Now it's time for our daily Bloomberg Law Brief, exploring legal issues in the news. Today, Bloomberg Law host Judon Grosso discusses congressional testimony from former Homeland Security Secretary j Johnson over Russian interference in the election. She speaks to Bradley Moss, a partner at Mark S BLC, and William Banks, director of the Institute for National Security and counter Terrorism
at Syracuse Law School. Brett Johnson described in detail how they saw the growing Russian probing around voter registration databases. So they had the knowledge, yet they didn't seem to have the ability to do anything about it, and do they yet, well, and this is part of the way we've set up our electoral system is that it's set up set in a decentralized manner and controlled by the states.
We don't have a quote unquote national election. We actually have fifty individual state election and each state has its own rules for handling them based on the county and the local level. So what the former secretary describing was they were attempting, and there was some pushback from the
individual states. They were attempting to coordinate with the states to raise these concerns and to find a mechanism by which DHS could provide assistance and to ensure the stability and the safety of the electoral process without infringing upon the state's sovereign rights to run their election process in cordance with state laws bill. At the Senate Intelligence Committee, where they had hearings on the same issue, the under Secretary for Cybersecurity at DHS said there's evidence that one
state election systems were targeted. Johnson said that what he knows from open source is that thirty nine states were hacked. Do you know the number? And why is the Department of Homeland Security still not willing to disclose which state election systems were hacked? Well, the number I've read in
the media's thirty nine as well. I probably spread the same reports that Johnson, and I think it's uh As brad said, these are these are fifty separate systems, and so it's it's up to the states to decide whether to reveal the extent to which the systems have been threatened or intruded upon. And that's William Banks, director of the Institute for National Security and counter Terrorism at Syracuse Law School, and Bradley Moss, a partner of Marks a Plc,
speaking with Bloomberg Law Hostun Grosso. And you can listen to Bloomberg Law weekdays at one pm Wall Street Time here on Bloomberg Radio, and that is This morning is Bloomberg lambre if. You can find more legal news at Bloomberg Law dot com and Bloomberg BNA dot com. Attorneys will find exceptional legal research and business development tools there as well. Visit Bloomberg Law dot com and Bloomberg BNA dot com for more information