Katy Tur hosts coverage of national and international news, including breaking stories. Influence american voters, including a Covert Campaign to spread Divisive Political messages. That has raised questions about what the government is doing to stop them. As the Washington Post reports lawmakers and independent analysts say that Voting Systems are more secure against hackers thanks to action at the federal and state levels and that the russians have not targeted those systems to the degree they did in 2016, but russian efforts to manipulate u. S. Voters through misleading social media postings are likely to have grown nor sophisticated and harder to detect. There is not a sufficiently strong Government Strategy to combat Information Warfare against the u. S. Outside experts say. Joining me now nbc National CorrespondentPeter Alexander at the white house, Nbc National Security and intelligence reporter ken dilanian, White House Bureau chief for the Washington Post, phil rucker, National Security reporter for the Washington Post and author of that report i read, alan
to say what we are going to do. We have not hit them where it hurts. One thing that was significant in this News Conference was the head of the nsa was clear that seems to have changed for his agency. He seemed to say he had authorization from the president to conduct Offensive Cyberaction against actors who meddle in our politics, including the russians. Thats a big deal. Thats a change. We may never see it, but its an important policy announcement. Obviously, wed like to know more about it. Dni dan coats made a point of saying that they are trying their best to make sure that the elections go off in a fairway for the midterms, but in the way he said it seems like he wasnt entirely sure that was going to be possible. Take a listen. The president , the Vice President , i think everyone on this stage has acknowledged the fact that ica was a correct
we are not hearing that there are any specific threats to those systems this year, and that is not the most pressing threat. What is the most pressing threat . You write about social media and the influence. It is really the Information Warfare campaign. The covert Information Campaign against america by russia and perhaps other foreign adversaries. That is harder to detect. It is harder to combat because the battleground in sfeeffect i really the Social Media Platforms right now, and that is not an area where the Law Enforcement and Intelligence Agencies are traditionally involved. They are not generally looking into the networks of these companies. So a lot of the responsibility need to be shouldered by these companies. Let me read a portion of your article because i found this fascinating. Russia has been particularly
skilled at exploiting the seams among u. S. Authorities, laws, and values, responding to the russian disInformation Campaign does not fall squarely in the province of any single u. S. Agency and they generally do not have visibility into the information that flows across Social Media Platforms. American respect for the Free Exchange of ideas as enshrined in the First Amendment has made to easier for outsiders to infiltrate National Political conversations, especially in the online world where it is simple to obscure identities and locations. Matt miller, what do you do . Its tough. In that case, you need to have an allout effort by the government addressing all three fronts. The potential hacks of election systems, the social media influence, and attempts to hack candidates and release their information to the public. With respect to the social media aspect, the one piece you can do other than prevention is for the government to come out with a
unified front and tell the American People whats going on. Until today, we have never seen a Press Conference like this from the administration because you havent had leadership at the top. I think its true you have had efforts going on inside the agencies. Christopher wray detailed an effort that the fbi has been working on. He didnt say it was directed bit the white house or attorney general, something the fbi was working on. You couldnt see the white house stand up with an event like this because it would offend the president , anger the president. Whats changed is that after the helsinki Press SecretaryPress Conference, he seemed to ro grovel in front of President Putin and deny Election Interference and come back to the United States and deny its happening now. You see them trying to dig out of this hole with this Press Conference, but the problem is you cant on the one hand convince the American People or try to convince the American People you are being serious about foreign interference in our election while the
president , the Press Secretary and the National Security advisor call it a witch hunt and call for the investigation to be shut down as the president did yesterday. They do not square. You will never convince the American People to take it seriously when the president doesnt. It is confusing because it was a couple of weeks ago that Kirstjen Nielsen was on stage in aspen telling one of our own reporters she didnt believe russia was still interfering in the election. Now she has done an about face on that. Peter alexander, is matt miller right . Is this what changed . Is this why we saw those natural security and intelligence heads today . I was moderating that panel with Kirstjen Nielsen where we had that conversation. It took a lot of followup questions before she finally said, yes, i agree with the intelligence assessment. What struck me here today and this was an announced briefing, but an unannounced series of guests, obviously. They brought out this sort of american National Security and intelligence wall. This sort of line of defense preventing another round of
meddling in the election, isnt that evidence that the tra, wum administration is doing, its not stopped them. We were talking about what facebook reported in the last several days and several candidates across the country with new indications they have been targeted by some of this meddling. A better word is interference. Meddling seems to make it small. The bottom line is that the administration has not ended this situation and what struck me perhaps more than anything else was when we heard from the director of National Intelligence, dan coats, a couple of weeks removed from helsinki, saying he still could not say thoroughly and fully what took place in that meeting between the president of the United States and the russian president Vladimir Putin. If he cant say what the two men discussed, its hard to see how they are working in unison to make sure russia doesnt do it again. Your point is well taken. Phil, my question to you is more political. The president ran on stoking
divisions. It was successful for him. It worked. Does he really want to stop the divisions . The disInformation Campaign that russians used in 2016 helped him. It would stand to reason that it would help him again. It did help him, and Vladimir Putin actually said that he wanted trump to win the election, that that was the aim of the interference. Is that why there is a disconnect . I dont know. Does the president not really want to stop that . Does he not take it seriously . He doesnt. And he conflates meddling with collusion. They are two very different things. Russia can interfere in the electi election. That doesnt mean what the Trump Campaign colluded with them. To President Trump, its all one and the same, and this is what white house advisors say. They cant get through to him that these are two different topics and that its okay to condemn russian interference in the election and still have a valid election win. He views any sort of acknowledgment of russian meddling to discredit his
election win, to make him an illegitimate president , and thats why he takes it so personally. Can it be an effective strategy to push back against this, ken dilanian, by the intelligence community, to deploy whatever they have at their disposal to stop the russians from getting or anyone else from getting into our election systems, our voting machines, to have facebook coming out and monitoring their site, is that enough if the president of the United States is not leading the charge . Does it really matter what he is saying on this . Absolutely it matters, katy. You heard dan coats say that he supported more sanctions on russia. And while this administration has imposed some sanctions, the president has also sat down with the leader of russia at a summit and elevated him and raised questions about whether he even believed that russia interfered in the election, standing right next to Vladimir Putin. Thats the opposite of making russia pay a price. You know, there are a lot of experts who will tell you its not really reasonable to expect private Companies Like twitter and facebook to stand up to an onslaught by a foreign intelligence agency. The russians will always be able to put bots on twitter and facebook. You have to make them pay a price, impose a cost on them. That hasnt been done by this president. Lets listen to marco rubio. He is calling it warfare. Its not influence. Its not interference. Its warfare. This is Information Warfare. Based on the russian doctrine of warfare, Information Warfare is a key part of it. My view is they are using platforms like facebook and twitter as a vehicle by which to conduct this. So i dont blame the companies for it. They are providing a product thats out there. These guys are going on and using that product. They need to do a better job of identifying it and sharing it and doing it in a timely fashion. It isnt their fault per se. Peter, how much was social media addressed in this News Conference . Well, a little bit. I think we heard specifically from the secretary of Homeland Security saying that there was sort of a division of labor here. So specifically Homeland Security oversees Election Interference as it relates to strzok, but its up to others, including the fbi and some of the Intelligence Agencies more broadly, to try to get to the bottom of the social media interference. I was struck by one of the things we heard from Sarah Sanders at the end of this exchange here. You know, in recent weeks we heard from the president on twitter basically saying that russias latest efforts were trying to help the democrats again, and sarah pointed to the recent facebook posts that have now been taken down from organizations, fake organizations like resisters. They were trying to get folks to fight back at an upcoming White Nationalist rally scheduled to take place in washington, d. C. She was saying, look, they were trying to help the democrats. I think a lot of people would
assess that very differently. In fact, they werent trying to help the democrats at all. They were trying to sow these divisions, make both sides, as the president said, look bad in a way, in effect to take heat off the White Nationalists and others who the administration was slow to condemn the first time this took place in charlottesville. That is a small portion of those images. Our reporters on the digital team combed through the cache of facebooks offline, what they took offline. What they found is although some of these groups may not have been fake to begin with, abolish i. C. E. Or whatever, they started what seemed like innocuous groups, they escalated and the russians behind it, its presumed they are the russians behind it, the malicious actors behind it would slowly introduce things like better bring a gas mask or prepare for violence. Its gonna get ugly. Trying to move these what seemed like innocuous protests or just regular trying to create a violent, ugly scene. Trying to create a violent, ugly scene. And we saw in 2016, and you cant deny this, peter, that sort of thing helped donald trump. Maybe a vote was not changed in a voting machine, but you cannot argue, it is much more difficult to argue that no votes were influenced by what the russians did. Donald trump stood on that stage and waved those wikileaks around, talked about how he loved them, read the emails out, confirmed biases against Hillary Clinton, convinced soft republicans or unsure republicans or independents or democrats who didnt like Hillary Clinton to not just stay at home, but to vote for him because of that, and they also used social media to their advantage. He would retweet things that were inflammatory routinely, and not apologize or back away from it. So would his staff. They would retweet these things in order to urge Donald Trumps supporters to make sure that they go to the polls to create hate, create anger, and make it seem like the only choice a voter had if they wanted things to change was donald trump. And katy, just to punctuate this thought, refusal, certainly the reluctance of many members of this administration in the last several weeks and months to acknowledge the intelligence communitys assessment that russia was working to benefit donald trump in the 2016 campaign really raises questions. If they cant acknowledge that much, which were the intelligence kmoourntcommunitys from 2016, why this group could be trusted in 2018 and 2020 to secure our election Going Forward. Legitimate questions. Startling, to say the least. Alan, i want you to jump in. The fbi, how well equipped are they to weed out social media
influence campaigns, identify them and stop them from happening . Yeah, again, so they can see only so far into private companies networks. They are able to gather intelligence on the ground and from and actually from the National Security agency, which also feeds intelligence to them from what they are gleaning in networks overseas, and they can put the two together to do analyses and share that information with the social Media Companies. But as one, you know, former fbi official told me, hey, we are not the thought police. And theyve also long been there is a lot of weariness of getting of having Law Enforcement get involved in policing, as it were, platforms where any time you have speech involved or First Amendment issues, we dont want the Law Enforcement agencies or the Intelligence Agencies to be telling companies what they can
and cannot have or say on their platforms. So thats one of the challenges they face. Matt, jump in on this. What are you thinking . I think ellen is exactly right. Look, the social Media Companies have a responsibilities for policing whats on their platform. They need to do what they can to find content that is being put into their systems by foreign governments, in this case mostly the russian government, and get it off their networks. The fbi has a responsibility to find out those attacks are attributed to, to take the information and find out if they can confirm its the fbi and work with the Intelligence Agencies and ultimately the policy makers, the president , to hold them accountable. The fbi has a Law Enforcement function. They cant be the ones out looking at every piece of content thats on social media. So i think it comes back to two things. One, you have to get this content off of the networks and have leadership from the top down to convince the American People not to believe it. When you have a president who not only wont do that on a consistent basis, but lets be honest, when we are in a
campaign setting again, if there is disinformation from the russian government, either that disinformation on s