does that include the parties and the infrastructure around candidates or just the mechanics of voting itself? if you read the way i wrote the statement on january 6th, it s pretty much confined to the election process itself. the election infrastructure itself. not the politicians, not the political parties. all right, thank you. time expired. adam. thank you, mr. chairman. mr. secretary, in the late summer of last year the russians were doing more than gathering for an intelligence that they were, in fact, dumping it in a way designed to potentially influence outcomes not by affecting the vote machines, necessarily. but by affecting american opinion with the dumping of these e-mails. so, that s happening in late summer. mid to late summer. why did it take the administration so long to make a public statement that a foreign adversary was trying to
seen and heard before directly from the intelligence community. the only thing i have on that is derivative of what the intelligence community has and the law enforcement community. speaking of the intelligence community, it strikes me that most of the information currently available was available in the fall of 2016. most of the intelligence products that are relied upon to form certain assessments, that underlying data was available in 2016. some of it before the election. i m not in a position to agree or disagree with that because i don t have access any more to intelligence over the last five months. well, looking at this a different way. before the election in november of 2016, you had already seen evidence of russian efforts to impact our election. in fact, you testified they had a preference for a candidate. they were aggressive and i think you used the phrase plain and
seemed, some serious action was taken. the sanctions. sanctions in particular. and also the public statements by the president and by the intelligence community coming out. really coming on strong and, yet, i didn t see what was present the election that was after the election? one month before the election, formally and very publicly accused the russian government of doing this in pretty blunt terms uncommon for the intelligence community. that statement was pretty blunt in saying we know the russian government is doing this. based on the picture we saw at the time. the picture continued to build upon itself as time progressed. there was more we knew about the russian government s efforts at scanning voter registration databases. you recall the october 7 statement says we were not then
being here and for your service. some of this may be redundant but i m trying to really better understand how all of the different entities have come together. can you briefly summarize dhs role in cyber defense. you have been watching the house intelligence committee question the former head of homeland security sitting right there, jeh johnson, in large part defended how the obama administration handled russian interference in the election and talked about how the dnc refused the dhs help when it came to the interference from russia regarding that hack. he also talked about working to designate the federal the election system as critical infrastructure as he called it and getting push back from states, that it might amount to a federal takeover. i want to bring in our msnbc
i feel congress is kind of stuck on that question. may not have hacked and changed vote totals but did their influence have sway that is not quantifiable. that s why you see donald trump so resistance to this notion that russia did interfere. he sees it as delegitimatizing his election, that s a useful political talking point for him because donald trump is all about identifying enemies and villains because it helps explain why he s losing. if he slipped in approval ratings, someone else must be pulling one over on him. they are trying to steal this election back from you. we won and they are going to take it back from us because they are saying it s been delegitimized. it s very effective. russia still a big topic for the trump white house and health care as we re getting new reporting what the president has been doing related to health care. he got a full briefing at this lunch he had yesterday with his legislative affairs team, has been in con tant with mitch