U.S. intelligence agencies are working to prevent Russian election interference in the upcoming midterm elections are doing so with little guidance from the White House, CNN reports.
President Donald Trump is expected to convene a meeting with the National Security Council and high-ranking officials like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to discuss Russian attempts to interfere with the upcoming elections.
Although Trump said last Tuesday that, "We're doing everything in our power to prevent Russian interference in 2018," CNN’s sources in Congress and the intelligence community say that the White House’s NSC is not taking the lead on the issue.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said at the Aspen Security Forum last week that there’s no indication that Russia is targeting the upcoming elections the same way it did in 2016, though he added on Wednesday that, "we could just be a moment away from it going to the next level."
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats agreed, saying that, "DHS does not have evidence of the fact that anywhere near what happened in 2016," at the Aspen Security Conference. "However, despite that, we absolutely have to ... we cannot just rest on that assumption."
On Thursday, Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill confirmed to The Daily Beast that the Russian intelligence agency behind the 2016 hacks have targeted her 2018 re-election campaign.
The DHS is "in the lead" in protecting the U.S. election infrastructure, but a Democratic congressional source said, "there are still a lot of holes," in the department's openness with the states about vulnerabilities.
CNN also reports that although the National Security Agency, the top digital intelligence agency, and U.S. Cyber Command, which carries out cyber attacks against foreign enemies, recently build a new center to jointly host their cyber operations, national security adviser John Bolton eliminated the position of cybersecurity coordinator and ousted several other cybersecurity experts.
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