Horowitz: Russian Election Interference Redux

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Rob Horowitz, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. PHOTO: Office of the Director of National Intelligence

President Trump’s reaction to recent warnings from the intelligence community that the Russians are actively interfering in the 2020 elections and doing so with more sophistication than they demonstrated in their damaging 2016 efforts was predictably to shoot the messenger, rather than proactively work to solve the problem.

In this case, the casualty was Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, who according to White House sources was let go because his staff, as they are routinely expected to do, briefed the House Intelligence Committee on the continuing problem of Russian interference and the fact that part of the motivation for our adversary’s meddling was to once again assist President Trump in his election efforts as well as to provide a boost to Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. Trump replaced Maguire with Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, veteran communication and political operative, whose main and nearly only qualification for this high- level position appears to be is his unquestioned loyalty to the president.

President Trump called this new warning about Russian interference from his own intelligence agencies a ‘hoax’, continuing his disturbing and all too familiar pattern of casting doubt on the conclusions of intelligence professionals, spraying insults and attacks, without providing any salient facts to back up his opinion.

President Trump’s continued self-serving rejection of the seriousness of Russian interference stands in the way of the full all-out effort required to protect the integrity of our elections. It sends mixed-messages to Russia as well as other nations who may decide to join the meddling about whether we will respond strongly to cyber-attacks on election infrastructure designed to cast doubt on the results and foreign social media influence campaigns designed to divide us.

While, despite the president, some progress has been made in election security since 2016, with the 2020 election only 10 months or so away, approximately 16 million Americans will vote on machines without back up paper ballots in 2020--making them highly vulnerable to penetration by foreign hackers, according to the Brennan Center. This is only one of several major vulnerabilities in our decentralized voting system run by the states that have yet to be satisfactorily addressed.

Senator McConnell did finally let the Senate act on increased funding for states to upgrade their election infrastructure; however, he continues at the behest of the president to block bipartisan legislation to ensure that foreign adversaries know there will be a high price to pay for meddling, along with other legislation aimed at ensuring that all voting machines and systems are hardened.

President Trump’s decision to reject John Adam’s admonition that ‘facts are stubborn things’ does not just apply to Russian meddling and election security, but is evident in his accelerating efforts to purge his administration of competent professionals whose only sin is their refusal to embrace the president’s alternative, fact-free reality. Especially in questions of national security and foreign policy, the danger of bad decisions being made because people only tell the president what he wants to hear and won’t challenge him, even when they know he is wrong, is manifest.

Admiral William McRaven, who oversaw the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, outlined the stakes in a recent Washington Post opinion piece commenting on the dismissal of Joseph Maguire: “As Americans, we should be frightened — deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.