Clint Watts on Russia Meddling: ‘We Still Can’t Ensure the Vote Is Accurate or Not Changed’
EXCERPT:
CHUCK TODD: Tillerson's answer prompted some to ask, "what's the Trump administration doing about Russian interference? Does it want to do anything about it?" Joining me now is Clint Watts. He's an NBC News national security analyst and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. And of course a former F.B.I. agent as well. Mr. Watts, welcome back to Meet the Press.
CLINT WATTS: Thank you.
CHUCK TODD: Let me start with the basics here. About a year ago, you were on the show, we talked about the Russian interference and you sort of talked about things that needed to be done. Has anything been done to protect future elections?
CLINT WATTS: No. I--They've worked on the critical infrastructure designation. But the number-one thing we've got to do is ensure the integrity of the vote.
CHUCK TODD: You just said designation. Which means they just were trying to decide what should we try to protect? We haven't even started anything, any actual protections yet?
CLINT WATTS: Exactly. This is the feds reaching out to states and locals that don't have the resources in cyber security and probably can't detect a hack to help them protect the vote. Because right now, we still can't ensure that the vote is accurate or not changed. We need paper ballot backups. We need to always be able to ensure that the vote is correct.
CHUCK TODD: You know, we've learned this week, there had been denials for a year that oh, the Russians sort of, well, they may have tried to penetrate elections systems, but they didn't get there. And then we learned later, well, it was 21 states. You know, first it was a few states. Now we're learning, well actually they got into, what was her quote, I think was a "small number of states," which is still plural. I found this with Facebook too. Every three months, their story changed about the Russian interference here. Do we have the full story?
CLINT WATTS: No. And I don't know that we ever will. I mean, it's a minimization strategy everyone's using in public relations. It wasn't that bad. If one vote gets changed. We've seen the Russians do this. They did this in Ukraine. The changed the actual vote. Luckily, Ukrainians caught it before it came out. But the goal isn't just one candidate or another, It's “undermine our democracy” so that we don't trust the election results. It's two parts. Make them think the vote might be changed, then influence them about voter fraud election rigs.
CHUCK TODD: So they're incentivized to have us almost discover that they've gotten into the voter rolls because they want us to report, "Russia got into the voter rolls."
CLINT WATTS: That's right.
CHUCK TODD: That's what you're saying?
CLINT WATTS: Yeah. Probe, probe, probe, hit. Take a database down. Have somebody not show up and be able to vote. And then say, "Hey, how do you know the election wasn't rigged for somebody? How do you know that your vote counted?"
