jim sciutto and shimon prokupez. jim sciutto, i saw some of your tweets about what was not said, what was said, what stands out? listen, the threat of russian interference is not only still a threat, it s happening right now. everybody has been briefed on the intelligence. you speak to folks on the hill and this would include the president. he knows this because his intelligence briefers would have let him know that there is evidence of not only continuing russian involvement in social media, divisive issues here in the u.s., but also probing attacks on actual voting syst s systems, which russia did in 2016 as well although it did not act on those attacks and interfere with the actual voting process in 2016, but it s continuing probing attacks on things like voter registration rolls, et cetera, to set up that possibility. that is the great concern of intelligence officials today. so for the president to stand there next to the russian president, who it is believed
the way is a potential avenue for influencing an election via voter suppression. if you can mess with the voter registration rolls, you can affect outcome on election day. so we see that. we also know, by the way, this gru, russian military intelligence persona, was talking to americans, roger stone and a florida gop operative. this sets the predicate for being able to investigate exactly what the russians were after in terms of americans, who they were talking to, why they were talk to them, what they were trying to get from them. i think this is just the first shoe. i want to clarify, it was exactly a month later, july 27th, when the president said what he said about russia, if you re listening, and they already were doing their phishing operations. clearly there is a nexus between what was happening that summer and the comments of the president. nick, this is a critical moment.
all 50 states? our sensors and monitors were here and that s where we understood they were going after voter registration rolls. we were concerned about the types of things they could do. that s why i think some of the pushbacks against the russians in the months, august, september, october might have deterred the russians from doing more than what they might have done. clearly they had some of the capability, they had a presence and it was a question about whether or not they were going to follow through on it. what makes the gru better than this than the fsb? well, i wouldn t say that they re necessarily better. they have different types of capabilities as well as areas of emphasis. but the fsb, which is the fbi equivalent in russia, the svr, which is the cia equivalent in russia and the gru, those three have very sophisticated and capable cyber efforts that are under way to go after sometimes domestic dissidents inside of russia as well as external efforts. were any of these
there were other ways that they could manipulate and suppress votes. they could change voter registration information. when the first news media report came out in late september, early october 2016 where evidence had been gained that russians had gone in and had been scanning and looking at the voter registration rolls, i had actually joked on air that junior russian military intelligence officers need something to do too, right? and in this case, that is precisely what this indictment alleges. they show that these teams, junior officers and other officers who were not mentioned in that indictment went out there and started scanning these voter registration rolls for pathways in and activities that we have yet to determine because our election was never audited. ari, you look at the indictment and there are lots of things in here. and for a nonlawyer like me,
russian hackers hit tens of thousands of voters back in the 2016 presidential election. many of those folks in one city alone. galesburg, illinois come a typical small town in the ferment of the midwest. the amtrak train to chicago stops here three times a day. but the unassuming place of the american heartland, and abraham lincoln debated 1858 was in the last presidential election invaded by the russians. the fbi, department of homeland security state the state s voter registration rolls were hacked by russian intelligence. is said that the declaration of war. it s a cyberwar. the supervisor of the overnights illinois state board of elections lasted for weeks. before the government attacks your system, obviously they re