On behalf of my friend and colleague, Jamal Khashoggi illustrates a commitment they , have made personally, which all of us feel very grateful for. I wanted to share that with you. Today, we are going to talk about cybersecurity, interference in our 2020 president ial elections, and Innovative New way of trying to deal with that and we will talk with two of the people who are most familiar with these issues. First, the former director of homeland, michael chertoff. Second, the former director of National Intelligence, james clapper. Each knows cyber and these and the difficult political and legal background as well as anybody. I want to start with a question that is on everybodys minds. It involves the question of interference in our elections. This is the complaint that has been raised by the still unidentified whistleblower whose complaint is before the House Intelligence Committee and is the subject of an intense discussion. Without asking what you think what youou think think about whether the president should be impeached, i want to ask you the baseline question, whether you as experts in this area find the whistleblower complaint, which we have now read, urgent and credible. Those were the words used. And whether you would think that it ought to be investigated to determine whether it is accurate. Maybe i should start. I am very familiar with the Intelligence Community whistleblower protection act and the complaint submitted with it. Of all the whistleblower complaints i saw during my 6. 5 years, this one was the best written, best prepared footnoted and caveated. As appropriately it should be. The law prescribes that once it whistleblower complaint is submitted, it goes directly to the Intelligence CommunityInspector General, which became statutory during my time and accordingly, it acts independently. The Inspector General makes a determination, is the complaint credible. I do not remember having any one that was declared to be urgent. The whistleblower complied meticulously. For me, it was one of the most credible and compelling such complaints i have ever seen. Should it be investigated . Absolutely. That is the whole premise of the whistleblower protection act. A serious credible threat complaints of wrongdoing should be accordingly investigated. Mike, what is your feeling about the same issues . Should be investigated . I cannot judge whether it is credible because you have to determine what the basis of knowledge is. Were they in a position to know certain things . There will probably be other people who will have to be talk to. Obviously, it is a matter of significant concern. Any investigation ought to be dispassionate, fair, thorough, and expeditious. What should not happen, people announcing the result they will get before the investigation is done because that impairs credibility of the whole process. To be clear, the law stipulates a period of 14 days where the Inspector General can investigate the allegation contained in the complaint. That was done in this case. There was within the time limit of 14 days a corroboration in the igs mind before he forwarded. Let me ask you, because you were in the position the acting dni found himself after taking office, he made a decision when he received the complaint from his Inspector General to go to the white house , white House Counsel and then to the Justice Department, the office of legal counsel. Part of thetions whistleblowers complaint. Do you think that was appropriate . He was in a tough place. Acting director of National Intelligence for about six weeks. This arrives on his doorstep. I have been this is beginning to be an faq. A frequently asked question. I think institutionally, joe did the right thing. The problem, by consulting with the doj and white house, and there is a genuine concern about violating executive privilege. He does not have the authority to waive executive privilege. You can argue until the cows come home, is that the right thing to do . He is consulting with an element of the government implicated in the complaint. That is a judgment call that he made. If it were me, i do not know what i would have done. I trust that i would have had an expensive and deep conversation with my counsel about the pros and cons of doing at. Of doing that. I am sure joe did the same thing. Mike, i want to ask you about a question becoming more central. That is, how can congress compel testimony, either through subpoenaed witnesses or depositions, other documents, in an investigation that it deems essential but were but where Administration Officials are holding that information . What happens next . What has happened in the past, when you get a subpoena, even if Congress Wants you to testify, they hold the power of the purse through appropriations, officials go along with it because the sanction they face is, the money gets cut off. If you are going to be technical about it, the subpoena would issue, and if someone failed to appear, they would go to court, congress would go to court, get a court order mandating the person to appear and if the person still fails to appear, they would be held in contempt of court. The other possibility, someone could appear and declined to answer certain questions on the ground that they are privileged. That gets you into some tricky legal issues about whether congress has the direct ability to impose contempt or whether congress has to go to court. As with most things in the american legal system, you usually wind up with potentially extended litigation because you deal with unprecedented issues and that means everybody will wind up being careful about how they deal with it. Would you guess, based on your experience, that this issue will end up in the Supreme Court . It is quite possible. Everyone remembers back with the nixon case. The court, given its schedule, only has a certain amount of bandwidth and in some ways, by the time it gets up to the Supreme Court, you are talking about months having gone by. There may be a tension of the tempo of these investigations and the tempo of the court system. We have not yet been a concrete dispute that is right for court. I want to turn to our main subject of political interference Going Forward in the 2020 elections. I want to invite our audience and also watching this live, if you have questions, you can send them to me postlive. In theory i will see them here let me ask jim first and then mike to give us a sense as , we head toward 2020, of how well prepared you think we are to protect our elections from the kind of interference we have seen powerfully in 2016 and 2018. Having happily left the government, i still do not know. It is my impression that a lot has been done among the key federal agencies, fbi, department of Homeland Security, National Security agency, all of those who are stakeholders. Overnk a lot has been done the situation where we were in 2016. You have to remember, our voting apparatus is very decentralized. It is done at the state and local level. I was really taken aback during the 2016 and what we were seeing the russians doing when jeh johnson reached out to election commissions at the state level and got a lot of pushback. We dont want the feds messing with us, sort of thing. That, imd all confident a lot has been done to make it better. If i may make a point, whenever this topic comes up, securing the voting apparatus, that is important. But that, to me, is one been of the problem. The other is intellectual security. Meaning, how do you get people to question what they see written on the internet . And this is where the russians exploited our divisiveness by using social media. So that part of the problem im not sure about. Mike, let me ask you the same thing. How vulnerable do you think we are heading into 2020, whether the resistance that jim describes to federal help, whether that is changing . And also, maybe on the broader question that jim raises about the way in which our Information Space as a whole is contaminated. I agree with jim. The federal government has been much more active and the states have been more willing to accept help. I also agree that the machines themselves, in some ways, are the least vulnerable because they are decentralized and they are normally not hooked up to the internet. To tamper with them, you have to have physical access. The greater challenges, the registration databases, tabulation databases, and all the infrastructure around voting, which includes, is your power working . Is transportation working . These issues require not just preparing to raise your level of cybersecurity against hacking but it also means resilience if there is something that makes it difficult to vote on election day, either the database goes down and you cannot verify who is entitled to vote, or the trains stop running because of a cyberattack, is there a plan for what you do next . That is the essence of resiliency. You have to make sure you know what the plan is and you have the authorities and the capabilities. Pat is an area we ought to look at. , disinformation. I think this is a challenge that is broader than the election itself. Obviously, one of the approaches that the russians and chinese also take to geopolitical conflict is the Information Space. Active measures. If you can disrupt the unity of effort of the United States or europe or other democratic countries, then you win without firing a shot. People do not trust each other and they do not trust institutions. I think that is what we seen over the last 10 years. It goes back decades. What has changed most recently is social media and the ability to maybe late that to draw tailored messages to particular individuals. Thats an area where i think we are still trying to implement standards and approaches that would mitigate the effect of that. Job number one is to get people to be critical in their thinking when they see a story and not simply accept it as true because its on the internet. This point you both have discussed the more that we , talk about the insecurity of our election systems, the more people have it in their mind that there is something wrong here. A friend who runs cybersecurity for one of the big social Media Companies sent to me recently what the russians really are , doing is weaponizing uncertainty. The very fact that you are in you are uncertain whether the systems may be attacked leads to less faith in the outcome. I think its one of the hardest questions there is. Is there any way to reduce that weaponized uncertainty that is appropriate for a democratic government . One of the points that has been made repeatedly, you need to have a verifiable system for actually getting voting. Whether it is a paper ballot or various kinds of tools being developed that would encrypt a copy of the ballot the ability , to ensure people that if there were a dispute, it might take a little bit of time but you could go back and you could actually manually count. I think that is an important confidence building measure. Any thoughts, jim . I do not have any Silver Bullet suggestions other than imploring people to think critically, try to corroborate information they are absorbing. Pick and choose your sources. I have often fantasized about some sort of National Fact checker. Unassociated with the government perhaps. I dont know quite how you would constitute this. The fact checker would be seen as universally credible. Verifyy like that could or refute what is being said particularly on social media. Its tricky. We do not want a Single Authority telling us what is true and what is not. That sounds like big brother. I want to get to something that is encouraging. It is a creative effort to deal with this problem and draw the public in. It is called the cyber dome and maybe i could ask each of you to explain the basic idea of this, what sorts of Services Cyber dome will offer to candidate around the country in 2020 and for many years to come. I was approached by this group, which is a group of citizens, public minded citizens who have aligned themselves with cybersecurity experts and have put together an organization which is designed on a bipartisan basis to support and assist campaigns and the two National Committees to secure themselves. They are seeking funding outside the government. Mike and i were both approached about it and we are both serving on their board of advisors. We have had campaigns hacked for years. In 2008, campaigns were hacked. What was different in 2016, not only were the campaigns hacked by foreigners to see what the campaign was thinking about but actually some of the content was disseminated by the russians and put out there in the runup to the 2016 election in a way to try to unnerve and demoralize the Democratic Party and supporters. That took the weaponization to a new level and part of what we are trying to do, get the campaigns to raise their game when it comes to protecting against these kinds of intrusions which can be weaponized. I urge people to take a look at what the cyber dome is proposing. It is a creative idea. It is not the government doing it but the private citizens in a way that should make it easier for people to help. As we think about how we will protect our democracy, which turns out to be more fragile than we realize, is a pretty good idea. I am pleased to have these two People Associated with it here with us. I want to ask another question. It lurks under the surface of our National Debate and it is a hard one. There are a lot of people out there, it is clear, who think there is something they call the deep state. They think of people like the two of you, experienced National Security, no criticism intended, but they think of experienced National Security officials, people like jim klapper, who served over 50 years as an intelligence officer. They about the u. S. Attorney whos seen every part of our government. They worry that you have got a kind of hidden hand on the nations steering wheel. That surfaced in the whistleblower complaint. A could be really interesting for people, could you respond from this long experience you have had to this argument that is out there. What is it that you want to say . I never heard of the term deep state. Bliss byas an ignorant never heard of it until the campaign and afterwards. Allegedly this is a conspiracy of career government Public Servants who somehow organized themselves into a conspiracy to undermine or overthrow the president , which on its face is ridiculous. The Intelligence Committee power underruth to whatever difficult circumstances that may be even if the power ignores the truth we have to keep telling it. My experience has been sure people in the Intelligence Community are citizens like everyone else. I observation, they part those political prefaces preferences at the door for they walk into the office. Unfortunately, this recent whistleblower complaint, coming from a member of the Intelligence Community, fuels that fire that there is such a thing as the deep state. Of aep state comes out different context. It has towith do with countries where military is so powerful, they wrestle control out of the industrial base. The revolutionary guard in iran, they control industry. We do not have any of that here. Our military is completely under civilian control and they stay in their lane. The Intelligence Community is carefully hedged with a lot of rules. We have courts that supervise almost everything. If you look at some of the history of surveillance programs and the controversy, those have always occurred because somebody was uncomfortable with a decision being made. Many got to court perhaps or congress changed the rule. So we are kind of the opposite of the deep state. I understand americans traditionally have a certain suspicion of government. But thats not so much the question of the Civil Service as it is more of a question of not overstepping its role with the private sector. Our solution in our constitution, we break the government into three parts and we also have federalism. What people miss sometimes, much of the real power is at the state level in terms of the police and the Enforcement Mechanisms and that is one of the things that guarantees that our government cannot overstep or really commit misconduct. Final question, and one i think every member of this audience would want me to ask you, what is the damage to our National Security agencies to the people of the cia, the intelligence agencies, the fbi, of this period in which you have the president calling the whistleblower a spy and accusing him of treason, what damage does that do to the people who work for these agencies . And the partners we have around the world. Who are essential liaisons. It is not good. It is not a good thing. It affects a lot of people in the Intelligence Community. I had to say its a dangerous thing to try to characterize another faq. The Intelligence Committee is a large complex and there are thousands of people in the Intelligence Community who are not affected by the stuff at all. If you are at Mission Ground station someplace and you are just doing our job. You are not affected by this. So th