| Резюме: | FBI Director Chris Wray said Wednesday that Russia is engaged in “information warfare” heading into the 2020 presidential election, though he said law enforcement is not seeing ongoing efforts by Russia to interfere in America’s election infrastructure. Wray told the House Judiciary Committee that Russia, just as it did in 2016, is relying on a covert social media campaign aimed at dividing American public opinion and sowing discord. That effort may have an election-year uptick, but is also a round-the-clock threat that is in some ways harder to combat than an election system hack. “Unlike a cyberattack on an election infrastructure, that kind of effort — disinformation — in a world where we have a First Amendment and believe strongly in freedom of expression, the FBI is not going to be in the business of being the truth police and monitoring disinformation online,” Wray said. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security Department are on alert for possible election-related instructions like those that occurred in 2016, when Russians hacked emails belonging to the Democratic campaign of nominee Hillary Clinton and probed local election systems for vulnerabilities. But, Wray said Wednesday, “I don’t think we’ve seen any ongoing efforts to target election infrastructure like we did in 2016.” His appearance came two days after Democratic presidential caucuses in Iowa marred by the malfunctioning of an app that caused a delay in the reporting of results. Though local and federal officials stressed that the problems weren’t caused by a foreign intrusion, the anxiety over the error underscored the ongoing unease surrounding election security. Wray said that Russian efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation and “fake news” had not tapered off since 2016. “You see the Russians taking opposite sides of an issue,” Wray said. “They take both sides and then they spin it up so they pit us against each other.” He avoided a direct answer when asked if President Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr had asked him for investigations into Trump Democratic rival Joe Biden or son Hunter Biden, or into any members of Congress. The question was posed by Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, the committee chairman and one of seven House Democratic managers of the impeachment case. He asked whether Trump might have requested FBI investigations into the Bidens, lawmakers or former national security adviser John Bolton — who is due out with a book next month said to undercut a key Trump defense — as possible payback for impeachment proceedings. Nadler then said that he assumed it was correct that neither Trump nor Barr nor other administration officials had asked for improper political investigations. Wray answered: “No one has asked me to open an investigation based on anything other than facts, the law and proper predication.” Trump has sought, without evidence, to implicate the Bidens in the kind of corruption that has long plagued Ukraine. Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at the same time his father, as vice president, was leading the Obama administration’s diplomatic dealings with Ukraine. Though the timing raised concerns among anti-corruption advocates, there has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden. Wray’s appearance was his first since a Justice Department inspector general report that sharply criticized the FBI’s surveillance of former Trump campaign […]
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