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After the meeting, Trump said nothing about the attack, which went undetected by his administration’s intelligence agencies for months. As these agencies now mobilize to assess the damage – which the government said Thursday could be more widespread than initially thought, posing a “serious risk to the federal government” – the president himself remains silent on the question, concerned instead with his electoral loss and his fabricated claims of widespread electoral fraud.
The massive data breach, revealed in the final weeks of the Trump administration, amounts to a dramatic coda for a presidency clouded by questions of deference to Russia and unsuccessful attempts to warm up relations with its president, Vladimir Putin. Just as he largely ignored the latest surge in coronavirus cases, Trump appears to have all but abdicated his responsibilities in his final weeks in office.
The White House has not listed an intelligence briefing on the president’s daily schedule since early October, although officials say he is regularly briefed on intelligence even when a formal briefing doesn’t appear on his schedule and ‘a senior White House official told CNN that Trump was briefed on the hack by his top intelligence officials on Thursday.
Staff members of President-elect Joe Biden have also been briefed by officials of the massive intrusion, an official with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said. Biden himself also received details in his daily classified briefing, which was listed on his public program each day this week.
The vast and extraordinary intrusion of suspected Russian hackers into US government systems has launched a technical introspection mission among key government IT officials and outside experts on how this ongoing cyber campaign, which has been going on for many years. months, managed to go undetected for so long.
It was not until Wednesday evening that the US government officially acknowledged that the ongoing cyber campaign was still active. The revelation comes at a particularly difficult time during a divisive presidential transition and after an election that was evidently free of foreign interference.
It is not known when, if at all, Trump may have been made aware of the latest hack. It is also unclear how much Trump is committed to responding. He left all public responses to members of his cabinet and administration. And despite a steady pace of tweets about the election results and his bogus allegations of electoral fraud, he did not post any messages about the hack.
Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah who has been a frequent critic of Trump, said Thursday it was “astonishing” that Trump had yet to respond.
“I think the White House needs to say something aggressive about what happened,” Romney said. “It’s almost like you have a Russian bomber flying undetected over the country, including over the country.”
Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien cut short a trip to Europe to return to Washington for urgent hacking meetings earlier this week, and the White House has called daily talks with security agencies national intrusion, according to people familiar. with matter.
The House and Senate Intelligence Committees were briefed on the matter on Wednesday, but lawmakers have since made it clear that there are still more questions than answers.
“(The) dirty fact is that most entities don’t know they’ve been hacked,” Representative Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN on Thursday.
Senate Republicans said Thursday they saw no problem in Trump’s silence as his administration struggled to get to the bottom of it.
“There is still information gathering going on, so I caution anyone who draws conclusions or makes statements until this is all over,” said Senate Intelligence Chairman Marco Rubio. “I think there is still a lot to learn about this. I would caution anyone from talking too much about something when there is still a lot of facts to be gathered.
‘A very big problem’
Senator Josh Hawley, who sits on the Senate Armed Services, says he has not been made aware of the hack. “I agree with what they have said publicly,” he said of the administration. “This is a very big problem. And we definitely need to know more … It really worries me.”
When asked if Trump should address this issue publicly, Hawley said: “I think the most important thing is to release a report and let us know the extent of the violation. They may be trying to figure this out. . “
While Trump has said nothing about the attack, his former homeland security adviser Tom Bossert has urged the president in an editorial to formally assign responsibility and, if Russia is confirmed behind it, “make it clear to Vladimir Putin that these actions are unacceptable. “
Trump is also threatening to veto the National Defense Authorization Act for a provision requiring the name change of military bases named for Confederate leaders and because he wants an added provision to reform accountability laws. social media companies like Twitter. The Defense Policy Bill includes provisions that would help the US government fight cyber threats.
“We have provisions in the bill that he needs for hacking, the cyber threats that exist,” Senate Armed Services President Jim Inhofe said of Trump and the NDAA, which he said. he led. But Inhofe, who was briefed on the hack, said he would not criticize Trump for not speaking up.
Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat on the panel, has not yet been notified but said he was trying to create one for himself on Friday.
“I think he should, but frankly I don’t think he will,” Kaine said when asked if Trump should respond forcefully. “I don’t think we’re likely to have a clear answer on the depths of this situation and what we need to do to counter it until the new administration is in place.”
While the contours of the data breach are still in sight, the incident underscores how limited Trump’s efforts to court Putin have been to improve relations with Moscow over the past four years. Even though he has frustrated his own advisers by delaying punitive measures and attempting to befriend his Russian counterpart, Trump is ending his term in the face of one of Russia’s most brazen attempts to date to infiltrate American systems.
It’s a bit like how Trump started his presidency, when U.S. intelligence agencies felt that Russia had worked to influence the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf. The president’s reluctance to confront Russia on this front, or to warn Putin not to intervene any more, has fueled the impression among his detractors that he is lenient towards Putin.
A tweet published by Trump in 2017, following his first meeting with Putin on the sidelines of a G7 meeting in Hamburg, has now come to illustrate the naivety with which many members of Congress and even within the administration say that Trump has approached Russia.
“Putin and I discussed creating an impenetrable cybersecurity unit so that election hacking, and many other negative things, would be kept,” he wrote at the time, an idea that was mocked at the time. and which never materialized.
While Putin was one of the last world leaders to recognize Biden as the winner of the US election, he finally acknowledged the president-elect’s victory this week, saying in a post that he was “ready for contacts and interactions. with you”.
“We need an honest reset in the relationship between the United States and Russia,” Senator Richard Durbin, D-Illinois said Wednesday. “We cannot be friends with Vladimir Putin and at the same time ask him to do this kind of cyberattack on America. It is practically a declaration of war by Russia against the United States, and we should take it seriously. serious.”
Silence
It was not only electoral interference that failed to attract condemnation from the president; he did not raise with Putin the question of whether Russia gives bonuses to American soldiers in Afghanistan when he spoke to him over the summer – another issue which Trump says has never been contained in its intelligence briefings, although officials said it contained a written briefing from February.
After several US troops were injured in Syria after what the Pentagon described as “deliberately provocative and aggressive behavior” by Russian forces, Trump did not respond. And in October, even after the EU and UK sanctioned six senior Russian officials close to Putin for poisoning Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Trump failed to do so.
Bolton listed a slew of the administration’s actions against Russia, saying Trump “touted them as major achievements, but nearly all of them drew opposition, or at least prolonged grunts and complaints, from Trump to him. -even.”
Perpetually frustrated with what he called the “Russia hoax,” Trump accused his opponents of trying to undermine good relations with Moscow as they sought to investigate links between his campaign and the interference Russian election.
Trump has become so annoyed at the mention of Russia’s misdeeds that in the past he has resisted warnings from intelligence agencies about Russia, the main members of his national security train – including those who delivered the Daily President’s brief – to inform him less often about Russia. threats against the United States, several former Trump administration officials told CNN.
When his oral intelligence briefing included information related to Russia’s malicious activities against the United States, Trump often questioned the intelligence itself.
CNN’s Alex Marquardt, Zachary Cohen, Brian Fung, Jennifer Hansler and Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.
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