Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed Wednesday that the Trump administration will counter continued Russian efforts to interfere in U.S. elections.
“We will not tolerate Russian interference in our 2018 elections. Much work has been done, there is more to do,” he told lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Rest assured that we will take the appropriate counter-measures in response to the continued Russian efforts.”
Pompeo on Wednesday praised the Trump administration’s “enormous efforts to push back against Russia,” which he described as a dramatic improvement from the Obama administration. But he conceded that “there is a great deal more work to do.”
“We have not been able to achieve effective deterrence of some of these efforts of the Russians,” he said.
Top intelligence officials, including then-CIA director Pompeo, said in February that they expected Russia to continue its efforts to sow division in the U.S. “There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations,” said Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.
The Trump administration has taken a range of harsh measures countering Russia, including going after Vladimir Putin’s inner circle with economic penalties, enforcing the 2012 Magnitsky Act, and providing Ukraine with lethal defensive aid.
But President Donald Trump has not consistently condemned Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and has attracted criticism over his expressed desire to improve relations with Russia as well as his praise for Putin. Trump has simultaneously described Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election interference, which includes the nature of any links between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, as a “witch hunt.”
The intelligence community concluded in January 2017 that Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at undermining faith in the democratic process and denigrating then-candidate Clinton, with a “clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
“I have not seen anything that would dissuade me from believing it was right,” Pompeo said Wednesday when asked about that assessment. But he noted that the NSA assessed the following key judgment with “moderate” rather than “high” confidence: “We also assess Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”
Pompeo also told lawmakers he would take advantage of the more than $55 million in funding available for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. The GEC was originally launched in 2016 to counter terrorist messaging, but its mission has expanded to include countering disinformation from foreign states including Russia. Former secretary of state Rex Tillerson faced bipartisan criticism over a months-long delay in tapping into GEC funds authorized by Congress.
In his written testimony Wednesday, Pompeo named a range of Russian challenges to national security, including Putin’s support for Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, the March poisoning of an ex-spy and his daughter in the United Kingdom, and continued support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.
