Democratic Representative Mike Quigley, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said he is worried that the Russians “never left,” raising the concern that Russia is planning to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections through cyber or other means.
“I am concerned that the Russians never left,” Quigley told CBS News when asked about his concerns about threats to November’s midterms.
Quigley also said that Russia-linked hackers breached “somewhere between 20 and 40 state board of elections,” including the Illinois voter database in 2016 adding that states are still not ready for future interference efforts by Russia.
“First, they attacked our election infrastructure. They hacked into somewhere between 20 and 40 state board of elections, including, in August of 2016, my own state of Illinois. They hacked and dumped emails into political parties and individuals. They weaponized social media,” Quigley told Michael Morell, host of CBS News’s “Intelligence Matters” podcast and former acting director of the CIA.
“This is a great concern,” he said.
Quigley blamed both the Obama and Trump administrations for insufficient response to Russian interference.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that what the Russians did was, as a wise man said, the political equivalent of 9/11,” the Democratic lawmaker said. “And our response to that is probably more important and will have more profound impacts on our country going forward.”
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