FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday the Kremlin is “upping its game” for interference in the American presidential race and that his agency needs more people and resources to combat it.
Wray told a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Tuesday the FBI’s countertampering efforts are being led by the Foreign Influence Taskforce, created in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. The task force can help push back against the ongoing interference efforts by Russia and other foreign adversaries.
Wray told the subcommittee that it “can help us get the personnel and the data analytics tools and the cybertools that we need.” And he said increased support from Congress in those areas is “the best way that we’re going to get ahead of this threat.”
Wray told lawmakers the FBI’s 2020 budget request totals $9.31 billion “to carry out the FBI’s national security, criminal law enforcement, and criminal justice services missions.”
When Chairman Jerry Moran, R-Kan., asked Wray to “elaborate on the FBI’s role in election security and actions taken by the FBI in the 2016 election to mitigate foreign interference,” Wray said that he would “let the Mueller report speak for itself.” Instead, he explained what the FBI was doing going forward, emphasizing the role of the Foreign Influence Taskforce he’d created in 2017. The task force acts as a “hub” with “spokes going out” to field offices as well as to Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the NSA, and state and local officials, Wray said.
Wray also said emerging technologies posing threats compel the agency to work clearly with the tech sector and Silicon Valley.
“We need to have the partnership with the social media companies in particular, and we’ve had really significant progress in that regard going into the midterms, and there were a lot of successes in 2018 through that team effort,” Wray said. “The specific kind of sowing divisiveness and discord through the bullhorn that social media provides — you know, the trolls, the bots, etc. — that was something that was fairly unique to the Russians, but certainly we know that other countries have been eyeing those efforts and entertaining whether to take a page out of that book.”
[Related: William Barr: Yes, Russia interfered, but Trump didn’t collude]
