Brennan opened this part of the discussion noting that it's "been public for years" that our intelligence folks determined China tried to influence our election by changing what we think, not by hacking or anything like that. She asked Warner, a long-time member of the Senate Intelligence Committee (IC), if it had ever been given any evidence backing up this statement from Trump:
This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes – and really exposes like levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.
"Absolutely not," Warner said, adding that the speech was full of "absurdities and falsehoods," and said that "the only election that Trump is concerned about is 2020. That was the election that his administration was in charge of," and that he "forgets or just omits" Russia. He confirmed the IC hasn't received any report from the administration's analysis of the 2024 election.
After itemizing moves by the administration, including cutting funding for the Cybersecurity Agency (CISA), abandoning the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), which allows states to share voter information to help identify duplicate registrations, deceased voters, and so on, and tanking the Election Assistance Committee (EAC), Warner said this:
Why is he doing all these things? I believe it's because Donald Trump intends to interfere in this year's elections. He knows, if there is a free and fair election, his policies will be rejected at record levels.
Brennan asked (twice) what Warner meant by interference.
Whether that takes - I think that what we just saw was, this was the opening shot, the opening shot of trying to undermine Americans' confidence that their vote will be actually counted and mean something... I fear as well that if he tries to pull something that could potentially - he's not ruled out bringing ICE to the polls. He's not even ruled out the idea of trying to bar certain voting machines.
Brennan then turned to CBS News contributors David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and Chris Krebs, the former director of CISA during the 2020 election cycle. Notably, Krebs was fired by Trump for saying that the 2020 election was secure, and that's where Brennan started this segment, asking if anything he heard from Trump changed his assessment.
Not - not at all. In fact, I would say that it further bolsters my confidence in the security of the 2020 election, between what has been released, disclosed last week, and all the information and the results of court challenges and other things in the intervening six years.
Brennan, noting that Trump was particularly aggressive towards Krebs, asked him to describe "the Chinese role in the 2020 election." He said there was an "honest debate and discussion" about China's intent across the intelligence community.
But ultimately, when it came out in the intelligence community assessment that was released in the spring of 2021, it was that China had a preference, and that they were not in favor of President Trump, but their efforts were principally limited to influencing the American public, seeking to pay journalists, media. But it was an influence effort...
A method, he said, China has been using since the early- or mid-2000s. It's not new, he said; "they did turn up the heat, and they are still doing it today. He said, "we have a significant and serious counterintelligence and counterespionage problem with China." And, responding to Trump saying folks did not disclose anything to him, "or to anyone else" or to Congress, Krebs offered this:
In January of 2020, there was a National Intelligence Community memorandum about the 2020 election that talked about the vulnerabilities we saw on systems and the work we needed to do there, but it also talked about the intent of adversaries. And there were countless memos after that...a lot of these products were in senior executive and policymakers' binders, their intelligence binders every single day. We used those to get out there and talk to the American people. I wrote an op-ed in September of 2020 for the general public that discussed various threat actors, including China. So, I have a hard time believing that it didn't get up into the Oval.
Brennan, before leaving this topic, said. "As China was described as attempting to influence, it was Iran and Russia, primary actors directly undermining the election in some of those 2020 statements. It sounds like you're saying he didn't read the memo" (emphasis added). Krebs agreed.
