Trump remains silent as massive cyber hack poses 'grave risk' to government - CNNPolitics
Trump has had absolutely nothing to say about this major breach by the Russians. Trump has never uttered a single word of criticism of Putin during his entire presidency. In fact, Trump has frequently praised Putin and Russia, and denigrated America. What can we conclude from that? What hold do the Russians have over Trump?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
(CNN)When President Donald Trump convened his Cabinet at the White House Wednesday as Washington absorbed news of a massive data breach, the heads of most agencies relevant to the intrusion — including the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Justice Department, the director of national intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency — were absent.
After the meeting, Trump said nothing about the attack, which went undetected by his administration's intelligence agencies for months. As those agencies now mobilize to assess the damage — which the government said Thursday could be more widespread than initially thought, posing a "grave risk to the federal government" — the President himself remains silent on the matter, preoccupied instead with his election loss and his invented claims of widespread voter fraud. The massive data breach, revealed in the final weeks of Trump's administration, amounts to a dramatic coda for a presidency clouded by questions of deference to Russia and unsuccessful attempts to warm relations with its President, Vladimir Putin. Just as he has largely ignored the latest surge in coronavirus cases, Trump appears to have all but abdicated responsibility in his final weeks in office. The White House has not listed an intelligence briefing on the President's daily schedule since early October, though officials say he is regularly briefed on intelligence even when a formal briefing doesn't appear on his calendar and a senior White House official told CNN that Trump was briefed on the hack by his top intelligence officials on Thursday.
Biden briefings
Read More Members of President-elect Joe Biden's staff were also briefed by officials on the massive intrusion, an official from the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said. Biden himself has also been given details in his daily classified briefing, which has been listed on his public schedule each day this week. "Our adversaries should know that, as President, I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber assaults on our nation," Biden said in a statement on Thursday, making no specific mention of Trump or his administration, but also not naming Russia as the culprit. The wide-ranging and extraordinary intrusion by suspected Russian hackers of US government systems has launched a technical soul-searching mission among the government's leading cyber officials and outside experts over how this months-long, ongoing cyber campaign managed to go undetected for so long. It wasn't until Wednesday night that the US government formally acknowledged that the ongoing cyber campaign was still active. The revelation comes at a particularly fraught time during a divisive presidential transition and after an election that had been, by all accounts, free of foreign interference. It's unclear when, if at all, Trump may have been briefed on the latest hack. Nor is it clear how engaged Trump has been in responding. He has left all public responses to members of his Cabinet and administration. And despite a healthy pace of tweets about the election results and his false claims of voter fraud, he has not issued any message about the hack. Why the US government hack is literally keeping security experts awake at night Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican who has been a frequent Trump critic, said Thursday it was "stunning" Trump had not responded yet. "I think the White House needs to say something aggressive about what happened," Romney said. "This is almost as if you had a Russian bomber flying undetected over the country, including over the nation." Trump's national security adviser Robert O'Brien did cut short a trip to Europe to return to Washington for urgent meetings on the hack earlier this week, and the White House has convened daily discussions with national security agencies related to the intrusion, according to people familiar with the matter. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees were briefed on the issue Wednesday, but lawmakers have since made clear that there are still more questions than answers. "(The) dirty fact is most entities don't know they've been hacked," Rep. Mike Quigley, a Democrat from Illinois who serves on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN Thursday. Senate Republicans on Thursday said they didn't see an issue in Trump's silence while his administration works to get to the bottom of the matter. "There's still information gathering occurring, so I'd caution anyone reaching conclusions or making pronouncements until all that is in," said Senate Intelligence Chairman Marco Rubio. "I think there's a lot that still needs to be learned about it. I would caution anyone from speaking out too much about something when there's still a lot of facts being gathered.
'A very big deal'
Sen. Josh Hawley, who sits on Senate Armed Services, says he hasn't been briefed on the hack. "I'm fine with what they said publicly," he said of the administration. "It's a very big deal. And we certainly need to learn more ... I'm really concerned about it." Asked if Trump should address this publicly, Hawley said: "I think the most important thing is to get report out and let us know the extent of the breach is. They may be trying to figure that out." While Trump has not said anything about the attack, his former homeland security adviser Tom Bossert urged the President in an op-ed to formally attribute responsibility and, if Russia is confirmed behind it, "make it clear to Vladimir Putin that these actions are unacceptable." Trump is also threatening to veto the National Defense Authorization Act over a provision requiring renaming of military bases named for Confederate leaders and because he wants a provision added to reform liability laws for social media companies like Twitter. The defense policy bill includes provisions that would help the US government address cyber threats. "We have provisions in the bill that he needs in case the hacking, the cyber threats that are out there," Senate Armed Services Chairman Jim Inhofe said of Trump and the NDAA, which he has shepherded. But Inhofe, who has been briefed on the hack, said he wouldn't criticize Trump for failing to speak out. Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat on the panel, also hasn't been briefed yet but said he is trying to set one up for himself for Friday. "I think he should, but frankly I don't think he will," Kaine said when asked if Trump should address it forcefully. "I don't think we will probably get a straight answer about the depths of this and what we need to do counter it until the new administration is in place." Christopher Krebs: We prepared for more Russian interference. But this year the assault on democracy was from within the US As the contours of the data breach are still coming into view, the incident underscores how little Trump's efforts to court Putin have done to improve relations with Moscow over the past four years. Even as he frustrated his own advisers by delaying punitive measures and attempting to befriend his Russian counterpart, Trump ends his term confronted with one Russia's most brazen attempts to date at infiltrating American systems. That is much like how Trump began his presidency, when American intelligence agencies assessed Russia had worked to influence the 2016 presidential election on Trump's behalf. The President's unwillingness to confront Russia on that front, or issue any warnings to Putin to not do interfere again, have fueled the impression among his critics that he is soft on Putin. A tweet Trump issued in 2017, following his first meeting with Putin on the sidelines of a G7 meeting in Hamburg, has now come to exemplify the naivete with which many in Congress and even inside the administration say Trump approached Russia. "Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded," he wrote then, an idea that was mocked at the time and never came to fruition. While Putin was one of the last world leaders to recognize Biden as the victor of the US election, he did finally acknowledge the President-elect's win this week, saying in a message he was "ready for contacts and interactions with you." "We need an honest reset in terms of relationships between the United States and Russia," Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, said on Wednesday. "We can't be buddies with Vladimir Putin and have him at the same time making this kind of cyber attack on America. This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States, and we should take it that seriously."
Silence
It wasn't only election meddling that failed to draw condemnation from the President; he did not raise with Putin the issue of Russia placing bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan when he spoke to him over the summer — another issue that Trump claimed was never contained in his intelligence briefings, even though officials said it was included a written briefing from February. After multiple US troops were injured in Syria after what the Pentagon described as "deliberately provocative and aggressive behavior" by Russian forces, Trump did not respond. And in October, even after the EU and United Kingdom sanctioned six top Russian officials close to Putin for the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Trump did not. In his book published after leaving the White House on poor terms with Trump, former national security adviser John Bolton wrote the President privately complained about sanctions and other punitive measures imposed on Russia. Bolton listed a bevy of administration actions against Russia, saying Trump "touted these as major achievements, but almost all of them occasioned opposition, or at least extended grumbling and complaining, from Trump himself." Perpetually frustrated by what he called the "Russia hoax," Trump has accused his opponents of trying to stymie good relations with Moscow as they sought to investigate links between his campaign and Russian election interference. So annoyed has Trump become at mention of Russian misdeeds that, in the past, he has resisted intelligence warnings about Russia, leading members of his national security ream — including those who delivered the President's Daily Brief — to brief him less often on Russia-related threats to the US, multiple former Trump administration officials have told CNN. When his oral intelligence briefing included information related to Russia's malign activities against the United States, Trump often questioned the intelligence itself.
CNN's Alex Marquardt, Zachary Cohen, Brian Fung, Jennifer Hansler and Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.
Tags
Who is online
428 visitors
What hold do the Russians have over Trump?
Still with the false "Russia, Russia, Russia" narrative.
What hold do the Russians have over Trump? Nothing other than the TDS driven in this country; who are willing to believe any bullshit narrative spewed forth.
Less than two months to go. Then we will all get to see what Joe has planned for the US. I am willing to bet it is nothing other than Trump bashing for the next 4 years. The same thing Obama did with Bush Jr while overseeing the slowest economic recovery ever from a recession; and turning into Bush on steroids when it came to overseas military ventures and extra judicial drone killings.
Obama rarely brought up GWB but he did assign blame where it belonged. Unlike trump who accepts blame for literally nothing, ever.
Lots of ties to Russia all up and down the GOP.
Still with the bullshit "Nothing but TDS" defense of the indefensible.
I'm willing to bet that all we're going to hear from Trumpists over the next 4 years is "the election was stolen, the election was stolen, wah, wah, wah".
Trump dedicated his presidency to Obama bashing for 4 years.
Good riddance to Donald J. Trump, the worst President in American history.
Your less than adequate comment fails to address a single point raised in the seeded article.
And Trump rarely criticized Hillary Clinton...
I mean, we aren't talking about William McKinley here. How could you make such a preposterous claim about such recent history?
Do you believe that Russia was not behind this attack?
Discarding China already? I only hope the Democrats aren't as stupid as they seem in regards to China.
That the Congress FORCED Trump into.
That Trump tried to use as a quid pro quo and the CONGRESS had to step in to ensure continued funding.
Occupying oil fields AFTER abandoning the Kurds on the border and allowing Turkey and Russia to fill the vacuum. Oil over people, you must be proud.
How can we be bombing the remnants of something that Trump insists was eliminated YEARS ago?
Talk about believing bullshit narratives...
Answering a question with a question = deflection.
. . . plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!
One thing might the tapes.
They hold his notes G. Trump's loans are coming due and it's been well documented that no bank will touch him. So Trump is counting on Russian oligarchs to keep him afloat.
Of course, his newly formed ''slush fund'' funded by the lemmings that are known as his followers will help to some extent. I believe it's a bit over $200 million. But hey, for a so-called Billionaire that's chump change.
How much are the loans, what is the payment schedule, who holds the loans?
Once NY gets done with him, we should know even more.
Apparently so.
His sons have bragged in the past that their money comes from Russia.
Yet the right insists that we are supposed to take them 'seriously but NOT literally'.
Nice little trick there right?
A bit too nice.
Sounds like you don't know shit right now.
I figured all those braying about what Trump owes and to whom he owes it were all full of hot air anyways.
You could prove me wrong by merely listing his debts and who he owes and what the payments are and when they are due.
When you make bullshit up, it is kind of hard to obtain a link.
They don't have any links.
Well, ones that back the bullshit up, anyways!
Recently, more and more of Trump's Pigeons have been coming home to roost!
"Trump and his businesses have a long history with the German bank, which this month posted its latest net loss, of €1.4bn. (Deutsche Bank) has been the only financial institution willing to lend Trump significant sums . In the 1990s other Wall Street banks, which had previously extended him credit, turned off the tap after Trump’s businesses declared bankruptcy four times ."
"In November 2008 the German bank took the unusual step of suing Trump after he failed to repay $40m of a $640m real estate loan. Trump countersued. The tycoon argued that Deutsche had contributed to the global recession, which had depressed property prices. He demanded $3bn in damages. Deutsche’s astonished lawyers described Trump’s lawsuit as frivolous and demanded immediate payment."
"The bank then quietly re-established its relationship with Trump via Deutsche’s private bank."
Sources in the banking world have expressed astonishment that Deutsche would continue lending to Trump in the wake of his $3bn 2008 lawsuit. Asked whether this was normal practice, one former Deutsche Bank employee, who worked for the bank in New York, said: “Are you kidding me?”
Another former CEO of a rival investment bank, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “The idea that a bank would walk away from an enforcement lawsuit on a defaulted loan with a litigious borrower because they hired a banking team is preposterous.”
"A person familiar with the matter said the relationship resumed because Deutsche Bank hired a group of private wealth bankers including Rosemary Vrablic, who had previously worked at Citigroup and Bank of America and was Trump’s personal banker. Vrablic began working for Deutsche in 2006."
"Possible links with Russia are a matter of acute sensitivity inside the bank, the Guardian has been told."
"The US Department of Justice is still investigating the Russian scheme."
Now even Deutsche Bank wants to dump Trump.
" Deutsche Bank AG is looking for ways to end its relationship with President Donald Trump after the U.S. elections, as it tires of the negative publicity stemming from the ties, according to three senior bank officials with direct knowledge of the matter ."
"Deutsche Bank has about $340 million in loans outstanding to the Trump Organization"
In meetings in recent months, a Deutsche Bank management committee that oversees reputational and other risks for the lender in the Americas region has discussed ways in which it could rid the bank of these last vestiges of the relationship , two of the three bank officials said."
" One idea that has come up in the meetings: sell the (Trump) loans in the secondary market , two of the bank officials said. But one of the officials said that idea has not gained traction, in part because it is not clear who would want to buy the loans and the attendant problems that come with it."
"If Trump is not in office, Deutsche Bank executives feel that it would be easier for them to demand repayment, foreclose if he is not able to pay it off or refinance, or try to sell the loans, according to two of the three bank officials."
I did.
Which looks like a hell of a lot more than you do.
The uninformed often 'figure' wrong.
I already provided you with a link Tex. I need not indulge you more.
Thanks yet again for the laughs!
It's good that you can laugh at yourself Tex.
I can do that.
Pity you misinterpret what I was laughing at in this particular instance.
I could correct you, but why bother? It is infinitely more fun to see what else you'll post!
I merely add cogency and then give what I get.
See/
It's gems like that that keep me reading!
Get real. One can own something outright and STILL take loans out on it.
So is it debt or NOT? Pick one.
Yes and since Trump has been lying for years about the value of his properties for tax and insurance purposes, NY will be figuring that out right quick.
Oh and BTFW, I thought your were averse to 'concentrating on one word'.
Nice try at goal moving. Problem is, you still own something 'outright' if there is a lien on it.
Double fail.
He may not have a choice since no banks want to work with him.
BTFW, Trump's bankers at Deutsche Bank just resigned...
NY can review what Trump claimed as the value of a property for tax purposes VERSES what he value he claimed for insurance purposes. Different values = fraud.
Wow, you really are taking nit picking and parsing one word to a whole new level. I thought you were averse to content like that in a discussion.
WTF does your nit picking and parsing one word have to do with Craig? Hint: Not a fucking thing.
I don't need to 'defend that logic', it's self evident. If in the same year, Trump cited one value for a property for tax purposes [low] and a different value for that same property for insurance purposes [high], THAT is fraud. Depending on what the REAL value of the property is, it could be tax or insurance fraud or BOTH.
There is also the question on Financial Institution Fraud since is was claimed that Trump lie about the value of collateral [property] for loans he received.
Actually I remember that story well.
And the two addresses you posted (Trump Tower, 721 5th Avenue and 40 Wall St) are not are a derail-- they're not the really shocking story here.
The relevant story is about another building-- 666 5th not 721 5th (AKA "Trump Tower").
IIRC. Jared couldn't make the mortgage payment and after American companies wouldn't bail him out, went to The Chinese and The Qataris to bail him out.
The Trump family's financial reputation in NYC City is not good. Many people refuse to do business with them, and most banks won't lend to them. (In addition, they frequently don't pay workers or companies they buy materials from).
To save money, Trump uses many undocumented laborers. They work for little money. He knows he doesn't have to worry about them saying anything, because as undocumented workers they live in fear of being deported.
.
And after he lis no longer President, he will be forced to release his taxers-- and my guess is that then we will know much, much more!
No you wouldn't!
Sadly Trump doesn't seem to be interested in anything but whining about the election being rigged.
Meanwhile back in reality there is COVID, this huge breach of government agencies and the day-to-day of actually running a country.
He's sulking.
If only that was all he was doing. I believe he is scheming all sorts of vindictive actions. It's a dangerous situation for the next 3 weeks or so.
I'm afraid you're right.
In tonight's news: he's accelerated the pace of pardons. Just pardoned some major convicted felons.
I wouldn’t be surprised to eventually learn that the access was orchestrated by the Trump administration as a trade off for Putin’s offer to use it to fix the election for Trump. Russia got the access but failed to follow through on throwing the election. That would explain the look on Trump’s face on election night. It was a look of panic over not receiving what he paid for.
I can't remember any. It is strikingly odd, come to think of it.
I'd be curious if any of the Trump followers here can produce a single sentence of Trump criticizing Vladimir Putin over the past four or five years. Trump doesnt criticize the Russian government either, although he brags about how tough he has been on Russia. For what? Can Trump even put it into words ?
Trump doesn't want to piss off his boyfriend.
Or, perhaps more accurately...his "puppet-master".
meh, not the first time the nazis have surrendered to the russians.
A day before he is slated to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin , President Donald Trump criticized Moscow’s actions in the strongest terms he has used as president.
And given how much praise he has over the years heaped upon his Russian Puppetmaster Vladimir Putin ....those -so-called "strongest terms he has used to date"...in actuality aren't very strong at all!
criticized Moscow’s actions in the strongest terms he has used as president
And given how much praise he has over the years heaped upon his Russian Puppetmaster Vladimir Putin ....those -so-called " strongest terms he has used to date "...in actuality aren't very strong at all!
Which should come as no surprise.....
About the strongest thing he most like said to his bf is...."Vladie, please use a breath mint before you kiss me."
Perhaps...
OTOH, given what we know of the relationship between Trump and his BFF Putin...perhaps its actually not that strange after all...???
The self-described ''War-Time President'' has once again shown his real colors, hiding out in his bunker having gone AWOL.
What a frickin disgrace.
He's more likely to start a war than actually conduct one.
It seems like he's trying to start a civil war.
He started a trade war with China, 'cause those are easy to win...
I just read they added DJI the largest drone maker to the "US do not do business with list" for Chinese businesses. So US companies can't supply parts to DJI now.
I saw yesterday, that Huawei will soon put Harmony OS - it's substitute for Android - on all its devices: phones, tablets, TVs, whatever...
I suspect the seeds of this cyber invasion were discussed, okayed and implemented after 'The Trump Stunt' at Helsinki.
Oh, is that what you thought ALL those other times you were talking about Helsinki?
LOL!
I do like your overactive imagination, though!