WASHINGTON — Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, blasted Russia on Sunday for a cyberattack he said amounted to an “invasion,” adding that the president’s unwillingness to blame Russia shows he has a “blind spot” when it comes to the country.
U.S. officials believe that Russian intelligence was behind a suspected hacking campaign unveiled last week that infiltrated more than 40 organizations, including many government agencies and contractors.
But while top government officials, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have publicly said it appears that Russia was behind the hack, President Donald Trump cast doubt on that assessment in a Saturday tweet, where he floated the possibility “it may be China” who perpetrated the hack.
“I was disappointed with the president’s comment,” Romney said during an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “But I think we’ve come to recognize that the president has a blind spot when it comes to Russia. And the 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.”
“This is an extraordinarily damaging invasion, and it went on for a long, long time.”
Microsoft said Thursday that the hack targeted more than 40 organizations, primarily in America. Those groups were targeted primarily by attacking a technology company called SolarWinds, which provides software to clients like government agencies as well as private companies.
Multiple government agencies have reportedly been breached, and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency directed agencies to halt its use of SolarWinds products.
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A private security official briefed on the matter confirmed to NBC News last week that Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service launched the attack, and Pompeo said Friday that “we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
Still, officials were told to stand down on a planned statement from the White House blaming Russia for the hack, NBC has confirmed. And the president tweeted out his doubts hours after Pompeo’s statement, musing about the possibility that China may have perpetrated the hack and attempted to connect it to his false allegations of widespread election fraud.
“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control. Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of… discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!),” Trump tweeted.
Romney, who was the only GOP senator to vote to convict Trump on one article of impeachment earlier this year, said that it’s clear Trump “backs away” from “anything that suggests Russia is being malevolent or not treating him with the respect he deserves.”
“He doesn’t want to recognize Russia as the problem they are and the extraordinarily bad actor they are on the world stage,” Romney said.d “Because it reflects poorly on him, at least perhaps in his own mind. And the reality is, Russia really is a geopolitical adversary. They go against us on every front. They have now invaded our cyberspace again. They kill people in their own country, whether it’s politicians or media people.”
The senator repeatedly referred to the cyberattack as “an invasion,” and said “we have to have a very clear-eyed approach to how we deal with Russia going forward.”
“This demands a response, and the response you’d expect to occur would be a cyber response,” he said.
“I don’t know if we have the capacity to do that in a way that would be of the same scale or even greater scale than what Russia has applied to us, but this is something we have to address as soon as possible.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
