Ranking member adam schiff and former National Security officials talked recently about russian cyber hacking in the u. S. Elections. Guantanamo bay, intelligence sharing and russian aggression. All right. Ready to go . I want to thank all of you for coming today, including our panelists. And of course representative shift and his staff for all their help, including my friend tim who works for the congressman on the intel committee. Now, ill be brief, since we dont have a lot of time and we have a lot to talk about. Its my honor to introduce representative adam shift. Representative shift among other things is the ranking democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on intelligence. Hes a leader on all intelligence issues and has been particularly outspoken and thoughtful on the issue of russian interference in the recent u. S. President ial election. After the congressman gives some opening remarks, he has agreed to participate in a Panel Discussion led by Vice President. Now other participants in the panel include rand beers who had a distinguished career of public service. And at the white house. And i also want to add United States marine in vietnam. Jeremy bash, another old friend and colleague from the cia, in the pentagon will be on the panel. Jeremy is managing director and was an excellent chief of staff for leon panetta, one of the best persons ive ever worked for at the cia and dod and is also a very good guy. Julie smith will also participate on the pant. She was a colleague as well. She worked at the pentagon and for Vice President biden. She now works with jeremy at the center and at works with jeremy and at the center for new American Security. Shes also one of the smartest people in town on europe and russia. Finally, when i started studying the soviet union, detaunt was the focus. Over time it moved from detaunt to parish and then we then went with the bill to boris era to peering into putins eyes to reset to today. And who knows what phrase we will come up to describe the putin and trump relationship. But a line from an old Buffalo Springfield song sums it for me. Theres something happening here, what it is aint exactly clear. Representative shift, maybe you can help us get some clarity. Thank you very much. [ applause ]. Thank you. Its pleasure to join you today and my special appreciation for the senator for making progress for the fabulous work that the center does and for the invitation to come and speak with you today. I very much look forward to our panel. Theres a lot to talk about, but what i thought i would focus my brief remarks on is the convergence of two trends in the world, the trend affecting ru russia and its place in the world and the world view of Vladimir Putin, as well as the trend of the increasing potency of cyber as a weapon and we saw those trends come into uniquely pernicious combination last november, which will bring us to the heart of the topic today. But let me start out by talking about russia with an an tech dote from a few years ago, when i was introduced to a Russian Oligarch in los angeles and made the observation that it was a shame that med ved yef hasnt been given a freer hand. I thought relations between the United States and russia should have been very different, that putin seemed to have a chip on his shoulder, that anything that was in the United States interest was by definition antithet kal to russias interest but had putin allowed med yesterday vef greater aon themy we might have had a different relationship and our countries might have been on a different trajectory because indeed there were a number of common interests. His answer was very dismissive. He said he was nothing. Do you know, he asked me, that he had with him at all times someone called the pillow carrier. Do you know what the job of the pillow carrier is . When i asked him it was the job of the pillow carrier to smother him in his sleep if he ever did something putin didnt like. Well, i imagine if i had someone following me around who was a pillow carrier i wouldnt sleep very well. I dont know how well mr. Med yesterday vef slept, but tragically putins world view was sharpened after the mass protests in 2011 that weve heard a lot about recently because they played such a formative role in his antipathy to secretary clinton, but i think its also an important chapter in russian modern history because the gravest concern for Vladimir Putin is the longevity of his regime and the biggest threat he saw were these mass protests they call it revolutions and of course the russians think the revolutions the arab spring were inventions of the cia. When i meet with the cia, i congratulate them on their omnipotence to produce these world changing events. They have far greater capabilities than im aware of, but nonetheless, this is apparently the russian perspective on things. And i used to describe even as recently as a year ago the threat emanating from russia as a form of creeping authoritarianism coming from the kremlin. I would no longer say its kr p creeping. We are not in a new cold war but we are in a highly consequential war of ideas now, not between communism and capitalism. We see that obviously vividly in the russian propagation of its model and its desire to tear down the democracies in europe, to tear down the american democracy, of course, one of the core conclusions of the Intelligence Community in terms of russian interference in our election was the desire to sew discord in the United States. So this is, i think, a hugely important battle of ideas. And sadly in this battle of ideas you see autocracy on the march. You see countries in europe that are becoming increasingly auto cattic, increasingly nationalist in their origin. You see changes here in the United States where our own new president displays often very authoritarian qualities. And i think the weakening of europe, the brexit, all of these factors i think are greatly endangering the future of democracy and i think this is is going to be the struggle of our times. Let me talk now briefly about the other trend, and that is the explosion of the potency of cyber. I think many countries have had a desire to blur the distinctions between different kind of cyber activity. There is obviously cyber for the purpose of theft, of intellectual property. This is a problem that weve had with many countries, but probably among the foremost china for many years. You have cyber for the purposes of the gathering of foreign intelligence, which all nations that have a cyber capability engage in. You have what we saw very recently in our own elections cyber for the purposes of affecting political outcomes, of meddling in the internal affairs of another country. We have seen this from russia and europe in the past, this was the first, the most brazen example of cyber being utilized in those means here in the United States. And cyber tragically i think for the United States is a wonderfully asymmetric weapon. It is easy and cheap to go on offense. It is phenomenonly and expensive to be on defense. They just need to find an opening, one of the illustrations i love to give is target when target was hacked. Apparently the hackers got apparently got into target throughout the air conditioning system because in an internet of things, you are only as secure as your least vulnerable port of entry and in that case it was apparently the air conditioning. So in the virtual equivalent of a jewel hooiz where the thieves were able to get into the system and target had a huge problem on its hands. This is cheap to do. It can be done remotely. It can be done always with some level of deniability. And in the context of a nation state actor who is doing damage to the United States, whether its north korea attacking a company or russia attacking our democracy, it will always put the administration in a difficult position of proving its case when it makes at tri bush or deciding it cant do so without giving up important sources and methods and making the decision not to attribute conduct. This gets me to the point id like to conclude on and that is our new president is doing deep damage to himself and to our country. Hes doing this in many ways. Hes doing it in his willingness to make up facts as he goes along and were in the midst of the most recent flareup of the invented facts, the invention that millions of Illegal Immigrants voted. Why is this significant. There will become a time when the president needs to be believed by the country. There will come a time when the president needs to make a case for what the intelligence agencies tell him without revealing what our sources of information are. If the president cant be believed by his own people, let alone our allies, if the president has so impugned the credibility of the intelligence professionals that are providing the best insights in the world, what rohope does he have of persuading our own country. This is i think an enormous problem. As you may remember as early as september, we made the unusual decision to go public with the attribution. My argument was that the administration didnt need to reveal sources and methods, but it did need to make attribution. Certainly whenever thats the case youre going to have people in the public and press saying where is your proof, but its going to be very much in our National Interest at times for the administration to make attribution and not disclose sources and methods. Im sure the kremlin would like to know how we know what the russians are doing. Right now the russians are doing reverse engineering in that open source report to figure out how we know what we know. I think its very important that the president have the confidence of the public to come before the American People and say that either the iranians are cheating, if theyre cheating, or the North Koreans are advancing on their Nuclear Warhead or whatever the case may be that warrants action. Its going to be important that that president have credibility. I think theres no one who is doing more to undermine his own credibility than this president is doing himself. Revisiting the creation of black sites or going back to waterboarding interrogation techniques, the consideration of a ban on immigration or visas to muslims in any form, these are co lossal mistakes that will cost us in our relationships with allies and this is a chapter that many of us had hoped we had turned the page on and i think it would be a tragic mistake for the country to revisit this and make the same mistakes all over again. On that optimistic note, i will conclude and i look forward to our discussion. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for being here. Thank you for the kind introduction of congressmen and all our distinguished panelists. We have julie and jeremy. I run the National Security program here. Im grateful to all our panelists for joining us today. Theres a lot going on in the news. Im grateful to you for taking the time to be here and to talk about what might be one of the most important issues weve sort of faced as a country. Im going to bounce around the panel a bit and come back here and ill try to save time for questions. I think well have a bunch of them at the end. Id like to start with you jeremy, as the former chief of staff both at the pentagon and the cia. One of the things we saw this week was maybe an attempt by the president to bridge a divide by going to langley and talking to cia staff that didnt necessarily play out as we would have expected or liked and its it was sort of questionable whether it had the desired impact, but what is the implications of what congressman shift was talking about here at the end here between the president and his Intelligent Agency and what does that sort of mean for us having the intelligence we need as a country . Thanks. I was at the agency on december 30th, 2009, a day that we sent about a dozen of our best officers out to a post in eastern afghanistan to conduct a sensiti sensiti sensitive counterterrorism operation when an officer detonated a suicide vest killing many people. Those seven cia officers are memorialized on the Memorial Wall in the lobby of the original Headquarters Building at langley, along with 100 other members of the agency who lost their lives in service of our country. So it was particularly jarring, disturbing and upsetting to a number of intelligence professionals that ive spoken to to see the president s presentation there on saturday. And as i think about it, i think there are really four areas where i think this important relationship between a president and his Intelligence Community is going to come into some tension and potentially conflict. The first is as the congressman noted on the assessment about russia, the Intelligence Community has been very clear and warning for many years about the threat posed by russia and i dont think thats a threat shared by the president and his team. Second, on counterterrorism the president said on saturday essentially we invented isis. Thats something he has said before. And that we should have taken their oil and we may have a Second Chance to take their oil. If you combine that with some of the other misguided antiterrorism policy hes already announced such as a hiring freeze for customs and boarder patrol, for people who keep our country safe and combine that with going back to waterboarding and black sites, misguided policies that will not make us safe or prevent terrorist attacks in our country, you see an inevitable collision between the president and the intelligence assessment and it will make the job of our intelligence harder. Third in an era of alternative facts, what does an Intelligence Officer do because an Intelligence Officers creedo is from john, ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. All Intelligence Officers know they have to speak truth to their superiors and bosses, even when its an uncomfortable truth, but also to allies and adverse se adversaries about what america stands for and what you start from the premise of made up facts, lies, it undermines the premise of intelligence. Intelligence is designed to put parameters around policy, to make sure that policy is guided by facts. Every National SecurityCouncil Meeting begins with the predicate of an intelligence picture and if we throw that out the window we are going to be destined to make poor policy. Finally, i do think there is something very important in the president s world view. During his inaugural address he talked about america first. Fundamentally the Intelligence Officers that i know are globalists in their outlook. They believe that American Security depends on our interdependence with other countries. Much of the work that intelligence officials do is working with other countries to keep us safe. These are people who many of them live overseas, they like serving overseas. Theyre almost more Like State Department professionals. They raise their children overseas and they believe and know and understand that you have to be involved in the world. That if we just pull the drawbridge and retreat and have a nativist, nationalist approach to our security, it wont work. For all those reasons i think we are potentially in for more Stormy Weather ahead. I think im going to go first to you rand and then to julien. The first point there being the long standing premise that russia is engaged in hacking in the United States. In what you do now focusing on Cyber Threats, what is the spectrum of threats we face . What is beyond the election . What should americans be worried about in sort of effecting other aspects, their daytoday lives and other aspects of our daily activities . I would start with a very simple deck clarative statement. Russia is the greatest threat to the United States in cyber space in the world today and we have known this for some time. Just looking at the election, just looking at the breach of the dnc or the revelation of the emails of john podesta and others and looking at the fake news, we see the current manifestations today, but thats not all there is to it. If we look at the whole spectrum of crime that congressman shift referred to and we know that russian organized crime operates within Russian Space and what we dont have a clear demarcation about is what is the connection between russian organized crime and the russian state. Well, if we cant specifically identify that, we can look at a visible fact that isnt happening and that is russia is not cooperating with the United States. In criminal investigations of People Living in their country who have breached particular databases within this country, whether it be a retail store or other kinds of Economic Activity within this country, if theyre not prepared to do that, how can we assuredly separate russian organized crime from the russian state . It offers us, i think, a really important indication of how we need to think about russia as we go forward in cyber space, not to mention all the other things that are going on. But, take a look at our Critical Infrastructure f