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.
Shifting gears to the widely shared belief in some quarters that non-citizens are voting in federal elections, Brennan first quoted a letter from the Justice Department to states which says
Any election official who knowingly retains noncitizens on voter registration lists or facilitates noncitizens in casting ballots will be held criminally liable.
And then, she quoted DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time.
She asked David Becker what he's hearing from election officials, and whether they're concerned with what "sounds like a threat."
Hardly a week goes by where someone in this administration doesn't threaten election officials with arrests. This – this week, we had at least two prominent administration officials doing that. It's become almost a running joke.
They've been into this administration 18 months now. The total number of election officials who've been arrested for wrongdoing is zero, and that's appropriate, because not only have they committed no crime. They've actually acted heroically and patriotically to support and facilitate our democracy through a pandemic and after – in the aftermath with disinformation.
Becker suggests that Mullin is trying to pressure folks to "surrender sensitive voter data" to the feds, noting that the DOJ is currently 0-for-16 with lawsuits on this issue, with 14 outstanding. Basically, Mullin "is threatening them with arrest for following the law."
And so I think the election officials in the states feel very confident that they are following their state laws, they're following federal laws. They're doing everything they can to make sure this election is going to be safe, convenient, and secure.
Brennan then brought up the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) Program (not to be confused with the SAVE America Act), which Mullin wants states to use, and asked Becker to explain how it works. Noting that there are some legal challenges tied to the program, he said it pulls data from federal sources and uses it to match with data shared by the states.
And from the limited federal data that it has, it can then match it in some cases to data that states may choose to share with it. The problem is that DHS admits that data is incomplete. They don't have all of the data, so a lot of the individuals that they might flag are actually citizens. They just don't have the documentation in the federal database to back that up.
As has been fairly widely reported, there are some risks with the SAVE program, and Becker touches on that, noting that "states actually have far better data. The states are
doing a really good job with this." He explains that anyone who goes to the DMV in their state to get a license or ID, including a REAL ID, must show proof of legal residence. The documentation you provide is maintained in the state's database.
And so you see election officials in states like Georgia, which is, you know, run by Republicans, and states like Michigan, which are run by Democrats, and all across the country able to do a better job of confirming that there are noncitizens on their voter lists than the federal government could ever do. And they've been in office for 18 months, and now they're talking about coming up with a plan in 30 days. And, in that 18 months, they've only charged 39 people throughout the entire country with voting as noncitizens.
Brennan shared information from Republican officials who've said they have had no outreach from the White House about any direct threats to elections. The officials, from Utah and West Virginia, basically said, 'you got them, bring them.' The Utah officials want the government to stop filing "frivolous lawsuits that consume our precious time and taxpayer resources."
Krebs agreed: "If there is intelligence that needs to be shared with the states, get it to them." That would usually happen before a public announcement, he added.
So, if there was something net new in the Thursday night address that needed to get out to election officials, that should have gone out Wednesday or Thursday morning.
He also said his team conducted 33 classified briefings with election officials in 2020, compared to what he believes is none since Trump took office last year. He said the partnership between the feds and state officials needs to be renewed, CISA refunded and staffed, as well as "FBI task forces" and "DNI mission centers all around election security. And funding for the states to modernize their systems.
Becker got the last word in the classroom, saying, "On the bright side - and this is a pretty limited bright side -" all the stuff that happened, that Sen. Warner and Krebs mentioned, "happened early in the administration"
So the states have been able to prepare for that. They have been trying – working and networking amongst themselves to fill that gap. And at the end of the day, they have paper ballots. They audit those paper ballots to make sure that they're counted properly. They've hardened their systems, their voter registration databases.
It's going to be a secure election.
And here's my last word: in my opinion, no one has done more to damage Americans' confidence in our elections than the man sitting in the Oval Office right now.
His constant drumbeat that the only way he can lose is if the Dems cheat, even as he tried, both directly and indirectly, to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, the January 6th insurrection, and his interference since then, has done almost immeasurable harm. I can only hope that the Election Gods look warmly on the midterms in November, and all of our future elections.
And let me be unequivocally clear: election fraud is wrong, no matter who does it. When there is actual fraud, the people involved should be charged, tried, convicted, and punished, if the evidence warrants. I don't care what party the perpetrator belongs to, or what their motivation is.
Chime in on any of this - comments are always welcome.
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