Thread by @ericgeller

New: Less than a week before the election, the Trump administration has no detailed strategy for countering foreign influence operations.

Senior officials met for the *first time* last month to discuss tricky issues, like when to announce disinfo ops.

politico.com/story/2018/10/…

There's a formal plan for convening agencies to respond to cyberattacks — an Obama-era PPD — but there's no equivalent plan for influence operations, which are easier to launch and often more effective than actual intrusions.

A source present at the Sept. 21 meeting, held in a SCIF in the National Security Division part of DOJ HQ, told me about the previously unreported discussion.

Here are the issues they tried to hash out. You can see how it gets complicated.

The White House's broad push to devolve authority from the NSC to the agencies extends to this issue.

But here, where there's little precedent for interagency cooperation, many problems could arise because of agencies' competing priorities.

Here's who attended the Sept. 21 meeting.

Again, this was the first senior-level discussion of this sort about countering influence operations.

There have also been lower-level meetings convened by the NSC, plus occasional meetings of agencies' No. 2 officials.

Meanwhile, the NSC is still playing some limited role in coordinating activities around election security, including influence operations.

But the NSC took a long time to create a structure for this, and as you can see in my story, it ... hasn't always gone well.

So why is this such a big deal? Well, every agency wants to approach this in a different way. And there have been some tensions because of that.

As a former DHS employee told me, "The lines of authority for defending against and responding to influence ops are going to be hyper-complicated."

Check out my story here: politico.com/story/2018/10/…

Wanted to add a few tidbits about my new story that didn't make it into the article. (There was so much trimming! A reporter's worst nightmare.)

There's a bit in the story about these repeated NSC requests for info.

"By the third time it happened," a source told me, "all of us were rolling our eyes, because we were just cutting and pasting from the last time. We can’t figure out why we’re being asked this over and over."

Then there's the part about preparing a briefing for Trump.

"I shit you not," my source said, "they told us, 'Less words, more pictures.'"

Another angle that we had to trim was the tension between DHS and other agencies due to DHS's desire to constantly share information with its partners.

Other agencies are more cautious about what to share and how. For DHS, it's partly about establishing credibility outside USG.

DHS Secretary Nielsen has tried to fill the void left by the White House on this issue.

A source suggested to me that "DHS had a little bit of an emboldened attitude because DOJ was so embattled and perceived as having weak influence within the administration."

"DHS kind of wanted to jump out in front," the source told me. "This was a very sexy topic for them, and people were personally motivated by a desire to be the face of things."

But of course, that's one person's view.

And I've extensively covered DHS's improved work on election security.

It's winning more and more plaudits from state and local officials. They have great personnel at the department who care a lot about getting this right.

DHS is also trying to be more transparent about its work, within limits.

On Oct. 19, it invited reporters to an election security exercise w/ federal, state & local partners.

The exercise was off the record, but @nppd_krebs talked to reporters afterward. subscriber.politicopro.com/cybersecurity/…

So this is a complicated situation that defies easy narratives.

It is not the case that Trump appointees and their employees are covering their eyes and ears and abdicating their duties.

It *is* the case that the WH's approach is concerning to many current and former officials.