Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia — the top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees — warned at a news briefing today that Russia is trying to influence the midterm elections as it has done since 2016 but that the effort is made easier this time around by the proliferation of AI and its ease of use.
“Many of the protections around our system were put in place by Trump’s first administration,” Warner said. “The good news about that is our system is safe; it is secure. The bad news is much of that institutional protection has been systemically dismantled in Trump Number 2.”
Himes said, “The Russians are also particularly focused in a bipartisan way on people and things that have been aggressive on Ukraine.”
But there has been no evidence that Russia — or any other foreign actor — has interfered in the election. The distinction between influence and interference is profound, they said.
“We are not seeing either the capacity or the intent to interfere,” Himes said. But he described the influence campaign by Russia as a “carnival.”
“The Russians are kind of throwing everything out there. Chaos, you know. Don’t trust your institutions, voting machines. They’re throwing everything out there to generate a sense of chaos and anarchy,” he said.
They said they believed China also was continuing a targeted influence effort.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington fired back at Himes and Warner.
“This is a false allegation and serious smear that has long been proved to be unfounded,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “China adheres to non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs. We never interfere in U.S. elections and have zero interest in that.”
The Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Himes said Iran already has a way to seek to influence the election: the price of oil, through strikes on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz or with Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.
“The Iranian regime is a pretty savvy regime,” Himes said. “Hideous though they are, they understand that they have a massive lever right now to influence the election, and they’re using it. And that, of course, is the price of oil.”
The two lawmakers said that they’d received a recent classified briefing on meddling efforts but that they were never given a declassified intelligence report on the 2024 election or the statutorily mandated intelligence reports on elections due 120, 60 and 30 days before Nov. 3.
Still, Himes and Warner said they feel more confident with the current head of intelligence, Jay Clayton, than they did with his predecessors. They said they have assurances that officials with National Intelligence Director’s Office will at least pick up the phone on Election Day and beyond. They said Democrats have worked through possible scenarios in which Trump could say there was foreign interference in elections or seek to seize ballots and they’d need to have quick access to intelligence community officials.
In a speech this summer, Trump described mail-in ballots as “inherently corrupt” and said China had wrongly acquired “220 million U.S. voter files,” or voter registration records, which he called potentially “the largest compromise of election data in history.”
Trump himself has repeatedly voted by mail.
Ahead of Trump’s summertime speech, the White House released some declassified documents, one of which was an August 2020 intelligence assessment that foreign actors might try to “compromise our election infrastructure for a range of possible purposes, such as interfering with the voting process, stealing sensitive data, or calling into question the validity of the election results.”
Himes said the documents the White House made public over the summer were “not manufactured,” but he said that they provided a confusing and scattershot picture of the election reality and that there was no evidence that China was interfering.
The two lawmakers said the executive branch has no constitutional right to seize ballot boxes without a Fourth Amendment warrant.
They said Democrats are prepared to counter any messaging they believe is false or misleading.