John Brennan, in my book “Rigged,” told me that Russian hackers had the ability to alter the voter data & vote tallies of U.S. citizens on Election Day 2016.

The next COVID relief bill should include major funding and cyber security requirements for election administration.

2) On Election Day 2016, as I further reveal in "Rigged," the White House and the Department of Homeland Security were running secret crisis teams, bracing for a Russian cyberattack against the nation's electoral systems.

3) Jeh Johnson, then the DHS Secretary, said his crisis team was ready to offer “quick cyber assistance” to states, were a “cyber intrusion [to] manifest itself on Election Day such that people who show up to vote can’t vote, or there is a problem in the reporting of the votes.”

4) The same went for the White House. “We did, in fact, have an entire crisis team set up in the White House,” said Michael Daniel, then Obama’s cybersecurity coordinator. “There were teams at all of the respective agencies,” he told me, monitoring for a Russian cyberattack.

5) When asked about these crisis teams, Susan Rice said, “We were monitoring very carefully, not just on Election Day, but in the run-up to the election, whether there was any evidence of Russia mechanically distorting the vote... That was obvious to do and necessary to do.”

6) On Election Day, the White House still considered it “very possible,” said Amy Pope, the deputy homeland security advisor, that there would be “actual interference with the voting record and voting systems.”

“Everybody was prepared for the worst-case scenario," she said.

7) For Jeh Johnson, the DHS secretary, the nightmare scenario involved “data being manipulated [by Russia] in a handful of key precincts in Miami-Dade, in Dayton, Ohio, in a key precinct in Michigan, a key precinct in Wisconsin, a key precinct in Pennsylvania.”

8) “What did seem very plausible,” added Avril Haines, Rice's deputy, “was that [Russia] could affect the votes of a small percentage of the population by... changing the addresses of registrants to make it more challenging for them to vote," to "undermine faith in the election."

9) This worst-case scenario did not arrive. “We saw no evidence of interference in voter tallying, not to say that there wasn’t, we just didn’t see any evidence,” Jim Clapper told me. Susan Rice likewise saw no indication that Russia had “altered votes or electoral databases.”

10) But Russia’s operation had by no means failed. By Election Day, hacked emails had already dominated the news cycle for months, and Russian propaganda had reached tens of millions of Americans on social media.

**END THREAD**