White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned Sunday of “plenty of reasons to be concerned” about Russia interfering in the 2024 election, though said, “I can’t speak to evidence.”
“I can’t speak to evidence today, but I can tell you, of course, there are concerns,” Sullivan said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “There is a history here in presidential elections by the Russia Federation by its intelligence services, and there’s plenty of reasons to be concerned.”
Sullivan’s comments come after the October 2022 release of a U.S. intelligence report alleging Russia made a “concerted effort” in recent years to undermine elections, including in the U.S. The report was shared with 100 other countries.
Republicans have heavily scrutinized such assessments by U.S. intelligence, including a report in 2017 by U.S. agencies that said Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump win. The 2017 analysis was slammed as not objective, and the House Intelligence Committee later released a report that contradicted prior findings and said there’s no “evidence that the Trump campaign colluded, coordinated, or conspired with the Russian government.”
“This is not about politics,” Sullivan told NBC’s Kristen Welker. “This is about national security. It is about a foreign country, a foreign adversary, seeking to manipulate the politics and democracy of the United States of America.”
“We are going to be vigilant about that,” Sullivan said. “We will engage the Congress on a bipartisan basis because this should be above and beyond politics.”
