Transcripts For KQED Firing Line With Margaret Hoover 20240712

And by. Corporate funding is provided by. Welcome back to firing line, senator angus king. Margaret, great to be with you. Looking forward to talkingme about retty important stuff today. Well, its a privilege is welcome you back for special edition of firing line. Senator, you were recently quoted in the new york tim as saying. As we sit here right n, are foreign adversaries trying to interfere in our election . Yes, absolutely. Theres no doubt about it. Russias in the lead. Something. To be doing were not sure exactly what. I dont think china is reallyga d at this point. Iran is working around the margins, but russias in, in a serious way. So what is the motivation, thensenator, for these foreign actors . Well, theres something in common between iran, russia, and china. None of them like democracy. Putin hates democracy. The idea of a free and open election terrifies him. They very much want to undermine our democracy and show the world that it doesnt really work. I think ths really the intent here. Foreign actors intervening in our elections n is not theme. I would like to show you a clipf from willibuckley jr. s original firing line. And youll see that this themes me up before. Take a look. The soviet union is devoting 2 billion a yearnd to propaactivities primarily directed against the United States. Ad they bst in 83 languages, 2,000 hours a year. This is 19. For that whole year, 2,000 hours. Thats radio moscow alone. They have another transmitter grcalled radio peace and ps, which assumes a more strident tone. Something has to be done. Okay, so there you see, senar, the russians, the viets have been waging influence campaigns for roughla century, interfering, according experts, in the elections of 1960, 1968, 1976, and the 1984 elections, russia then again interfering in the 2016 election. Is is nothing new if we look at history. Correct, senator . Its absolutely notng new. What mr. Staar was talking about is absolutely whats going on toda the difference is the availability of the technology to do it in auch more insidious and im afraid to say effective way than just, you know, distributing fliers on the streets of new york or, you know, radio moscow, that kind of thing. Wh they can do today with with the internet platforms,wi hacking into emails or Voting Systems is far beyond the dreams of stalin. T its certainly in the purview of Vladimir Putin. But, senator, one thing that seems to be different todao ise seem to be more vulnerable to being manipulated because there is already distrust that exists within thelectorate about the integrity of our elections. Do you agree that creates i think it does, and i think its a real concern. And what were talking about, theres a new term thats just sort of come up in the last few weeks. Its called a perception hack. And what it means is its creating a perception of the unreliability, the distrust in the electoral process. And th all they have to do. If you think about it, this isnt much of a challenge for the russians. They dont have to change votes. All they have to do is convince a number, a lot of americans that they can do it or maybe that theyre trying to do it. An thats enough. And thats what theyre doing. Theyre trying to raise doubts about the validity and the protection of our election. And thats a challenge for us. You know, in government, we want people to be aware of whats going on, but we dont want to we dont want to do their work for them by undermining confidence in the electoral process. E well, letk you then about President Trumps claims about voter fraud, partularly with mailin voting. Does that contributehe to raising t kind of doubts youre talking about . Unfortunately, the answer t t is an unequivocal yes. He is saying exactly what our adversaries are also saying and what they would want him to say. He has the biggest megaphone all. He has 30 or 40 million followers in the country, at least, who believe everything he says. And if he tells them the election is rigged or its going to be rigged or u cant trust mailin voting or all of those kinds of things, thats exactly unfounately, i hate to say this but thats exactly what the russians and the iranians are trying to convince americans of. So he ought to be resuring people about the integrity ofst our , not himself talking about undermining it. Listen, ive disagreed with a lot of things hes done over the past four years. But this to me is the mo serious because our whole system rests upon trust. And when you undermine that, thats a profound disservice to the people of this country. Russian News Services currently are telling stories that americas mailin Voting System is susceptible, particularly susceptible to voter fraud. So he russian News Services are saying the same thing that the president himself isaying, to your point, is President Trump being briefed by the Intelligence Community about the risk that he is posing, as you describ i honestly dont know the answer to that. Of course, hes, from the very beginning of his administration, expressed nothing but disdain for the Intelligence Community. And the directorna of natintelligence now is a guy with not much experience in intelligencef but a loxperience in supporting the president as a member of the house. So whether hes being told thi hes certainly not ltening because everywhere he go, he talks about, you know, if i lose, the election is going to be rigged. Its really disturbing. I mean, hes got to know that this is also what the russians and the iranians are pushing for. Heres an intereg point. And i hesitate to get people in blhis administration in tr but there are people throughout the administrationwh are doing exactly what they ought to be doing and are doing a damn good job. They are warning the public about this. Director wray said theo great threat to mailin voting. He said that last summer. So, interestingly, the sort of professional level of the adminisn is doing the right thing, and theyve done a really good job. So its the president thats really out of step with pretty much everybody th studied this issue. Theres a report this week, senator, from axios that President Trump is eager to fire fbi directordi wray, cictor gina haspel, the defense secretary esper, as soon as he can. He would do it now, but for the political implications, and if he wins reelection, has communicated that he will turn over that staff. What do you make of that well, he has a fundamental misunderstanding of who these peoplwork for. Remember hearing him say, my generals . No theyrhis generals. Theyre americas generals. And when you join the federalwe service, you an oath. The oath is to the constitution. Its not to the president. Its not to any particular president. And he doesnt get that. He thinks theyrlike assistant managers at the bedminster country club. You can fire them, and in fact, he can. He does have that power. But over and over and over, people in this administration the being fired for doing nothing more thar job. People like wray and othershe indministration, gina haspel, theyre committed to the mission of and theyre committed to telling the truth to the American People. The politicization yes. Lligee. Firing people for telling the truth is incredibly dangerous for the untry. Thats how we get into Bad International situations with cooked intelligence. Vietnam, iraq, the bay of pigs. E whenntelligence is cooked to meet the predilections of the executive of the president or the secretary of defense when we get into real trouble. The Intelligence Communitys job is tseek the truth and tell t truth. And youve got to be ablet to listen to tuth. If you dont, youre going to make some big mistake in july, you wrote an oped for time, senator, and you said. Senator, is sunlight the best disinfectant . A absolutel thats why i said that. The best protection for the americ peoplfrom disinformation, for example, is to know its disinformation. I want the Intelligence Community to tell the americanle pehat they know in real time in order to allow us to defend ourselves. I dont think theyve done as thorough a job of informing the American People as they could. But theyve done some. Ill give them two cheers, i guess. Youve be critical of the fact that the Obama Administration waited until october of 2016 to tell the American People about russian terference in the last president ial election when they had known about it at that point for months. Members of President Trumps Intelligence Team have briefed the blic multiple times since july on current you said youd give them two cheers. Are those two cheers better than at least four years ago . Yes, and i understand whatas going on in the Obama Administration. That was one of the things we looked at in detail on thege senate intele committee in our analysis of 2016. Obama was afraid that by fully informing the people about the ruians activity, it would undermine e nfidence in the election. In other words, rase i remember hearing was, we dont want to do the russians work for them. So they didnt talk about it until actually october of 2016. I think and i dont have anyr realhand information i think many of the people thato ributed to that decision, perhaps including president obama himself, regret that desion. But that was thats the tension going on here, y want to inform people about foreign activity targeted at our elections, but you dont want to make them feel that, well, you cant believe whats going on in the elections because, you know, weve got a pretty robust, strong election system, in part because its so decentlized. You know, its someone once described it as a hairball. Its thousands of election t systems all ov country in states and municipalities. That doesnt mean it cant be manipulated. The problem is youont have to be a genius to know. Dade county, florida, target for example. And you can certainly t screw reporting and also the the final results of a president ial election. So i think we shld feel much better about how the states area protected thanthey were in 16. Theyre much more prepared, i believe. A letslook at what the director of National Intelligence said in a press nference just last week. Im going to show you a clip. Take a look. We have confirmed that some voteregistration informaon has been obtained by iran d separately by russia. To that end, we have already emails designed to intimidate and damage President Trump. T, now, dni ratcliffe wase referring to fmails sent to democratic voters in florida and other states, purportedly from a white supremacist group, the proud boys, that said vote for trump or else. And as we heard in that sound bite,ra dnliffe said these emails threatening democratic voters were actually meant to damage President Trump. Ex can yoain how they were supposed to damage President Trump . Its a little bitf mental jiujitsu because ostensibly, of it, fac those emails were attempting to help President Trump. They were trying to tell democrats, dont vote for biden or else. Now, the argument is, that they intendedt caughtclumsy and they were trying to look like this was something coming from a trump ally and therefore blowback against President Trump. But it is a little bitan of a s argument. The other thing people should know is that a lot i of votormation is public. T. U can buy it. You can download just because somebody has gottet ind of information doesnt necessarily mean theyre in the systems. What is concerning me somewhat, though, margaret, this goround is that there is evidence that the russians are attemptin to get into tual voting infrastructure. To the point of manipulating systems, the fbi and Homeland Security officials onr octond said that Russian Hackers had targeted dozens ofnd governmentviation networks, retrieved from at least two counties. The Washington Post latert reported tose counties were in california and indiana. C yomittee fnd that rusanaffiliated cyber hackers accessedle restrictednts of election infrastructure four years ago but didnt alterst any retion data. Now, is the current reported activity,enator, the same as four years ago, or is this different . Well, ive got to tell you at the finding of four years ago that they penetrated the election infrastructure of practically every state has always haunted me. The inteigence at the time was they didnt change any votes. They didnt mess up the registrationists or anything like that. But its always haunted me s because whatd to myself is they werent doing it for fun. And now we know that theyre getting into a couple of counties. We dont know how many others. My anoncern is that what they did in 16 was practice. It was poking aroundseeing where the vulnerabilities were,a because, remember, if the purpose is to sow distrust of the election, what could be more chaotic than showing up to vote at your polling place and all of a sudden your nameon isnhe list anymore and you dont know what happened . Or what if the power goes off . You know, we know the russians have poked around in our ectric system. What if the power goes off in dade county on election day and all the sites go dark, all the compers are down . An i theres so many opportunities, and thats what the danger is here. And so i dont know what theyre doing this time, and its something it aint good we should be concerned about. Now, the good news is the states have really strethened their systems. So i think were frankly a lot stronger than we were in 2016, but were certainly not invulnerable. I want to be really clear. At this moment, is there any evidence of voter information no. No. Ged . At this moment, is there any evidence that we should worry about votes being changed . No, i dont think so. Although, again, why are the russians going into voting systs . Are they just, you know,oi coeurs of software of Voting Systems . Again, you got to ask yourself, why are they doing it and are othey doing it just for f for some nefarious purpose . I dont think theyre up to anything good. Has the Intelligence Community, senator, told the public enough about russian interference up to this point . I dont think so. Sand that was rememberd two cheers. Mmhmm. The press conference that you played a clip from, a the emphasis was on iran. And i think theyre younow, im, you know, psychoanalyzing here but there seemed to be an effort or there has been an effort downplay what the russians are doing and have done and try to say, well, china is doing it, too, or iran is doing it, too. The fact is the russians are the most active and the most skilled. And the most dangeus. Are you aware, senator, from your position on the intelligence committeee of anything ssians are doing that the public should be aware of and hasnt been informed of yet . Youve just asked me c a questiont answer. Maybe you can comment on, senator, one of your colleagues, senator chs murphy, a democratic senator from connecticut, tweeted the following. Whats he talking about . I dont know. M i cant confat. Do you think its that President Trump understands that he is not doing an to stopim and it . Well, ive spent the last almost four years working on the massive report that ourommittee produced, by the way, on a bipartisan and almost unanimous basis of whahappened in 2016, andar partic the last volume, which is over a thousand pages, of the relationship between the Trump Campaign and the russians. Nc and heres my sion, after looking at all of that material. I dont think there was ever a time where donald trump jr. Or President Trump or Corey Lewandowsk Paul Manafort sat down with Vladimir Putin and signean agreement. Youre going to do this. Were going to do that. In i dont there was that kind of agreement. The phrase that has suggested itself to me is one i remember from law school, fromntitrust law. The term is consciousel param. Its when two parties are working in the same direction and they know what the other is doing. They accept the relationship, but theres notic a specgreement. Thats one of the reasons that mr. Mueller didnt find because there wasnt this kind of a criminal conspiracy has to start with an agreement. I dont think there was an agreement, but i think its sort of evolved. The russians did this and the Trump Campaign welcomed it. The russians want to sow discord, chaos, and distrust in our election system. And the president has overtly, in plain viefor the past three or four months, been sowing distrust andack of confidence in our electoral system. So are they working togeth . I dont think you can say that. Are they working in the same direction . Ye so youre saying the conscious parallelism continues in 2020 . Well, it certainly seems to be. Their goal is to divide us. Their goal is to divide us and to sap our confidence in our system. And unfortunately, the president also doesnt seem interested in unifying the country. In and he cer has been overtly sowing distrust and a lack of confidence in our electoral system. Margaret. Hate to say this, this is not you know, this is uncomfortable for me, but i just dont think you can i dont know how you can not talk about it. Its so obvious. Senator, yojust mention the concern of a possibly devastating cyberattack on the grid. What do we do to prepare ourselves against that possibility . Well, i think you may b aware, margat, that i spent the last year and a half of my life working on that. Congress, in 2019, set up a National Commission to develop a strategy for defending ourselves in cyberspace, which we really havent had in any coherent y. So this commission, which was bipartisan, we really dug in on this issue. And theres a lot we have to do. Weave to reorganize becaus cyber is scattered throughout the federal government. We have to involve ourselves with the international communits to establie rules of the road about cyber. You know, weve had a thousand d years elop the law of war. Well, cyber is a whole new realm, and whavent we dont have the norms. And so the needs to be some International Work on that. America has to be in the lead on that, it seems to me, and then finally and i think very importantly, margaret, we haveca to commu to our adversaries that a cyberattack is an attack and that were going to take it seriously and that there will be consequences. E problem now is, if you look back to 2016, obama did put some sns on the russians after the election, but it wasnt really a very dramatic response. And if youre sitting in the kremlin saying, w shaattack the American Election aga . , one guy at the end of the table says, why not . Nothing happened to us last time. Why not . Its n very expensive. We can hire 8,000 hackers for the price of one jet aircraft. Lets go. Yeah. I want them to say, man, we better not do thecause were going to get whacked in some way. It may be sanctions, it may be something else, but onof our major commendations is the development of a deterrence sttegy. To me, its the most imminent threat against theed unittates. The next pearl harbor, margaret, will be cyber. At s, its also widely expected that we wont know the results of the election on electn night, that it could to know the results. Eks for us how can foreign adversaries try to take advantage well, the first thing to say is we may not know the results of election night. That doesnt mean its rigged or its improper, theres anything wrong. Its just going to take a lot of t to count all those ballots. People have to be prepared for that. What ive been saying to people ,is you need to be prepar you need to have a plan to vote, and you ne to be patientct and not exll the results on election night. We may have them,. But we may n the biggest concern, margaret, is that we dont have ghthe results on election it drags on for two or three days. People start filing ts and trying to stop recounts and that kind of thing. T and people jt more and more uneasy about whether this is going to be a fair election. You know, senator, theres an old saying, as maine goes, so goes thnation. And main as you know, it splits its elector votes, and its 2nd Congressional District went for trump four years ago. What are you seeing on the ground in maine, in that district in the north . Well, i think maine is very reflective of the country. Nd and mary did an r. V. Trip a couple of weeks ago when we were in recess in washington and went around a lot of the rural areas. An of trump signs. Ful lot theres no question about it. So i think its going to be a horse race in the 2nd district. But i think joe biden is going to carry maine, and i think that will be reflected around the country. And clearly, i donthink theres any doubt,argaret, that this is the most important election in our lifetimes. Op i mean, often say that, but ive never seen one where the stakes are so high, the passions are runni so high, t number of voters, the energy in voting is running so high. So i think the most important thing for everybody is to vote. You know, its no accident the United States constitution, the first three words of the United States constitution,r we the people. Er and four years we, the people have an opportunity to speak, and thats whatsto goinappen next week. Senator king, thank you r joining me on firing line for this special edition on election security. Pleasure to be with you, margaret. Look forward to seeing you again. Firing line with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by. And by. Corporate funding is provided by. Youre watching pbs. Le the peho gave the money to make Mister Rogers neighborhood are the people of this a other. And. Its a Beautiful Day in this neighborhood a Beautiful Day for a neighbor could you be mine . Wld you be mine . 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