Rigged by David Shimer

Author:David Shimer [Shimer, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

ELECTION DAY

When Jeh Johnson woke up on November 8, 2016, his mind was on Russia. He had already ordered DHS to establish a crisis response center, in case Russian intelligence disrupted the voting process. “That was my decision,” he explained, when asked who formed this secret team, which was prepared to offer “quick cyber assistance” to states, were a “cyber intrusion [to] manifest itself on Election Day such that people who show up to vote can’t vote, or there is a problem in the reporting of the votes.” For months, Johnson had tried to shore up America’s defenses. These efforts had borne some fruit but ultimately failed; electoral systems remained vulnerable. Johnson’s focus had thus transitioned from preventing a cyberattack to managing one.1

In secret, the Obama administration awaited an Election Day cyberattack. Emergency plans were in motion. “Everybody was prepared for the worst-case scenario,” Amy Pope said, including by establishing “a whole crisis team, a whole team, a pretty big team, ready to respond” to a Russian strike. “It was very high alert,” she said. “People were taking it very, very, very seriously.”2

At the center of this emergency apparatus was the White House. “We did, in fact, have an entire crisis team set up in the White House,” Michael Daniel said, as did the “usual national security agencies.” Daniel lacked direct evidence that Russian intelligence was still inside voter registration databases, but it seemed likely, given the intrusions that had been detected since the summer, as well as Washington’s limited insight into the security of state electoral systems. As voting progressed, Daniel updated Susan Rice and Lisa Monaco, who, in turn, updated Obama. “We were monitoring very carefully, not just on Election Day, but in the run-up to the election, whether there was any evidence of Russia mechanically distorting the vote, whether that was by manipulating or falsifying voter rolls, before or on Election Day itself,” Rice said, when asked about these crisis teams. “That was obvious to do and necessary to do.”3

Putin had signaled elsewhere that he would cause chaos as the election unfolded. The U.S. intelligence community was well aware that in Ukraine, Russian hackers had sabotaged electoral systems, and that in Montenegro, Russian intelligence had plotted an election night coup d’état.4 It seemed entirely feasible that Putin would escalate his operation against the United States the day of the election.

America was vulnerable, and Obama’s security chiefs knew it. “[Russia] could have done things as far as voter registration rolls; they could have done things as far as tallies,” John Brennan said. The White House considered it “very possible,” Amy Pope explained, that there would be “actual interference with the voting record and voting systems” on Election Day. For Jeh Johnson, the nightmare scenario involved “data being manipulated in a handful of key precincts in Miami-Dade, in Dayton, Ohio, in a key precinct in Michigan, a key precinct in Wisconsin, a key precinct in Pennsylvania.”5

The White House was most concerned that Russian hackers would manipulate voter registration databases.

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