U.S. Slaps New Sanctions On Russia Over Cyberattack, Election Meddling

NPR 

SCOTT NEUMAN

DUSTIN JONES

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  Transcript

Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik/Kremlin/Pool via AP

President Biden is ordering a new round of economic sanctions on Russia — a response in part to Moscow's election meddling and a Kremlin-linked computer breach that penetrated numerous U.S. government networks.

Biden said Thursday that the United States isn't pushing for "a cycle of escalation and conflict" with Russia, but instead for both nations to manage tensions and work together when needed.

But the president also said that during a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he made it clear that any actions taken against the United States would be met with proportionate repercussions.

"My bottom line is this, where it is in the interest of the United States to work with Russia, we should and we will. If Russia seeks to violate the interests of the United States, we will respond," Biden said. "We will always stand in defense of our country, our institutions, our people and our allies."

TECHNOLOGY

What We Know About Russia's Alleged Hack Of The U.S. Government And Tech Companies

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday afternoon that "our objective here is not to escalate, our objective is to impose costs for what we feel are unacceptable actions by the Russian government."

The sanctions are also meant to impose a penalty over Russia's continued occupation of Crimea, which it infiltrated and annexed from Ukraine seven years ago, and for reportedly offering bounties for attacks against U.S. and coalition military personnel in Afghanistan.

Psaki said that while the U.S. believes with "low to moderate confidence" that bounties were offered by Russia, "we had enough concern about these reports that we wanted to have our intelligence community look into them."

"We still feel there are questions to be answered by the Russian government," she added.

POLITICS

Congress Unites To Demand Answers From Trump On Russian Bounties In Afghanistan

She said the sanctions signal that "we are going to be clear to Russia that there will be consequences when warranted."

On the possibility of a Biden-Putin summit at some point in the future, Psaki said that "the invitation remains open."

The Kremlin has denied any involvement in U.S. elections or on offering the bounties. Moscow has also said it had nothing to do with the SolarWinds computer attack.

Speaking after the measures were made official, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the "aggressive behavior" would lead to an "inevitable" response and that the U.S. would "pay" for the deterioration in relations.

"The United States is not ready to come to terms with the objective reality that there is a multipolar world that excludes American hegemony," Zakharova said.

In December, reports emerged that U.S. technology firm SolarWinds had been hit by a cyberattack that went undetected for months as the company sent out software updates with the hackers' code to its clients worldwide. The attack — first identified by cybersecurity firm FireEye when its own systems were found to have been compromised — later allowed hackers to infiltrate U.S. government networks, including those used by the Homeland Security and Treasury departments.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking with CNN on Thursday, said that the White House believes the sanctions "are proportionate measures to defend American interests in response to harmful Russia actions, including cyber intrusions and election interference."

A fact sheet released by the White House on Thursday morning said, "The Biden administration has been clear that the United States desires a relationship with Russia that is stable and predictable."

"We do not think that we need to continue on a negative trajectory," it said. "However, we have also been clear — publicly and privately —that we will defend our national interests and impose costs for Russian Government actions that seek to harm us."

According to the White House, the latest sanctions target more than 30 Russian entities and individuals it said are involved in election meddling. The U.S. is expelling 10 personnel from the Russian diplomatic mission from the country. The sanctions target six Russian tech firms believed to provide support to Russian intelligence.

The sanctions also include a prohibition on U.S. financial institutions participating in the trade of bonds used by the Russian government after June 14. They leave open the possibility "to expand sovereign debt sanctions on Russia as appropriate."

On CNN, Sullivan said that in a telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week, Biden made clear that "his goal is provide a significant and credible response, but not to escalate the situation."

"We believe that altogether, both the actions we are taking today and that broader diplomacy, can produce a better set of outcomes for U.S.-Russia relations," Sullivan said.

Senior administration officials, speaking to reporters on background, said the U.S. has "no desire to be in an escalatory cycle with Russia" and that the sanctions are intended to be "proportionate and tailored" to the Kremlin's past actions.

While the latest sanctions are meant as a response to Russia's meddling in the 2020 presidential election, they follow on from Obama-era sanctions that called out the Kremlin for similar interference in the 2016 presidential race.

ELECTIONS

Intelligence Report: Russia Tried To Help Trump In 2020 Election

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly downplayed or denied any Russian involvement in the 2016 election, calling the accusation a "witch hunt" and a "hoax."

A U.S. intelligence report released last month confirmed that Russia sought once again to aid Trump in last year's election.

Russian Intelligence Agencies Push Disinformation on Pandemic

Declassified U.S. intelligence accuses Moscow of pushing propaganda through alternative websites as Russia refines techniques used in 2016.

NY TIMES

NY TIMES

Russian intelligence services have been spreading disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, according to newly declassified intelligence, material that demonstrates how Moscow is continuing to try to influence Americans as the election draws closer.

Russian military intelligence, known as the G.R.U., has used its ties with a Russian government information center, InfoRos, and other websites to push out English-language disinformation and propaganda about the pandemic, such as amplifying false Chinese arguments that the virus was created by the United States military and articles that said Russia’s medical assistance could bring a new détente with Washington.

The disinformation efforts are a refinement of what Russia tried to do in 2016. The fake social media accounts and bots used by the Internet Research Agency and other Russia-backed groups to amplify false articles have proved relatively easy to stamp out. But it is far more difficult to stop the dissemination of such articles that appear on websites that seem legitimate, according to outside experts.

First We Take Russia and Then We Take The West. Putin Ruthlessly Rules KGB Capitalist Russia.

Putin, Like a Czar, Controls a Greedy, Corrupt Oligarchy

NY TIMES

In the years that it took the journalist Catherine Belton to research and write “Putin’s People,” her voluminous yet elegant account of money and power in the Kremlin, a number of her interview subjects tried various tactics to undermine her work. One of them, “a close Putin ally” apparently alarmed by her questions about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s activities as a K.G.B. agent in Dresden in the 1980s, emphatically insisted that any rumored links between the K.G.B. and terrorist organizations had never been proved: “And you should not try to do so!” he warned.

Another source, defending Putin’s tenure as the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, took a cooler approach. Asked about a local politician named Marina Salye who found evidence of corruption in the so-called oil-for-food scheme that Putin oversaw in the early ’90s, he didn’t bother to deny her findings; he just rejected the very idea that her findings mattered. “This all happened,” he smugly acknowledged. “But this is absolutely normal trading operations. How can you explain this to a menopausal woman like that?”

Belton suggests that this is the kind of two-pronged strategy the Kremlin has used to pursue its interests at home and abroad: Deploy threats, disinformation and violence to prevent damaging secrets from getting out, or resort to a chilling cynicism that derides everything as meaningless anyway.

The dauntless Belton, currently an investigative reporter for Reuters who previously served as the Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, allowed neither approach to deter her, talking to figures with disparate interests on all sides, tracking down documents, following the money. The result is a meticulously assembled portrait of Putin’s circle, and of the emergence of what she calls “K.G.B. capitalism” — a form of ruthless wealth accumulation designed to serve the interests of a Russian state that she calls “relentless in its reach.”

As central as Putin is to the narrative, he mostly appears as a shadowy figure — not particularly creative or charismatic, but cannily able, like the K.G.B. agent he once was, to mirror people’s expectations back to them. The people who facilitated Putin’s rise didn’t do so for particularly idealistic reasons. An ailing Boris Yeltsin and the oligarchs who thrived in the chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union were looking for someone who would preserve their wealth and protect them from corruption charges. Putin presented himself as someone who would honor the bargain, but then replaced any Yeltsin-era players who dared to challenge his tightening grip on power with loyalists he could call his own.

“Putin’s People” tells the story of a number of figures who eventually ran afoul of the president’s regime. Media moguls like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky were stripped of their empires and fled the country. Belton says the real turning point was the 2004 trial that sent Mikhail Khodorkovsky — at one point Russia’s richest man, with a controlling stake in the oil producer Yukos — to a Siberian prison camp for 10 years. Putin has since presided over the country and its resources like a czar, Belton writes, bolstered by a cadre of friendly oligarchs and secret service agents. Russia’s legal system was turned into a weapon and a fig leaf.

Putin allowed and even encouraged the oligarchs to accrue vast personal fortunes, but they were also expected to siphon some money from their business ventures into the obschak, a collective kitty whose slush funds, Belton says, have been useful in projecting the image of a powerful Russia on the world stage.

The Kremlin’s abiding definition of power was cramped and zero-sum; the resources were plowed into undermining other countries on the relative cheap, by funding troll farms, election meddling and extremist movements.

It was an old K.G.B. model adapted for the new era, with Putin pursuing a nationalist agenda that embraced the country’s pre-revolutionary imperial past. Putin’s people had even figured out a way to turn London’s High Court into a tool for their own interests, freezing the assets of rival oligarchs while British lawyers took fat fees from both sides.

As much as the West has been a target for the Kremlin’s “active measures,” Belton argues that the West has also been complacent and even complicit. The complacency has taken the form of a blithe belief in the power of globalization and liberal democracy, a persistent faith that once Russia opened itself up to international capital and ideas, it would never look back.

But more mercenary motives were at play, too. Western business interests recognized how much profit could be made off of Russian oil behemoths and the giant sums of money sloshing around. (Unsurprisingly, Deutsche Bank — an institution at the center of many scandals — has occupied a crucial role.) Even when Putin was the beneficiary of such arrangements, he was contemptuous of them; his ability to use Western companies to Russia’s advantage only confirmed his long-held view “that anyone in the West could be bought.”

“Putin’s People” ends with a chapter on Donald Trump, and what Belton calls the “network of Russian intelligence operatives, tycoons and organized-crime associates” that has encircled him since the early ’90s. The fact that Trump was frequently overwhelmed by debt provided an opportunity to those who had the cash he desperately needed. Belton documents how the network used high-end real estate deals to launder money while evading stricter banking regulations after 9/11. She’s agnostic on whether Trump was a witting accomplice who was aware of how he was being used. As one former executive from the Trump Organization put it, “Donald doesn’t do due diligence.”

But Belton does. And while the president may not read much — neglecting even those intelligence briefings about Russian bounty payments to Taliban militants — there are presumably any number of people in the White House and his party who do.

Still, to read this book is to wonder whether a cynicism has embedded itself so deeply into the Anglo-American political classes that even the incriminating information it documents won’t make an actionable difference. A person familiar with Russia’s billionaires told Belton that once corrosion sets in, it’s devilishly hard to reverse: “They always have three or four different stories, and then it all just gets lost in the noise.”

The Russian President (NOT) Putin: Unread Intelligence and Missing Strategy

High-level clearance is not required to see that the list of Russian aggressions in recent weeks rivals some of the worst days of the Cold War. 

NY TIMES

The intelligence finding that Russia was most likely paying a bounty for the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan has evoked a strange silence from President Trump and his top national security officials on the question of what to do about the Kremlin’s wave of aggression.

Mr. Trump insists he never saw the intelligence, though it was part of the President’s Daily Brief just days before a peace deal was signed with the Taliban in February.

The White House says it was not even appropriate for him to be briefed because the president only sees “verified” intelligence — prompting derision from officials who have spent years working on the daily brief and say it is most valuable when filled with dissenting interpretations and alternative explanations.

The administration’s defenses took a new turn on Wednesday, when the national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, told Fox News that the C.I.A. officer who delivered in-person intelligence summaries to the president had not flagged it for his attention.

But it doesn’t require a top-secret clearance and access to the government’s most classified information to see that the list of Russian aggressions in recent weeks rivals some of the worst days of the Cold War.

There have been new cyberattacks on Americans working from home to exploit vulnerabilities in their corporate systems and continued concern about new playbooks for Russian actors seeking to influence the November election. Off the coast of Alaska, Russian jets have been testing American air defenses, sending U.S. warplanes scrambling to intercept them.

Yet missing from all this is a strategy for pushing back — old-fashioned deterrence, to pluck a phrase from the depths of the Cold War — that could be employed from Afghanistan to Ukraine, from the deserts of Libya to the vulnerable voter registration rolls in battleground states.

Trump “repeatedly objected to criticizing Russia and pressed us not to be so critical of Russia publicly,” his former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, notes in his recent memoir. A parade of other former national security aides have emerged, bruised, with similar reports.

Yet the nature of intelligence — always incomplete and not always definitive — gives Mr. Trump an opening to dismiss anything that challenges his worldview.

“By definition, intelligence means looking at pieces of a puzzle,” said Glenn S. Gerstell, who retired this year as the general counsel of the National Security Agency, before the Russian bounty issue was front and center. “It’s not unusual to have inconsistencies. And the President’s Daily Brief, not infrequently, would say that there is no unanimity in the intelligence community, and would explain the dissenting views or the lack of corroboration.”

That absence of clarity has not slowed Mr. Trump when it comes to placing new sanctions on China and Iran, who pose very different kinds of challenges to American power.

Yet the president made no apparent effort to sort through evidence on Russia, even before his most recent call with President Vladimir V. Putin, when he invited the Russian leader to a Group of 7 meeting planned for September in Washington. Russia has been banned from the group since the Crimea invasion, and Mr. Trump was essentially restoring it to the G8 over the objection of many of America’s closest allies.

Said Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who managed the impeachment trial against Mr. Trump. “This is something you ought to know if you’re inviting Russia back into the G8.”

And in this case, there was another element: concern inside the White House about any intelligence findings that might interfere with the administration’s announcement of a peace deal with the Taliban.

After months of broken-off negotiations, Mr. Trump was intent on announcing the accord in February, as a prelude to declaring that he was getting Americans out of Afghanistan. As one senior official described it, the evidence about Russia could have threatened that deal because it suggested that after 18 years of war, Mr. Trump was letting Russia chase the last American troops out of the country.

The warning to Mr. Trump appeared in the president’s briefing book — which Mr. Bolton said almost always went unread — in late February. On Feb. 28, the president issued a statement that a signing ceremony for the Afghan deal was imminent.

Russia’s complicity in the bounty plot came into sharper focus on Tuesday as The New York Times reported that American officials intercepted electronic data showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account, according to officials familiar with the intelligence.

The United States has accused Russia of providing general support to the Taliban before. But the newly revealed information about financial transfers bolstered other evidence of the plot, including detainee interrogations, and helped reduce an earlier disagreement among intelligence analysts and agencies over the reliability of the detainees.

Lawmakers on Tuesday emerged from closed briefings on the matter to challenge why Mr. Trump and his advisers failed to recognize the seriousness of the intelligence assessment.

“I am concerned that they did not pursue it as aggressively or comprehensively as perhaps they should have,” said Representative Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat who heads the House Armed Services Committee. “There was clearly evidence that the Russians were paying the bounties.”

The oddity, of course, is that despite Mr. Trump’s deference to the Russians, relations between Moscow and Washington under the Trump administration have nose-dived.

That was clear in the stiff sentence handed down recently in Moscow against Paul N. Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, after his conviction on espionage charges in what the U.S. ambassador to Russia, John J. Sullivan, called a “mockery of justice.”

Even Russian state television now regularly mocks Mr. Trump as a buffoon, very different from its gushing tone during the 2016 presidential election.

Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says

The Trump administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment.

Trump Got Written Briefing in February on Possible Russian Bounties, Officials Say

The investigation into Russia’s suspected operation is said to focus in part on the killings of three Marines in a truck bombing last year, officials said.

NY TIMES
American officials provided a written briefing in late February to President Trump laying out their conclusion that a Russian military intelligence unit offered and paid bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan, two officials familiar with the matter said.

The investigation into the suspected Russian covert operation to incentivize such killings has focused in part on an April 2019 car bombing that killed three Marines as one such potential attack, according to multiple officials familiar with the matter.

The new information emerged as the White House tried on Monday to play down the intelligence assessment that Russia sought to encourage and reward killings — including reiterating a claim that Mr. Trump was never briefed about the matter and portraying the conclusion as disputed and dubious.

But that stance clashed with the disclosure by two officials that the intelligence was included months ago in Mr. Trump’s President’s Daily Brief document — a compilation of the government’s latest secrets and best insights about foreign policy and national security that is prepared for him to read. One of the officials said the item appeared in Mr. Trump’s brief in late February; the other cited Feb. 27, specifically.

Moreover, a description of the intelligence assessment that the Russian unit had carried out the bounties plot was also seen as serious and solid enough to disseminate more broadly across the intelligence community in a May 4 article in the C.I.A.’s World Intelligence Review, a classified compendium commonly referred to as The Wire, two officials said.

20M Americans lost their jobs in April in worst month since Great Depression. Virus Reaches 77,000 Deaths in US. UPDATES.

Unemployment rate rose to 14.7% from just 4.4% in March as the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the global economy

More than 20 million people in the US lost their jobs in April and the unemployment rate more than trebled as the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the world’s largest economy, triggering a financial crisis unseen since the Great Depression.

The Department of Labor announced Friday that the US unemployment rate rose to 14.7% from just 4.4% in March and a near 50-year low of 3.5% in February before the US was hit by the virus.

A decade’s worth of job gains have now been wiped out in under two months. The latest jobs losses are the worst monthly figure on record. The closest comparison came in 1933 when unemployment hit an estimated 25% but that was before the government began publishing official statistics.

The previous peak for unemployment was 10.8% in 1982 and the largest monthly job loss, close to 2 million, came in September 1945 at the end of the second world war, when the country was demobilizing. April’s job losses also easily eclipsed the 800,000 jobs lost in March 2009, the height of the last recession.

The job losses swept across the economy, hitting all industries. Leisure and hospitality lost 7.7m jobs as the sector was hit hard by quarantine measures. But 2.5m jobs were also lost in education and health services, where dentist offices shed 503,000 people. Retail lost 2.1m jobs and manufacturing employment dropped by 1.3m.

Unemployment for African Americans soared from 6.7% last month to 16.7%, wiping out all of the gains made since the last recession. For white Americans unemployment also rose sharply, from 4% to 14.2%. Some 6 million people dropped out of the labor force during the month – meaning they stopped looking for work.

The labor force participation rate – which measures the percentage of the population working or looking for work – dropped 2.5% over the month to 60.2%, the lowest rate since January 1973.



Katie Miller, press secretary to vice-president Mike Pence, has tested positive for Covid-19. With her husband, Stephen Miller. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/Associated Press

Pence's press secretary has coronavirus

The staffer at the White House who tested positive for coronavirus this morning is Katie Miller, Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary, Donald Trump just confirmed. Katie Miller (nee Waldman) is married to the top adviser to the president, Stephen Miller. The White House strongly defended its efforts earlier to protect Trump and Pence from catching coronavirus.


Document reveals Secret Service has 11 current virus cases, as concerns about Trump’s staff grow
YAHOO

Multiple members of the U.S. Secret Service have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, according to Department of Homeland Security documents reviewed by Yahoo News.

In March, the Secret Service, which is responsible for the protection of President Trump and other leaders, acknowledged that a single employee tested positive in March. However the problem is currently far more widespread, with 11 active cases at the agency as of Thursday evening, according to a daily report compiled by the DHS.

This report comes as a pair of cases among White House staffers close to Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have put the West Wing’s coronavirus security procedures in the spotlight.

According to the DHS document, along with the 11 active cases there are 23 members of the Secret Service who have recovered from COVID-19 and an additional 60 employees who are self-quarantining. No details have been provided about which members of the Secret Service are infected or if any have recently been on detail with the president or vice president.

The DHS, which oversees the agency, referred all requests for comment to the Secret Service, which in turn declined to comment on the number of coronavirus cases among its employees.

“To protect the privacy of our employee’s health information and for operational security, the Secret Service is not releasing how many of its employees have tested positive for COVID-19, nor how many of its employees were, or currently are, quarantined,” Justine Whelan, a Secret Service spokesperson, said.

While the Secret Service is best known for providing security to the president and vice president, it also protects other leaders, including presidential candidates, former presidents, and visiting dignitaries. The Secret Service also conducts investigations, including most recently, scams involving the coronavirus.

Whelan said the Secret Service is following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, but she declined to comment on how many of the Secret Service employees who have tested positive for the coronavirus worked at the White House complex.

the coronavirus measures at the White House complex, which includes both Trump and Pence’s offices, have not necessarily followed the guidelines from the CDC or the president’s own coronavirus task force. Those guidelines include staying 6 feet away from other people, avoiding large gatherings and wearing masks or other face coverings.

On Monday, Yahoo News reported that there are regularly held large events with unmasked attendees in close quarters at the White House — including inside the Oval Office, which is the president’s inner sanctum. Many Secret Service employees on the White House grounds are among those who are not wearing masks. The agency did not respond to questions about why its employees are not wearing masks or whether personal protective equipment is being provided to members of the Secret Service who request it. Pence and Trump have also regularly opted not to wear masks.

White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere responded to questions about coronavirus protocols in the West Wing last week by saying, “Those in close proximity to the president and vice president are being tested for COVID-19.”

“Temperature checks are occurring for all those entering the complex as well as an additional temperature check for those in close proximity to the president and vice president,” Deere said.

While temperature checks were being administered to everyone entering the White House complex, not everyone who entered the Oval Office with the president was given a test. On multiple occasions last week, reporters were brought into the Oval Office without being given tests or being required to wear masks.

Dr. Kavita Patel, a primary care physician who worked in the Obama administration as director of policy for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement, said she believes the partial testing for those in the White House complex is not sufficient.

“Having worked in the White House, there’s a ton of people that come in and out of there, and they touch things,” said Patel, a Yahoo News health contributor. “So, unless you are literally testing every individual and then following up … even with wiping down those surfaces every night, it’s not foolproof.”

CNN legal analysts say Barr dropping the Flynn case shows 'the fix was in.' 

YAHOO/CNN

National security correspondent Jim Sciutto laid out several reason why the substance of Flynn's admitted lie was a big deal, and chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin was appalled. "It is one of the most incredible legal documents I have read, and certainly something that I never expected to see from the United States Department of Justice," Toobin said. "The idea that the Justice Department would invent an argument — an argument that the judge in this case has already rejected — and say that's a basis for dropping a case where a defendant admitted his guilt shows that this is a case where the fix was in."

F.D.A. approves the first home saliva test for the coronavirus.

The Food and Drug Administration said on Friday that it had granted emergency authorization for the first at-home saliva collection kit to test for the coronavirus. To date, 8.1 million people in the United States have been tested. But public health experts said testing needed to double by the end of May.

The kits must be ordered by a physician and have the potential to widen the audience for virus screening. By keeping symptomatic people home, the spit kits could reduce the risk of infecting health care workers.

The agency has come under fire in recent weeks for allowing myriad companies to offer diagnostic and antibody tests without submitting timely data for review, under its emergency use authorization policy because of the pandemic. Tests have varied widely in terms of their accuracy, and there have been shortages of tests and the materials required to process them.

The F.D.A. said that Rutgers had submitted data showing that testing saliva samples collected by patients themselves, under the observation of a health care provider, was as accurate as testing deep nasal swabs that the health professional had collected from them. The agency said it still preferred tests based on deep nasal samples.

Russia has registered more than 10,000 new coronavirus cases for the sixth day in a row, after emerging as a new hotspot of the pandemic.

A government tally on Friday showed 10,669 new cases over the last 24 hours, fewer than Thursday’s record of 11,231, bringing the total number of confirmed infections to 187,859.

The country also recorded 98 new deaths from the virus, for a total of 1,723, and while some officials are considering softening the current lockdown, the WHO warned Russia is going through a “delayed epidemic.”

Russia now ranks fourth in Europe in terms of the total number of cases, according to an AFP tally, behind countries where the epidemic hit considerably earlier: Britain, Italy and Spain.


Trump: ‘Virus will go away without vaccine’
Donald Trump has alleged that coronavirus is “going to go away without a vaccine”, but warned there could be “flare ups” next year. Speaking to Republican members of Congress on Friday, he did not offer any scientific evidence for that prediction.

Russia Targeted Election Systems in All 50 States, Report Finds

NY TIMES