Chris Wray tells Congress Moscow waging social media campaign but says he has not seen new effort to hack election infrastructure

The FBI director, Christopher Wray, has warned that Russia is engaged in “information warfare” heading into the 2020 presidential election, though he said law enforcement has not seen ongoing efforts by Russia to target America’s election infrastructure.

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Wray told the House judiciary committee that Russia, just as it did in 2016, is relying on a covert social media campaign aimed at dividing American public opinion and sowing discord.

That effort, which involves fictional personas, bots, social media postings and disinformation, may have an election-year uptick but is also a round-the-clock threat that is in some ways harder to combat than an election system hack, Wray said.

“Unlike a cyber-attack on an election infrastructure, that kind of effort – disinformation – in a world where we have a first amendment and believe strongly in freedom of expression, the FBI is not going to be in the business of being the truth police and monitoring disinformation online,” Wray said.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are on alert for election-related cyber-activity similar to what occurred in 2016, when Russians hacked emails belonging to the Democratic campaign of nominee Hillary Clinton and probed local election systems for vulnerabilities.

But, Wray said on Wednesday: “I don’t think we’ve seen any ongoing efforts to target election infrastructure like we did in 2016.”

Even without signs of election system targeting, Wray said Russian efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation had not tapered off since 2016. He said social media had injected “steroids” into those efforts.

“They identify an issue that they know that the American people feel passionately about on both sides and then they take both sides and spin them up so they pit us against each other,” Wray said. “And then they combine that with an effort to weaken our confidence in our elections and our democratic institutions, which has been a pernicious and asymmetric way of engaging in … information warfare.”

At another point in the hearing, Wray avoided a direct answer when asked if Donald Trump, the attorney general, William Barr, or other administration officials had asked him for investigations into Trump’s Democratic rival Joe Biden, his son Hunter, or into any members of Congress.

The question was posed by Jerry Nadler of New York, the committee chairman and one of seven Democratic House managers of the impeachment case. He asked whether Trump had requested FBI investigations into the Bidens, lawmakers or the former national security adviser John Bolton – who is due out with a book next month said to undercut a key Trump defense – as possible payback for impeachment.

Wray initially said: “I have assured the Congress, and I can assure the Congress today, that the FBI will only open investigations based on the facts, and the law and proper predication.”

Wray’s appearance was his first since a DoJ inspector general report that sharply criticized the FBI’s surveillance of the former Trump campaign national security aide Carter Page. The errors produced rare bipartisan calls for changes to the federal government’s surveillance powers.

The report identified what it said were significant errors in applications to eavesdrop on Page, including omitting critical information that cut against the FBI’s original premise that Page was a Russian agent – something he has repeatedly denied.

After the report was issued, Wray told the Associated Press that the mistakes were “unacceptable and unrepresentative of who we are as an institution”. He repeated that message to lawmakers on Wednesday.