COMMITTEE SENSITIVE—RUSSIA INVESTIGATION ONLY
is a concern of what they might have learned and how much more they know about the systems."[1]
- Mr. McCabe told the Committee that it seemed to him like "classic Russian cyber espionage. … [They will] scrape up all the information and the experience they possibly can," and "they might not be effective the first time or the fifth time, but they are going to keep at it until they can come back and do it in an effective way."[2]
- Mr. Daniel told the Committee:
While any one voting machine is fairly vulnerable, as has been demonstrated over and over again publicly, the ability to actually do an operation to change the outcome of an election on the scale you would need to, and do it surreptitiously, is incredibly difficult. A much more achievable goal would be to undermine confidence in the results of the electoral process, and that could be done much more effectively and easily. … A logical thing would be, if your goal is to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system—which the Russians have a long goal of wanting to put themselves on the same moral plane as the United States … one way would be to cause chaos on election day. How could you start to do that? Mess with the voter registration databases.[3]
- Ms. Monaco further echoed that concern:
Well, one of the things I was worried about—and I wasn't alone in this—is kind of worst-case scenarios, which would be things like the voter registration databases. So if you're a state and local entity and your voter registration database is housed in the secretary of state's office and it is not encrypted and it's not backed up, and it says Lisa Monaco lives at Smith Street and I show up at my [polling place] and they say 'Well we don't have Ms. Monaco at Smith Street, we have her at Green Street,' now there's difficulty in my voting. And if that were to happen on a large scale, I was worried about confusion at polling places, lack of confidence in the voting system, anger at a large scale in some areas, confusion, distrust. So there was a whole sliding scale of
- ↑ (U) SSCI interview with DHS and CTIIC, February 27, 2018, p. 15.
- ↑ (U) DTS 2018-2152, SSCI Transcript of the Interview with Andrew McCabe, Former Deputy Director of the FBI, February 14, 2018, pp. 224-225.
- ↑ (U) SSCI Transcript of the Interview with Michael Daniel, Former Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator, National Security Council, August 31, 2017, pp. 27, 34.
36
COMMITTEE SENSITIVE—RUSSIA INVESTIGATION ONLY
