Wolf says DHS will still brief Congress on election security

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said his department will continue briefing Congress on election security despite the Director of National Intelligence’s announcement it would switch to written briefings on the subject.

The agency will “absolutely” continue to brief Congress in-person, Wolf said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “We’ve done that over 25 times in the past two months, we have in-person briefings set up this week for the Senate and the House and we have another eight or nine scheduled between now and the election.”

Wolf said it was important to differentiate between the role of DHS versus the intelligence community.

 “We’re focused on cyber-threats targeting election infrastructure,” Wolf said.

NEWS: @DHS_Wolf says @DHSgov “absolutely” intends on briefing members of congress on #electionsecurity as @ODNIgov announced it will cease in-person briefings for lawmakers on key committees.

“This is not about limiting access” he says, adding it’s just a “different format” pic.twitter.com/iJbWkX44XJ

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) August 30, 2020

Wolf noted that much of the information reviewed by DHS was unclassified, distinguishing it from information that Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has said he will no longer share in-person.

“The DNI statement that he put out is… they deal with classified intelligence, and the concern is the leak of classified intelligence,” he said. “The information we share with Congress is almost exclusively unclassified … this is not about limiting access.”

Ratcliffe’s announcement led to condemnation by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

“This is a shocking abdication of its lawful responsibility to keep the Congress currently informed, and a betrayal of the public’s right to know how foreign powers are trying to subvert our democracy,” Pelosi and Schiff said in a joint statement Saturday. “This intelligence belongs to the American people, not the agencies which are its custodian. And the American people have both the right and the need to know that another nation, Russia, is trying to help decide who their president should be.”