Russian government attempts to hack into U.S. election infrastructure were “much broader” than what was laid out in a report Monday in The Intercept, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top-ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, told USA Today in an interview Tuesday.
Warner’s claim was made in response to newly disclosed findings by the National Security Agency that Russian operatives had hacked into an election software company and attempted to spear-phish at least 122 addresses associated with local election officials, with uncertain results.
“The extent of the attacks is much broader than has been reported so far,” Warner said, referring to the report in The Intercept. “I don’t believe they got into changing actual voting outcomes,” he said, adding that he was pressuring intelligence agencies to declassify which states were hit, with the goal of helping them shore up their systems ahead of 2018 and 2020.
“None of these actions from the Russians stopped on Election Day,” he said. “I really want to press the case. This is not an attempt to embarrass any state. This is a case to make sure that the American public writ large realizes that if we don’t get ahead of this, this same kind of intervention could take place in 2018 and definitely will take place in 2020.”
On Monday afternoon, the Department of Justice announced that it had arrested a 25-year-old NSA contractor, Reality Leigh Winner, and charged her under the Espionage Act for leaking a highly classified document. U.S. officials have told media outlets that Winner was The Intercept’s source. The source provided the document anonymously and The Intercept has no independent knowledge of the source’s identity.
Top photo: Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., talks to reporters before a closed-door committee meeting in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, June 6, 2017, in Washington.
IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.
What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.
This is not hyperbole.
Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.
Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”
The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.
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IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?
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I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?
We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?
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