Senate Intelligence report on Russian meddling sounds alarm for 2020

The Senate Intelligence Committee outlined the dire need for the U.S. to better defend elections against attacks such as the massive campaign Russia carried out to disrupt the 2016 vote.

In a 67-page report issued Thursday, a day after special counsel Robert Mueller warned about Moscow's ongoing efforts to disrupt American democracy, the committee detailed the vast variety of ways that Russia attempted to manipulate the election by attacking state election systems as early as 2014 and executing a campaign to spread disinformation.

Much of the information in the heavily redacted document has come out in previous reports on Russian interference, and charges against the Kremlin's trolls and hackers that stemmed from Mueller's investigation, which found last year that the effort to sabotage the presidential election cost millions of dollars, may have employed hundreds of people and included fake political rallies staged on U.S. soil. But Thursday's Senate catalog of offenses arrives as many in Congress are pushing for legislation to shore up U.S. election systems against foreign cyberattacks only to face Republican opposition to the measures.

Mueller made a plea for the U.S. to quickly move to protect elections during his Wednesday testimony in the House. "Whatever legislation will encourage us to working together — the FBI, CIA, NSA and the rest — should be pursued aggressively early," he said. Furthermore, he said, "much more needs to be done in order to protect against this intrusion. Not just by the Russians, but others as well."

Yet, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has continued to block bills that would take steps to bolster protections at the polls. On Thursday, he once against stopped two election related bills in the Senate. He's accused Democrats of pursuing election security measures for "political benefit."

The Senate Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), said he hoped the findings and recommendations in the report “will underscore to the White House and all of our colleagues, regardless of political party, that this threat remains urgent, and we have a responsibility to defend our democracy against it.”

The report, which has been cleared by the U.S. intelligence committee, lays out a series of public and classified findings and recommendations that are the result of the panel's roughly two-and-a-half-year investigation examining the Moscow-led interference campaign in the last presidential election.

The Russian government “directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure at the state and local level," according to the report.

While the committee found "no evidence" that attackers changed any votes or manipulated voting machines, the efforts “exploited the seams between federal authorities and capabilities, and protections for the states.”

“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," according to the committee's findings.

The committee released its initial report and recommendations on election security in May 2018. Those findings showed that at least 21 states had their election systems targeted by Russian hackers, a figure also used by the Department of Homeland Security.

In its new report Thursday, the committee cites estimates by DHS and Michael Daniel, former President Barack Obama's cybersecurity coordinator, that the Russians had probably scanned election-related systems in all 50 states for vulnerabilities — as Daniel had testified publicly last year.

The committee says that in March 2018, DHS told it that an “attack resulted in data exfiltration from the voter registration database.” The sentences before are redacted, but the paragraph discusses Russians’ targeting of Illinois’ election systems.

The document contains an almost entirely redacted section that details Russian access to election infrastructure in “State 2,” a possible reference to Florida.

Mueller, in his report into Russian interference, disclosed that Russian hackers compromised local election systems of two Florida counties in 2016, a development later confirmed by the state’s governor.

The bipartisan report also offers up policy recommendations to shore up the nation’s voting infrastructure.

For example, U.S. intelligence agencies should place a high priority on quickly determining the culprits of cyberattacks and DHS should establish better communication between the federal government and the states.

DHS and FBI warnings ahead of Election Day 2016 "did not provide enough information or go to the right people,” the report states. “They provided no clear reason for states to take this threat more seriously than any other alert received.”

“In 2016, the U.S. was unprepared at all levels of government for a concerted attack from a determined foreign adversary on our election infrastructure,” Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said in a statement.

He credited DHS and state and local officials for making strides in the last three years to “bridge gaps in information sharing and shore up vulnerabilities.”

“There is still much work that remains to be done, however,” Burr said. “It is my hope that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report will provide the American people with valuable insight into the election security threats still facing our nation and the ways we can address them."

Thursday's report will be followed by additional volumes reviewing the Obama administration’s handling of the Russian interference effort; social media's role in the disruption campaign; the panel’s own assessment of the Obama-era Intelligence Committee’s conclusions about Russian meddling; and a final assessment of the questions surrounding the Trump campaign and whether it engaged in a conspiracy with Russia.

Burr has previously predicted that the fifth and final volume will be released toward the end of September.