The meeting comes about a week after President Donald Trump appeared to raise doubts about the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia was continuing to target the U.S. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Trump to chair National Security Council meeting on election security

President Donald Trump will chair a full meeting of the National Security Council on Friday to discuss election security, two White House officials said.

National security adviser John Bolton is also hosting two Cabinet-level NSC principals committee meetings this week: one Thursday focused on Iran and one Friday on North Korea, the officials said. Bolton has come under criticism from some Trump administration officials for holding few high-level NSC meetings.


The meeting on election security comes about a week after Trump appeared to raise doubts about the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia was continuing to target the United States. He later said he believes his administration’s statements on the issue.

U.S. intelligence officials believe that Russia will try to interfere in this year’s mid-term elections, echoing their efforts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election in a bid to boost Trump.

“We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy, and we will continue to provide unvarnished and objective intelligence in support of our national security,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said last week after Trump seemed to side with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the subject during a press conference in Helsinki.

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Lawmakers, cybersecurity experts and state officials have criticized the White House for not playing a more active role in coordinating the government’s election security work.

“The president and the administration [have] to take a leadership role in this,” Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said on C-SPAN last week. “Unfortunately, the person at the top has not been supportive and has sent mixed messages, and that makes it difficult on us as secretaries.”

Experts have said that Bolton’s decision to eliminate the position of White House cybersecurity coordinator compounded the leadership issues. The coordinator previously supervised agencies’ cybersecurity activities and served as the administration’s public face at conferences and events.

Last week, Reps. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) sent a letter to Trump urging him to appoint an election security coordinator, calling it “an important first step in acknowledging and mitigating [cybersecurity] risks to our democracy.”

In the absence of White House coordination, the Department of Homeland Security has taken the lead in election security matters, briefing state officials, testifying at hearings, and exchanging data about possible cyber threats with the intelligence community and other agencies. In December, DHS and the states formed a “coordinating council” to better sync their efforts. In the last weeks of the Obama administration, DHS designated elections as “critical infrastructure,” on par with the nation’s power plants and hospitals.

The other agencies playing a significant role are the Election Assistance Commission, which manages the $380 million in federal funding that Congress approved in March and performs security audits of voting systems, and National Institute of Standards and Technology, which works with the EAC to write voluntary voting system guidelines that states can adopt.

The Justice Department is also involved, primarily through FBI investigations of cyberattacks on voting technology vendors and state election systems. Last week, DOJ unveiled its policy for alerting the public to election interference by foreign powers.



CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that the EAC performs voting system security audits.