WASHINGTON, D.C. — FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in front of the House Committee on Homeland Security Thursday, telling lawmakers that Russian operatives are targeting Joe Biden in an attempt to sway the 2020 presidential election.
“The intelligence community’s assessment is that Russia continues to try to influence our election primarily through what we call malign foreign influence,” Wray testified, adding the efforts aim “primarily to denigrate vice president Biden and what the Russians see as kind of an anti-Russian establishment.”
Wray noted that intelligence officials have not seen foreign efforts to target election infrastructure this year, a tactic widely used by Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential elections.
“We have not seen that second part yet this year or this cycle, but we certainly have seen very active, very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020,” Wray said of cyber security attacks similar to those in 2016.
Instead, Russian operatives are employing proxies and social media campaigns to “sow divisiveness and discord” amid the presidential elections, Wray said.
The hearing came just over a week after the United States Department of the Treasury sanctioned Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker with ties to Rudy Giuliani, for being an “active Russian agent” and attempting to interfere in the upcoming presidential election, the department said in a statement.
“Between May and July 2020, Derkach released edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S. officials, and he levied unsubstantiated allegations against U.S. and international political figures,” the department’s statement reads in part. “Derkach almost certainly targeted the U.S. voting populace, prominent U.S. persons, and members of the U.S. government, based on his reliance on U.S. platforms, English-language documents and videos, and pro-Russian lobbyists in the United States used to propagate his claims.”
During Thursday’s hearing, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle questioned Wray about whether left-wing or right-wing extremist groups are to blame for rising violence across the country. Wray demurred, saying the FBI does not look at political ideology, but the intention for violence when making such a judgement.
When pressed on whether ANTIFA posed a threat to the country, Wray answered, “It’s not a group or an organization, it’s a movement or an ideology,” adding, “we have any number of properly predicated investigations into what we would describe as violent anarchist extremists and some of those individuals self-identify with Antifa.”
The most violent domestic terror attacks nationwide, Wray added, come from “people subscribing to some king of white supremacist-type ideology.”
That characterization contradicts the depiction from Trump, who in June singled out antifa – short for “anti-fascists” and an umbrella term for far-left-leaning militant groups – as responsible for the violence that followed George Floyd’s death. Trump tweeted that the U.S. would be designating antifa as a terrorist organization, even though such designations are reserved for foreign groups and antifa lacks the hierarchical structure of formal organizations.
The hearing focused almost entirely on domestic matters, including violence by white supremacists as well as anti-government extremists.
It underscored the shift of attention by law enforcement at a time of intense divisions and polarization inside the country. But one area where foreign threats were addressed was in the presidential election and Russia’s attempts to interfere in the campaign.
Wray sought to make clear the scope of the threats while resisting lawmakers’ attempts to steer him into politically charged statements. When asked whether extremists on the left or the right posed the biggest threat, he pivoted instead to an answer about how solo actors, or so-called “lone wolves,” with easy access to weapons were a primary concern.
“We don’t we don’t really think of threats in terms of left, right, at the FBI. We’re focused on the violence, not the ideology,” he said later.
The FBI director said racially motivated white supremacists have accounted for the most lethal attacks in the U.S. in recent years, though this year the most lethal violence has come from anti-government activists.
Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf defied a subpoena to testify alongside Wray on Thursday.
Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli said Wolf would not appear because his nomination to his position permanently is pending. Cuccinelli offered to testify in Wolf’s place, but the Democratic-led committee declined, drawing criticism from Cucinelli.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
