a tweet-rant about how Russia is a “hoax” and that we need to investigate Hillary Clinton. Again.
In a Tuesday tweet, President Donald Trump seemed to gleefully cite Fox News’s Judge Andrew Napolitano for the assumption that the Justice Department is hiding evidence of illegal activity by former Secretary Hillary Clinton.
“He’s got a very good point. Somebody in the Justice Department has a treasure trove of evidence of Mrs. Clinton’s criminality at her own hands, or through others, that ought to be investigated. I fully agree with the President on that,” Trump said in a tweet citing Napolitano on Martha MacCallum’s Show.
And he’s been complaining that there’s “No collusion.”
And then you’ve got his official spokeshill claiming that Trump hasn’t given authority to Admiral Rogers — despite his testimony about exactly that — and instead blaming Obama, again.
“But Admiral Rogers is the one that would have the agency that could actually go and confront the Russian intrusion at the source,” [ABC correspondent Jonathan] Karl insisted. “And he hasn’t been given the authority. In fact, he says the Russians haven’t paid a sufficient price to make them change their behavior. Why not give him the authority?”
“Nobody is denying him the authority!” Sanders shot back. “We’re looking at a number of different ways that we can put pressure [on the Russians]. This president… has been much tougher on Russia than his predecessor. Let’s not forget that this happened under Obama. This didn’t happen under President Trump. If you want to blame somebody on past problems then you need to look at the Obama administration.”
“This is not about the past!” Karl pointed out. “This is about preventing intrusion in the next election. He says he needs the authority and hasn’t been given it.”
The simple fact that Obama did just about everything he could short of starting a cyberwar with Russia to stop them from hacking the election. Some of that may have worked at least in preventing them from actually trying to change the voting results, but it may not have been enough.
The highlight Talking Points for Dems are as follows:
- Obama ultimately sanctioned Russia three times but Trump has only [barely] done it once instead, he’s tried multiple times to cut or end the sanctions without any justification.
- Trump has still failed to respond to Russian bots and trolls hyping false memes about the Parkland Florida Massacre.
- Obama wasn’t first briefed about the Russian Cyber attack until August of 2016, just 2 months before the election so there wasn’t a lot of time to waste.
- Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnston alerted and reached out to offer technical cybersecurity support to the states, but some rejected his help and some were ultimately hacked.
- Obama notified Congress only to have McConnel and Ryan refuse to issue a joint public statement against the Cyber Attacks, and then they threatened to claim any such announcements were “partisan politics”. Ranking Intel Dems Feinstein and Schiff made announcements anyway.
- Instead of congratulating Putin for his re-election or defending his claims that “He says he didn’t do it” — Obama got directly Putin’s face and warned him to “Cut it out.”
- CIA Director Brennen also got on the phone with the head of Russia’s FSB and warned them that they needed to stop.
- Obama then used the Nuclear War “Red Phone” to warn the Kremlin that there could be “Armed Conflict” if they didn’t stop.
- Obama warned Mark Zuckerberg about Fake News on Facebook, but Zuckerberg denied it and ignored it.
- Obama implemented punitive sanctions, closed two Russian compounds, ejected dozens of Russian diplomats and planted the seeds for a future Cyber War if needed.
Considering how much time he had to work with, that was quite a bit and still far more than Trump has done over a year later.
1. Obama sanctioned Russia three times but Trump hasn’t [yet] done it once.
I know reporters aren’t really supposed to part of the Obama Administration Protection and Defense Force but it’s particularly galling when Huckabee-Sanders tries to sling naked bullshit like Trump has been much tougher on Russia” than Obama when in fact Obama signed the Magnitski Act and spearheaded Sanctions over their illegal invasion of Crimea, which crushed their economy into a fine powder, then he extended the Sanctions for another year which means they come to a halt in March of 2018.
Then he hit them again with sanctions in response to the election meddling [more on that later.]
Almost immediately after that Michael Flynn told Kislyak they would “review everything” including Obama’s sanctions for election meddling then lied about it to the FBI, some of his staff tried to get the State Department to totally drop sanctions only to get told “No”, they tried to cut sanctions just for the energy section and got told “NO” again and Michael Cohen and Felix Sater tried to negotiate a deal with a Ukrainian Diplomat that would have ended sanctions.
Meanwhile, Trump and Tillerson have closed the State Dept. Sanctions office, and so far refused to implement the additional sanctions on Russia that were implemented by Congress as a result of their previous attempts to drop the sanctions for no reason. [Update: Trump’s Treasury eventually did implement some sanctions against the FSB for their election meddling finally, but so far it’s had no discernible effect.]
So, “tougher” how exactly?
2. Trump has failed to respond to Russian bots and trolls hyping false memes about the Parkland Florida Massacre.
This isn’t about “the past” in the sense that Russian bots are already gearing up to attack us during the midterms and are currently flogging right-wing memes about the Parkland Florida shooting.
In the wake of Wednesday’s Parkland, Florida, school shooting, which resulted in 17 deaths, troll and bot-tracking sites reported an immediate uptick in related tweets from political propaganda bots and Russia-linked Twitter accounts. Hamilton 68, a website created by Alliance for Securing Democracy, tracks Twitter activity from accounts it has identified as linked to Russian influence campaigns. As of morning, shooting-related terms dominated the site’s trending hashtags and topics, including Parkland, gun control now, Florida, gun control, and Nikolas Cruz, the name of the alleged shooter. Popular trending topics among the bot network include shooter, NRA, shooting, Nikolas, Florida, and teacher.
But in general, this isn’t much different from the blather we basically here from Eric Trump claiming the Russian thing is a Hoax, and gee isn’t it sad Obama didn’t stop it?
Eric Trump admitted on Fox News that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election — but he blamed his father’s predecessor for not stopping it.
The president’s son told “Fox & Friends” that the Democratic response to a memo compiled by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) showed the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign was politically motivated, although even co-host Ainsley Earhardt gently corrected his claim.
...
Earhardt pointed out that the FISA court that approved surveillance against a Trump campaign adviser was told that some of the evidence had been gathered by political operatives, but the president’s son pressed on.
“What started off as a hoax, you know, Trump won the election because of Russia, has been nothing further from the truth, [Yeah, that’s now clearly bullshit] and they ended up finding themselves in this whole irony, and it’s kind of amusing,” Trump said.
Co-host Brian Kilmeade said it was troubling that Russia was bold enough to interfere in the U.S. election, and he said it had to stop.
“I agree,” Trump said. “I wish Obama would have done that. If he knew, which he clearly did, I wish he would have stopped that. The big question is, why did he do nothing about it?”
Why did he do nothing about it? Well, actually — he did plenty about it.
3. Obama wasn’t first briefed about the Russian Cyber attack until August of 2016, just 2 months before the election.
In point of fact Obama was very interested in the Russia attacks and meddling in the U.S, election after he was told in August when CIA Director Brennen sent an “Eyes Only” private note to the WH for Obama and just 3 senior aids which stated that “Putin has ordered a cyber attack to defeat or damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and elect Donald Trump.”
Early last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides.
Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.
But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.
At that point, the outlines of the Russian assault on the U.S. election were increasingly apparent. Hackers with ties to Russian intelligence services had been rummaging through Democratic Party computer networks, as well as some Republican systems, for more than a year. In July, the FBI had opened an investigation of contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates. And on July 22, nearly 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were dumped online by WikiLeaks.
One of the sources for Brennen’s concern was information he receiving from the Netherlands, whose intel services had managed to hack the Russian hackers.
As if the story of the 2016 election and associated cyberattacks wasn’t already complicated enough, new information now suggests that Dutch intelligence has for years been aware of, and sharing, information on the Russian hackers suspected to be behind a number of high-profile hacks.
Dutch broadcaster NOS and newspaper Volkskrant reported the news today.
The Netherlands’ Joint Sigint Cyber Unit, in the summer of 2014, seems to have found the den of “Cozy Bear,” as the state-sponsored group came to be known (also APT29) after the DNC hack in 2016. JSCU infiltrated its network and a nearby security camera, allowing it to see what Cozy Bear was up to, and possibly who was a member.
JSCU shared this data with the CIA and NSA on a continuing basis all the way through the 2016 election, after which their surveillance was discontinued or compromised.
A report in the Washington Post months later apparently revealed a bit more than they were comfortable with, and the report says that the Dutch intelligence sources have been more guarded with their information since that time.
4. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnston alerted and reached out to offer technical cybersecurity support to the states, but some rejected his help and some were ultimately hacked.
And the first thing he did was try to do was “STOP THEM” from accessing our voting systems but it’s not exactly that easy.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is weighing new steps to bolster the security of the United States’ voting process against cyberthreats, including whether to designate the electronic ballot-casting system for November’s elections as “critical infrastructure,” Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, said on Wednesday.
In the wake of hacks that infiltrated Democratic campaign computer systems, Mr. Johnson said he was conducting high-level discussions about “election cybersecurity,” a vastly complex effort given that there are 9,000 jurisdictions in the United States that have a hand in carrying out the balloting, many of them with different ways of collecting, tallying and reporting votes.
“We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process is critical infrastructure, like the financial sector, like the power grid,” Mr. Johnson told reporters in Washington. “There’s a vital national interest in our electoral process.”
…
Mr. Johnson said he was considering communicating with state and local election officials across the country to inform them about “best practices” to guard against cyberintrusions, and that longer-term investments would probably have to be made to secure the voting process.
However, some states responded to this effort by Secretary Johnson by claiming it was nothing more than a Federal Power Grab.
The federal government wants to help states keep hackers from manipulating the November election, amid growing fears that the U.S. political system is vulnerable.
But Georgia’s top election official is balking at the offers of assistance — and accusing the Obama administration of using exaggerated warnings of cyberthreats to intrude on states’ authority.
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s objections add to a bumpy start for the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to shore up safeguards for the election, during a summer when cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee have called attention to weaknesses across the electoral system. Cybersecurity experts call tougher protections long overdue for parties, political advocacy groups and voting machinery, but DHS’ efforts risk becoming caught in the same partisan arguments about state sovereignty that have hung up programs such as President Barack Obama’s Medicaid expansion.
“It seems like now it’s just the D.C. media and the bureaucrats, because of the DNC getting hacked — they now think our whole system is on the verge of disaster because some Russian’s going to tap into the voting system,” Kemp, a Republican, told POLITICO in an interview. “And that’s just not — I mean, anything is possible, but it is not probable at all, the way our systems are set up.”
Yeah, right — “not probable at all.” Except for the 20 states that they apparently attempted to breach.
Nearly half of the states in the U.S. have recently had their voter registration systems targeted by foreign hackers, and four of those systems have successfully been breached, sources tell ABC News.Nearly half of the states in the U.S. have recently had their voter registration systems targeted by foreign hackers, and four of those systems have successfully been breached, sources tell ABC News.
That amount of targeting and actual infiltration into state election-related systems is significantly larger than the U.S. government has been willing to acknowledge.
Hackers working on behalf of the Russian government are suspected in the onslaught against more than 20 state election systems, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.
"There's no doubt that some bad actors have been poking around," FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers Wednesday, without offering any more specifics
He acknowledged there have been “some attempted intrusions at voter registration databases” since August, when the FBI issued a bulletin to state governments warning that hackers had infiltrated the Illinois State Board of Elections and tried to breach election systems in Arizona.
We’ve most recently learned that Registration systems for at least 7 states were successfully breached.
Top-secret intelligence requested by President Barack Obama in his last weeks in office identified seven states where analysts — synthesizing months of work — had reason to believe Russian operatives had compromised state websites or databases.
Three senior intelligence officials told NBC News that the intelligence community believed the states as of January 2017 were Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Texas and Wisconsin.
Although there are other reports from the NSA that indicates that as many as 39 states were attacked and potentially breached including Illinois.
Russia’s cyberattack on the U.S. electoral system before Donald Trump’s election was far more widespread than has been publicly revealed, including incursions into voter databases and software systems in almost twice as many states as previously reported.
In Illinois, investigators found evidence that cyber intruders tried to delete or alter voter data. The hackers accessed software designed to be used by poll workers on Election Day, and in at least one state accessed a campaign finance database. Details of the wave of attacks, in the summer and fall of 2016, were provided by three people with direct knowledge of the U.S. investigation into the matter. In all, the Russian hackers hit systems in a total of 39 states, one of them said.
...
The new details, buttressed by a classified National Security Agency document recently disclosed by the Intercept, show the scope of alleged hacking that federal investigators are scrutinizing as they look into whether Trump campaign officials may have colluded in the efforts. But they also paint a worrisome picture for future elections: The newest portrayal of potentially deep vulnerabilities in the U.S.’s patchwork of voting technologies comes less than a week after former FBI Director James Comey warned Congress that Moscow isn’t done meddling.
“They’re coming after America,” Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russian interference in the election. “They will be back.”
5. Obama notified Congress only to have Republicans refuse to issue a joint public statement against the Cyber Attacks, and then they threatened to claim any such announcements were just “partisan politics”
Okay, then Obama notified Congress “Gang of 12” in order to get them to issue a unified statement condemning the attack.
The Intelligence Community had already gone on the record in early October with an assessment that Moscow was interfering with our election.
Now, it has come to light that senior Members of Congress had been briefed in September on the pervasive Russian threat to the core functioning of our democracy. Obama dispatched FBI director James Comey, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnston, and White House counterterrorism and homeland security advisor Lisa Monaco to brief the so-called “Gang of 12” lawmakers: House & Senate leaders, as well as the chairmen and ranking members on the Homeland Security and Intelligence Committee.
Guess how that went?
Good luck getting Republicans to agree on anything here. Mitch McConnell? Please. He’s the one who said, at a hush-hush meeting back in September where administration officials urged that bipartisan group of 12 legislators go public with concerns about Russian interference in the election, that he would not participate and that if Democrats did so, he would tell the American people this was just partisan politics.
Think that through. McConnell, according to the Post story, showed no concern about the truth of the allegations. And bear this nugget in mind: This was not Barack Obama trying to persuade him to join in this bipartisan effort. This was Lisa Monaco, the president’s counterterrorism adviser; and Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security secretary; and FBI Director James Comey. McConnell told Comey, in essence, to go take a jump in the lake. McConnell was interested only in party, not at all in country. That’s not treason, but it sure isn’t patriotism.
So going without McConnel Sen. Feinstein and Rep. Schiff issued a joint public statement calling out the Russians for attacking us in September of 2016.
Two senior Democratic lawmakers with access to classified intelligence on Thursday accused Russia of “making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election,” a charge that appeared aimed at putting pressure on the Obama administration to confront Moscow.
The jointly issued statement from Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam B. Schiff — Californians who are the ranking Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees, respectively — described recent cyber penetrations of the Democratic National Committee and other U.S. political entities as intrusions that were likely directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin
6. Instead of congratulating Putin for his re-election or defending his claims that “He says he didn’t do it” — Obama got directly Putin’s face and warned him to “Cut it out.”
When he had the chance Obama got directly in Putin’s face about it.
President Barack Obama has said that he ordered Russia's Vladimir Putin to "cut it out" in a conversation about email hacking ahead of the US election.
Implying that the Russian president knew about the hacks, Mr Obama said: "Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin."
The president said he had warned Mr Putin of serious consequences at a summit in September.
7. CIA Director Brennen also got on the phone with the head of the FSB and warned them that they needed to stop.
Brennen also called his counterpart Alexander Bortnikov Director of the FSB and issued him a stern warning about the hacking and active measures.
Brennan said that he first picked up on Russia's active meddling last summer and, in an August 4, 2016, phone call with Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia's FSB intelligence agency, warned him against further interference. Bortnikov, Brennan said, denied any active efforts in the election.
Rep. Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican, grilled Brennan on whether evidence he cited amounted to collusion between Trump aides and Russia.
"Seeing these types of contacts during the same period of time raised my concern," Brennan said.
Brennan cautioned lawmakers that although he could not definitively say if those contacts amounted to "collusion," he knew that Russians were actively cultivating US contacts and, very likely, did not present themselves as Russian spies.
8. Obama then used the Nuclear War “Red Phone” to warn the Kremlin that there could be “Armed Conflict” if they didn’t stop.
A month later Obama spoke directly to Putin and reached out Russia using the old cold-war “Red Phone” system and literally brought up the possibility of war.
A month later, the U.S. used the latest incarnation of an old Cold War communications system — the so-called "Red Phone" that connects Moscow to Washington — to reinforce Obama’s September warning that the U.S. would consider any interference on Election Day a grave matter.
This time Obama used the phrase "armed conflict."
"International law, including the law for armed conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace," said part of a message sent over the Red Phone on Oct. 31, according to a senior U.S. official. "We will hold Russia to those standards.”
…
Did the message work? "Look at the results," said an Obama administration official. "There was nothing done on Election Day, so it must have worked."
He meant that the nightmare scenario officials feared didn’t occur: An attempt by Russia to manipulate the voting results or throw them into question
That would be in contrast to Trump repeatedly saying “Putin denies it, and I believe him.”
9. Obama warned Mark Zuckerberg about Fake News on Facebook, but Zuckerberg denied it.
At that point in time, however, the actually hacks, had been stopped and were being deterred still, Obama went personally to Mark Zuckerberg and specifically warned him about fake ads on Facebook, however, he didn’t listen.
Then-president Barack Obama tried to warn Mark Zuckerberg about the risk of fake news on Facebook last year.
According to the Washington Post, Obama pulled Zuckerberg aside beseeching the tech billionaire to take the threat seriously just days after Zuckerberg called the possibility of fake news affecting the election a “crazy idea.” He made a second appeal on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November last year.
But while Facebook eventually acknowledged that fake news and disinformation did in fact pose a threat, Zuckerberg reportedly told Obama that there was no easy fix and claimed the messages were not widespread on Facebook.
Yeah, now we know better, don't we?
Facebook sharply increased on Wednesday its estimate of how many Americans were exposed to Russian propaganda around the 2016 election after pointed and even angry questioning from the Senate intelligence committee.
Adding into account the reach of Russian propaganda on Instagram, which Facebook owns, Facebook vice president and general counsel Colin Stretch conceded that “gets you to a little less than 150 million” people.
10. Obama implemented punitive sanctions, closed two Russian compounds, ejected dozens of Russian diplomats and planted the seeds for a Cyber War if needed.
So with the states resistant, the GOP in Congress resistant, and Zuckerberg and Facebook blowing him off Obama did the following on his own.
Over that five-month interval, the Obama administration secretly debated dozens of options for deterring or punishing Russia, including cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure, the release of CIA-gathered material that might embarrass Putin and sanctions that officials said could “crater” the Russian economy.
But in the end, in late December, Obama approved a modest package combining measures that had been drawn up to punish Russia for other issues — expulsions of 35 diplomats and the closure of two Russian compounds — with economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic.
Obama also approved a previously undisclosed covert measure that authorized planting cyberweapons in Russia’s infrastructure, the digital equivalent of bombs that could be detonated if the United States found itself in an escalating exchange with Moscow. The project, which Obama approved in a covert-action finding, was still in its planning stages when Obama left office. It would be up to President Trump to decide whether to use the capability.
Now the implementation of the Sanctions and the use of those cyber tools that were set up by Obama are currently in Trump’s hands.
So exactly what’s he doing with all that?
Nothing.
Not a damn thing. This is not about what Obama did then anymore, he put in a pretty good effort short of starting a literal CYBER WAR with Russia. The question is what’s Trump doing about it now?
