Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo ordering the military to defend the U.S. midterm elections against foreign interference, the Pentagon announced Monday.
U.S. Cyber Command, the military’s cyberwarfare unit, and combat support agencies “will deploy advanced intelligence and cybersecurity capabilities” to “identify, disrupt, and neutralize foreign interference in U.S. democratic processes,” the department said in a press release.
The memo, issued about five weeks before the midterm elections, directs the command to work with the Department of Homeland Security to counter foreign cyber threats to U.S. election infrastructure.
The activities described in the memo are largely activities by the U.S. military and spy agencies to protect U.S. elections from foreign threats ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025. Weeks before the 2024 presidential election, for example, Cyber Command hackers conducted a covert operation to disrupt the work of Russian trolls spewing false information to U.S. voters, CNN previously reported.
But the second Trump administration disbanded or downsized several government centers, including within the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, charged with fending off foreign influence operations. Trump also continued to reject or question past U.S. intelligence on Russian and Chinese efforts to influence the election. These factors have led to widespread concern among current and former U.S. national security officials that the second Trump administration had not prioritized defending U.S. elections against foreign interference.
Those concerns grew in April when the new head of Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, Gen. Joshua M. Rudd, told lawmakers he did not know whether a specialized military and intelligence team dedicated to thwarting foreign threats to elections had been established for the midterm elections.
For every general and midterm election since the 2020 election, the team — known as the Election Security Group (ESG) — has been a hub for NSA and Cyber Command officials to share intelligence and launch counterattacks against trolls from Russia, Iran and elsewhere who were trying to undermine the U.S. election. The group was a response to Russia’s multi-pronged influence operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election, when intelligence and security agencies were caught off guard.
It was not immediately clear what role, if any, this group would play in the new activity ordered by Hegseth.
Cyber Command and the NSA “regularly thwart the actions of malicious foreign cyber actors, including those who intend to interfere with our democratic process,” Rudd said in a statement Monday.
“What concerns me is that (Rudd) testified as recently as April that he wasn’t sure there was an election security group within the command,” Andrew Schoka, who worked at Cyber Command during the 2020 election cycle, told CNN. “ESG’s work takes months of planning and coordination, and much of its impact happens well before Election Day. If it’s just starting now, you really limit the impact you can have on opponents before the midterms.”
Gn usa
