Not that I’m unconcerned about sexual harassment (etc) BUT there’s another story which is getting lost behind the steady drip of the Mueller Investigation and the deluge of harassment stories — not to put too fine a point to it, but the Russians played havoc with our election in 2016 and the Congress of the United States hasn’t done squat about it.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence seems perfectly happy to make charges and counter-charges about “collusion” without apparently looking all that deeply into what espionage techniques and strategies were applied by the Russians, and what was the outcome. Nor have I heard one peep out of them about how to better secure our election institutions and systems against incursions. Given White House water boy Devin Nunes is in charge of the committee, I don’t suppose we’ll get that much out of this outfit, and that’s both a tragedy and a missed opportunity.
While the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence manages to sound more organized and focused, there’s not much emerging from that quarter either. Again, the committee seems to have Republicans intent on proving there’s “nothing to see here,” and Democrats hoping to find the smoking arsenal. Again, the conspiracy/collusion segment is only part of the story, and while it’s important so too is the notion that we need to find out what the Russians did, how they did it, and how we can prevent this from happening in future elections.
Then there’s the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) seems rather more interested in absolving Republicans and the President from responsibility for or knowledge of Russian activities than in finding out exactly what happened in 2016. I wouldn’t want to hang by my hair for as long as it will take to get this outfit to determine what laws were broken, or eluded, by Russians — nor how we might want to modify our statutes to prevent future problems. The House Judiciary Committee is essentially AWOL on all manner of topics, case in point the “calendar” for the subcommittees is almost blank for the month of December with one FBI “oversight” hearing, and one session with Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein. The Chairman appears to be more concerned with disparaging the Mueller Investigation than with determining how to identify and prevent foreign incursions into our elections.
Remember back on September 22, 2017 the Department of Homeland Security finally informed 21 states that their elections systems had been hacked in some way, shape, or form:
“The federal government on Friday told election officials in 21 states that hackers targeted their systems before last year’s presidential election.
The notification came roughly a year after officials with the United States Department of Homeland Security first said states were targeted by hacking efforts possibly connected to Russia. The states that told The Associated Press they had been targeted included some key political battlegrounds, such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
The A.P. contacted every state election office to determine which ones had been informed that their election systems had been targeted. The others that confirmed they were targeted were Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Washington.” (emphasis added)
21 states, notified a year after the fact was bad enough — but not only was the information belated, but some of it wasn’t even accurate.
“Now election officials in Wisconsin and California say DHS has provided them with additional information showing that Russian hackers actually scanned networks at other state agencies unconnected to voter data. In Wisconsin, DHS told officials on Tuesday that hackers had scanned an IP address belonging to the Department of Workforce Development, not the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla (D) said in a statement Wednesday that DHS gave his office additional information saying hackers had attempted to target the network of the California Department of Technology’s statewide network and not the secretary of state’s office.”
So, we might expect the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee to be looking into this? No, the Chairman, Sen. Ron Johnson is more interested in finding out if members of the Mueller team are biased against the current President. The “logic” appears to be that because Special Counsel Mueller REMOVED those who made prejudicial statements in text messages therefore the investigation is prejudiced. It doesn’t get more bass-ackwards than this. Can we expect oversight regarding the slowness and inaccuracy of the DHS response to election hacking? Under the current Senate leadership probably not.
The national broadcast media (as usual) is currently chasing the newest shiny object — which members of the Congress can or cannot keep their hands to themselves and their “little soldiers” zipped inside the “barracks.” This is an important topic — but to continue to focus on the salacious and to continue to ignore the insidious is not in the best interest of this country and its institutions.
There are questions introduced last August which remain unresolved, and for which we should demand answers:
- What was the extent and nature of Russian hacking (and meddling) in the US election of 2016?
- Will the United States deploy safeguards and countermeasures to address thee Russian activities?
- Will the frustrations of state governments with the quality of information shared by DHS be alleviated? Will states receive up to date and accurate information so they can prevent hacking and meddling?
- What measures should be taken to prevent future hacking and meddling, and to give the states the support they need to deal with forms of assault as yet undeployed by the Russians?
The Mueller Investigation can explore and illuminate the extent to which criminal statutes may have been broken in regard to the 2016 election, but it cannot determine how the US analyzes, evaluates, and prepares for the next round of elections. That should be the function of Congress, but then we seem to have one so focused on giving tax breaks to the wealthy and so determined to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid they can barely pay attention to the transgressions of their own members (speaking of Farenholdt here) while chasing conspiracy theories about the “Deep State” opposition to the administration.
Perhaps in the midst of asking our Senators and Representatives about the “questions of the day,” we should squeeze in a couple of questions (see above) that have been sitting on the shelves since last Summer?
Desert Beacon 