Senators, experts confident Russia behind cyberattack despite Trump skepticism

Senators and cybersecurity experts on Sunday reacted to the cyberattack on federal agencies, the role of Russia and what level of retaliation is appropriate.

“I would echo what Secretary Pompeo has said and [Sen.] Marco Rubio [R-Fla.] has said: all indications point to Russia. Matter of Fact, FireEye, one of the nation’s top cybersecurity companies who got hacked, they also indicted Russia,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“This attack also shows when a nation state brings their best tools to the table, it’s very tough for any government agency or company for that matter to keep them out,” he said.

President Trump, however, has expressed skepticism about Russia’s culpability for the attack, suggesting on Saturday that China could be responsible and accusing the media of refusing to discuss the possibility “for mostly financial reasons.”

“This is extraordinarily serious, and when the President of the United States, either tries to deflect or is not willing to call out the adversary as we make this attribution, he is not making our country safer,” Warner told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) sounded a similar note, saying on CNN’s “State of the Union” that a response of “like magnitude or greater” is warranted.

“This is the same thing you can do in a wartime setting, so it’s extraordinarily dangerous, and an outrageous affront on our sovereignty and one that’s going to have to be met with a strong response,” Romney told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

The Utah senator suggested Trump is reluctant to blame the Kremlin for the attack due to a “blind spot” on the subject of U.S.-Russia relations.

Romney made similar comments to NBC’s Chuck Todd, saying “[t]he reality here is that the experts, the people who really understand how our systems work and how computers work and software and so forth, the thousands upon thousands at the CIA and the NSA and the Department of Defense, have determined that this came from Russia.”

“I’m not going to psychoanalyze the president. But I think he feels that anything that suggests that Russia is being malevolent or not treating him with the respect he deserves, why, he obviously backs away from that,” he added on “Meet the Press.”

Christopher Krebs, the former head of U.S. cybersecurity, told Tapper he would be “very careful with escalating this” and that there should be a “conversation among like-minded countries” about the appropriate response to cyber-warfare.

Krebs echoed the conclusion that Russia was responsible, saying the Kremlin’s intelligence service is “exceptionally good at it” and blaming what he said were outdated systems still in use across U.S. agencies.

Trump fired Krebs as head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency shortly after he contradicted the president’s unsubstantiated claims about widespread voter fraud, saying the 2020 election was the most secure in American history.