Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pushed back Monday against a slew of attacks labeling him “Moscow Mitch” in the wake of blocking Democratic election reform bills last week, calling the accusations “modern-day McCarthyism” and saying that Democrats were playing right into Putin’s hands.
The Kentucky senator defended his record on election security by pointing to the hundreds of millions of dollars in funding the Senate has already approved and highlighting the foreign interference bills the Senate has already passed, saying that Congress and the Trump administration had made “huge strides” toward improving election security.
“Last week I stopped Democrats from passing an election law bill through the Senate by unanimous consent, a bill that was so partisan that it only received one Republican vote over in the House. My Democratic friends asked for unanimous consent to pass a bill that everyone knows isn’t unanimous and never will be unanimous. So I objected,” he said.
McConnell also turned the critiques back around on critics, calling the Obama administration “feckless” for downplaying the threat posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2012 presidential election, when President Obama mocked then-candidate Mitt Romney’s warnings on Russia by saying that “the 1980s are now calling for their foreign policy back,” and pointing out that the U.S. had been caught flat-footed when the Russian government carried out cyberattacks, election system intrusions, and other efforts leading up to 2016.
“Over the last several days I was called unpatriotic, un-American, and essentially treasonous by a couple of left-wing pundits on the basis of bold-faced lies,” McConnell said. “I was accused of aiding and abetting the very man I’ve singled out as an adversary and opposed for nearly 20 years, Vladimir Putin.”
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough last week dubbed McConnell “Moscow Mitch,” claiming McConnell “is aiding and abetting Putin’s ongoing attempts to subvert U.S. democracy, according to the Republican FBI, CIA, DNI.”
“How can Moscow Mitch so willingly turn a blind eye not only this year to what his Republican chairman of the Intel Committee is saying, to what Robert Mueller is saying, to what the FBI director is saying, to what the DNI is saying, to what the CIA is saying, to what the United States military intel community is saying?” Scarborough said.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank echoed these sentiments, writing that “Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset.”
“This doesn’t mean he’s a spy, but neither is it a flip accusation,” Milbank said. “Russia attacked our country in 2016. It is attacking us today. Its attacks will intensify in 2020. Yet each time we try to raise our defenses to repel the attack, McConnell, the Senate majority leader, blocks us from defending ourselves.”
“The outrage industrial complex needed a new target, and that’s where I come in,” McConnell said Monday. “Mitch McConnell, the hawkish foreign policy conservative who spent decades pushing back on Russia every way I can think of was accused to what amounts to treason by multiple media outlets within a couple of hours.”
He pointed to Congress passing legislation to bolster election security in 2018, providing $380 million to the states to help with securing their election systems, the largest such provision of federal dollars to assist with elections since 2002. The Department of Homeland Security also offered free election security services to both states and local governments that were used quite a bit during the 2018 midterms. DHS and DOJ said earlier this year that they’d worked with all 50 states and 1,400 local jurisdictions to secure elections and combat foreign influence in 2018 and that “efforts to safeguard the 2020 elections are already underway.”
A DHS inspector general report from earlier this year said that steps had been taken to mitigate risks to election infrastructure, but that more work from the department was needed to improve its coordination with the states.
McConnell also pointed to election security bills passed in bipartisan fashion by the Senate — one which was designed to make ensure that the hacking of election systems is considered a federal crime and one called the Defending Elections against Trolls from Enemy Regimes Act, which would make any improper foreign interference in U.S. elections a violation of U.S. immigration law.
“These pundits are lying, lying when they dismiss the work that’s been done. They’re lying when they insist I have personally actions which I have in fact championed and the Senate has passed,” McConnell said. “I’m proud of my record, I’m proud that it’s right there in black and white, and liars cannot gaslight it away.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report last week concluded that “Russian government-affiliated cyber actors conducted an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure in the run-up to the 2016” but found “no evidence” that vote tallies were altered. The intelligence community assessed that Russia attempted to intrude into election systems in all 50 states.
Democrats used last week’s report to attempt to pass their proposed election security bills, but those efforts to pass these bills by unanimous consent were blocked by Republican senators at the request of McConnell.
DHS officials testified to Congress last year that they do not currently see the need for new mandates to improve election security, and FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month that he could not think of any new election security laws or foreign deterrence legislation that he thought should be passed.
“We feel that we have significant resources devoted to the foreign influence piece, and the president’s budget that’s currently up before the Congress asks for additional resources to help us do that,” Wray told lawmakers.
