Liberal lawmakers are upping their rhetoric over alleged Russian interference activities, with several senators on the Armed Services Committee describing them as “warfare.”
The head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and US Cyber Command, Adm. Mike Rogers, testified before the panel on Tuesday about future funding, but mostly fielded questions related to the 2016 election and Russia’s online activities.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) was the first during the hearing to employ military language, when he described alleged Russian hacking as part of an “ongoing warfare against our democracy.”
But Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) went a step further, telling Rogers that the country has already been defeated, and that the government “failed to protect the US democracy.”
“We’ve lost what may be the first real cyber war that our nation has been,” said Kaine, who was personally defeated as the Vice Presidential nominee on the 2016 Democratic ticket.
Later in the hearing, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) told a story about a woman who approached her in the grocery store to ask if Russia was at war with the US.
“I said ‘yes!’” McCaskill told Rogers. “They came after our democracy—I can’t imagine anything more essential to the United States of American than our democracy,”
Rogers attempted to clarify the senator’s language by stating there’s a legal definition of war.
But Tuesday’s rhetoric from Democrats falls in line with prior statements from politicians like Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and even Hillary Clinton. They have each described alleged campaign meddling in 2016 as a Pearl Harbor equivalent and a “cyber 9/11.”
What’s known about Russian influence operations, however, has largely come from the intelligence community, newspapers, and the Department of Justice indictments. And so far, the findings don’t comport with Democrats’ claims of a military assault.
The US government has so far found no evidence that alleged Russian activities included changing vote totals. This month, the head of cyber security at the Department of Homeland Security, Jeanette Manfra, said that “an exceptionally small number” of state election systems were penetrated, but not manipulated in any way. In a report last January, the intelligence community pinned the hacking of the Democratic National Committee on Russian spy services.
And the head of the DOJ’s probe into Russian meddling, special counsel Robert Mueller has only returned one set of indictments related to an interference operation. The court filings detailed what’s described as a Russian “troll farm” and 13 employees who used social media and other methods to impersonate American citizens to engage in online political debate and, on a few occasions, organize actual political rallies.
During Tuesday’s hearing, NSA chief Rogers explained the current situation in a different way from Democratic senators. He put it in terms of a cat-and-mouse game of state tradecraft.
“We are in a competition with these guys and they are trying to gain every tool they have to gain advantage,” Rogers testified.
