To discuss them with a great group with us, jeh johon is the former secretary of Homeland Security answers as general counsel of the department of defense among other positions. He also represes new jersey in th seven state council the coordinates covid related reopening. Sue gordon is the former Principal Deputy director of national intelligence, the nation secondhighest intelligence post and sheerved in the Intelligence Community for over three decades in a variety of senior positions. Carrie corderode is the robert gates senior fellow at cns and organizations general counsel. When she was in, she served at the department of justice and the office of the director of national intelligence. Its a great group. We i have got to discuss today. Well start our conversation among us and then moved to some audience questions which, can enter in the q a box on your screen and we will also have a few questions as we done in our past couple sessions that we will we then throughout so we can get a sense with the audience thinks about some of those things and topics. Lets start with Homeland Security and jay, outgo to you first. Ill go despite the really broad array of responsibility that dhs has come Trump Administration is focused heavily on immigration and Border Security enforcement as the sort of signature policy priority of the administration, in your mind what will or should the Biden Administration due to recalibrate the policy focus of the department . Are there areas that have been overweighted, neglected that need some sort of recalibration . Hey, richard, thanks for having me on. Thanks for including me in this program. And im a proud member, proud board member of cnas, terrific organization, for all those who are listening in. I have to begin by saying i was very, very please with the news a few minutes ago that alejandro mayor cruz the former deputy secretary of dhs president elect bidens choice to be the secretaryhs of dhs. He has a wellrounded experience with the department of Homeland Security. He ran uscis as deputy secretary years ago. He was u. S. Attorney in the southern california, so i can think anyone more qualified to take on the leadership of dhs. So when i was in office for three years i constantly saw to remind the public and the congress that dhs is much more than immigration enforcement. Dhs is aviation security, cybersecurity, port security, maritime security. Its essentially protecting the American People in theng homelad on the one yard line, and people inside the beltway very often overlooked the fact that whats on the minds of most americans is, is it safe for me to travel . Is it safe for my daughter or son on spring break to travel someplace . Thats what americans really care about. So they care about aviation security. They care about maritimeio security. They care about the full range dhs does toat protect the American Public. I think the more the next Leadership Team does the same, the more it will help to restore the credibility of dhs, which has really taken a battering over the last four years because as you pointed out immigration has been the signature issue of the entire Trump Administration, dhs hass been used as the hammr for driving that mission. There is a way to enforce our immigration laws in a sensible, compassionate way while pursuing Immigration Reform in this country. All he knows how to do that. Im confident he will take on that mission in the very confident way. But its important member the recent dhs was created was in the wake of 9 11 essentially for counterterrorism. [phone ringing] different ways over. Sorry about that. No problem. No problem. Let me just follow up on that and then i want to get sous take on this as well which is you said dhs founded and created after 9 11 to prevent another 9 11 and two decades later where do you sort of place terrorism in the rate of National Security threats facing the United States . Its pretty striking in very focused are on great power competition, the rise of china, foreign interference in our election, write a different things. If you look at the polls, americans put terrorism still quite high in the list of concerns that they care about. Its less north korea, iran and things like that but where do you place terrorism now 20 is after the creation of dhs . Good question. Itss important when ranking National Security threats to rememberra that something may ba secondary level threat until its not come into the moment its not. Terrorism, the threat of terrorism to this country has evolved greatly since 9 11. I saw it evolved just a watch at the department of defense and dhs, from what we referred to as terrorist directed attacks on there homeland, to terrorist inspired attacks through the internet and so forth. The principal Terror Threat right now in the United States, frankly, is domesticbased, domestic inspired terrorism. And that is what weve been seeing of late, the antidefamation w league, for example, has been tracking this for sometime now and has been repeatedly pointing out that the principal terrorist threat to our homeland is right wing pilot inspired terrorism, domestic in nature. Dhs was created by congress in 2002 on the assumption that terrorism was in extraterritorialal threat and, therefore, if you consolidate into one cabinetlevel department all the different ways somebody can enter our country, land, sea and air, you are effectively dealing with terrorism. That model is somewhat outdated and its why i, for example, while i was in office spent so much time on our cve mission, countering violent extremism here at home. While i was in office also i quickly came to the realization that if terrorism, counterterrorism was a cornerstone of the nation, the other cornerstone needs to bee cybersecurity. Done a lot both on my watch and after, frankly, on a pretty dhs cybersecurity mission. I am very proud of what since it under the leadership of crist grabs has done to strengthen our election infrastructure cybersecurity cisa though he was fired for reasons i dont fully understand last week. Over. Yeah, i think well, i guess we shouldnt speculate on intent of why he was fired, but seems like you said the wrong things about the integrity of the election. Sue, let me go to you, and if you have at you about dhs and its responsibilities, but also i wanted to ask y this question about whe you sort of rank their resumes of threat and maybe to drill down a little bit on his point that you have terrorists overhere, isis, alqaeda, all of theifferent terrorist groups weve been acking for whole decade now and this domestic problem here at home, and how doou think about what the rponsibility of the government should be Going Forward o the . It was a great questio and thanks for having me, and everything jeh said i support. From an ielligence perspective i will talk about three thing i put in the eventnd start with terrorism and i wil start with a partilar kind, wch is that associate with wmd, weapons o mass destruction, whether that is nuclear weapo or whether that i biological or chemical. I think those are low probability, high impactvents. And when i think of dhs,rom my Vantage Point as an intelgence officer, in a way the transportation from a threat to an action to protect. And i think that if you look at the playbook a little b, that cisa affectedith Election Security, what they did is reach all the way to state and local, theyhe reached all the way to te private sector. Th exercised the heck out of it, so when we came to an election you couldee that there was a preparedns and resilience. My question is, have we done e same thi with the ris of wmd in t hands of terrorists, and ar equally prepared . Pandics taught us the same thing wre we certainly knew the pandemic was a strategic threat, it even though we had exercises, were we prepared all the way to the localit if i think, add to jehs point about what i think are good, new age focused for dhs, i would add pandemics. Whats the Border Patrol issues there . I wou add wmd. Whats the connection with sta and local and preparednes if you have that kind of event . I would certainly keep going with cybersecurity because this is a digal world and that is just so and t low Cost Effective way to go. Let me follow up with you on this and then i want to bring in kerry you and minute. I want to bring in a in a qstin from one of the audience members of the threat disinformation activities that seemo be super focused before the election and now weve got our own problems with the president who doesnt want to ccede and all of this. Which i seems like it makes it a little hardit to evaluate kind of all those people with the disinfmation effect would have been ahead of the election a how it is compared to 26. Are we getting our hands on how to respond to this . What is your sense of how the government is doing i dealing with this information, please coming from foreign actors . I think we are aware its a real. Trust in truth of the foundation of free andpen societies i you cant be confident in Communications Going from point a t poi b in a protective fashion come i we cant count on what you hear to be true you ar going have come you run the risk of undermining the basic tenets of democracies. We know that something we need to deal with. Certainly our adversaries have watched this and see that they canpen up wrists or create opportunities for themselves through disinformation wheth that is disinformation about covid covert vcines of whether that is disinformation about suicidal behavis. I think they certainly know it suicidal behavrs. I think theres a harkin ment here in that itsot just the government whos going toe expected to protect against disinformation. A lot of transparency around this issue is really to get the citizenry t involve a little bit of critical thinking. I dont knowhether twitter a facebook have quite right in terms of what they are doing to tr and ensure the authenticity of information, but i like they are making attempts. I think it is an incredibly powerful tool of our adversary or any adversary against an open society. But i think w have a moment where we just havei to bear down and create more rules around it, the rules abo behavior, we need to get the citizenry involved in criticalhinking. Great. Kerry, let me g to you, and so cisa has come up twiceow. Youve done a lot of work on election secity during the time it cnas andlso you are also in government when other issues that fall into cisa valley which cameth abo including some of the major leaks and hacks that hit the Intelligence Community. I wanted to ask wt your sense is both on the Election Security front but also federal and cyrsecurity and whats left to be done there, given how shall we say consequential some of these leaks have been thus far . [inaudible] you are unmute, carrie. Orry, got it for it would not a virtually thatithout saying youd are unmute ateast once or twice. At lea one time. There we go. Great to be with this very distinguishe panel here. So on cisa, first of all, with respect to direcr krebs being fired last week, i think its pretty apparent why he was five picky was fired because cisa stood up a webpage called rumor control which was intded to bat down originally foreign disinformaon about threats to the election. W and a more disinformationrom even domestic sources continue to provide wrong informationo americans, cisa used that capacity to bat and rumors come in particular rumorsbout inadequate voting systems and technogy about voting systems that was just not true. It was that truth telling to the American Public that finally got the cisa director fired by the esident. What cisa was able to do was really remkable because what they did is they took the form threats to the election that we all know through birtisanly use of the Senate Intelligence committee in016, the special counsels review, rusher interference in the election in 2016, a they work with ruer interference thetate and local Party Support because its not the federal government ru elections. Its happening by professionals who know how to run ection to the state and local level. But cisa health get them resourcesan help educate them in order to harden the entire country defenses when it came to the functioning of elections and vong stems. And sohis election was the really smooth running election, especially given all of the challenges of the pandemic and coronavirus and pples health and safety of trying to run electi in that of private and yes, the actualechanics of the election with extraordinarily well, very few if any problems in the administration of the actual electio i think that was a real cisa story. Of course cisa was critical as an entity. It was a component of dhs but was formalized through legislation during the Trump Administration and so it is one realin bright spot in the department of Homeland Security of the last few years which is jeh was describing earlier, otherwise in the Trump Administration really has been overly consumed with the immigration and emigration importer security issue. On your question with respect to leaks, that takes us in Different Directions that we can talk more about the Intelligence Community issues, but we really have been in a pervasive era of hacks and leaks. One of the things i think the Bidenharris Administration will be looking to do is to really take another look at what the whole of government response is to addressing pervasive intellectual property theft, on the part of some for nationstates, continuation of criminal hacking activity they can build on the successes that cisa has brought but there still is a lot more that can be done. Great. Lets go to some of thehe questions about the Intelligence Community. We saw just a little while ago today that admiral haynes who is another board member of cnas ong witheh and others has been named the nominee signated for national intelligence. Let me go to jail and then i want to bringfo in sioux here on this. Odni is about in its 15th anniversary. I think its safe to say that we will enter and administration where the president has a very different approach to intelligence comes use both personally and his policy matters than the current one. Reportedly the president elect is an avid consumer of intelligence including briefings, including in person tbt types of briefings. The dean i could go in a in a r of different ways leaning heavily into the aspect of the primary intelligence prefer of the president or the role of coordinator of the ic more proud of the role of managing the budget potential of the roles as well. Howr el do you see the superstructure that now exists over the Intelligence Community and the best possible direction that it should go as we go forward . Let me go to jeh first. First, he is simply an extraordinary human being. I have spent literally hundreds if not thousands of hours working with her duringot the Obama Administration. She is one of the hardest working people i know and she will be fantastic at dni. Ii will confess that when the di bureaucracy was first created in 2002 by congress, i was not a big fan of it, having been at the pentagon once by that point. Because i thought was an added layer of unnecessary bureaucracy. I have to say now that ive become a fan of the way it works. I think jim clapper really did bringy it along way in coordinating all the different intelligence agencies in thef alphabet soup. And as the consumer of intelligence for a number of years in National Security, i see now the virtue of doing it the way we do it. It got to the point where i too am a big fan of briefings. It was a most important part of my day w to read the daily intel and then give a verbal briefing later on, and would all be corrugated through dni and every once in a while you would get a dissenting opinion out of the alphabet soup. It would say dissenting opinion here and so i had the analyst come up to headquarters both majority and dissenting opinions to explain the different views, and the process works pretty well now. I cannot emphasize the importance enough if youre a National Security of consuming intelligence on a daily basis. It really is your eyes and ears for doing your job, and the people who worked with me when i set Homeland Security would tell me that it was a firstnet did when i got to work, then i would spend an hour, half hour verbally getting the daily intel and then if i have time left over i would turn to the washington post, New York Times and others to see how the press was covering what i knew to be reality. I cant stress enough the importance of a well running, functional, bipartisan, credible Intelligence Community. Sioux, i suspect you may have thought or two on this. What do you think . What im smiling add jason he wasnt initially a fan of information of the dni, i was at the cia and we were like, dont you understand about the word central . Why do we a need this additional layer . I will tell you in the years since its been instrumental in that bringing the fbi in dhs more homeland, more domestic agents to bee part of the same thing to achieve the whole of government responses that we need w to adversarial event. It keeps us from allowing them to hide here because intelligence im huge fan. Listen