After Robert Mueller's warning, a broad agreement on election threats but not on what to do about them

WASHINGTON – Barely a day after former special counsel Robert Mueller sounded an alarm over Russian election meddling, the Senate offered a reminder of how turbulent and fractious efforts to secure U.S. elections have become.

Republicans who control the Senate blocked two bills, both offered by Democrats, that would have required political campaigns to report attempts at interference by foreign interests. A third Democratic proposal, aimed at thwarting hacking attacks against senators and their staffs, also bit the dust.

Meanwhile, Senate investigators said in a new report that Russian hackers appeared to have targeted election offices in all 50 states in 2016 as they probed for weaknesses in American defenses.

With a little more than a year to go until Americans select a president in 2020, the events combined to lay bare the looming challenges confronting lawmakers, security officials and the nation's electoral system.

Mueller's two-year investigation of Russia's efforts in 2016 determined that the Kremlin had engaged in a "sweeping" assault on the U.S. political system. And while lawmakers from both parties and President Donald Trump's administration have largely agreed on the need to guard against similar attacks in the future, there is little agreement on how to do it.

"The Russian government's (continuing) efforts to interfere in our election is among the most serious," Mueller told the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday. "I hope it's not the new normal, but I fear it is."

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Broad agreement on the threats

Indeed, lawmakers, former federal officials and cybersecurity analysts said much more work was necessary to secure the government against an all-but certain new campaign of foreign interference.

A new assessment of election security released Thursday by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that while the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI had taken important steps to improve protective measures, the threat had not been eliminated.

"Cyber-security for electoral infrastructure at the state and local level was sorely lacking in 2016," the committee found. "Despite increased focus over the last three years, some of these vulnerabilities, including aging voting equipment, remain."

State and local defenses are critical, the committee found, because Russia had successfully "exploited the seams between federal authorities ... and protection for the states," the report, endorsed by members of both parties, found.

"State election officials, who have primacy in running elections, were not sufficiently warned or prepared to handle an attack from a hostile nation-state actor," the Senate panel concluded.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday authorities were bracing for a new assault.

“In the last few years, we’ve seen many examples of cyber actors targeting political campaigns to glean intelligence,” Wray said in speech at Fordham University. “We’ve also seen examples of actors targeting election infrastructure to obtain (personal information), exact ransoms, temporarily disrupt election operations and undermine voter confidence in the electoral process. We expect much the same in 2020.”

Wray's warning built on a daunting assessment he provided earlier this week to the Senate Judiciary Committee, just a day before Mueller's highly anticipated House testimony outlining the findings of the two-year investigation into Russian election interference.

"The Russians are absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections through foreign influence in particular," Wray told the panel, adding that all of the public admonishments and government sanctions leveled against the Kremlin since 2016 have failed to eliminate the potential peril.

"My view is that until they stop, they have not been deterred enough," he said.

Disagreement on what to do next

The new warnings came as lawmakers bitterly disagreed Thursday on how to bolster defenses in advance of the 2020 election.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., leveled a broadside against Majority Leader Mitch McConnell after Republicans blocked a proposal that in part would have provided more than $500 million to upgrade state election security.

"Mueller's (Wednesday) testimony was a clarion call for election security," Schumer said on the Senate floor. "Mueller's testimony was a wake-up call for every American."

McConnell dismissed the proposal as a "partisan" move that had little Republican support.

"This is just a highly partisan bill from the same folks who spent two years hyping up a conspiracy theory about President Trump and Russia," McConnell said.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the Intelligence Committee's vice chairman and sponsor of one of the nixed proposals to require campaigns to report attempts at foreign interference to federal authorities, said McConnell was standing in the way of voter security.

"The majority leader has been blocking multiple, serious, bipartisan election security bills for months," Warner tweeted. "If he would let it, the Senate could get serious about election security right now."

Among the most alarming shortcomings in U.S. election security, some analysts said, is the absence of a formal protection strategy linking federal, state and local governments to guard against the future attacks.

"Honest to God, have we learned nothing?" said David Hickton, a former federal prosecutor who directs the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security. "We're not doing what we need to do. We can't expect local governments to defend against sophisticated attacks supported by the Russian government. It's just not a fair fight."

Hickton urged lawmakers to heed the warnings leveled by both Mueller and Wray.

"Mueller is a guy who has been to war, has had shrapnel in his leg and yet describes the threat posed by Russia has perhaps the most serious he has seen," Hickton said, referring to Mueller's service in Vietnam. "We need to listen to the people who have seen this threat up close."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: After Mueller's warning, parties split on fixing 2020 election threats