8/26/20
The intelligence community has seen no evidence that foreign powers intend to manipulate mail-in voting in the 2020 election, senior Trump administration officials said Wednesday, undercutting a claim by President Donald Trump that such fraud “will be the scandal of our times.” “We have no information or intelligence that any nation-state threat actor is engaging in any activity to undermine the mail-in vote or ballots,” said a top official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Trump has repeatedly and groundlessly asserted that mail-in ballots will be subject to widespread fraud, driving doubts about the security of the election as a slew of states have ramped up mail-in voting access amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Intelligence community leaders and lawmakers of both parties have pleaded with political leaders to refrain from casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election, which they’ve emphasized could be amplified by foreign adversaries like Russia who seek to cast doubts about the legitimacy of American institutions. Trump has ignored those warnings, repeatedly blaring unsupported suggestions that widespread mail-in voting will result in a fraudulent election.
A senior FBI official on the same Wednesday call said any consequential election fraud is unlikely to materialize. More broadly, the national security officials issued reassurances about the level of visibility and awareness they have into foreign election threats this time around — as opposed to in 2016, when intelligence officials were caught off guard by the ferocity and breadth of Russia’s interference campaign. “We are way ahead of where we were in 2016,” said a senior official at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The landscape is more promising, too, the official said, with no obvious “ramp-up in activity targeting election infrastructure” that officials were seeing from the Russians around this time four years ago.
