After the meeting, Trump said nothing about the attack, which went unnoticed by his administration’s intelligence services for months. While those agencies are now mobilizing to assess the damage – which the government said Thursday could be more widespread than initially thought and pose a “ serious risk to the federal government ” – the president himself remains silent on the matter, but has he was instead preoccupied with his election loss and his trumped-up claims of widespread voter fraud.
The massive data breach, which came to light in the closing weeks of Trump’s administration, amounts to a dramatic coda for a presidency clouded by questions about respect for Russia and failed attempts to reinforce relations with its president, Vladimir Putin, to heat. Just as he has largely ignored the latest wave of coronavirus cases, Trump seems to have almost relinquished his responsibility in his last 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 if a formal briefing is not on his agenda and a senior White House official told CNN that Trump was. notified of the hack by its top intelligence officials on Thursday.
Members of the staff of President-elect Joe Biden were also briefed by officials about the massive burglary, an official from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said. Biden himself has also been given details in his daily secret briefing, which is on his public agenda every day this week.
The widespread and extraordinary intrusion by suspected Russian hackers of US government systems has launched a technical mission among the government’s leading cyber officials and outside experts on how this month-long, continuous cyber campaign went unnoticed for so long.
It wasn’t until Wednesday evening that the US government formally recognized that the ongoing cyber campaign was still active. The revelation comes at a particularly fraught time during a divisive presidential transition and after an election that was, in all likelihood, free from foreign interference.
It’s unclear when Trump may have been briefed on the latest hack. It is also unclear how concerned Trump has responded. He has left all public comments to members of his cabinet and administration. And despite a healthy pace of tweets about the election results and his false allegations of voter fraud, he has not given any notice about the hack.
Senator Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican who has been a frequent Trump critic, said on Thursday that it was “astonishing” that Trump had not yet responded.
“I think the White House should say something aggressive about what happened,” said Romney. “This is almost like flying a Russian bomber flying unnoticed over land, including over land.”
Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien cut short a trip to Europe earlier this week to return to Washington for urgent meetings about the hack, and the White House has convened daily discussions with national security agencies about the break-in, according to well-known people. with the issue.
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) filthy fact is that most entities don’t know they’ve been hacked,” said Rep. Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN Thursday.
Senate Republicans on Thursday said they saw no problem in Trump’s silence as his administration works to get to the bottom of the matter.
“Information is still being collected, so I would warn anyone drawing conclusions or making statements until everything is in,” said Marco Rubio, chairman of the Senate’s intelligence service. “I think there is still a lot to be learned about it. I would warn everyone not to speak up too much if there are still many facts to be gathered.
‘A very big problem’
Senator Josh Hawley, who is a member of Senate Armed Services, says he has not been informed about the hack. “I’m fine with what they have said in public,” he said of the administration. “It’s a really big deal. And we definitely need to learn more … I’m really worried about it.”
When asked if Trump should discuss this publicly, Hawley said, “I think the important thing is to get a report and let us know the extent of the breach. Maybe they are trying to figure that out. “
Although Trump has said nothing about the attack, his former homeland security adviser Tom Bossert urged the president in an op-ed to formally assign responsibility and, if Russia is confirmed behind it, “make it clear to Vladimir Putin that these actions are unacceptable. to be. . “
Trump is also threatening to veto the National Defense Authorization Act on a provision requiring the renaming of military bases named after Southern leaders and adding a provision to reform liability laws for social media companies such as Twitter. The defense policy bill contains provisions that would help the US government tackle cyber threats.
“We have provisions in the bill that he needs in case of hacking, the cyberthreats out there,” said Senate Armed Forces Chairman Jim Inhofe of Trump and the NDAA, which he has led. But Inhofe, who has been briefed on the hack, said he wouldn’t criticize Trump for not speaking out.
Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat on the panel, has also not yet been briefed, but said he is trying to set one up for himself before Friday.
“I think he should, but frankly I don’t think he will,” Kaine said when asked if Trump should take it firmly. “I don’t think we’re likely to get a clear answer as to the depths of this and what we should do to counter it until the new government is in place.”
As the outline of the data breach is still coming into view, the incident underscores how little Trump’s efforts to bring Putin to justice have been done over the past four years to improve relations with Moscow. Even when he frustrated his own advisers by delaying punitive action and trying to befriend his Russian counterpart, Trump is ending his term when faced with one of Russia’s most brutal attempts yet to infiltrate American systems.
That’s a lot like how Trump started his presidency, when US intelligence agencies assessed that Russia had worked to influence the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf. The president’s reluctance to confront Russia on that front, or to warn Putin not to interfere again, has created the impression in his critics that he is too weak for Putin.
A tweet that Trump published in 2017, following his first meeting with Putin on the sidelines of a G7 meeting in Hamburg, now illustrates the naivety with which many in Congress and even within the administration say Trump was approaching Russia.
“Putin and I discussed creating an impenetrable Cyber Security unit to guard election hacking and many other negative things,” he wrote at the time, an idea that was derided at the time and never materialized.
Although 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 by saying in a message that he was “ready for contacts and interactions with you.”
“We need a fair reset in terms of relations between the United States and Russia,” Senator Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, said Wednesday. “We cannot be buddies with Vladimir Putin and have him carry out such a cyber attack on America at the same time. This is basically a declaration of war by Russia on the United States, and we have to take it so seriously.”
Silence
It was not just electoral interference that did not lead to condemnation of the president; he did not raise with Putin the issue of Russia giving bounties to US soldiers in Afghanistan when he spoke to him this summer – another issue Trump claimed was never included in his intelligence briefings, although officials said it was a written briefing from February.
After several US troops in Syria were injured following 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 the UK sanctioned six top Russian officials close to Putin for the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Trump did not.
Bolton listed a slew of government actions against Russia, saying Trump “cited these as significant achievements, but nearly all of them provoked opposition, or at least protracted grumbling and complaining, from Trump himself.”
Constantly frustrated by what he called the “Russian hoax,” Trump accused his opponents of trying to hinder good relations with Moscow when investigating links between his campaign and Russian electoral interference.
Trump has become so annoyed at mentioning Russian atrocities that he has in the past resisted intelligence warnings about Russia, with leading members of his national security group – including those who delivered the president’s Daily Brief – less likely to inform him about Russia – related threats to the US, multiple former Trump administration officials have told CNN.
When his verbal intelligence briefing included information about 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.