Michael Daniel sat at another meeting of the Cyber Response Group. The people who gathered in the room had gradually become more alarmed, as their hypotheses were beginning to come true. Daniel held a printout of a report made through the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, a kind of a fusion center for intragovernmental reporting—including everyone from White House staff to senior policy makers. Information about viruses, hacks, espionage, etc. are cherry-picked from the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, intelligence analysts, and other officials to create a consolidated picture.1 The system was established in 2014 by the National Security Council.

The critical report detailed hacks into Illinois voter registration databases. The hackers had essentially absconded with names, social security numbers, and addresses of registered voters.

Forensic investigation tried to determine if a specific hacker's fingerprint could be traced to the Illinois hack. Daniel couldn't say if they confirmed the Russian hacker's involvement at that point. They created a tracking matrix to see whether other states were affected, and eventually discovered at least twenty-two states had been potentially compromised. They couldn't decipher a pattern or verify if any information plucked from the databases had been manipulated. Again, they didn't know much at all.²

There was a more significant barrier to weeding out the hack than identifying its roots or even how many states had been invaded.

For many, the atmosphere of the campaign had the disconcerting quality of being lost in the space-time continuum, with people on the Far Right seeming to revisit perspectives related to race and gender, predating events like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Roe v. Wade, even the Nineteenth Amendment, and people leaning toward the Left reacting vehemently. This deepened the division not just between parties, not just between red and blue states, but between the states and federal government.

It wasn't a great time to be compromised. When Daniel and other members of the National Security Council reached out to states to see if they could do anything to help protect their voter registration databases—in places where elections had been viewed as local matters that states were most protective of—they were reproached.3 Federal employees responding to the cyber-espionage attacks were caught in a bureaucratic quagmire. Again, freedom became a liability.

In late 2017, I met Daniel at Sequoia, a Georgetown restaurant, for lunch to discuss what was happening during the late summer of 2016. The sun beat down on the restaurant plaza, set along the wide banks of the Potomac.

I sat by myself for a few minutes and looked outside at the stunning iconic view. It was so close I could make out slight waves on the muddy river, and see across it all the way to Arlington, Virginia, and down the street to the Kennedy Center and the Watergate Hotel.

I recognized Daniel as he arrived, and we shook hands and exchanged formalities before Daniel sat down. I set up my recorder and started the interview.⁴

Daniel spoke of the Russian hackers’ goal in 2016.

Daniel: I think that their goal was, first and foremost, to undermine Americans’ confidence in the…electoral process. The Russians very much wanted to put themselves on the same moral playing field as the United States. And they want to do everything they can to basically [be] able to argue, “See, the United States is no better than anybody else. So, when they tell you that you should follow their examples, don't believe them. Look how crappy they are at running their own elections.”

And you know, I think that they were also strategically hoping to weaken the United States. The Russians don't view that as an isolated thing. They view it as part of a larger continuum of efforts to push back against the West. They're not going to just view that as just an isolated thing.

Next, we started talking about the difficulty Daniel and other members of the National Security Council had in trying to offer reconnaissance to the states.5

Daniel: I'm a career civil servant. I've been in the national security field for over twenty years now. My first instinct is not to think politically in the sense of party dynamics, even though I live in Washington, DC, you know…and have for my entire professional career. And so…I was completely taken aback at the reaction that we got from the states when we did…some of those outreach calls, at the amount of pushback that we got.

Pegues: How would you describe it?

Daniel: Some of them were the secretaries of state, on that initial call that Jeh Johnson did, were outright hostile.

Pegues: Georgia?

Daniel: Among them.

Pegues: Florida?

Daniel: Yeah. I don't remember the exact breakdown. But certainly, Georgia was among them. And they saw it completely as an Obama, political, Democratic Party attempt to horn in on their election space. And I'm completely flabbergasted. Because I'm like, “There's a foreign power trying to screw with us. And you know, you're being willfully blind to this.” And it was a real wakeup call for me that this was going to be way harder than we were anticipating, because of that political overlay.

Pegues: What month was that in?

Daniel: That was August. And so what we also realized as we were going along is that there's a couple of things here, which is that, frankly, what we can actually offer the states in terms of real hardcore capability is pretty limited.

You know, we can offer the scanning services. We have some ability, if the states request it, to send assessment teams to help them shore up their systems. We can make some recommendations on best practices.

But we don't have a whole lot else that we can really offer the states or local governments, especially on the time frame that we're in, which is, for many of them they had already, long since, locked down their voting machines. They had already locked things down. [Princeton professor] Ed Felten refers to it as “the Election Valley of Death.” What he means by that is there's a misalignment between when people tend to focus on election cybersecurity and when anybody could actually do anything about it, which is, when anybody could do anything about it, nobody's paying any attention. And by the time people are paying attention, you can't do anything about it.

Pegues: It's too late.

Daniel: In many ways, we were already too late. And at the same time, we're…trying to think of all the different ways that we can assist with election security.

At the same time, we're also thinking through, how do we push back on the Russians diplomatically? How do we ready some options? How do we work on a communications plan, in case things go sour? At the same time we're trying to maintain the public messaging about confidence in the underlying electoral system.

Pegues: That was going all the way up to the president. He was on that message, as well? Were you part of that advisory process to brief him on how to respond to these questions, to emphasize this over that?

Daniel: I mean, sure. You know, we were certainly providing that. I can't say that I briefed the president personally on that. But we were feeding the folks who were.

Pegues: What was important at that point in terms of messaging?

Daniel: Well, you know, one of the things we were trying to do was not do the Russians’ work for them. We didn't want to be causing people to panic by what we were doing, either. We didn't want to feed the narrative that “Oh, the electoral infrastructure is unreliable.”

Pegues: But it was already out there. Because you had a candidate who was saying that the system was rigged.

Daniel: Right. But then that just added the extra political overlay on it, right? And you know, it was very clear, from the president on down, the chief of staff, that they did not want us to do anything that looked like we were putting our thumb on the scale one way or the other, for one candidate over the other, that we, from a national security perspective, needed to treat this as a national security issue that was not partisan in that sense. And that was very clear guidance from the president on down.

Pegues: I understand what the White House was trying to do. But in hindsight, did that lead to an atmosphere where the administration was too cautious?

Daniel: You know, it's hard to say. It's also hard to say what would've happened if we had been more aggressive. You know, I think that, for me, the larger lesson is that this issue is not going to go away. These information operations are going to continue.

Other people, other nations are probably going to start. Other groups are going to start playing in that space, because of the perceived success that the Russians had. We need to invest in the cybersecurity of our electoral infrastructure. Because that's been shown to not be where it needs to be.

And I think we should think of it like we think about the power grid or our telecommunications grid or our healthcare system or the financial services industry. It's critical. It's a process and a thing that is critical to the functioning of our democracy.

After the interview, I was headed back to CBS and processing what Daniel had said. I looked out the window while passing through Georgetown and stopped near the Watergate Hotel. It suddenly struck me as ironic that Daniel and I had interviewed across from that building as historical parallels to the Watergate scandal started to be revealed in 2016.

My mind drifted. I was happy. I felt like the interview went well and provided me with a new perspective on the story.

I learned more about how we behaved collectively at this point in history. It was interesting to note how genuinely confused, even heartbroken Daniel was when the states accused his office of pandering to a particular party or interfering with their elections. I was puzzled by the fact that by the time anyone in the federal government discovered the state hacks, the machines were essentially in lockdown mode—Felten's Election Valley of Death. Even if the machines weren't locked down, the federal government wouldn't have been able to offer much help. Were we amazingly underequipped to deal with this type of emergency? Again, how could one of the most modern, Western, purportedly technologically advanced nations in the world be unprepared for an attack on our voter databases, one of the crown jewels of our democracy? It just didn't make any sense.

It was still unclear whether the separation between the states and federal government made voter databases more or less secure. Sources had told me the lack of a cohesive collective election system across all the states and counties in the country made them more difficult for hackers to penetrate as a whole. James Comey, who was the FBI director at the time, called the system old and clunky.6 The hackers may be able to reach twenty-three states, for instance, but they couldn't get every state's database. On the flip side, the federal government's reluctance to inform the public until it was too late (or in many cases state representatives found out long after the elections, or not at all) was shameful and dangerous; it was as if the federal government didn't trust us enough to tell us and, hence, protect us. The states’ distrust of the federal government also made us vulnerable. But was it warranted?

I headed along K Street and then passed the World Bank, where my father worked as a senior banking sector specialist.

I frequently ruminated over this issue during the course of this investigation. Millions of people, including women and African Americans, had fought for the right to vote, to be part of a society that addressed everyone's needs. United we stand. Divided we fall. I could also understand where the states were coming from in distrusting and resisting the federal government. There is a historical precedent for that, most notably in the South. I reflected on that concept while traveling back to Birmingham, Alabama, with then CIA director John Brennan.