On Monday night, Twitter stopped a user’s account after posting what the US intelligence community had just cited as a specific example of Russia’s attempts to “denigrate” Joe Biden. The post may not have gone unnoticed, except for the fact that Trump himself retweeted it to his more than 85 million followers.
The president turbocharged the whole tactic that his own intelligence community had just nine days in advance called a measure used by a suspected Russian-backed actor “to defeat the candidacy of former Vice President Biden and the Democratic Party undermined. “
The intelligence community did not respond publicly. No other election officials yet. It fell on Twitter to do what could be done to spread the word, they have disabled the account.
None of the federal agencies accused of protecting the November election – the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, among others – are empowered or seem capable of dealing with one of the most serious election issues they face on a daily basis when it comes to the White House.
“It puts the agencies in an impossible position because it is their own boss and how will they oppose the main board of our government?” said Miles Taylor, the former human resources manager of the Homeland Security department to former secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
“Over the past four years, much has been done to prepare the United States for the possibility of disinformation and foreign interference in the elections,” Taylor added, “but none of that can prepare us for when. the president can be the one who reinforces the foreign government’s disinformation. “
Taylor recently became one of the Trump administration’s top senior officials to honor Joe Biden.
Not their job
“Our system is not designed for elected officials – especially at [the President’s] level – who regularly present categorically false information, “agreed a former intelligence officer.” And so, all the systems and controls that are meant to be are ineffective against this particular situation. ”
Intelligence officials state that it is not their job. By definition, they are aimed at overseas threats, even if the president reinforces them. The Office of Director of National Intelligence declined a request for comment. In the president’s retweet, they refer questions to the White House, which focused on the Trump campaign, which did not respond.
That appearance of similar threats, say Democrats and numerous former intelligence officers, is very misleading as Moscow is very active and open with its intentions regarding the elections. But with a president interpreting talk of Russian interference as diminishing his 2016 victory, Evanina’s statement was also seen by many as a way to place Trump.
“People do backflips to do their job,” the former intelligence official said, “it’s difficult.”
“This is all about the willingness of people to be fired,” said a Democratic aide in the House Committee on Homeland Security, which oversees the Department of Homeland Security and its efforts to protect the election. “If you want someone to come out swinging, stop them nothing, but they can be fired. And this president will fire people.”
The FBI’s and DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security (CISA) plays a variety of critical roles in helping states – which are in fact conducting the elections – protect themselves safely. But none of those roles as preparations involve the disappearance of a disinformation threat coming from the Oval Office.
‘Rigged’
At a Wisconsin rally on Monday, Trump told the crowd that “The only way we will lose this election is if the election is rigged.” Two days earlier, he told reporters and supporters at his New Jersey golf club that the winner of the election could be determined months or years ago, “because these ballot boxes are all lost, they will all be gone.”
Recently asked by CNN how CISA can combat the president’s disinformation, agency director Chris Krebs did not immediately respond, but emphasized the array of tools and educational awareness for disinformation his agency has provided to states. , adding that state election officials “must be” going to “trusted sources of information before their election.”
The FBI denied a request for comment.
Several state election officials say there has been no specific guidance from CISA or the FBI on what to do if the president or other government officials make allegations about their states that are not true.
“We have no talks about that,” said Washington DC Chairman of the Board of Elections Michael Bennett. “I would go and correct and say there is no evidence. But we have no plans per se.”
Trump has targeted California, misjudging the fact that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has ordered that votes be sent to non-citizens and undocumented immigrants. “Millions,” the president tweeted, “everyone who walks in California will get a vote.”
“We need a national response if the president shares propaganda, we have not seen it yet,” California Prime Minister Alex Padilla said in an interview. “That the clock is ticking.”
Padilla, a Democrat, said California officials follow the same protocol to take up false claims coming from the president because they are suspected of disinformation Russia as another foreign actor.
While the president has rallied against voting via mail-in, saying it will lead to “the most corrupt election in the history of our country,” CISA published an opinion. It did not say that submission rates present significantly more risks and that detail how they can best be managed. It then warned that “threatening actors could mislead and confuse the public about the mechanics of voting for mail-in and use limited understanding of post-in-vote process, to cause chaos and provoke mistrust in the election administration and election results.”
Critics of the president read that warning from CISA just as the president does now and can easily do in the future. Short of speech and sometimes risk being fired, which is almost as far as administration officials can go if the president’s tactics reflect those of malicious actors, the Democratic aide said in the House Committee Homeland Security.
‘Nobody in Lead’
“There’s no one in charge of the sanctity of elections and the provision of accurate information in a democracy,” said Glenn Gerstell, the former NSA top lawyer who resigned in February. “There is no one in charge and there is no plan.”
There is also no president.
Beyond amplifying the attacks of the primary foreign threat before the election, Russia, Trump has presented national security and election officials with another obstacle: his own words about post-in-vote and the underlying potential for a rigged election, which observers of the Russian strategy expect to be used as food by foreign influence campaigns.
“Trump just gave her a gift on a silver plate,” said a second former intelligence official. “If you were sitting in the Kremlin and saying, ‘How could we address inequality, is there anything we can address if jumping on that could really resonate?’ And someone walked into the room and said, ‘Well sir, we have this tweet from the president. “You would say, ‘Oh my god, thank you. ‘”
Election officials say that due to the pandemic, the results are likely to be known on November 3. Chris Krebs, arguably the most visible official of the federal election, has repeatedly called on voters to be patient and issued a warning.
Ripe for attack
The uncertainty over results and the expected lack of an immediate winner on November 3 make it “absolutely ripe for a devastating or disruptive attack by a state opponent,” Krebs warned last month.
Facebook, along with other major tech companies, met with Krebs’ bureau and officials last week, saying after the meeting that in the days before a winner is announced, malicious actors “could fill the vacuum of information with misleading information.”
For many election officials, such as Alex Padilla, of California, the president could be among them.
“You can imagine what a certain person in that era would do in terms of spitting, lies and conspiracy theories about what’s going on,” Padilla said.
Padilla says much of the request he and others should consider the president depends on Facebook and the other social media companies responding to their requests that messages be taken down. In the midst of fierce criticism for allowing disinformation to spread rampant, they have recently tried to show that they are cracking.
Two weeks ago, Facebook took down a video that posted the Trump campaign about the coronavirus that said it had violated Facebook’s misinformation rules. When the president retweeted Biden’s widely discredited phone call on Sunday, coming from a Ukrainian parliamentarian who says the intelligence community says it works for Russia, Twitter took down the account.
“This is a very different threat from 2016, when he only quietly welcomed the help of a foreign government,” said Taylor, the former chief of staff of DHS. “Now he is the Commander-in-Chief and he includes foreign interference while sitting behind the Resolute Desk.”
On Tuesday, the House Intelligence Committee published a nearly 1,000-page, two-part report that said Russian intelligence operations were closer to the top actions of Trump campaign in 2016 than previously known.
Its findings, Democrats in the commission said, amounted to “an alarm clock for our nation,” both as a 2016 report and as a precaution for what is happening now. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden added that edited information in the report “is directly relevant to Russia’s interference in the 2020 elections.”
“The threat is ongoing,” said Republican Senator Richard Burr, who was much of the chairman of the commission’s inquiry.
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