“We have no authority to do that in the department,” Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
Asked by Tapper if Trump had asked him to send lawmakers to polling stations, Wolf replied, “No, absolutely, he does not. Again, that is not what we do at the Department of Homeland Security.”
“We have law enforcement authorities and law enforcement officers at the department, we have explicitly given authority through Congress and this is not one of them,” he said, adding, “This is not a mission for the Homeland Security department.”
“We will have sheriffs, and we will enforce the law, and we will hopefully have American lawyers, and we will have everyone and attorneys general (sic),” Trump said.
Wolf also said Sunday that there was no intelligence that foreign entities were trying to hack into voting systems to intervene in the upcoming elections, a threat that U.S. intelligence community officials have long warned about.
“We do not have intelligence that says they are specifically attacking electoral infrastructure. That is again what the department is focusing on, but we do know about the disinformation campaigns and China, Russia, Iran, all doing that a little bit differently,” Wolf told Tapper.
“We are working with other elements of the federal government to address this. At the end of the day, we want to make sure voters, American voters, American elections decide,” he added.
“The diversity of electoral systems among states, multiple controls and disruptions in those systems, and post-election control make it all extremely difficult for foreign opponents to narrow or change ballot boxes broadly without detection,” Evanina said in her statement.
This story has been updated with additional comments from Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf.
CNN’s Fredreka Schouten, Alex Marquardt, Pamela Brown and Manu Raju contributed to this report.
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