Trump defiant despite Mueller’s warning shot on Russia meddling

Bloomberg

US Special Counsel Robert Mueller is the latest top official to sound the alarm that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, but there’s no sign that Donald Trump is listening yet.
The president’s silence has some experts worried that Trump and his administration aren’t taking the threat from Russia to this year’s elections, with Republican control of Congress at stake, seriously enough. “Everybody keeps thinking about it as, ‘We need to be wary of 2018.’ Well, it is 2018 and they’re still after us,” said Michael Allen, an intelligence and cybersecurity consultant who worked on national security policy for President George W. Bush. “Do I see a presidential initiative? No, I haven’t seen one.”
Trump spent the holiday weekend claiming vindication after Mueller’s indictments detailing an election interference scheme by 13 Russian nationals, saying it showed his campaign had done nothing wrong even though that part of the probe continues. Then the president lashed out at the investigation and his critics 14 times in fierce terms unusual even for the combative New Yorker.
Russians, Trump tweeted, are “laughing their asses off” at the US over the continuing investigations and divisions in the country. He knocked his own national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, who called Russian interference “incontrovertible,” for not defending the validity of Trump’s election in November 2016. And Trump said the probes have distracted the FBI from stopping attacks like the school shooting in Florida last week that killed 17 people. Russia’s behaviour wasn’t mentioned.

PUTIN’S DENIAL
Trump has long been reluctant to publicly criticise Russian behaviour during the election and once said he accepted President Vladimir Putin’s denial of meddling.
Allen said the president’s latest actions show he appears more concerned that the Mueller probe casts doubt on his electoral success — whether his campaign sought Russian assistance or not.
“The president has tried to draw a line around his electoral victory, and he’s in a trench. But he’s dug the trench in the wrong place,” Allen said. “He thinks anytime someone mentions Russia and the election that it delegitimizes his presidency. That’s not a defensible position.”
Instead of leading an effort to shore up vulnerable US elections systems, the president tweeted “get smart, America,” and found himself in familiar political fights. He feuded with Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, after the California congressman said the Mueller indictment doesn’t clear Trump. He was labeled a “psychopath” by Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona for connecting the FBI’s Russia probe to the bureau’s failure to act on a tip about the South Florida school shooter.
The lack of top White House leadership means companies like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., as well as lower-level officials in the administration and state governments, are on the front lines of trying to ensure that Russia has a harder time interfering in the November 2018 midterm elections.
Over the weekend, election officials from all 50 states received classified briefings on risks to their electoral systems, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation joined the sessions.
Bob Kolasky, an acting deputy undersecretary of Homeland Security, said 21 state election officials have received interim security clearances to access information from the federal government and others are being processed.
“Should we see stress on the system, we will share information more quickly. We will understand where vulnerabilities exist and whether that stress actually has any chance of actually doing any damage in a better way than we did last time,” Kolasky said.