Florida state senator decries being targeted by 2016 Russian election hacking
Florida State Senator Annette Taddeo will appear on 60 Minutes Sunday to decry the Russian hack of the 2016 elections. The Democrat's campaign strategy and other sensitive data was stolen from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's computers by the Russians when she was running for the state's 26th Congressional seat. Department of Justice officials say those files were hacked and dumped by a Russian military intelligence units.
Taddeo speaks to Bill Whitaker for a report that explains in detail how the Russians stole the critical information and disseminated it to undermine political candidates in 2016. It will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, November 24 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
Taddeo was on her way to a live television debate with her opponent when she learned of the hack. "My opponent Joe Garcia, showed up at that debate with a printout of all the documents," she tells Whitaker. "We've seen a lot [in Southern Florida.] But this was a foreign government. This was so much bigger," says Taddeo, who says she lost to her opponent by about 700 votes. "You know, I've been told by a lot of people, 'You should stop talking about this. It's really not good for you politically to remind people that you lost.' But I refuse to stop talking about it. Because, again, if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. And it didn't happen to me: It happened to our democracy," Taddeo tells Whitaker.
Whitaker also interviews John Demers, the assistant attorney general who runs the Department of Justice's National Security Division, which inherited the Russian hacking case from Special Counsel Robert Mueller. There is no doubt in his mind the Russians executed the hack and strategically disseminated the documents through the online persona Guccifer 2.0. The agents behind Guccifer 2.0 then gave the data to political operatives and local journalists, and it eventually found its way to mainstream media. "So Guccifer 2.0 is a fictional online persona," says Demers. "It's all an effort on the Russian side to hide their involvement."
Robert Anderson, who played leading roles in the FBI's counter intelligence and cyber security divisions, tracked Russian intelligence operatives for years. He warns in an interview with Whitaker that the Russians will be back for the 2020 election. "The thing that you need to worry about with Russia and every one of their intelligence services is they will learn from these operations…They will analyze everything they did right or wrong. And when they attack again, they will not come at you the same way," he says.
