The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Wednesday he supports exposing Russian hacking and influence operations in the United States, but warned it might come with a cost.
Public talk of Moscow’s meddling could also expose how the U.S. collects intelligence on its old Cold War adversary, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said during a meeting with defense reporters.
“I am very much on the side of calling them out and exposing what they are doing,” Thornberry said. “[But] you always have a tension about revealing what you learn through classified measures, because the risk is you expose what you know and how you know it.”
The chairman’s comments come a day after Adm. Mike Rogers, the head of U.S. Cyber Command, told the Senate that President Trump never ordered any retaliation for ongoing Russian hacking and online bot operations aimed at stoking domestic unrest.
Rogers also warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin believes there are no consequences for the meddling, which included hacking Democrats during the 2016 presidential election. Other intelligence officials recently told Congress they believe Russia will target the midterm elections in November.
“An aggressor will always push forward and do more until he meets resistance. We’ve seen that time and time again over history. There has to be a price to be paid,” Thornberry said Wednesday.
But Thornberry cautioned that waging any retaliation could be complicated and he used terrorist activity as an example.
“If something bad is coming out of a terrorist website, do you expose it as coming from them, do you try to block it, do you try to take the website down, and then what is an act of warfare under our Constitution that requires some act of Congress, some order from the commander in chief?” he said.
On Tuesday, Rogers told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he would need specific authorization from Trump by way of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to wage any cyber strikes on the Russian operations.
The admiral said he has taken some steps to counter the Russians within his existing authorities as CYBERCOM commander, though we would discuss them only in a classified briefing.
“I have directed the national mission force to begin some specific work. I’d rather not publicly go into that, using the authorities that I retain as a commander of this mission,” Rogers said.
Democrats on the Senate committee were angered Tuesday that Trump had not issued orders for the military to target the operations.
“Why the hell not? What’s it going to take?” Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said. “I want somebody to sit in that chair and say to the United States of America we’ve got this and until we have that moment, Russia is winning and that is disgusting.”
