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Trump fills government boards with loyalists as term nears end (nationthailand.com)

Trump fills government boards with loyalists as term nears end

InternationalDec 19. 2020Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to President Donald Trump, center, speaks with attendees following the announcement of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination for associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court during a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on Sept. 26, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Stefani Reynolds. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Jordan Fabian

President Donald Trump has appointed a slew of prominent aides, supporters and fundraisers to federal advisory boards since losing re-election, a sometimes controversial practice that indicates recognition his time in office is coming to a close.

Roughly three dozen Trump allies have received appointments to federal boards and commissions in recent weeks — including some who bring no apparent expertise to the posts.

For instance, Trump appointed two of his 2016 campaign officials, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, to the traditionally nonpartisan Pentagon Defense Business Board. Andrew Giuliani, the 34-year-old son of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, secured a spot on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s board, along with the president’s close aide and body man, Nick Luna.

Other appointees are overseeing the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and military service academies and supervising funding for organizations and programs including the Library of Congress and education research. The positions can be highly coveted, as they represent affiliations with prestigious Washington institutions.

The appointments are yet another implicit recognition by the president that he will soon leave office, even as he continues to refuse to concede defeat to President-elect Joe Biden. The largely ceremonial and unpaid appointments, which don’t require Senate confirmation, typically happen at the end of a presidency.

The appointments aren’t extraordinary — President Barack Obama named his close aides Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett to the Kennedy Center board with three days remaining in his second term, and some of his appointees remain on government advisory committees today.

“These are things you want to put your friends on because it’s a nice thing to do for somebody or it’s something they care about,” said Terry Sullivan, executive director of the White House Transition Project.

But some of Trump’s selections have drawn backlash from critics who say the backgrounds of the appointees aren’t suited for the positions they’ll hold, or that they lack qualifications.

On Wednesday, Trump announced the appointment of Andrew Giuliani, a White House aide who works as a liaison to sports teams. The elder Giuliani, the former New York mayor, has been representing Trump in his effort to overturn the election results.

Andrew Giuliani referred to a statement he posted on Twitter saying that the appointment “by this president, who has been a champion for our Jewish brothers and sisters all around the world, makes this honor that much more humbling.”

Earlier this month, Trump appointed Lewandowski and Bossie to the Pentagon board, which provides advice to senior officials on business management.

Members of the board are supposed to have experience running large corporations and organizations or posses a “wealth of top-level, global business or academic experience,” according to its website. The former Trump aides were named to the board after other members were dismissed.

“It’s not standard practice to put your former campaign manager and a campaign adviser onto a core defense advisory board. That is not typical fare,” said Max Stier, president and chief executive officer of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that seeks to make government more effective and efficient.

President-elect Joe Biden’s administration could replace Lewandowski and Bossie upon taking office since their board seats do not carry a fixed term, Stier said.

The Anti-Defamation League last month demanded that Trump rescind the appointment of Darren Beattie to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, which identifies cemeteries and historic buildings in Europe, including Holocaust sites. Beattie was ousted in 2018 from his job as a White House speechwriter after he participated in a conference of the H.L. Mencken Club, a right-wing group that has hosted racist speakers.

The unpaid commission seat carries a three-year term that will last into the Biden administration.

Heidi Stirrup, a White House liaison at the Department of Justice, was named to the board of visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy on the same day the Associated Press reported that she was banned from DOJ headquarters after pressuring officials for information on sensitive investigations and work on election irregularities.

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and former White House counselor, was also named to the board of visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Matt Schlapp, the American Conservative Union chairman who has amplified Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud, will serve on the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board.

Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University, said that with some of Trump’s appointments, it appears “there’s no effort whatsoever to match names with interest.” While it’s not unusual for presidents to make last-minute picks for boards and commissions, Light said, political loyalty seems to be the overriding factor for Trump even more so than his predecessors.

“It’s about the prestige and it’s about the favors owed,” he said.

The positions Trump has recently filled generally do not provide a salary, though reimbursements for travel expenses are allowed. While the titles pad résumés of the people appointed to the posts, they will have little to no effect on Biden’s ability to run the federal government.

The administration has made other recent personnel moves, however, that could hamper Trump’s successor. The Senate’s confirmation this month of a Trump nominee to the Federal Communications Commission will cause a 2-2 partisan deadlock on the panel once Biden takes office, with chairman Ajit Pai stepping down.

And the administration has reportedly installed a Trump supporter as general counsel at the National Security Agency, a career post that carries civil service protections.

“Trump is creating a hornet’s nest of a kind and Biden could find that those hornets are pretty damn aggressive if they are disturbed,” said Light.

Other board appointments have gone to Trump campaign fundraisers. Republican lobbyists Brian Ballard and Jeff Miller on Dec. 3 received posts on the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees and the Holocaust Memorial Council, respectively. Both raised large sums of money for Trump’s re-election.

Their board positions will last well into Biden’s presidency; the Kennedy Center seat carries a six-year term while the Holocaust Memorial Council’s term last five years.

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao on Dec. 8 was named to the Kennedy Center board. She is the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Global warming skeptic David Legates, a top official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was named to the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science. The 12-person panel evaluates nominees for the medal.

Last Friday, Trump named pro sports figures who have publicly supported him to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition. The list includes New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick, former NFL running back Herschel Walker and mixed martial artist Jorge Masvidal.

Former Trump campaign adviser Bryan Lanza, who accepted a spot on the President’s Advisory Commission on Hispanic Prosperity, described a deliberative process for his selection. He said he was in discussions with the White House about serving on various boards during the first year of the Trump administration and was asked about his interests and in what capacity he would want to work.

Lanza, a partner at the lobbying and public affairs firm Mercury, didn’t take a position at the time. But he decided to join the commission when the post was offered again following the election, he said.

Stier said the process of filling government advisory boards should be overhauled to focus on merit and qualifications.

“These positions are all highly sought after. It’s the reason why the outgoing president uses it as a chit or a recognition because they know they are doing a consequential favor for somebody,” he said. “We ought to be asking the question, ‘is that what we want to see in anything associated with the public sector?'”

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U.S. blacklists more than 60 Chinese firms, including SMIC (nationthailand.com)

U.S. blacklists more than 60 Chinese firms, including SMIC

InternationalDec 18. 2020

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg

The U.S. Commerce Department announced it’s blacklisting Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and more than 60 other Chinese companies “to protect U.S. national security.”

“This action stems from China’s military-civil fusion doctrine and evidence of activities between SMIC and entities of concern in the Chinese military industrial complex,” the Commerce Department said in a statement.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross confirmed the move in a Friday morning interview with Fox Business. It was reported first by Reuters overnight. Shares in China’s top chipmaker slid 5.2% Friday in Hong Kong on the news.

Other affected Chinese entities include those “that enable human rights abuses, entities that supported the militarization and unlawful maritime claims in the South China Sea, entities that acquired U.S.-origin items in support of the People’s Liberation Army’s programs, and entities and persons that engaged in the theft of U.S. trade secrets,” according to the U.S. government statement.

The majority of the newly banned companies are Chinese and will join the likes of Huawei Technologies Co. on a list that denies them access to U.S. technology from software to circuitry.

Companies including Huawei and SMIC have been caught in the middle of worsening tensions between the world’s two largest economies, which have clashed on issues from trade to the pandemic.

President Donald Trump had been widely expected to level more sanctions against China’s national champions before Joe Biden formally took office.

“If the report you mentioned is correct, it will be another example of how the U.S. is using its national power to crack down on Chinese companies,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a briefing in Beijing on Friday. “We urge the U.S. to stop its wrongful activities cracking down on foreign companies.”

The Shanghai-based company, a supplier to Qualcomm Inc. and Broadcom Inc., lies at the heart of Beijing’s intention to build a world-class semiconductor industry and wean itself off a reliance on American technology. Washington in turn views China’s ascendancy and its ambitions to dominate spheres of technology as a potential geopolitical threat. A blacklisting threatens to cripple its longer-term ambitions by depriving it of crucial gear.

In response to the widening U.S. crackdown, China is planning to provide broad support for so-called third-generation semiconductors in its next five-year plan to increase domestic self-sufficiency in chip manufacturing, people with knowledge of the matter have said. SMIC, backed by the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund as well as Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC Pte and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, is expected to play a central role in that overall effort.

SMIC representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment. The company had already been laboring under similar, less severe curbs after the Commerce Department in September placed it on a separate export restrictions list, accusing SMIC of supplying the military. Those sanctions took a toll on shares of the company, whose co-CEO Liang Mong Song this week unexpectedly resigned, triggering another selloff.

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Relying on his gut, Biden shrugs off criticism to form a ‘Cabinet of firsts’ (nationthailand.com)

Relying on his gut, Biden shrugs off criticism to form a ‘Cabinet of firsts’

InternationalDec 18. 2020President- elect Joe Biden introduces his health team at the Queen in Wilmington, Del. on December 8, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman 

By The Washington Post · Matt Viser

Thick packets have been delivered regularly to President-elect Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home, providing meticulous details on each potential Cabinet member’s strengths, weaknesses and possible areas of conflict. Biden has been conducting virtual interviews with final candidates, focusing on their values and life stories nearly as much as their approach to the departments they would lead.

He has made Vice President-elect Kamala Harris perhaps his closest partner in the Cabinet-selection effort; she has interviewed each candidate separately and traded notes with Biden afterward in what people close to the transition say has been an important step in deepening their working relationship.

Biden’s transition – which began months before the election results were known – is providing the first portrait, if one largely conducted behind the scenes, of his style as a manager and decision maker-in-chief.

From the outside, advocates, groups, and members of Congress can find his process cryptic and unpredictable as they attempt to discern which directions Biden and his small core of advisers are leaning, only to find out he’s abruptly switched course. Some nominations have been rushed much quicker than expected, while other decisions have lingered, creating some frustration even among allies. Proponents of demographic and ideological diversity have complained that he has rested too much power in more moderate White officials like himself.

But Biden, in what was a defining feature of his campaign, has largely shrugged off the criticism, confident in his own approach to what he sees as a gut-check decision-making process. Lately he has become more animated in defending some of the choices that his internal deliberations have yielded, urging those on the outside to take his full Cabinet into consideration.

“This Cabinet will be the most representative of any Cabinet in American history,” Biden said Wednesday while introducing Pete Buttigieg, who would be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary, as his nominee to run the Transportation Department. “We’ll have a Cabinet of barrier breakers, a Cabinet of firsts.”

The formation of the Biden Cabinet began much earlier and has been far more comprehensively planned than previously known, according to multiple people close to the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Biden instructed transition officials months ago that he wanted a range of options for jobs available in his administration. By Election Day, the transition had built a database of 9,000 potential administration hires. Some 2,500 had already been vetted – half of whom were people of color and more than half of whom were women. That database now has more than 45,000 entries.

Inside the transition, officials say they have tried to exceed the Rooney Rule – the NFL requirement that teams interview at least one minority candidate for every head coaching and high-level job – so that more would have an opportunity to be considered, according to several people involved with the transition. That has not stopped criticism of his eventual selections, particularly for the highest-profile roles.

Biden prefers to work from paper: His transition team has so farsent him more than 130 detailed background memos on the candidates.

“The Biden transition team is the most organized, best resourced and most effective transition team ever,” said David Marchick, director of the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, who has worked for months with Trump and Biden transition officials. “Future transition teams, Republican and Democratic will be studying their model. They’re just wickedly organized.”

Four years ago, President Donald Trump’s transition provided an early indication of how Trump would conduct his presidency. Potential nominees were paraded into Trump Tower or to his golf course in Bedminster to shake hands before television cameras. Trump and Mitt Romney, then a possible secretary of state, dined on frog legs at Jean-Georges in Manhattan.

Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, had set up a vetting process, a detailed schedule and 30 volumes of transition documents in the months before the election, only to get pushed out along with his plans just days after Trump’s victory. In many cases, Trump, a relative political newcomer, settled on nominees with whom he had little relationship but whom he thought looked the part.

In part because of health protocols, but also by design, Biden’s opening efforts to form his administration could not be more different.

During his interactions with potential Cabinet members, which have been mostly virtual until the formal announcements, he is rarely confrontational, and more often casually breaks the ice. During a video call with homeland security candidate Alejandro Mayorkas, the former Obama administration official stumbled over how to address the president-elect.

“Just call me Joe,” Biden eventually said, by Mayorkas’s account.

While Harris’s role is still undefined and the her imprint on the choices of the nominees is so far unapparent, she has been involved in almost every discussion as Biden makes decisions on his administration, according to people involved in the process.

“She is the first and last in the room. He is asking her input and her feedback,” said a person involved in the transition. “That’s the partnership Biden had with Obama, and as Harris wanted with Biden . . . He wants her feedback.”

The discussions about Cabinet picks and other high-profile posts are kept to a very small circle, with Harris and Biden joined by incoming chief of staff Ron Klain and just a handful of others. The mood veers from light banter – with joking laments from Biden about how he fractured his foot playing with one of his dogs – to the severity of the economic and health crises his administration will confront.

“He gave us all the following advice: These are tough jobs, make sure you take care of yourself and your family,” Mayorkas said.

Former senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who helped lead Biden’s similar vice-presidential search process, said Biden’s management style is one of “a collaborator.”

“He likes to talk things out,” Dodd said. “He’s not averseat all to people expressing alternative views. It’s a very healthy approach. He’s not insular in any way.”

While Biden has a soft spot for hiring people he knows and has long worked with, he likes to have a wide range of options.

“With the vice-presidential selection process, I had assumed we’d narrow candidates down to two or three people,” Dodd said. “Joe wanted to see a lot. He really wanted more of an opportunity to meet with and talk to folks. It was like six, seven, eight people. I was sort of surprised.”

The transition team examined each agency and looked at how it had been run historically and which model of leadership was most successful – a chief executive, or a budget expert, or someone who looked through a regulatory lens. Candidates were judged by how best they fit the model the transition team decided on for each job, and those options were presented to the president-elect.

In most of his picks, Biden has valued expertise – not necessarily in particular subject areas but in crisis management. In his view, his administration is inheriting a multipronged crisis, and a government workforce that has spent four years being disparaged and downplayed. That is why many of his appointments have extensive government service, those close to the decision-making say.

That instinct, however, has led to some unusual picks that have baffled outside groups that closely follow each department. Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general, has little background running a health care agency but has been nominated as secretary of health and human services. Denis McDonough, a former chief of staff to President Obama, was chosen to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs despite never serving in uniform.

In both cases, the perception of their general abilities overrode outside concerns about their expertise in those specific areas.

Biden has always been one who stews over difficult decisions, letting them linger and growing agitated with those who try to rush him. Deciding whether to run for president, including the most recent of his three campaigns, was a process that stretched later than advisers wanted, as he ruminated over the possibilities in front of him before making a final decision.

His advisers describe a decision-making and hiring approach that resembles the playing of an accordion, starting wide and then narrowing – and then, sometimes suddenly, expanding once more.

Becerra was initially not a top candidate for HHS, but then suddenly was filling out paperwork to be vetted late in the process. Retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin was not considered a top pick for secretary of defense until shortly before Biden announced his nomination, causing his team to scramble to line up support and catching key Democratic senators off guard.

The quest for an attorney general nominee appeared to have narrowed in recent days, but advisers then began floating the name of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, according to two people close to the process, even though he has repeatedly denied interest in the job and Biden has been primarily focused on a trio of other candidates.

Biden views his decision-making as taking into account broad amounts of information and then relying on his gut – and what he considers to be his forte, homing in on what is politically possible.

“I measure what happens, how the leaders that I’ve served with based on . . . whether their judgment about what to do comes from their gut or their head,” he said earlier this year during a virtual roundtable to discuss on rural issues in Wisconsin.

“I trust people who start with their gut,” he added. “And they have had a head bright enough to know what to do about that gut feeling. People who arrive at it purely from intellectual standpoint, they’re not always ones that can be counted on to stay through at the very end when it gets really tough . . . It starts here in the gut, and it moves to the head.”

Those who have worked with Biden say that he trusts his instincts even when they run counter to the advice he is given.

“He’ll be the first to tell you, ‘I have better political instincts than all of you,’ ” said one adviser. “He wants the recommendations. He will hear varied perspectives, and he wants people to present their case. But at the end of the day he listens to his gut. If everybody is like, ‘Sir we have to go right,’ and he says, ‘My gut says we have to go left,’ he’s going to give his gut a lot of weight.”

Harris and Biden, who receive the same packets of information on potential appointees, ask numerous follow-up questions in their interviews, at times evaluating two candidates against one another or trying to determine whether a substantive difference between Biden’s position and those of the potential nominees is a disqualifier.

Becerra, for example, has long been a proponent of Medicare-for-all, the health care plan Biden campaigned against, favoring expansion of Obamacare. But those differences were not deemed not a big enough problem to thwart his nomination.

Most of Biden’s choices so far are aligned with his views – and, in many cases, have helped shape his views over the decades. His nominee for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, is one of Biden’s longest-serving foreign policy advisers, helping craft lines that Biden still quotes to this day. Klain, the chief of staff, was Biden’s chief of staff as vice president.

Biden’s virtual sessions have at times been folksy and conversational, much as he appears in public. If a dog barks during a presentation, he defuses the tension by laughing about it. If a staff member’s children walk into the screen, he’ll engage them in conversation.

“Biden understands it’s so much bigger than him,” said Rep. Cedric L. Richmond, D-La., whom Biden has named as senior adviser and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. “He’s not caught up on title and he’s not caught up on what people call him in the interview. . . . Trump is erratic and it’s all about Trump. If you do anything to take attention away from him, he acts like a child. Biden does not seek or crave attention.”

But, publicly and privately, he does like to talk.

“When I first sat down with Joe Biden, it was like I had known this man for 10 years. I didn’t know him at all,” said one person who has interviewed with Biden in the past. “But by the end, he’s offering his cellphone number and making jokes and talking about family. That’s just who Joe Biden is.”

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Biden and lawmakers raise alarms over cyber-breach amid Trump silence (nationthailand.com)

Biden and lawmakers raise alarms over cyber-breach amid Trump silence

InternationalDec 18. 2020A Marine stands guard outside the West Wing as snow begins to fall at the White House on Wednesday, Dec 16, 2020 in Washington, D.C. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford 

By The Washington Post · Anne Gearan, Karoun Demirjian, Mike DeBonis, Annie Linskey

WASHINGTON – Democrats and some Republicans raised the alarm Thursday about a massive and growing cybersecurity breach that many experts blame on Russia, with President-elect Joe Biden implicitly criticizing the Trump administration for allowing the hacking attack to occur.

“We need to disrupt and deter our adversaries from undertaking significant cyber attacks in the first place,” Biden said in a statement. “Our adversaries should know that, as president, I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber assaults on our nation.”

President Donald Trump, by contrast, has said nothing about the hack affecting numerous federal agencies as well as U.S. companies. U.S. national security agencies are still assessing the scope and severity of the breach, which was discovered by a commercial firm.

The president’s silence about an organized attack on the U.S. government marks the latest example of his persistent reluctance to criticize Russia, which U.S. intelligence agencies have accused of interfering in the 2016 election to help Trump. Throughout his presidency, Trump has contradicted his own government’s findings about 2016 election hacking and disinformation efforts, and he has publicly accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s word that Moscow was blameless.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee and a frequent Trump critic, assailed the administration’s handling of the attack.

“What I find most astonishing is that a cyber-hack of this nature is really the modern equivalent of almost Russian bombers reportedly flying undetected over the entire country,” Romney said in an interview with SiriusXM Chief Washington Correspondent Olivier Knox. “So our national security is extraordinarily vulnerable. And in this setting, not to have the White House aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action is really, really quite extraordinary.”

In his statement Thursday afternoon, Biden said he has instructed his team to learn as much about as possible about the breach and indicated the team is being briefed on the attack. He received a presidential daily briefing Thursday afternoon, according to his transition office.

Biden pledged that he will make cybersecurity more of a priority in his administration and declared that foes should know they will incur “substantial costs” for penetrating U.S. systems.

The president-elect did not pin blame on Russia, but his phrase “stand idly by” appeared to be a reference to Trump’s response to Russia’s sophisticated cyberspying.

The breach affected the Department of Homeland Security, the State, Treasury and Commerce departments and the National Institutes of Health, officials have said.

Ned Price, a Biden transition spokesman on national security issues, declined to answer more specific questions about Biden’s response to the hack. “We respect the principle of ‘one president at a time,’ ” he said.

In late July, Biden put out a statement on election security and specifically called out the Kremlin for its effort to interfere with democracy. The statement laid out potential responses, including “financial-sector sanctions, asset freezes, cyber responses, and the exposure of corruption” along with “other actions could also be taken, depending on the nature of the attack.”

Biden, who was then the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, added: “I will direct our response at a time and in a manner of our choosing.”

On Capitol Hill, the House and Senate Intelligence committees on Wednesday received the first of what are expected to be several briefings from intelligence officials, including representatives from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Senior Democrats emerged from the briefings sounding a note of alarm.

“The seriousness and duration of this attack demonstrate that we still have enormous and urgent work to do to defend our critical information and networks,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement Wednesday night. “We must move quicker than our adversaries do to adapt.”

Most Republicans have been more cautious about expressing their concern.

“They’re still assessing this one,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters, explaining that officials had not yet determined whether this hack rose to the level of a series of earlier attacks on the Office of Personnel Management database, which Cornyn called “the mother of all hacks.”

When asked whether Trump should be responding more forcefully, Cornyn said: “I don’t really care what he says, but I do care what he does.”

Cornyn added that “to get the Russians to stop,” the government would need to employ “equal and opposite reactions that cause them to pay a price.”

“Old fashioned deterrence,” Cornyn said. “Words mean nothing.”

“There is still much we don’t know about the massive cyber-hack that breached U.S. cyber-defenses, including federal agencies and major private-sector companies.”

Sens. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and Jack Reed, D-R.I., chairman and senior Democrat of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that “the cyber intrusion appears to be ongoing and has the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation. The U.S. government must do everything possible to counter it.”

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said the U.S. investigation is only beginning and suggested patience in waiting for Trump to respond.

“It’s early. It’s early for this kind of thing. Attribution is hard,” he said in an interview. “You’ve got to have it rock-solid before you respond.”

Outside the intelligence panels, the reaction to the hack has been relatively muted, as a last push to finalize legislation to address the pandemic consumed the attention of most lawmakers this week.

But other committees in both the House and Senate have announced they will be launching investigations.

In the GOP-led Senate, Finance Committee leaders Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service for an immediate briefing into whether taxpayer data had been caught up in the hack, noting that “the IRS appears to have been a customer of SolarWinds as recently as 2017.” SolarWinds is the Texas-based firm whose software was exploited in the hacking.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said information U.S. investigators have amassed so far points squarely at Cozy Bear, a group considered part of Russian foreign intelligence.

“This massive cyberattack demands a massive response. Assess the damage, clean it up, secure systems, make the attacker pay a price, & more. So far, not a word from any responsible official. Right now come clean with the American people,” Blumenthal tweeted Thursday.

In the Democratic-led House, the chairs of the Homeland Security and Oversight committees jointly announced Thursday that they would be launching a general investigation into the scope and targets of the hack, requesting a briefing from the FBI, the Homeland Security Department and the Office of the Director of Intelligence on Friday.

“It is imperative that our Committees receive the latest information on the number of federal departments, agencies, and other entities affected by the breach, the extent to which sensitive information and data – including classified information – may have been compromised or exposed, the threat actor or actors responsible, and the Administration’s ongoing efforts to prevent further damage,” they wrote in letters asking for the briefing.

Spokesmen for the White House and National Security Council did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

On Dec. 8, the cybersecurity firm FireEye announced that hackers had broken into its servers and stolen sensitive security-testing tools as part of a breach it had discovered in recent weeks. FireEye later determined that software updates from SolarWinds had been corrupted and contacted the company shortly after, The Washington Post reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Putin deflected questions about Russian hacking during his annual news conference Thursday. He claimed the United States was waging similar efforts into Moscow’s affairs but did not expand on Kremlin denials that Russian government hackers were behind the recent digital spying operation.