In the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan has been a consistent voice warning about the Russian threat, particularly when it comes to Russia’s military buildup in the Arctic.
At a hearing on cyber hacking Thursday, Sullivan focused on hacking by other countries and didn’t discuss Russia at all.
The subject of the hearing was “foreign cyber threats to the United States.”
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Arizona, made Russia and its pre-election hacking the focus.
“There’s no escaping the fact that this committee meets today for the first time in this new Congress in the aftermath of an unprecedented attack on our democracy,” McCain said.
For McCain and other senators, this was a chance to push back at President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump has publicly scorned the U.S. intelligence agencies for concluding that Russia hacked American email systems to interfere with the presidential election.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Trump should reconsider his disparagement of the intelligence agencies and hit Russia hard for what it did.
“I want to let the president-elect know that it is OK to challenge the intel. You are absolutely right to want to do so,” Graham said. “But what I don’t want you to do is to undermine those who are serving our nation in this arena until you are absolutely sure they need to be undermined, and I think that they need to be uplifted.”
When it was Sullivan’s turn to question a trio of intelligence agency witnesses, he didn’t ask about Trump or Russia. Sullivan focused instead on the threat from North Korea, Iran and China. Sullivan said the U.S. hasn’t responded forcefully enough to foreign computer breaches from several countries.
“I did not hear any claim of a retaliation on a huge hack. Huge,” Sullivan said. “Twenty-two million American federal, military, intel workers hacked by the Chinese.”
National Intelligence Director James Clapper suggested that was cyber espionage, rather than an attack.
“We and other nations conduct similar acts of espionage, and so if we are going to punish each other for acts of espionage, that is a different policy issue,” Clapper said.
Sullivan said America has become “a cyber punching bag.”
After the hearing, Sullivan said he had Russia questions, but, by the time he spoke, most had been asked already. And Sullivan said the topic has been politicized.
“I think — I don’t think, I watched — that there were some people that have been using the Russia hacking issue as a way to try to delegitimize the results of the November election,” Sullivan said. “What was clear today was that, you know, Donald Trump and Mike Pence won fair and square.”
Clapper testified that the intelligence community has no way to gauge whether Russia’s hack influenced how Americans voted.
Sullivan said it’s important to look at what Russia is doing, but he, like McCain, said he doesn’t see evidence that hacking determined the election outcome.
None of the senators at the hearing disputed the intelligence chiefs’ conclusions that the hacks came from Russia and were an attempt to interfere with the U.S. election.
“No, I mean you watched the hearing today, right? I mean they were quite definitive on that,” Sullivan said. “And they’re the experts and I don’t have a reason to doubt that.”
Whether Trump is still skeptical of the agencies is hard to say. A few hours before the hearing he said in a tweet that he’s a big fan of “intelligence.”
