Sunday, June 2, 2024
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Former CIA director James Woolsey, who has ceased advising President-elect Donald Trump's team amid controversy surrounding Russian cyberattacks the U.S. intelligence community says were meant to hep ensure Trump's victory, remains worried about bigger hacks to come -- like voting machines.
“If you want to hypothesize a terrible and disastrous situation it would be that,” he told Inside Defense in a Friday interview.
“I do think they ought to find the things that are really going to matter like voting machines and get them fixed so they can’t be used for completely improper purposes,” he continued.
Woolsey said he specifically worries about electronic voting machines in 14 states that have no paper trail once ballots are cast.
Separately, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an unclassified report Friday asserting that the Russian government “aspired” to elect Trump and, using cyberattacks and other means, conducted an “influence campaign” to “denigrate” his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Though the report does not claim that Russian operatives tampered with voting machines or the tallying process, Woolsey said he remained concerned that the American electoral process was vulnerable and needed protecting.
“They really need to get busy on that now,” he said.
Woolsey, who served as CIA director under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1995, first joined Trump's team as an adviser in September appearing on various cable and network news shows to support the campaign.
But Woolsey on Thursday announced he was no longer advising Trump's team, noting that he hadn't really been all that involved when the campaign morphed into a transition effort.
“I mainly helped by talking to the press and other things because I'm used to doing it,” he said. “But I didn't take part in the transition in any sense of planning or participating in meetings.”
Woolsey's announcement that he was no longer advising Trump came the same day U.S. intelligence chiefs testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Russian government sought to influence the presidential election through cyberattacks of the Democratic National Committee's email system and other means.
Trump, however, has refuted the intelligence community's assertions.
“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” Trump said in a Dec. 9 statement. “The election ended a long time ago. It’s now time to move on and 'Make America Great Again.'”
Woolsey said he did not intend for his announcement to influence anyone's perception of Trump or his statements about the intelligence community.
“I wasn't trying to influence any big issue,” Woolsey said. “I was just trying to get straight my own situation.”
Woolsey said he has no regrets supporting Trump, but does lament that the issue of cybersecurity has now become so politicized.
“The hard thing, I think, is going to be putting all this behind everybody and get busy making the kind of changes that are hard for bureaucracies to accept,” he said. “Like the electricity companies. It's going to be hard to get them to harden the grid. They don't want anybody telling them about anything. There's really a huge need to improve the resilience of our infrastructure. We have a very vulnerable infrastructure.”