Election security poses many tough questions for the federal government, which must navigate relationships with state and local election officials, vendors and a sometimes suspicious public. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images Cybersecurity Inside the Trump administration’s rudderless fight to counter election propaganda The administration is letting individual agencies respond to foreign governments’ attempts to undermine U.S. elections.

Nearly a dozen senior law enforcement, homeland security and intelligence officials held a first-of-its-kind meeting at the Justice Department in late September to discuss how to respond if a foreign adversary tried to influence the midterm elections.

But they left after 90 minutes without devising a plan or answering key questions, according to a person who attended the previously unreported gathering.


No one from the White House was present, said the attendee, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. The only presidential appointee there, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, delivered opening remarks and left after the first half hour. And in a twist that epitomized the administration chaos surrounding election preparations, attendees emerged to discover that The New York Times was reporting that Rosenstein had discussed secretly recording his meetings with President Donald Trump.

“There are TVs out in the front office, and his face was on them,” the person said of Rosenstein. “It was very weird.”

A month after the Sept. 21 meeting, the Trump administration still has no strategy for fighting disinformation campaigns aimed at swaying U.S. elections, three people knowledgeable about the matter told POLITICO — less than a week before voters nationwide return to the polls.

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In the absence of high-level White House coordination, the administration is letting individual agencies such as the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security make decisions about how to respond to foreign governments’ attempts to use social media and other propaganda to undermine U.S. elections, according to people who have been briefed on or participated in the administration’s discussions of the issue. That means broader strategic questions remain unresolved because of White House turf wars, agencies’ competing priorities, political sensitivities and a lack of experience with a relatively new threat, the people say.

Meanwhile, intelligence and law enforcement agencies warned this month that Russia, China and Iran are waging “ongoing campaigns” to influence American elections and policies.

“The lines of authority for defending against and responding to influence ops are going to be hypercomplicated,” said one former DHS employee, who also requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive deliberations.

Lisa Monaco, who served as Barack Obama’s second White House homeland security adviser, said the federal government needs a broad strategy to address the problem — along with “someone to bring all of these agencies and departments together and make sure they are implementing that strategy.”

“Otherwise,” she said, “there is a danger that well-meaning agencies are executing operations that may have unintended consequences for other operations, for sources and methods, or for diplomatic relations.”

Election security poses many tough questions for the federal government, which must navigate relationships with state and local election officials, vendors suspicious of potential regulations and voters who may dislike either the president or the career bureaucrats who are supposedly sabotaging his agenda. The Obama administration famously had its own problems navigating the issue, spending much of 2016 agonizing over whether and how aggressively to publicize evidence that Russia was carrying out a massive hacking and social media campaign aimed at disrupting the presidential race.

But the Trump administration is hardly faring any better, according to the three sources.

“I don’t think you can create some sort of line-and-block flowchart of, ‘If this happens, then this is the outcome,’” the meeting attendee said. “But I do think that you can establish some principles that should guide the federal government in determining whether the American public has a right to know about matters essential to our democracy. And I don’t think the sophistication level exists within this White House to be able to have a conversation like that.”

In the absence of an overarching strategy, officials from agencies such as DHS and the FBI have met repeatedly over the past year to discuss issues such as when to announce evidence of foreign influence operations and who in the government should take the lead. Some agencies have taken individual actions, such as a recent effort by the Pentagon’s Cyber Command — reported last week by The New York Times — to contact individual Russian operatives to discourage them from interfering in U.S. elections.

But the administration’s approach doesn’t resolve questions that inevitably arise when the agencies’ perspectives and priorities clash, such as the FBI’s need to keep investigations secret versus DHS’ greater focus on building public awareness.

The White House told POLITICO that the process is working as intended.

“In this Administration, operational planning and execution is implemented by the Departments and Agencies, as is wholly appropriate,” National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis said in a statement. The NSC provided “regular and continuous coordination,” he said, and “any inference otherwise is incorrect.” He did not answer a question about whether the administration had a formal, detailed strategy.

With White House leadership lacking, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has convened her own meetings with agency leaders on election security issues, though several sessions focused more on developing a messaging strategy than solving operational problems, the Sept. 21 meeting attendee said. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats’ team has held weekly meetings on the topic.

Trump, meanwhile, has reacted angrily to the investigations into Russian election meddling in 2016 — but White House involvement in election security was a sensitive subject even before his victory. Two years later, administration officials still haven’t decided whether to meet at the White House for an interagency response to election interference, the person who attended the Sept. 21 meeting told POLITICO.

“It may not be appropriate, particularly in a presidential election, for the White House to be the convening authority,” the person said, “because it gives the impression of politicization.”

Those planning the Sept. 21 meeting debated whether to formally raise the issue of the White House’s role but opted not to, the attendee said.

But at one point in the meeting, Christopher Krebs, the undersecretary in charge of the DHS cyber wing, asked whether any White House officials were present, according to the attendee. When he learned the answer was no, Krebs said something to the effect of, “All right, I’ll tell you what I really think.”

When told no White House officials were present at a meeting, Christopher Krebs, the undersecretary in charge of the Homeland Security Department's cyber wing, said he would tell people what he really thought of their response. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

DHS did not dispute this exchange. In a statement, spokeswoman Sara Sendek said: “Despite the opinion of some unnamed sources, the Secretary, the Under Secretary and the entire DHS team are totally focused on improving security and countering any foreign attempts to interfere with the 2018 midterm elections.”

Months before the meeting, according to the attendee, officials concluded that cyber intrusions, such as hacks of voting technology vendors or state voter databases, would fall under an Obama-era framework for responding to “significant cyber incidents.” But they realized that no similar process existed for influence operations such as social media propaganda campaigns, which the intelligence community has called the bulk of the Russian government’s efforts in 2016.

At the Sept. 21 meeting, one question the officials considered was whether the government should be more aggressive in announcing disinformation that targeted the election process than attacks on specific campaigns. “We were more worried about false claims of election interference on an Election Day that would sow confusion and depress turnout,” the attendee said.

Another question that divided the room was whom to notify if intelligence agencies discover an influence operation targeting a particular race — specifically whether they should notify the campaign being targeted, both sides or the public. “How confident would we have to be?” the attendee said, recounting the debate. “Would it be enough to know that they were thinking about doing something?”

As they ate sandwiches and debated during the midday meeting in a secure DOJ conference room, the officials also considered which part of the government should deliver warnings about influence operations. Not every agency is equally trusted, and sending out the wrong messenger could undercut the message. Most meeting participants, according to the attendee, agreed that “the White House is not the right messenger.”

Some participants suggested the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that mostly serves as a clearinghouse for sharing best practices with election supervisors. But the general view was that it should be DHS, the FBI and the intelligence community.

Those agencies have been trying to reassure Americans. In a vague joint statement on Oct. 19, they said they were working “closely together in order to develop the most up-to-date picture of the threat.”

The Sept. 21 meeting involved several hypothetical scenarios, one of which raised a thorny question: What should the government do if hackers release fake documents alongside real ones? “Would the federal government simply acknowledge or confirm the hack and release was foreign-sponsored,” said the source present, “or would we go so far as to identify which ones were accurate and which ones were fake?”

The session ended without clear answers to most of these questions, though the meeting attendee argued that this didn’t represent failure.

“The purpose of this meeting wasn’t to reach consensus,” the person said. Instead, the goal was “to build a little bit of muscle memory, so that the first time we’re having some of these discussions isn’t when there’s an actual thing that’s occurred.”

Participants in the meeting included John Demers, the head of DOJ’s National Security Division, who chaired the session; Krebs, from DHS; Tonya Ugoretz, head of the intelligence community’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center; and Brian Benczkowski, who leads DOJ’s Criminal Division.

Also present were Matt Gorham, the head of the FBI’s Cyber Division; Robert Johnson, the head of the bureau’s Criminal Division; Joseph Bonavolonta, the No. 2 official in the bureau’s Counterintelligence Division; Anne Neuberger, the NSA’s lead on countering foreign influence operations; a CIA official; and someone from DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

A National Security Agency spokesman confirmed that the meeting occurred and that Neuberger participated. The other agencies did not confirm their attendees.

The Justice Department declined to discuss the meeting. “As you would expect the department to do, we have held a number of meetings in preparation for the upcoming election to discuss possible scenarios and our response to them on a variety of fronts,” said spokesman Marc Raimondi. “We will not comment on any particular meetings or about the attendees.”

Inside the White House, meanwhile, a nine-month bureaucratic turf war delayed a decision about which part of the National Security Council would oversee election security, according to the meeting attendee.

Rather than designate an “election security czar,” as some Democrats have suggested, the NSC wound up creating a bifurcated system, according to the meeting attendee and the former DHS employee. The teams that handle cybersecurity and “resilience” — meaning natural disasters and other public health crises — oversee policy related to election infrastructure, while the intelligence and Russia teams deal with foreign influence operations.

Through this system, the NSC has convened regular election security meetings with lower-level officials from across the government. The agencies’ No. 2 officials also hold occasional meetings, according to a former Obama administration official who keeps in contact with current government employees.

But the new structure has caused confusion. Different NSC teams have asked agencies three times for a list of their election security activities, the meeting attendee said, as well as repeated questions such as: “On Election Day, who will be reporting to us?” and “How will we be getting live updates about what’s going on?” When the White House decided that Trump would chair an NSC meeting on election security in July, “we all of a sudden are being called in to put together a slide deck with clip art for the president,” the person said.

Even absent White House issues, election security presents massive coordination challenges, because every agency approaches it from a different perspective.

The FBI treats election security probes like digital crime scenes, where investigators must preserve evidence and keep facts secret so prosecutors can build a case. DHS handles election-focused influence operations and cyberattacks like disaster zones, where public awareness and public-private cooperation can resolve incidents and reduce future risks. And CIA and NSA spies vigorously oppose declassifying their intelligence and sharing it with outsiders like state and local officials, fearing that publicizing what the U.S. knows would compromise the sources and methods used to learn it.

“The [intelligence community] and FBI are much more concerned about the reasons why we are sharing” and weighing costs and benefits, said the meeting attendee. “Whereas for DHS, it’s very two-dimensional. It’s like, ‘We should share. We should always share.’”

DHS has two election task forces, one for protecting infrastructure and one for combating foreign influence, as first reported by the Daily Beast. But those have had problems, too. The infrastructure group has been hobbled by states’ control over their election systems, and the influence group raised eyebrows elsewhere in the government, because the FBI already runs a foreign influence task force.

It’s “very difficult to imagine what role [DHS] could play in that space, given their authorities,” said the meeting attendee. This person compared the task force to DHS’ constant push to share information with tech firms. “It was kind of like, they just wanted the relationship, and they wanted to be the first phone call.”

Sendek, the DHS spokeswoman, responded: “Any notion that the department is sharing too much information with our state and local partners or working too hard to raise this public awareness is a criticism we will proudly embrace.”

