Romney: Trump has a ‘blind spot’ when it comes to Russia

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had said on Friday that the attack was “a very significant effort,” and directly linked it to Russia. But the following day, Trump, in his first public comments on the issue, appeared to undercut those remarks in a pair of tweets, suggesting without evidence “it may be China” that’s responsible. The President also claimed “everything was under control,” though administration officials said last week that the attack “poses a grave risk” to networks across both the public and private sector.

Romney similarly said that the cyberattack puts the US in a vulnerable position, and suggested the country should strongly react.

“What Russia has done is put in place a capacity to potentially cripple us in terms of our electricity, our water, our communications,” he told Tapper. “This is the same sort of thing one can do in a wartime setting and so it’s extraordinary dangerous and it’s an outrageous affront on our sovereignty and one that’s going to have to be met with a very strong response, not just rhetorical, important as that is, but also with a cyber response of like magnitude or greater.”

Agencies aren’t ‘optimized for defense’

Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told Tapper later in the program that federal agencies are not currently “optimized for defense” and part of the reason his former agency didn’t detect the hack sooner was a bill giving them certain authorities to aggressively root out adversaries hasn’t yet been signed by Trump.

“There is a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act … that’s sitting on the President’s desk waiting for his signature … that would give CISA, my old agency, the authorities to go out and really aggressively hunt and look for these adversaries and that’s what we’re going to have to do to get certainty to the other side of this,” the ex-cyber chief said.

This story is breaking and will be updated.