Attorney General William Barr said he agreed with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the Russians were behind the global cyberattack that affected numerous federal government agencies, even as President Trump has speculated China may have been culpable.
“From the information I have, you know, I agree with Secretary Pompeo’s assessment,” Barr said during a press conference announcing new charges in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and in which he shot down the idea of appointing special counsels to investigate Hunter Biden or allegations of voter fraud. “It certainly appears to be the Russians, but I’m not going to discuss it beyond that.”
Pompeo attributed the hacking operation to the Russians last week during an appearance on conservative host Mark Levin’s show.
“I can’t say much more as we’re still unpacking precisely what it is, and I’m sure some of it will remain classified. But suffice it to say there was a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embed code inside of U.S. government systems, and it now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as well,” Pompeo said. “This was a very significant effort, and I think it’s the case that now, we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
Pompeo said that “I get asked all the time who’s our enemy” and that “Russia is certainly on that list.” The secretary of state said that “Vladimir Putin remains a real risk to those of us who love freedom” and that while “I rank China as the challenge that truly presents an existential threat, but I don’t minimize the risk that having hundreds and hundreds of nuclear warheads capable of reaching the United States imposes.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency revealed on Thursday that the hacking campaign was even larger than originally reported, with the cyberactors gaining secretive backdoor access in more ways than just through the known SolarWinds software update being corrupted. CISA issued a governmentwide directive last week to purge all federal agency networks of potentially compromised servers after discovering that, at the very least, the Treasury and Commerce departments were victims of a monthslong cyber campaign. The Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the National Institutes of Health are also believed to be victims.
The FBI, CISA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a joint statement on Wednesday revealing that the “cybersecurity campaign” was “significant and ongoing.” The groups established a Cyber Unified Coordination Group to respond to the crisis.
Over the weekend, Trump tweeted that the Russians might not have been behind the attack.
“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control,” Trump tweeted. “Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!)”
Republican Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Marco Rubio tweeted late last week that “the methods used to carry out the cyber hack are consistent with Russian cyber operations” and that it was “increasingly clear that Russian intelligence conducted the gravest cyber intrusion in our history.”
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking member on the intelligence committee, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday that “I would echo what Secretary Pompeo has said and Marco Rubio has said — all indications point to Russia.”
Kevin Mandia, the head of FireEye, said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that “I think it’s definitely a nation behind this” and that “I think this is an attack very consistent with” Russian intelligence, but he stopped short of directly attributing the attack to that country, saying that “we can speculate it, or we can do some more work and put a neon sign on the building of the folks that did this.” Mandia, whose company went public with the fact that it had also been hacked earlier this month, added that “we’re gonna get attribution, not 92% right, not consistent with, but 100% — let’s just get it right so that we can proportionally respond, period.”
Ron Klain, President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming chief of staff, appeared on the same show and said the Biden team had been briefed, arguing that “I don’t think it’s our place to disclose this information in terms of who gets the blame” and lamenting that “we’ve heard one message from the secretary of state, a different message from the White House, a different message from the president’s Twitter feed.”
