Two leading Senate Republicans responsible for foreign policy disagree about whether Russian-linked cyberattacks against Democratic campaigns amount to an “act of war.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the Republican nominee for president in 2008 and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, dubbed the cyberattacks an “act of war” last week and pressed the point with U.S. intelligence officials Thursday. But Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., whose committee has jurisdiction over the State Department, thinks that’s an overstatement given how cyberattacks are “commonplace” even among U.S. allies.
“If you have two countries that are doing the same thing to each other, collecting information, how can one country accuse the other country of an act of war if you’re doing exactly the same thing?” the Tennessee Republican said at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast Friday.
That was an apparent response to McCain, who has used that language repeatedly in recent days. “When you attack a country, it’s an act of war,” McCain said while traveling in Ukraine last week. “And so we have to make sure that there is a price to pay, so that we can perhaps persuade the Russians to stop these kind of attacks on our very fundamentals of democracy.”
Corker prefaced his statement by “divorc[ing] our country from this” to avoid revealing U.S. practices. But he added later that cyberattacks “have become commonplace, if you will, in the intelligence community” around the world.
“So when you put in place sanctions, you’ve got to make sure you’re sanctioning a country for doing something that you yourself are not doing,” he emphasized. “That’s pretty important.”
Corker maintained that U.S. angst about the cyberattacks should be contingent, not only on the question of whether the Russians were responsible for the leaks, but what was their goal in conducting the espionage. “Typically, when intelligence agencies around the world do that they do that to gain intelligence insights, it’s not to take offensive actions, right? So that matters,” he said at the breakfast. “And then to take it to the point of, some people have said to declare it an act of war, you’ve got to really, you’ve got to really dig deep and go way beyond just initial intent before you start making those kinds of declarations.”
The Tennessee Republican surmised that “evolved as the landscape evolved and as they began to see success in what they were doing,” an assessment than underpinned a critique of the media. “Y’all are participants in this and the rush to get headlines and news, y’all are participating in making the fake news thing even more credible, and damaging, I might add,” he said.
Corker warned that politicians and even journalists who “annoy” Russia with their stories could have their computers hacked, to the point that they could be falsely accused of committing crimes. “For instance, they could download a bunch of pornographic material into your website and then tell authorities that you’ve been involved in something very grotesque,” he said.
“Let’s say in the middle of a campaign, an important campaign, something like I just said happened to a leading candidate; by the time it’s over, they’re over,” he said. “So, look, this is going to be growing in sophistication. Other countries are going to be doing the same thing and obviously we want to protect against that.”
In addition to stealing documents from the Democratic National Committee and one of Hillary Clinton’s top aides during the presidential campaign, Russian hackers are believed to have breached multiple voter registration systems during the campaign. Those cyberattacks reportedly stopped after a direct warning from President Obama, and federal officials say Russia did not affect the votes cast on Election Day.
“If they succeeded in changing the results of an election, which none of us believe they were, that would have to constitute an attack on the United States of America because of the effects if they had succeeded,” McCain said Thursday during a committee hearing with U.S. intelligence officials.
