The former head of the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama and President Trump says he wishes the United States had taken more action against Russian meddling prior to the 2016 election and claimed the country is better prepared in 2020.
Adm. Mike Rogers, who retired in 2018 after four years as NSA chief and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, spoke with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly on All Things Considered this week, saying that “I wish we had taken, broadly, more action prior to the election itself” in 2016.
He said the U.S. was aware of Russia’s meddling efforts in the summer of 2016, even after Obama said in December 2016 that he pulled Russian President Vladimir Putin aside during an early September 2016 G-20 meeting and told him “to cut it out” and “there were going to be serious consequences if he did not.” Obama claimed that “we did not see further tampering of the election process” afterward.
But after warnings from Obama and others, the third volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia report concluded, “Russia continued disseminating stolen emails, conducting social media-based influence operations, and working to access state voting infrastructure through Election Day 2016.” The committee criticized the Obama administration for being unprepared to combat Russia’s election interference effort and for fumbling the response, finding that “the U.S. government was not well-postured to counter Russian election interference activity with a full range of readily-available policy options.”
Rogers said that “once we saw then in the aftermath” of the Obama-Putin talk that “this activity wasn’t stopping, I wish we had taken more direct, more public action sooner, as opposed to doing so after the election itself.” The U.S. tossed nearly three dozen Russian operatives out of the U.S. the month after the November election.
When asked what sort of action he wished had been taken, Rogers said, “I would say enacting a price. Making them pay a price for the behavior as part of that.”
Rogers has reportedly met with U.S. Attorney John Durham multiple times in the Connecticut prosecutor’s investigation into the Trump-Russia investigators. Rogers was likely talked to because of his key intelligence perch, experiences uncovering Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act violations, and his role in the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment of Russian interference.
Rogers told NPR the intelligence community was broadly aware of Russian interference by the summer of 2016 but admitted it underestimated the scale of the effort.
“We had an awareness that the Russians had been trying to penetrate the computer systems, the networks, of political parties in the United States. And by the summer of 2016, collectively, we, the U.S. intelligence community, had come to the conclusion that we were dealing with a systematic effort on the part of the Russians to attempt to through cyber and disinformation, largely through social media, but using those capabilities to influence the outcome of the U.S. election,” Rogers revealed but said that, “I think in fairness to everybody involved, while we had some level of knowledge in the summer of 2016, we didn’t fully appreciate the social media and disinformation side — just how aggressive it was and how many resources the Russians were putting into that side of the effort. We had some appreciation, but I don’t think we fully understood the magnitude.”
Rogers discussed Putin’s view of 2016, saying that “I think as he looks back, it was a good effort, it was a good investment, and it was probably more effective than the Russians had anticipated in some ways” and that the actions taken since then, which include a host of Trump administration sanctions against Russia, are “not enough that’s made him stop.”
But the former NSA chief did show some optimism about November’s election, arguing that “the 2020 dynamic is a little different in some ways than 2016” because “there’s been increased government focus on attempting to ensure both our electoral associated systems are much more able to be resistant to attempts to penetrate, manipulate, or extract from them” and “broadly, there’s a much greater awareness and a much greater set of activities ongoing to ensure that the 2020 election process isn’t as impacted or the Russians don’t have the same success.”
Officials from the Department of Homeland Security and FBI also said on Wednesday that the U.S. is better prepared to thwart meddling efforts now than it was four years ago.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report detailed how Rogers and the NSA viewed British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier with skepticism, pushing back against efforts by then-FBI Director James Comey and then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to include information from it in the high-profile January 2017 assessment on Russian election interference put together by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA.
The 2017 intelligence assessment, being scrutinized by Durham, concluded with “high confidence” that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” The NSA diverged on one aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” that Putin actively tried to help Trump’s election chances and harm those of Clinton.
“I wouldn’t call it a discrepancy, I’d call it an honest difference of opinion between three different organizations and, in the end, I made that call,” Rogers told the Senate in May 2017. “It didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report in April defending the intelligence community assessment, determining that it presented “a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Those findings clash with a 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee, led at the time by Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican. That assessment, which was not bipartisan, concluded that “the majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft” but found the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.”
Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
