>> How secure is this election from foreign interference?

This week on "Firing Line."

>> The Russians are going to try and are trying to interfere in the election of 2020.

>> As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Independent Senator Angus King spent years working alongside Democrats and Republicans examining Russia's effort at influencing the 2016 election.

>> Was the Russian activity in the 2016 election a one-off proposition?

>> It's a long-term practice.

They will be back.

>> The intelligence community says the Russians are back at it, and other adversaries are borrowing from their playbook.

>> We have already seen Iran sending spoofed e-mails.

>> With just days to go, a worsening pandemic, and a supercharged atmosphere ripe for disinformation campaigns, what does Senator Angus King say now?

>> "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by... ...and by... Corporate funding is provided by... >> Welcome back to "Firing Line," Senator Angus King.

>> Margaret, great to be with you.

Looking forward to talking about some pretty important stuff today.

>> Well, it's a privilege to welcome you back for this special edition of "Firing Line."

Senator, you were recently quoted in The New York Times as saying... As we sit here right now, are foreign adversaries trying to interfere in our election?

>> Yes, absolutely.

There's no doubt about it.

Russia's in the lead.

Iran seems to be doing something.

We're not sure exactly what.

I don't think China is really engaged at this point.

Iran is working around the margins, but Russia's in, in a serious way.

>> So what is the motivation, then, Senator, for these foreign actors?

>> Well, there's something in common between Iran, Russia, and China.

None of them like democracy.

Putin hates democracy.

The idea of a free and open election terrifies him.

They very much want to undermine our democracy and show the world that it doesn't really work.

I think that's really the intent here.

>> Foreign actors intervening in our elections is not a new theme.

I would like to show you a clip from William F. Buckley Jr.'s original "Firing Line."

And you'll see that this theme has come up before.

Take a look.

>> The Soviet Union is devoting $2 billion a year to propaganda activities primarily directed against the United States.

They broadcast in 83 languages, 2,000 hours a year.

This is 1979.

For that whole year, 2,000 hours.

That's Radio Moscow alone.

They have another transmitter called Radio Peace and Progress, which assumes a more strident tone.

Something has to be done.

>> Okay, so there you see, Senator, the Russians, the Soviets have been waging influence campaigns for roughly a century, interfering, according to experts, in the elections of 1960, 1968, 1976, and the 1984 elections, Russia then again interfering in the 2016 election.

This is nothing new if we look at history.

Correct, Senator?

>> It's absolutely nothing new.

What Mr. Staar was talking about is absolutely what's going on today.

The difference is the availability of the technology to do it in a much more insidious and I'm afraid to say effective way than just, you know, distributing fliers on the streets of New York or, you know, Radio Moscow, that kind of thing.

What they can do today with with the Internet platforms, with hacking into e-mails or voting systems is far beyond the dreams of Stalin.

But it's certainly in the purview of Vladimir Putin.

>> But, Senator, one thing that seems to be different today is people seem to be more vulnerable to being manipulated because there is already distrust that exists within the electorate about the integrity of our elections.

Do you agree that creates an increased vulnerability?

>> I think it does, and I think it's a real concern.

And what we're talking about, there's a new term that's just sort of come up in the last few weeks.

It's called a perception hack.

And what it means is it's creating a perception of the unreliability, the distrust in the electoral process.

And that's really all they have to do.

If you think about it, this isn't much of a challenge for the Russians.

They don't have to change votes.

All they have to do is convince a number, a lot of Americans that they can do it or maybe that they're trying to do it.

And that's enough.

And that's what they're doing.

They're trying to raise doubts about the validity and the protection of our election.

And that's a challenge for us.

You know, in government, we want people to be aware of what's going on, but we don't want to -- we don't want to do their work for them by undermining confidence in the electoral process.

>> Well, let me ask you then about President Trump's claims about voter fraud, particularly with mail-in voting.

Does that contribute to raising the kind of doubts you're talking about?

>> Unfortunately, the answer to that is an unequivocal yes.

He is saying exactly what our adversaries are also saying and what they would want him to say.

He has the biggest megaphone of all.

He has 30 or 40 million followers in the country, at least, who believe everything he says.

And if he tells them the election is rigged or it's going to be rigged or you can't trust mail-in voting or all of those kinds of things, that's exactly -- unfortunately, I hate to say this -- but that's exactly what the Russians and the Iranians are trying to convince Americans of.

So he ought to be reassuring people about the integrity of our system, not himself talking about undermining it.

Listen, I've disagreed with a lot of things he's done over the past four years.

But this to me is the most serious because our whole system rests upon trust.

And when you undermine that, that's a profound disservice to the people of this country.

>> Russian news services currently are telling stories that America's mail-in voting system is susceptible, particularly susceptible to voter fraud.

So the Russian news services are saying the same thing that the President himself is saying, to your point, Is President Trump being briefed by the intelligence community about the risk that he is posing, as you describe it?

>> I honestly don't know the answer to that.

Of course, he's, from the very beginning of his administration, expressed nothing but disdain for the intelligence community.

And the Director of National Intelligence now is a guy with not much experience in intelligence, but a lot of experience in supporting the President as a member of the House.

So whether he's being told this, he's certainly not listening because everywhere he goes, he talks about, you know, "If I lose, the election is going to be rigged."

It's really disturbing.

I mean, he's got to know that this is also what the Russians and the Iranians are pushing for.

Here's an interesting point.

And I hesitate to get people in his administration in trouble, but there are people throughout the administration who are doing exactly what they ought to be doing and are doing a damn good job.

They are warning the public about this.

Director Wray said there's no great threat to mail-in voting.

He said that last summer.

So, interestingly, the sort of professional level of the administration is doing the right thing, and they've done a really good job.

So it's the President that's really out of step with pretty much everybody that's studied this issue.

>> There's a report this week, Senator, from Axios that President Trump is eager to fire FBI Director Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel, the Defense Secretary Esper, as soon as he can.

He would do it now, but for the political implications, and if he wins re-election, has communicated that he will turn over that staff.

What do you make of that?

>> Well, he has a fundamental misunderstanding of who these people work for.

Remember hearing him say, "my generals"?

They're not his generals.

They're America's generals.

And when you join the federal service, you swear an oath.

The oath is to the Constitution.

It's not to the President.

It's not to any particular president.

And he doesn't get that.

He thinks they're like assistant managers at the Bedminster Country Club.

You can fire them, and in fact, he can.

He does have that power.

But over and over and over, people in this administration are being fired for doing nothing more than their job.

People like Wray and others in the administration, Gina Haspel, they're committed to the mission of and they're committed to telling the truth to the American people.

The politicization of intelligence.

>> Yes.

>> Firing people for telling the truth is incredibly dangerous for the country.

That's how we get into bad international situations with cooked intelligence.

Vietnam, Iraq, the Bay of Pigs.

When the intelligence is cooked to meet the predilections of the executive of the president or the secretary of defense or members of Congress, that's when we get into real trouble.

The intelligence community's job is to seek the truth and tell the truth.

And you've got to be able to listen to that truth.

If you don't, you're going to make some big mistakes.

>> In July, you wrote an op-ed for Time, Senator, and you said...

Senator, is sunlight the best disinfectant?

>> Absolutely, and that's why I said that.

The best protection for the American people from disinformation, for example, is to know it's disinformation.

I want the intelligence community to tell the American people what they know in real time in order to allow us to defend ourselves.

I don't think they've done as thorough a job of informing the American people as they could.

But they've done some.

I'll give them two cheers, I guess.

>> You've been critical of the fact that the Obama administration waited until October of 2016 to tell the American people about Russian interference in the last presidential election when they had known about it at that point for months.

Members of President Trump's intelligence team have briefed the public multiple times since July on current interference attempts.

You said you'd give them two cheers.

Are those two cheers better than at least four years ago?

>> Yes, and I understand what was going on in the Obama administration.

That was one of the things we looked at in detail on the Senate Intelligence Committee in our analysis of 2016.

Obama was afraid that by fully informing the people about the Russians' activity, it would undermine confidence in the election.

In other words, the phrase I remember hearing was, "We don't want to do the Russians' work for them."

So they didn't talk about it until actually October of 2016.

I think -- and I don't have any real firsthand information -- I think many of the people that contributed to that decision, perhaps including President Obama himself, regret that decision.

But that was -- that's the tension going on here, is you want to inform people about foreign activity targeted at our elections, but you don't want to make them feel that, "Well, you can't believe what's going on in the elections" because, you know, we've got a pretty robust, strong election system, in part because it's so decentralized.

You know, it's -- someone once described it as a hairball.

It's thousands of election systems all over the country in states and municipalities.

That doesn't mean it can't be manipulated.

The problem is you don't have to be a genius to know.

All you have to do is target Dade County, Florida, for example.

And you can certainly screw up the reporting and also the the final results of a presidential election.

So I think we should feel much better about how the states are protected than than they were in '16.

They're much more prepared, I believe.

>> Let's take a look at what the Director of National Intelligence said in a press conference just last week.

I'm going to show you a clip.

Take a look.

>> We have confirmed that some voter registration information has been obtained by Iran and separately by Russia.

To that end, we have already seen Iran sending spoofed e-mails designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest, and damage President Trump.

>> Now, DNI Ratcliffe was referring to fake e-mails sent to Democratic voters in Florida and other states, purportedly from a white supremacist group, the Proud Boys, that said vote "for Trump or else."

And as we heard in that sound bite, DNI Ratcliffe said these e-mails threatening Democratic voters were actually meant to damage President Trump.

Can you explain how they were supposed to damage President Trump?

>> It's a little bit of mental jiu-jitsu because ostensibly, on the face of it, those e-mails were attempting to help President Trump.

They were trying to tell Democrats, "Don't vote for Biden or else."

Now, the argument is, I think that they were so clumsy that they intended to get caught and they were trying to look like this was something coming from a Trump ally and therefore blowback against President Trump.

But it is a little bit of a strange argument.

The other thing people should know is that a lot of voter information is public.

You can buy it.

You can download it.

Just because somebody has gotten that kind of information doesn't necessarily mean they're in the systems.

What is concerning me somewhat, though, Margaret, this go-round is that there is evidence that the Russians are attempting to get into the actual voting infrastructure.

>> To the point of manipulating systems, the FBI and Homeland Security officials on October 22nd said that Russian hackers had targeted dozens of government and aviation networks, retrieved data from at least two counties.

The Washington Post later reported that those counties were in California and Indiana.

Your committee found that Russian-affiliated cyber hackers accessed restricted elements of election infrastructure four years ago but didn't alter any registration data.

Now, is the current reported activity, Senator, the same as four years ago, or is this different?

>> Well, I've got to tell you that the finding of four years ago that they penetrated the election infrastructure of practically every state has always haunted me.

The intelligence at the time was they didn't change any votes.

They didn't mess up the registration lists or anything like that.

But it's always haunted me because what I said to myself is they weren't doing it for fun.

And now we know that they're getting into a couple of counties.

We don't know how many others.

And my concern is that what they did in '16 was practice.

It was poking around, seeing where the vulnerabilities were, because, again, remember, if the purpose is to sow distrust of the election, what could be more chaotic than showing up to vote at your polling place and all of a sudden your name isn't on the list anymore and you don't know what happened?

Or what if the power goes off?

You know, we know the Russians have poked around in our electric system.

What if the power goes off in Dade County on Election Day and all the sites go dark, all the computers are down?

I mean, there's so many opportunities, and that's what the danger is here.

And so I don't know what they're doing this time, but my instinct is it ain't good and it's something we should be concerned about.

Now, the good news is the states have really strengthened their systems.

So I think we're frankly a lot stronger than we were in 2016, but we're certainly not invulnerable.

>> I want to be really clear.

At this moment, is there any evidence of voter information being changed?

>> No.

No.

>> At this moment, is there any evidence that we should worry about votes being changed?

>> No, I don't think so.

Although, again, why are the Russians going into voting systems?

Are they just, you know, connoisseurs of software of voting systems?

Again, you got to ask yourself, why are they doing it and are they doing it just for fun or for some nefarious purpose?

I don't think they're up to anything good.

>> Has the intelligence community, Senator, told the public enough about Russian interference up to this point?

>> I don't think so.

And that was -- Remember I said two cheers.

>> Mm-hmm.

>> The press conference that you played a clip from, all the emphasis was on Iran.

And I think they're -- you know, I'm, you know, psychoanalyzing here.

But there seemed to be an effort or there has been an effort to downplay what the Russians are doing and have done and try to say, "Well, China is doing it, too," or "Iran is doing it, too."

The fact is the Russians are the most active and the most skilled.

And the most dangerous.

>> Are you aware, Senator, from your position on the Intelligence Committee of anything the Russians are doing that the public should be aware of and hasn't been informed of yet?

>> You've just asked me a question I can't answer.

>> Maybe you can comment on, Senator, one of your colleagues, Senator Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, tweeted the following... What's he talking about?

>> I don't know.

I can't confirm that.

>> Do you think it's that President Trump understands that Russia is trying to help him and he is not doing anything to stop it?

>> Well, I've spent the last almost four years working on the massive report that our committee produced, by the way, on a bipartisan and almost unanimous basis of what happened in 2016, and particularly the last volume, which is over a thousand pages, of the relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

And here's my conclusion, after looking at all of that material.

I don't think there was ever a time where Donald Trump Jr. or President Trump or Corey Lewandowski or Paul Manafort sat down with Vladimir Putin and signed an agreement.

"You're going to do this.

We're going to do that."

I don't think there was that kind of agreement.

The phrase that has suggested itself to me is one I remember from law school, from antitrust law.

The term is conscious parallelism.

It's when two parties are working in the same direction and they know what the other is doing.

They accept the relationship, but there's not a specific agreement.

That's one of the reasons that Mr. Mueller didn't find a criminal conspiracy because there wasn't this kind of -- A criminal conspiracy has to start with an agreement.

I don't think there was an agreement, but I think it's sort of evolved.

The Russians did this and the Trump campaign welcomed it.

The Russians want to sow discord, chaos, and distrust in our election system.

And the President has overtly, in plain view for the past three or four months, been sowing distrust and lack of confidence in our electoral system.

So are they working together?

I don't think you can say that.

Are they working in the same direction?

Yes.

>> So you're saying the conscious parallelism continues in 2020?

>> Well, it certainly seems to be.

Their goal is to divide us.

Their goal is to divide us and to sap our confidence in our system.

And unfortunately, the President also doesn't seem interested in unifying the country.

And he certainly has been overtly sowing distrust and a lack of confidence in our electoral system.

I mean, I hate to say this, Margaret.

This is not -- You know, this is uncomfortable for me, but I just don't think you can -- I don't know how you can not talk about it.

It's so obvious.

>> Senator, you just mentioned the concern of a possibly devastating cyberattack on the grid.

What do we do to prepare ourselves against that possibility?

>> Well, I think you may be aware, Margaret, that I spent the last year and a half of my life working on that.

Congress, in 2019, set up a national commission to develop a strategy for defending ourselves in cyberspace, which we really haven't had in any coherent way.

So this commission, which was bipartisan, we really dug in on this issue.

And there's a lot we have to do.

We have to reorganize because cyber is scattered throughout the federal government.

We have to involve ourselves with the international community to establish some rules of the road about cyber.

You know, we've had a thousand years to develop the law of war.

Well, cyber is a whole new realm, and we haven't -- we don't have the norms.

And so there needs to be some international work on that.

America has to be in the lead on that, it seems to me, and then finally and I think very importantly, Margaret, we have to communicate to our adversaries that a cyberattack is an attack and that we're going to take it seriously and that there will be consequences.

The problem now is, if you look back to 2016, Obama did put some sanctions on the Russians after the election, but it wasn't really a very dramatic response.

And if you're sitting in the Kremlin saying, "Shall we attack the American election again?

", one guy at the end of the table says, "Why not?

Nothing happened to us last time.

Why not?

It's not very expensive.

We can hire 8,000 hackers for the price of one jet aircraft.

Let's go."

>> Yeah.

>> I want them to say, "Man, we better not do this because we're going to get whacked in some way."

It may be sanctions, it may be something else, but one of our major recommendations is the development of a deterrence strategy.

To me, it's the most imminent threat against the United States.

The next Pearl Harbor, Margaret, will be cyber.

>> Senator, it's also widely expected that we won't know the results of the election on election night, that it could take days or even weeks for us to know the results.

How can foreign adversaries try to take advantage of this time period?

>> Well, the first thing to say is we may not know the results of election night.

That doesn't mean it's rigged or it's improper, there's anything wrong.

It's just going to take a lot of time to count all those ballots.

People have to be prepared for that.

What I've been saying to people is you need to be prepared, you need to have a plan to vote, and you need to be patient and not expect all the results on election night.

We may have them, but we may not.

The biggest concern, Margaret, is that we don't have the results on election night.

It drags on for two or three days.

People start filing lawsuits and trying to stop recounts and that kind of thing.

And people just get more and more uneasy about whether this is going to be a fair election.

>> You know, Senator, there's an old saying, "As Maine goes, so goes the nation."

And Maine, as you know, it splits its electoral votes, and its 2nd congressional district went for Trump four years ago.

What are you seeing on the ground in Maine, in that district in the north?

>> Well, I think Maine is very reflective of the country.

And Mary and I did an R.V.

trip a couple of weeks ago when we were in recess in Washington and went around a lot of the rural areas.

And there are an awful lot of Trump signs.

There's no question about it.

So I think it's going to be a horse race in the 2nd district.

But I think Joe Biden is going to carry Maine, and I think that will be reflected around the country.

And clearly, I don't think there's any doubt, Margaret, that this is the most important election in our lifetimes.

I mean, people often say that, but I've never seen one where the stakes are so high, the passions are running so high, the number of voters, the energy in voting is running so high.

So I think the most important thing for everybody is to vote.

You know, it's no accident that the very first words of the United States Constitution, the first three words of the United States Constitution, are "we the people."

And every four years we, the people have an opportunity to speak, and that's what's going to happen next week.

>> Senator King, thank you for joining me on "Firing Line" for this special edition on election security.

>> Pleasure to be with you, Margaret.

Look forward to seeing you again.

>> "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by... ...and by... Corporate funding is provided by... ♪♪ ♪♪ >> You're watching PBS.