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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that the Trump administration won’t tolerate Russian meddling in the 2018 congressional midterm elections.
Pompeo told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the administration would take “appropriate countermeasures” to fight what he called “continued efforts” by Russia to meddle in November’s vote.
He did not offer details on Russia’s interference or say what the countermeasures would be but admitted there was much more work to be done to stop Russia’s efforts.
He said the U.S. had not yet been able to establish “effective deterrence” to halt them.
The top-ranking Democrat on the committee, New York Rep. Eliot Engel, however, contended that the Trump administration “is giving Russia a pass” because Russian President Vladimir Putin “supported President Trump over Hillary Clinton” in the 2016 election.
Pompeo’s statement added to the growing disagreements among the administration and some lawmakers about what Russia did and why.
The Senate Intelligence Committee said last week it agreed with a 2017 assessment by US intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the presidential election earlier to hurt Clinton and help Trump — a view that the GOP majority on the House Intelligence Committee does not share.
GOP Senate intelligence chair Richard Burr said in a statement a week ago that his staff has spent 14 months “reviewing the sources, tradecraft, and analytic work, and we see no reason to dispute the conclusions.”
That’s in contrast to the House committee — headed by Trump loyalist and California GOP Rep. Devin Nunes — which said last month that the agencies “did not employ proper analytic tradecraft” while assessing Putin’s intentions.
Then on Tuesday, Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen said she did not understand Russia to have tried to help Trump during the 2016 election. “I do not believe that I’ve seen that conclusion that the specific intent was to help President Trump win,” she said. “I’m not aware of that.”
Trump himself has also repeatedly cast doubt on the intelligence community’s conclusions, calling special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing probe “fake news,” “a witch hunt” and “a hoax” cooked up by Democrats as an excuse for losing the election.
The former FBI chief’s investigation has so far resulted in 19 indictments and a flurry of guilty pleas, including from Trump’s first national security adviser, Mike Flynn.