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Trump Signs Executive Order On Cybersecurity (techcrunch.com)
President Trump on Thursday signed a long-delayed executive order on cybersecurity that "makes clear that agency heads will be held accountable for protecting their networks, and calls on government and industry to reduce the threat from automated attacks on the internet," reports The Washington Post. From the report: Picking up on themes advanced by the Obama administration, Trump's order also requires agency heads to use Commerce Department guidelines to manage risk to their systems. It commissions reports to assess the country's ability to withstand an attack on the electric grid and to spell out the strategic options for deterring adversaries in cyberspace. [Thomas Bossert, Trump's homeland security adviser] said the order was not, however, prompted by Russia's targeting of electoral systems last year. In fact, the order is silent on addressing the security of electoral systems or cyber-enabled operations to influence elections, which became a significant area of concern during last year's presidential campaign. The Department of Homeland Security in January declared election systems "critical infrastructure." The executive order also does not address offensive cyber operations, which are generally classified. This is an area in which the Trump administration is expected to be more forward-leaning than its predecessor. Nor does it spell out what type of cyberattack would constitute an "act of war" or what response the attack would invite. "We're not going to draw a red line," Bossert said, adding that the White House does not "want to telegraph our punches." The order places the defense secretary and the head of the intelligence community in charge of protecting "national security" systems that operate classified and military networks. But the secretary of homeland security will continue to be at the center of the national plan for protecting critical infrastructure, such as the electric grid and financial sector.
Like every "executive order" issued by Trump, this one is racist and unconstitutional. If Clinton won and issued the same decree, that would've been most enlightened, of course.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Incompetence and maliciousness often look the same, and the presence of one doesn't rule out the other.
Of course the democrats were political pandering with both comments, same for the republicans. That doesn't reduce the optics of this. Their is a standard for political positions like this where you make a clean transition by asking for the person to step down, and they always resign in these type of positions. Outright firing would be seen as a attempt to cause disgrace to the person, a person Trump had complimented many times for his handling of those previous matters. Trump followed this even with Flynn, a person who lied to his administration and brought disgrace to them. That Comey was about to testify before congress, at least partially about the Russian investigation into his campaign and he was removed immediately, without consideration for a replacement and didn't have time to even wait for him to be notified in person to pull this off. Clearly it wasn't about what Comey did last year. That the administration can't keep the story straight about the firing, and Trump brought up the Russia investigation in the dismissal letter, as well as Trump bringing it up in his interview with Lester Holt that it was one of the issues while responding to a question about the Comey firing.
It isn't proof of anything, other than the admin story that this was all about Hillary can only be true if Trump is totally incompetent.