The following is a transcript of an interview with David Becker, Samantha Vinograd and Chris Krebs on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that aired on Nov. 3, 2024.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Welcome back to Face The Nation and our panel of election law and security experts. David Becker is the Executive Director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. Chris Krebs is the former head of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under the Trump administration. And Samantha Vinograd was most recently a counterterrorism official at the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration. Good morning to you all setting the table for a consequential week. Chris, I want to start with you. We’re in that 48-hour window that Microsoft warned was going to be rife with attempts to hack people’s minds. We’ve seen at least four fake videos the FBI and US intelligence have warned are meant to manipulate. Yesterday, the FBI said there were two out there that are fake. Before that, we had disclosures that Russia was behind a Bucks County, Pennsylvania fake video and one targeting voters in Georgia, falsely claiming that Haitian migrants were voting. How do these tactics that Russia is using now compare to what you saw in 2020 and back in 2016?
CHRIS KREBS: Well, they’ve evolved their techniques from generating and launching content from, for instance, St. Petersburg. That’s what we saw in 2016, you had the internet research agency operating out of an office building, almost like a normal business. Over time though, given the improvements in the intelligence community, Cyber Command, and our own awareness of the activities and what they’re doing, they’ve started to push the boundaries out. And so they’re actually generating content, and then they’re laundering it effectively through other platforms like Telegram, and even now, what we’re seeing is a significant amount of laundering through X. And then US citizens pick up this information and pick up these videos, and then they promote it on their own accounts and on their own social media platforms like Facebook. So they’re moving it out. They’re avoiding the techniques that US law enforcement intelligence has deployed and developed, and so they’re not as good, though. So a lot of these videos that we’re seeing, they’re actually quite amateurish. That’s not to say they can’t have better content coming forward, but really they’re just kind of flooding the zone and trying to distract.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And confuse and sow- and sow distrust of our institutions. Sam, US intelligence has been briefing and disclosing. That’s part of what they’re doing to try to counteract this. We also saw early on warnings about Iran and what they are doing. The assessment, Iran favors Harris, Russia favors Trump. What form of influence are we seeing?
SAMANTHA VINOGRAD: Well, Iran has two main goals in this election cycle. First, to denigrate President Trump, they have expressed a precedent, excuse me, a preference for vice president Harris based upon Trump’s record in office and their perception of what Mr. Trump would do if elected. That’s objective one. Objective two is to sow discord, and they view undermining perceptions about the integrity of our elections as an effective tool. So they are using influence operations to denigrate Mr. Trump and to sow discord using AI generated content really focused in particular on, for example, allegations of voter fraud. We should expect Iran to continue increasingly sophisticated influence operations related to perceptions of a lack of election integrity. That will last well after polls close, Margaret. This is the most attenuated election security related threat environment we have likely seen in history.
MARGARET BRENNAN: It’s not about just changing votes. It’s about not trusting our democracy. David, 76 million Americans already voted. So can we say those numbers show the adversaries are failing, or are the election workers you’re speaking with really concerned about what’s to come?
DAVID BECKER: Well, it’s-it has increased our ability to be resilient against the disinformation. The more people who vote early, they’ve effectively inoculated themselves against disinformation that might be inclined to be intended to help them self suppress their vote or confuse them about how to vote. So the fact that we’ve had over 76 million vote already, and that’s going to increase by several million more once all the mail ballots are in, once there’s even early voting going on today still in about 27 states and DC. So that’s very good. That means the number of people that still need to vote on Election Day, when disinformation might be very focused on them, trying to get them confused, with very little time for them to be resilient against that disinformation, that’s going to affect fewer voters. That’s a very good thing, and I think we’re seeing especially in states like Georgia and North Carolina, well over 4 million votes in each of those states has been cast millions of votes in many of the swing states. And so far, very few problems, despite efforts to create problems, perhaps from our adversaries overseas.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And you would point people to the Secretaries of State themselves? Their websites? For reliable information.
DAVID BECKER: Yes. Whenever you need information, go to your state election website. That’s usually the Secretary of State’s website. Sometimes in North Carolina, Wisconsin, there’s an election commission or election board. Go to your local election website. If you know your county or locality where elections are taking place. And if you need help, go to vote.gov that’ll navigate you there eventually. Go- just rely upon those sources solely for information.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Chris, when you were in government, we did see back in 2018 disclosure by the General at the head of then Cyber Command and the National Security Agency say that the government at that time set up a small group to basically knock Russia offline, to physically stop them from some of these influence operations. Can the US undertake offensive operations like that now?
CHRIS KREBS: Absolutely. I do think, though, that the infrastructure that the adversaries- the Russians, the Iranians- have put into place may not be where it once was. It has moved. Keep in mind that earlier this year, the Department of Justice took offline a disinformation group that we track as Doppelganger. They took their various websites offline, and they did it in a way that was timed so that they could not rebuild those websites and re establish the engagement with those websites in time for the election. So there have been steps take taken to ensure that the bad guys can’t execute their strategies, and in the meantime, you have organizations like CISA that are doing more with more jurisdictions on election security than at any other point previously. So they have a lot of confidence around the resilience of the system.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But what you said about using Americans to spread disinformation, people are becoming unwitting agents of a foreign adversary, essentially by reweeting or reposting some of these fake videos.
CHRIS KREBS: We have seen that right. So there was another department of justice announcement that a media outlet based out of Tennessee was receiving funding from the Russians from RT–
MARGARET BRENNAN: –Tenet group
CHRIS KREBS: Tenant group. Now to David’s earlier point. This is why it is so critically important that American voters, when they’re looking for information about the election, they go to their relevant local or state official. They know what’s going on. Go, if you’re in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger and Gabe Sterling are probably running the tightest ship when it comes to elections in the country right now, they’re incredibly effective. They’re out there. They’re putting information in the hands of the American people so they understand what’s happening. And so when Russian operations like the Haitian voters, pops up, they were on it immediately, and they knocked it down. That is hugely effective in maintaining trust in the process.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Sam, we have seen concerns about physical security, though, as well at voting locations. The Democratic governor of Washington State has activated the National Guard, put them on standby, citing general and specific information and concerns about violence and unrest. You did have that drop box in Vancouver that damaged hundreds of ballots. There’s an incendiary device there. Are there specific plots the federal government knows of at this time.
SAMANTHA VINOGRAD: Well, it is a generally heightened threat environment, both in terms of complexity and the length of time that terrorism related threats, criminal threats and influence operations by nation states will last related to the election. It is just prudent planning Margaret in this threat environment for officials at all levels of government, federal, state and local to engage in detailed operational planning. State and local officials are in the lead for the security in their jurisdictions. Now, in my experience, particularly post January 6, those operational plans must include a full sense of all available law enforcement resources, the National Guard’s last resort. You have local resources, state resources, and then as necessary National Guard, as well as a clear sense of who to call when, so that there aren’t communication failures. Federal officials have invested a lot of money and time in doing exercises, hundreds of them, with state and local officials, sharing intelligence and information and trying to share best practices. But at the end of the day, the state and local officials are in the lead and should have clear operational plans for a range of scenarios that may arise, in particular, large scale security incidents that may arise with little or no warning. We learned lessons from January 6th and from my conversations with former colleagues that operational planning has been underway for years. Margaret.
MARGARET BRENNAN: David I want to quickly get you to respond to what Senator Rubio was raising during our interview. He was talking about the charges brought by the Secretary or, I mentioned the charges brought by the Secretary of State against the individual he highlighted had cast a vote despite not being a citizen. How is it that someone who’s not a citizen could register and cast a ballot? How did that even happen?
DAVID BECKER: Well we have several protections in place to make sure it’s very, very unlikely this is going to happen. We’ve seen places like Ohio, which has documented only six cases of non-citizen voting over a decade, dating back to 2014. We have places like Georgia that has documented nine cases of non-citizen voting since 2008. So it does happen, but it’s extremely rare, and I’m sure Michigan is going to go through the process of evaluating exactly what went wrong in this one particular instance. But it’s also important to note, this is one case. It was very swiftly dealt with. This individual is going to lose his admission at the University of Michigan. He’s going to be prosecuted, he might go to jail, and he’s almost certainly to be deported. This is a cautionary tale. It’s one of the reasons we know that non-citizen voting is extremely rare. It’s not zero, but it’s very close to zero, because the potential benefit to the person who perpetrates that crime one vote in an election with 160 million ballots is far outweighed by the potential risk that they’re facing of deportation and other jail time, etc.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Thank you for that. I wanted you to explain the process, because I think explaining how our courts work, of how the systems are set up to deal with these things is important. One of the things disclosed in the US intelligence report put out by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was that Russia is amplifying these claims of non citizen voting. So that’s what happens.
DAVID BECKER: Right, that’s what happens. And there are plenty of protections in place to make sure that this is extremely rare, as close to zero as it can be.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Thank you. Thanks for your perspective. I know we’ll keep you on speed dial throughout the week. We’ll be right back.
