Tens of thousands of internal documents and emails appeared online late Friday after being pilfered from the political party of Emmanuel Macron, who went on to beat Marine Le Pen. | AP Photo Trump’s silence on French hacks troubles cyber experts

The Trump administration is so far ignoring pleas from both on and off Capitol Hill to denounce the suspected Russian-backed digital assault that appeared aimed to tilt Sunday’s French presidential election toward nationalist candidate Marine Le Pen.

The White House’s failure to mention the attack on one of America’s oldest allies has worried Democrats, cyber policy specialists and former White House officials, who say the omission reveals a troubling inability to call out Russia over its digital aggression.


“This is an issue that should provoke grave concern in both parties,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the floor Monday afternoon. “It should compel us, Democrats and Republicans, to take proactive actions against this new threat.”

In the hack — which some researchers have linked to Russian intelligence — tens of thousands of internal documents and emails appeared online late Friday after being pilfered from the political party of centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron. The dump came less than two days before Macron’s resounding victory on Sunday.

The White House’s lack of comment on the incident comes just over a week after President Donald Trump publicly renewed his own skepticism about Russia’s role in the hacking of Democratic Party emails during the U.S. presidential race, despite the U.S. intelligence community’s forceful conclusion that senior Kremlin officials personally orchestrated the campaign with the aim of undermining Hillary Clinton.

“The silence is just a sign of how unprepared we are to deal with these things,” said James Lewis, a cyber expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

After Macron’s victory, the White House issued a congratulatory statement from press secretary Sean Spicer that made no mention of the email hack. Trump’s tweet congratulating Macron on his “big win” likewise ignored the hack. Trump later spoke with Macron by phone, but a readout of the call didn’t mention the cyberattack.

White House spokespeople did not respond to emails asking whether the administration would denounce the apparent Russian operation.

“In a different world, with a different U.S. government, yes, we would have spoken up, and we should have,” said Herb Lin, a senior cyber policy researcher at Stanford University. “I think it was a mistake not to.”

“It tells people that we’re not willing to even acknowledge that they’re under threat,” added Lin, who served on former President Barack Obama’s independent cyber commission.

In recent years, lawmakers and cyber specialists have increasingly urged the U.S. government to reprimand foreign governments publicly for online meddling campaigns that they say are quickly escalating into dangerous territory.

Traditionally, the White House has been hesitant to discuss openly which overseas adversaries officials believe are behind specific digital intrusions. It’s difficult to link any hack to a foreign government conclusively, and public accusations risk derailing already-tense relationships with digital adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran. Going public also exposes the U.S. to being called out over its own digital snooping operations around the globe.

But as cyber activity has graduated from stock-and-trade espionage to the potential sabotage of critical infrastructure — such as power plants or the electric grid — or interference in democratic elections, experts say governments must break their silence.

In its final years, the Obama administration started to speak out cautiously. In late 2014, it formally blamed North Korea for the bruising digital attack that took out Sony Pictures’ computer network. And in late December, Obama publicly fingered Russia for the hacks that felled the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

And since 2014, the Justice Department has also brought charges against government-backed hackers in China, Iran and Russia.

But the Obama administration also received criticism for waiting until after Election Day to officially condemn Russia for the presidential race hacks.

Lawmakers and cyber experts say the White House cannot continue to waver in such instances — even if the attacks aren’t in the U.S.

Washington Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, called the French election hack “a threat to all of us, and our way of life,” and called on Trump “to respond forcefully to this attack.”

“He must not downplay, ignore, or encourage such an assault,” he added in a statement.

Staying quiet after the France attack, said ex-Obama administration cyber official Megan Stifel, “doesn’t send a very clear message to our allies, let’s put it that way.”

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Stifel, who served as director for international cyber policy on Obama’s NSC, said a forceful condemnation was necessary to “advance the norms the U.S. has been pursuing” in the international community.

Lin, the Stanford researcher, warned that by remaining tight-lipped, the White House risks allowing Russia’s election meddling to become “normalized.”

If nations don’t complain about this kind of attack, he said, “then by de facto practice it becomes okay under international law.”

Complicating Trump’s silence is the fact that the president recently praised Le Pen, who is friendly with Russian President Vladimir Putin. She visited the powerful leader at the Kremlin in March and promoted a number of Kremlin-favored positions during her campaign, including plans to curb immigration, withdraw from the European Union and repeal the EU’s sanctions on Russia.

Additionally, the leaked documents from Macron’s campaign — which have yet to produce any major revelations — spread online because of a barrage of tweets from Trump-supporting, U.S.-based, far-right activists, as well as WikiLeaks, the government transparency activist organization that posted the pilfered Clinton campaign emails during the U.S. election.

According to the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, Jack Posobiec, a journalist with the far-right news outlet The Rebel, was the first to tweet out a link to the documents using #MacronLeaks. The hashtag quickly took off after it was promoted by WikiLeaks and other far-right Twitter personalities, the researchers said.

If Trump weighed in on the Macron leaks, it would bring attention to these issues, not to mention the ongoing FBI investigation into whether Trump’s camp colluded with the Kremlin over its apparent hacking of Democratic targets during the 2016 election.

“It’s actually pretty shrewd not to say anything, because there’s no way to win in this situation,” said CSIS’s Lewis. “I think that until we end the Russia investigation here one way or the other, the administration’s going to be very cautious in saying anything.”

James Norton, a Department of Homeland Security official during the George W. Bush administration, added that it was “unrealistic to expect President Trump to recognize a reported cyberattack in a foreign country.”

Norton and others noted the Trump administration was likely working behind the scenes with French intelligence officials to help with any investigation. U.S. intelligence agencies have already shared with European allies the classified version of a deep-dive report on Russia’s 2016 digital meddling.

Regardless, the drumbeat on Capitol Hill to take more public action is unlikely to cease.

“We should begin an extended, bipartisan discussion about how to combat foreign information operations campaigns and safeguard the integrity of democratic elections all over the world and, most importantly, in our own country,” Schumer said.

Tim Starks and Cory Bennett contributed to this report.