Former President Barack Obama’s DHS secretary accused President Trump on Thursday of increasing the likelihood of future cyberattacks against U.S. election systems through his defensive response to Russia’s 2016 attack on the Democratic Party.
“[T]he current administration in power is sending the signals basically that this will be tolerated if [foreign governments] do this,” Jeh Johnson, who led the Department of Homeland Security in Obama’s second term, said during a national security forum on Capitol Hill. “We have yet to see any strong statement from the current administration condemning what the Russians did, and warning them not to do it again.”
Johnson offered that rebuke in response to Trump’s latest series of tweets about Russian interference in the 2016 elections, which the president called “a big Dem hoax” and an “excuse for losing the election.” Such comments, coupled with a failure to implement new cyber protections, make future attacks more likely, according to Johnson.
“The way to get superpowers to stop doing this kind of thing is to make it cost prohibitive for them,” Johnson said.
Johnson and other national security officials blamed Russia in public for stealing documents from the Democratic National Committee and releasing them to the public through WikiLeaks. The Russians also attempted to hack state-based voter registration systems, according to a National Security Agency report compiled in May of 2017 and leaked in June.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged “that Russia must be held accountable for its meddling in U.S. elections” during a recent congressional hearing. At the same time, however, he warned lawmakers not to pass wide-ranging legislation that would impose new sanctions on Russia over those cyberattacks.
Johnson said punishment for Russia should be paired with bulked up cyberdefenses, particularly focused in state-based election systems.
“We remain exposed to this kind of attack six months after the events, and nine months after the [director of National Intelligence] and I publicly said this is what happened and this is who was doing it,” he said. “And as we speak, my concern is that we have still not done much to harden our cybersecurity defenses around state election systems since that time though we have made public exactly what happened.”
