Fired FBI Director James Comey defended his bureau’s response to Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election by claiming three times on Sunday that “nobody” imagined the Russians would do something like this, though history and a Russia expert suggest otherwise.
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a nearly 1,000-page report last week, and it discussed the “counterintelligence threat” posed by the Russian influence operation, devoting sections to critiquing the bureau’s response to the Russian military hack of the Democratic National Committee’s email systems, arguing that “in many ways, the DNC hack was a novel scenario … but in other ways, the DNC hack played out like a typical FBI cyber case.” The Senate panel said that it “understands” that the FBI “currently follows a victim-driven model” in dealing with cyberattacks but that “it is clear to the Committee that the FBI could have, and should have, escalated its messages within the DNC much sooner than it did.”
Comey was questioned about the FBI’s flawed response to the DNC hack by Margaret Brennan on CBS News’s Face The Nation on Sunday. Brennan noted that the Senate report said the FBI should have done more to alert the DNC. The moderator also said, “This was a national security threat happening under the nose of the FBI.”
In response, Comey said, “Our folks thought that just telling an institution that the Russians are inside your house was enough” and that “what may have led to a lack of urgency … is that nobody anticipated this wasn’t normal intelligence-gathering by the Russians.” He called it a “miss” when asked if it was his mistake and claimed that “it didn’t occur to us that the Russians were doing something that they had never done before, which is to weaponize and actually fire stolen material at our democratic process.” Brennan asked how the FBI could “miss that this was an active measures campaign” by Russia. Comey claimed that “the simple answer is because it never happened before” and that “nobody” in the intelligence community “imagine[d] that the Russians might do this.”
Daniel Hoffman, a longtime CIA veteran and former Moscow station chief, isn’t convinced by Comey’s explanation.
“I don’t believe that. It’s not like you have to guess that it’s coming. There’s lots of intelligence to show that they’ve done this in the past and could do this in the future,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Hoffman said that the Soviet Union had a decadeslong history of conducting similar operations pre-internet and that Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, ramped up similar high-profile cyberoperations around the world leading up to the 2016 election.
“The Russians destroyed Estonia with a cyberattack in April of 2007. They invaded Georgia with a hybrid war in 2008. They launched the NotPetya attacks against Ukraine, and they mounted massive offensive cyberoperations against Ukraine,” the CIA veteran said. “So, you’d have to have your head in the sand not to understand, not to be cognizant of the ubiquitous Russian cyberthreat. The tactics are different, but the strategy is the same. It’s stealing secrets or influencing opinion — it’s just in cyberspace as opposed to the old KGB days.”
A 1987 FBI report on Soviet “active measures” in the United States seems like a prelude to Russia’s online operations in the present. It says that the Soviets “utilized a wide range of techniques which include: forged documents, written and oral disinformation, agents of influence, political influence operations” as well as communist parties and various front groups. The bureau said that “through these operations, the Soviets attempt to directly influence the policies and actions of the U.S. government, undermine public confidence in U.S. leaders and institutions, influence public opinion,” and more.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, put out a lengthy report in 2019 arguing that “Moscow’s actions need to be understood as part of a long-term campaign to weaken the United States.” The report said that during the Cold War, Moscow “conducted a similarly aggressive campaign of ‘active measures’ in the United States, not just overseas, including repeated attempts to influence U.S. elections.”
The report explains how Soviet interference took place in a number of U.S. elections over the past several decades. The report said that the interference targeted Republican nominee Barry Goldwater in 1964, noting that “Moscow was deeply concerned about Goldwater’s anti-Soviet views, and Soviet and Czechoslovak agencies orchestrated a disinformation campaign labeling Goldwater as a racist and a KKK sympathizer.” Also targeted was Republican nominee Richard Nixon in 1968 because “the KGB strongly opposed” his anti-communist stances and “secretly offered to subsidize the campaign” of Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey, who rejected the offer. Democratic hopeful Sen. Henry Scoop Jackson, an anti-Soviet hawk, was targeted in 1976, in which the KGB “prepared a wide-ranging set of measures to discredit Jackson, especially by falsely portraying him as a homosexual.” Jimmy Carter ultimately defeated Jackson in the Democratic primary. Republican hopeful Ronald Reagan was also targeted in 1976, when the KGB “hunted for compromising material” and “planted articles in Denmark, France, and India” during his failed bid. Reagan was targeted again in 1984, when the Soviets sought to stop his reelection by “placing sources” inside both campaigns and working with “front groups and agents of influence — such as pro-Soviet journalists — in the United States to disparage Reagan.”
The CSIS said that the USSR was still “trying to influence U.S. politics in the late 1980s” but that “by the early 1990s, however, Russian active measures went into a deep thaw as the Soviet Union collapsed.” The think tank’s assessment said that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report “needs to be viewed as a continuation of Moscow’s strategic competition with the United States.”
Mueller’s investigation concluded that the Russian government interfered in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” and that Russian military intelligence hacked the DNC, disseminated emails through GRU personas, and provided tens of thousands of emails to WikiLeaks. The special counsel “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
