The Daily Beast reports intelligence community working groups tasked with creating plans to counter foreign election interference still have not finished the job even though the midterms are less than a month away.
The issue came up in a meeting this month that included current senior intelligence officials and former officials who were asked to attend and provide advice. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency were pinpointed as two of the departments that had made the most progress. The Department of Homeland Security, however, is lagging behind, according to officials inside the meeting.
The concern around election security is attributed, at least in part, to a lack of information-sharing between government agencies, officials said. But even if there was smooth inter-agency coordination, officials said they would still face one major hurdle: the White House’s unwillingness to talk about the main meddler in the 2016 presidential elections, Russia.
“We should have been doing meetings and talking about this two years ago,” one individual who was involved in a recent election briefing said. “There’s only been one or two meetings with the president on this because people have learned that if you want to keep your job you don’t bring up Russian interference in the White House.”
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President Trump has at times snapped at officials who broach the Russian meddling subject and instead, current and former senior intelligence officials said, has turned the conversation to what some believe is a red herring— China.
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“Russia is definitely changing their tactics,” one senior homeland security official said. “We just don’t know what those tactics are yet. We probably won’t know until they’re carried out.”
So far, cybersecurity researchers have found little, if any, evidence of direct Russian interference in this year’s races for the Senate and the House of Representatives. But Kremlin operatives sometimes wait until the 11th hour to strike ...
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The vulnerability of voting machines is still a major concern for U.S. intelligence agencies. For the midterms, the government has conducted on-site assessments of local election systems in preparation for any kind of foreign meddling. But officials inside the Department of Homeland Security say those systems could still be vulnerable to hackers even though many are not connected to the internet. And across the country, states are relying on outdated voting machines with antiquated software and hardware.
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In August, the White House issued a statement saying President Trump held two National Security Council meetings about the issue—one in May and one in July. The meetings focused on a “whole-of-government approach to election security,” the statement said.
Officials scoffed at the characterization. Officials at DHS briefed on the National Security Council meetings said only one of them included conversation that focused on election security and Russia.
“I can tell you that approach definitely isn’t there,” one senior intelligence official said, describing the government efforts instead as “piecemeal.”
U.S. Still Hasn’t Finalized Election Security Plans—and the Midterms Are Weeks Away (Daily Beast)