Brian Stelter has an always interesting show on CNN on Sunday mornings, where he discusses the media. He is not a “both sides” commentator.
Watch this powerful analysis of the “mass “”radicalization” promoted by Trump and his baseless conspiracy theories. Trump allies talk about martial law, overturning the election, seizing voting machines.
Bottom line: Our democracy was known for years as highly stable. No more. We are in trouble.
Phyllis W. Jordan of Future-Ed, a D.C. think tank, explains here what the latest Congressional agreement on COVID aid means for education and compares it to last spring’s CARES Act as well as to the HEROES Act passed in May by the House of Representatives. The agreement does not include any aid for cities or states. President-Elect Joe Biden has pledged another relief package after he takes office.
She writes:
The $900 billion package builds on a $908 billion stimulus bill introduced Dec. 14 and would include stimulus checks, small business relief, unemployment benefits, and support for vaccine distribution, among other things. The measure includes $82 billion for education, with $2.7 billion specifically for private and parochial schools. A detailed proposal has not been publicly released yet, but the Dec. 14 bill included the $82 billion figure and broke it down like this:
$54 billion of that for K-12 schools, largely delivered through Title I funding. That’s about four times what schools received in the CARES Act approved in March.
$20 billion for higher education with dollars set aside for minority-serving institutions
$7.5 billion for governors to spend at their discretion, including on private schools.
School meal programs and child care. and expand the Pell Grant program to support 500,000 new low-income college students. Separately, lawmakers have agreed to lift a ban on Pell Grants for prison education programs, an agreement that will be part of a broader bill to fund the government through the fiscal year.
The Covid relief deal that House and Senate leaders stuck is far below the $2.2 trillion Democratic leaders had been seeking for much of the Fall but higher than the $500 billion that Senate Republicans favored.
• Colleges and schools will have $82 billion to help cover HVAC repair and replacement to reduce the risk of coronavirus infections and reopen classrooms. The Republican summary specified $2.75 billion in designated funds for private K-12 education.
• Lawmakers also struck a deal on $10 billion for child-care assistance.
Manu Raju, senior Congressional correspondent, for CNN, reported on Twitter that the parties are now battling over how much money to send to private schools.
@mkraju
Two sides are still going back-and-forth over a handful of issues, including how private schools should be treated in the more than $80B in aid for education. GOP had been pushing for $5B for private schools — but Dems had tried to cut that to be about $2.5 billion, per sources
This is both absurd and unfair.
In the CARES Act, nearly 100,000 public schools (and charter schools) received $13.2 billion, while thousands of charters and private and religious schools collected more than $6 billion. Charter schools were allowed to double-dip from both funds. Some of the wealthiest private schools in the nation collected hundreds of thousands or more, while the average public school got only $134,500. More than 85% of students are enrolled in public schools.
Today is the birthday of the poet and novelist Sandra Cisneros (books by this author), born in Chicago (1954) and best known for the highly acclaimed coming-of-age novel The House on Mango Street (1984). Although the book was largely ignored when it was first published, its popularity grew, and soon Cisneros became the first Mexican-American woman to sign a contract with a big American publishing house. The House on Mango Street has since been translated into a dozen languages and has become required reading for middle schools and high schools throughout the United States.
Cisneros was the third child — and the only girl — in a family of seven children, and she spent most of her childhood rootless, moving back and forth between Chicago and Mexico City. Because her father felt that daughters were meant for husbands and not necessarily careers, she was free to study anything she wanted in college, including something as “silly” as English. But like many young Mexican-American women, she was expected to live at home — either until she was married or kicked out because of what she calls “some sexual transgression — you know, you’ve had a baby or you come out and say you’re gay.” Cisneros found her way out in poetry. “I said that I needed a place of my own to write, which was true. But I also wanted to have freedom to lead my life and to fall in love and to do things I couldn’t do under my father’s roof.”
Cisneros studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but she felt disconnected from her fellow students there. “I didn’t want to sound like my classmates; I didn’t want to keep imitating the writers I’d been reading. Their voices were right for them, but not for me,” she wrote later. When she realized that, she felt free to draw from her own background to tell the story of Esperanza, a Latina girl who is growing up in a rundown Chicago neighborhood and dreams of living in a real house. That book became The House on Mango Street.
In Los Angeles, the UTLA reached an agreement with the LAUSD and superintendent to extend remote learning as COVID surges and every ICU bed is filled in the city. The billionaire-funded “Parent Revolution” complained (billionaires are parents although they have no children in LA public schools).
With children mired in distance learning and many struggling academically, Los Angeles teachers will take on more live online interaction with students next semester, under an agreement announced Friday. Also under the deal, school nurses will conduct campus-based coronavirus tests.
The pact between the teachers union and the Los Angeles Unified School District was essential for the nation’s second-largest school system; the agreement’s predecessor would have expired Dec. 31. And, based on current infection rates, a return to campus in January is almost impossible under state health guidelines.
“This progress in online instruction reflects the shared learning of all who work in schools about the need to maximize the interaction between teachers and students and their families,” Los Angeles schools Supt. Austin Beutner said in a statement.
“We are gratified to reach an agreement to extend the distance learning agreement, which is what our students need right now,” said Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of United Teachers Los Angeles. “In the face of the upheaval we are all dealing with, educators, students and families need stability most of all.”
The new side letter to the teachers’ contract goes at least part way to addressing complaints from critics — including many parents and some community groups who have called for increased daily live interaction between students and teachers.
“This agreement still leaves Los Angeles Unified with less learning time, less support for teachers, less partnership with families and less focus on racial equity than other large California school districts,” said Seth Litt, executive director of Parent Revolution, a local advocacy group that has provided support for a lawsuit filed on behalf of families who contendthat the district is violating their legal right to an education.
There also are parents who would settle for nothing less than a return to full-time in-person instruction. Others support remaining in distance learning, while some worry that current practices force students to remain online for too long, especially younger ones. No strategy has emerged that offers full academic support and an elimination of risk for school employees and the families they serve. Making strides in that direction has become more complicated as an alarming COVID-19 surge stretches local healthcare resources past their capacity.
A recent district survey of employees represented by the teachers union indicated that 24% are prepared to return to schools; 55% said they are able to go back but prefer to remain in distance learning; 18% said an underlying health condition would make it potentially unsafe for them to return; 2% said they are 65 or older and would explore continuing to work remotely; and 1% said they intend to apply for unpaid leave.
The survey was conducted Nov. 30 through Dec. 6, with 26,305 responses, well over two-thirds of union members. The union represents teachers, librarians, counselors and nurses.
Under the new pact, nurses have to help carry out the district’s testing program. They will receive an extra $3.50 an hour for such work completed in person on a campus and additional pay when the work extends beyond normal hours.
The federal CARES Act included the Paycheck Protection Program to help struggling small businesses and nonprofits survive the pandemic. Lobbyists for the charter industry slipped in a provision enabling charter schools to apply for PPP funding, even though they experienced no financial losses. Charter schools got a share of the $13.2 billion allotted to the nation’s early 100,000 public schools. The average public school received about $135,000 to meet the expenses of the pandemic. On the advice of their lobbyists, some 1200 charters also sought and won PPP funding. Thus charters drew funding from two sources; public schools were not eligible for PPP funding. Charters that applied for PPP funding won six times as much federal money as public schools.
Primavera online charter school, like many businesses this spring, sought help from the federal Paycheck Protection Program to weather the economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Chandler-based school received a PPP loan of nearly $2.2 million, the largest forgivable loan among the 132 Arizona charter schools that obtained them.
But Primavera’s loan appears to have been more of a bonus than a lifeline.
The school, which like all Arizona public schools didn’t lose state funding because of the pandemic, ended its fiscal year on June 30 with $8.8 million in the bank — almost double the annual payroll costs for its 85 teachers, records show.
The school also shipped $10 million to its lone shareholder: StrongMind, an affiliated company owned by Primavera’s founder and former CEO Damian Creamer.
The school’s annual audit indicates Creamer controls both Primavera and StrongMind, noting he has “the ability to influence the school’s operations for the benefit of StrongMind.” Primavera paid StrongMind nearly $23 million this past fiscal year for software and curriculum services, records show.
Creamer declined to comment.
An Arizona Republic review of more than 100 charter school financial records, audits and federal Small Business Administration documents found the overwhelming majority of the Arizona charter schools that obtained PPP loans didn’t need the money.
John Todd, a longtime auditor of Arizona charter schools, said there are numerous problems with fully funded charter schools getting PPP loans intended to help struggling businesses.
“The PPP loans are taxpayer dollars intended to help the needy, not the greedy,” Todd said.
A few charters, including Legacy Traditional Schools, repaid several million dollars worth of PPP loans after The Republic reported in August that Legacy and other operators had millions of dollars in the bank when they received loans.
Most charters that got loans didn’t need them
The Republic found that most of the charter schools getting PPP funds padded their cash balances (savings accounts), and a few for-profit charter operations, like Primavera, gave money away to shareholders that matched or exceeded their PPP loan amounts.
Further, The Republic found that PPP loans didn’t significantly enhance teacher pay at schools that received them. The 132 Arizona charter school loan recipients, on average, paid their teachers several thousands dollars less than the statewide average.The 132 charter schools receiving PPP loans increased teacher pay by an average of 5% — an amount similar to all 555 charter operations and 263 school districts.
Arizona public schools saw no major job losses or layoffs this year because the state Legislature fully funded schools and gave them additional money to raise teacher pay.
Creamer is among the prominent figures who’ve made millions of dollars operating Arizona charter schools. His online alternative school boasts more than 20,000 full- and part-time students. Primavera paid Creamer $10.1 million in 2017 and 2018.
A spokesman for StrongMind declined to say how much the company paid Creamer.
Ian Kidd, superintendent of Pima Prevention Partnership, said financially strong charter schools that took PPP loans open themselves to criticism and scrutiny.
“I don’t subscribe to making money off of students. It’s not appropriate,” Kidd said.
Kidd said he obtained PPP loans for his three charter schools, but the money was used to cover social and behavioral services for low-income, at-risk kids. His three charters had a combined negative $7,031 in cash balances, even after getting PPP loans.
The SBA, under pressure from news outlets, recently released specific figures for all PPP loan recipients. Previously, it released only the names of the borrowers and loan ranges above $150,000.
The earlier SBA records had indicated about 100 Arizona charter schools had received up to $100 million in PPP loans. The new data shows about 30 more charter schools got loans.
Several watchdog groups, including Accountable.Us, have panned the loan program for enriching companies that didn’t need the money while shutting out many minority- and women-owned businesses.
Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.Us, which compiled a database of all PPP recipients, said there has been widespread fraud and abuse of the program, including celebrities and wealthy companies getting loans.
“The Trump administration’s faulty design and mismanagement of the Paycheck Protection Program let thousands of mom-and-pop businesses slip through the cracks without adequate aid while charter schools cashed in,” Herrig said…
Arizona Schools Superintendent Kathy Hoffman, who also is a member of the Charter Board, said she was astonished by The Republic’s findings.
“It saddens me those dollars are not going to students,” she said. “It’s very excessive. These dollars should be going where they are needed most, and that’s the students and instructional needs.”
Hoffman, a Democrat, said Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and the GOP-controlled Legislature should consider reducing state funding for full-time virtual charter schools like Primavera, which receives nearly the same per-student funding as brick-and-mortar schools that have more costs.
Ducey, at a news conference Wednesday, declined to answer questions regarding Hoffman’s proposal. He also declined to answer whether charter schools that received the PPP loans should return the money or have their state funding reduced by an amount equal to the loans.
Ducey said the PPP loans were a federal issue, but added: “I want to make sure all public schools have available funding.”
Creamer has been a major political donor to Ducey, records show.
Creamer spent at least $137,650 during the past two elections to mostly help conservative Republicans retain control of the Legislature. Among his political giving was $50,000 in December 2019 to the Republican Legislative Victory Fund, state campaign finance records show.
There has been no significant effort by Republicans in the Legislature to change the funding formula for online charter schools. A few of those lawmakers have financial interests in charter schools…
Paying shareholders, boosting reserves
In addition to Primavera, at least three other charter school operators that received PPP loans paid distributions to shareholders. Most of the rest put large sums in savings.
• The year-end cash balance for the 132 Arizona charter schools that received $51.8 million in PPP loans in April and May, increased by $62.6 million. Individually, cash balances increased for 87% of the loan recipients.
• Twenty-one charter schools that received PPP loans increased their cash reserves by at least $1 million, with Primavera seeing a $3.3 million increase.
Educational Options Foundation of Peoria, which got a $278,292 loan, saw its cash balance increase by $2 million to $13.7 million. The school has enough money to operate for four years without additional money. The state Charter Board only requires schools to have one month of cash liquidity. A call to the school was not returned.
• For-profit charters Humanities and Sciences Academy in Tempe and Accelerated Learning Center in Phoenix made shareholder distributions of $388,770 and $230,000 this past fiscal year, respectively. Both amounts exceed the charters’ PPP loans.
The Montessori Schoolhouse of Tucson gave a shareholder distribution of $92,372, equal to about 72% of its PPP loan.
Calls to the three schools were not returned.
Jim Hall, a former public school administrator who runs Arizonans for Charter School Accountability, compiled financial records from charter schools that received PPP loans and said he concluded that they didn’t need the money.
Hall said those loans should have gone to small businesses that have struggled to make payroll or mortgage payments. He said several of the charter operators engaged in “unmitigated greed.”
Trevor Potter is a Republican who was former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and president of the Campaign Legal Center. He writes here about efforts by Trump and his surrogates to promote their belief that the election can be overturned to Congress on January 6, when the Electoral College results are presented to Congress. The Trump campaign has chosen “alternate slates of electors” and will pressure Republicans to accept them, even though they do not represent the voters of their states and were not certified by the Secretary of State or the Governor.
Jan. 6 is not another Election Day. Don’t let President Trump convince you it is.
What will happen then — a joint session of Congress to receive the presidential and vice-presidential election results transmitted by the states — typically occurs every four years in relative obscurity. But this election cycle has been anything but typical. While there’s no realistic chance of anything happening Jan. 6 to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power consistent with the will of America’s voters and Monday’s electoral college votes, there is still a good chance Trump will try to make the day a super spreader event for the election disinformation with which he is relentlessly trying to infect American democracy.
Foreknowledge is, however, a form of inoculation here. By understanding exactly what does and doesn’t happen Jan. 6, all of us can contribute to making that day a reaffirmation of our democratic process rather than part of a continued assault on it.
As required by the Constitution’s Twelfth Amendment, the House and Senate will gather in a joint session presided over by Vice President Pence. There, the slates of electors for president and vice president from the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, received by Congress from the state governments and accompanied by certificates from the governors, will be read out, and the vote totals will be counted. This is usually a routine process — as it should be, because federal law urges any disputes over such slates to be resolved in the states by Dec. 8, ahead of the electoral college meeting Dec. 14. That is to say any disputes (which are rare to begin with) are meant to be disposed of well before Congress gathers to count the electoral votes. It’s “really a formality,” as Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) has rightly called the coming session.
But it is at least possible for members of Congress to raise objections to one or more slates of electors as they’re read aloud. Under a 130-year-old law called the Electoral Count Act, if one representative and one senator jointly object to a slate, then the whole process pauses while the House and Senate separately debate the objection, then vote on whether to sustain it.
This gives Trump’s die-hard supporters in Congress an opportunity to again provide more disinformation about the election on national television Jan. 6. At least one Republican House member, Rep. Mo Brooks (Ala.), has said he is considering making such an objection — much to Trump’s delight. He’s thinking of objecting even though his ostensible reason, purported election fraud, has been resoundingly rejected by state and federal courts, state election officials of both parties and even Trump’s own attorney general. (It has also been rejected by Trump’s lawyers, who have mostly refrained from bringing fraud charges in actual court proceedings where they would have to prove them, even as they fling accusations around outside of court.)
Even if Brooks finds one or more colleagues and senators to join him, there’s no real possibility of overturning the outcome of the election: the Electoral Count Act requires both the House and the Senate to reject a slate of electors, and there is no sign that either chamber would do so. A number of Republican senators have already rejected such a challenge to the votes of the people, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is telling his caucus not to join any such effort. Surely a majority-Democratic House won’t do so.
As with so much that’s happened since Nov. 3, however, it’s not the threat of actually changing the outcome that’s most worrisome here. Instead, it’s the danger of spreading disinformation and undermining the perceived legitimacy of American democracy, planting the seed for future attempts by the losing party to change election results if they control state legislatures or Congress.
Imagine how Trump might frame the votes that he could push for in January as he continues to deny his election defeat. First, just as Trump has turned on Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp — previously a close ally — because Kemp would not take illegal steps to disrupt that state’s vote certification, the soon-to-be-former-president could start tweeting demands that objections be lodged in Congress. Trump has also attacked Arizona’s Republican Gov. Doug Ducey for not preventing that state’s certification of electors for President-elect Joe Biden, and the U.S. Supreme Court for rejecting a far-fetched lawsuit by his supporters in Texas. Second, if one or more objections are made, Trump might frame the potential votes in the House and Senate to be a vote for him or for Biden — and Trump might, in turn, excoriate any Republican who votes “for Biden,” as he would misleadingly frame it.
That’s why it’s essential to immunize the American people against these falsehoods now, before they can spread. There’s simply no vote for or against any candidate Jan. 6 when Congress meets. No representative or senator is being asked to choose between Trump or Biden. That’s something they were all entitled to do along with other Americans, when they as citizens voted before or on Nov. 3. As Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said recently, “trying to get electors not to do what the people voted to do is madness.”
Instead, there’s only one thing that could be put to a vote Jan. 6: American democracy. The question is whether to respect the choice already made by the American people in every state, as certified by each state’s own election system, whether any particular member of Congress likes that choice. The alternative is to lodge a legally futile but psychologically damaging blow against the integrity of America’s fundamental democratic process and the principles of federalism and the sovereignty of voters.
There’s a way to prevent all of this, of course. No member of Congress should have to choose between casting a vote for democracy itself or avoiding excoriation by the sitting president on Twitter. If lawmakers do not indulge in partisan, baseless claims of election fraud by joining an objection Jan. 6, no vote occurs. Instead, the day proceeds just as it should: as a routine ceremony finalizing the votes already cast by the American people, proceeding the inauguration ceremony Jan. 20.
Don’t let Trump claim otherwise. There’s nothing left to vote for or against. We already voted — and he lost.
Up until now, the only districts with charters in Missouri were St. Louis and Kansas City, the state’s two biggest districts. But the state board just granted a charter for a new school in the Normandy district, one of the state’s poorest and lowest performing.
The state board of education approved the charter with six votes in favor, one against, and one abstention.
Normandy lost its state accreditation in 2012, triggering a student transfer law that bled it of funding and students. The state school board bumped the district up to provisional accreditation in 2017. Academics have improved in recent years but the district still struggles. Less than half of third-graders passed state math and reading assessments in 2019. Its high school graduation rate in May was 69%.
Because of the district’s obstacles, state board member Pamela Westbrooks-Hodge, who previously served on Normandy’s governing board, voted against the charter.
“You can’t morally advance options and choice for one group by taking away the rights and choice of another,” she said...
Some elected leaders who represent the towns that make up the Normandy school district oppose this new charter, arguing all available resources should be poured into improving the district’s struggling schools.
Normandy’s school board is also skeptical of the encroaching school. Townsend went before the board Monday to offer partnership opportunities, but board member Ronald Roberts said the school’s track record doesn’t give him confidence for the future.
“It sounds like the community engagement process was disjointed, for lack of a better term, and there were missed opportunities for collaboration,” he said.
Other members called Townsend an outsider because she grew up in Chicago. She’s lived and taught in the St. Louis area for 18 years, including some in Normandy. She met with area parents and held virtual sessions this year to promote the new school.
Normandy educates children from 24 municipalities in near-north St. Louis County. Its enrollment has been dwindling for the past two decades, down to about 3,000 students from nearly 5,900 in 1991.
The Leadership School will start with 125 children in kindergarten through second grade with plans to grow a grade each year until hitting 450 students through eighth grade. The location of the school has not been determined. The Special School District will provide special education services, as it does for all public schools in St. Louis County.
No one suggests that the charter will somehow improve the education available for the 3,000 students in the district. The logic is that providing a charter for 450 students while abandoning the other 2,550 students is a good deal.
Trump is obsessed with overturning the election he lost. He continues to tweet that he won and that the election was tainted by widespread fraud, even though his campaign lost every lawsuit in state and federal courts for lack of evidence and was twice rejected by the US Supreme Court. Trump appears to be delusional, egged on by conspiracy theorists and his inflated ego and raging narcissism.
The New York Times published a story about a long meeting at the White House on Friday where Trump considered ways to reverse the results of the election. Trump consulted with attorney Sidney Powell, who was previously ousted as one of his campaign lawyers after she unveiled her theories about voting machines programmed in Venezuela by followers of deceased dictator Hugo Chavez. No court accepted her evidence.
President Trump on Friday discussed naming Sidney Powell, who as a lawyer for his campaign team unleashed conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States, to be a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud, according to two people briefed on the discussion.
It was unclear if Mr. Trump will move ahead with such a plan.
Most of his advisers opposed the idea, two of the people briefed on the discussion said, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer. In recent days Mr. Giuliani has sought to have the Department of Homeland Security join the campaign’s efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the election.
Mr. Giuliani joined the discussion by phone initially, while Ms. Powell was at the White House for a meeting that became raucous and involved people shouting at each other at times, according to one of the people briefed on what took place.
Ms. Powell’s client, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser whom the president recently pardoned, was also there, two of the people briefed on the meeting said. Some senior administration officials drifted in and out of the meeting.
During an appearance on the conservative Newsmax channel this week, Mr. Flynn pushed for Mr. Trump to impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election. At one point in the meeting on Friday, Mr. Trump asked about that idea.
Ms. Powell’s ideas were shot down by every other Trump adviser present, all of whom repeatedly pointed out that she had yet to back up her claims with proof. At one point, one person briefed on the meeting said, she produced several affidavits, but upon inspection they were all signed by a man she has previously used as an expert witness, whose credentials have been called into question.
The White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, repeatedly and aggressively pushed back on the ideas being proposed, which went beyond the special counsel idea, those briefed on the meeting said.
Mr. Cipollone told Mr. Trump there was no constitutional authority for what was being discussed, one of the people briefed on the meeting said. Other advisers from the White House and the Trump campaign delivered the same message throughout the meeting, which stretched on for a long period of time...
Mr. Trump, egged on by supporters like Ms. Powell, has never conceded and, holed up inside the White House, he continues to assert that he actually won — even though the baseless claims Ms. Powell and others have made of widespread fraud have been thoroughly debunked and even many of Mr. Trump’s closest allies have dismissed as preposterous her tale of an international conspiracy to rig the vote...
Ms. Powell accused other Trump advisers of being quitters, according to the people briefed.
But the idea that Mr. Trump would try to install Ms. Powell in a position to investigate the outcome sent shock waves through the president’s circle. She has repeatedly claimed there was widespread fraud, but several lawsuits she filed related to election fraud have been tossed out of court...
Part of the White House meeting on Friday night was a discussion about an executive order to take control of voting machines to examine them, according to one of the people briefed on the discussion.
Mr. Giuliani has separately pressed the Department of Homeland Security to seize possession of voting machines as part of a push to overturn the results of the election, three people familiar with the discussion said. Mr. Giuliani was told the department does not have the authority to do such a thing.
Trump spent four years cultivating his friendship with Putin. No matter what Vlad did to violate human rights, Trump was silent. Now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledges what reports reported for days: the Russian government hacked into the “secure” networks of every federal agency, where they roamed at will for several months. No word yet from Trump. He has abandoned his day job and spends all his time tweeting about the election and scheming to overturn it. His friend Michael Flynn suggested sending the military into key states and forcing them to hold new elections.
Craig Timberg and Ellen Takashima wrote in the Washington Post:
Federal investigators reported Thursday on evidence of previously unknown tactics for penetrating government computer networks, a development that underscores the disastrous reach of Russia’s recent intrusions and the logistical nightmare facing federal officials trying to purge intruders from key systems.
For days, it has been clear that compromised software patches distributed by a Texas-based company, SolarWinds, were central to Russian efforts to gain access to U.S. government computer systems. But Thursday’s alert from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security said evidence suggested there was other malware used to initiate what the alert described as “a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations.”
While many details remained unclear, the revelation about new modes of attack raises fresh questions about the access that Russian hackers were able to gain in government and corporate systems worldwide.
“This adversary has demonstrated an ability to exploit software supply chains and shown significant knowledge of Windows networks,” the alert said. “It is likely that the adversary has additional initial access vectors and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that have not yet been discovered.”
The U.S. government has not publicly blamed Russia for the hacks [they have now, with Pompeo’s admission Friday night], but U.S. officials speaking privately say that Russian government hackers were behind the operation. Moscow has denied involvement. [Lying as usual]
The alert cited a blog post this week from Volexity, a Reston, Va.-based cybersecurity company, about repeated intrusions into an unnamed think tank that, according to the company, took place over several years without being detected. The attackers, who are described using a pseudonym in the Volexity post, gained access to the think tank’s networks using “multiple tools, backdoors, and malware implants” and exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Exchange Control Panel software, which is central to the company’s email services.
In a statement, Microsoft said, “This is an ongoing investigation into an advanced and sophisticated threat actor that has several techniques in their toolkit. We have not identified any Microsoft product or cloud service vulnerabilities in the recent attacks.”
Only the last of three separate intrusions against the think tank, in June and July, involved a corrupted patch from SolarWinds, suggesting an aggressive, persistent hacking team with sophisticated tactics at its disposal.
The Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile, were also breached, officials said Thursday, joining a growing list of agencies reported in recent days to have been hacked by the Russians and that are central to U.S. national security and other core government functions. They include the State, Treasury, Commerce and Homeland Security departments, as well as the National Institutes of Health.
Politico first reported the breaches at the Energy Department and NNSA.
An Energy Department spokeswoman, Shaylyn Hynes, said that at this point, the investigation has found that the malware has been isolated to business networks and has not affected the department’s “mission essential national security functions,” including at the NNSA. Thousands of private companies worldwide also were potentially affected, many in sensitive industries, after they uploaded software patches that were infused with malware, reportedly by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR.
Purging the intruders and restoring security to affected networks could take months, some experts say, because the hackers moved rapidly from the initial intrusions through the corrupted software patches to collect and deploy authentic system credentials, making discovery and remediation far more difficult. Closing the digital back doors initially created by the Russians will not suffice because they appear to have stolen keys to an unknown number of official doorways into federal and private corporate systems, according to investigators at FireEye, a cybersecurity firm that also was hacked.
On Monday, Microsoft and FireEye diverted the channel the Russians used to send commands to systems that download the corrupted patch, causing the malware to shut down. But that does not help those organizations whose networks the Russians have deeply penetrated.
The intruders into the U.S.-based think tank in each case were searching for email from particular targets, according to Steven Adair, president of Volexity. Only the Exchange vulnerability was Microsoft-related, but through it, the hackers were able to act as system administrators for the think tank’s network.
“If you can exploit it, it’s a pretty direct way into somebody’s infrastructure, with pretty high-level access,” Adair said.
Meanwhile, the SolarWinds issue continues to vex federal officials. The agency that runs the Department of Defense’s sprawling communications network downloaded a poisoned SolarWinds update that potentially exposed the agency’s network to the Russian hackers, according to U.S. officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
It is unclear whether the hackers used their access to the Defense Information Systems Agency to steal any data from the department’s networks, the officials said. So far, there is no evidence they have, but the investigation is in its early stages, they said.
“We’re just at the front end of figuring out the points of contact and what might have been left behind,” said one U.S. official. “We’re taking it very seriously. We don’t know as much as we’d like to know. We’ll keep going till we do.”
DISA is the department’s information technology nerve center. Besides running its own network, which houses billions of dollars of contracts and computer network designs, it runs the Defense Department’s unclassified intranet, which serves 4 million to 5 million personnel around the globe, including contractors and troops in combat zones.
A defense official acknowledged Thursday that “our software supply chain experienced a cyber attack to their systems…”
Experts were skeptical of the notion that the Russians would gain access to a Defense Department network — especially one as sensitive as DISA — and not exploit it over many months of presumed access.
“DOD is one of the top priority targets for Russian intelligence,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a cybersecurity expert and executive chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank. “I can’t imagine a situation where, given an opportunity like this, they would not take advantage of it to get inside, roam around and try to steal as much sensitive data as they could related to force structure and readiness, weapons systems, and other issues of strategic concern to them.”
On Monday, the National Security Council convened an emergency meeting of agencies under a 2016 presidential order to address coordination on a “significant cyber event,” according to an official. Key agencies present were the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
President-elect Joe Biden said in a statement Thursday that he is seeking to learn as much as he can about the breaches. As president, he said, he will work with allies to impose costs on those responsible for such actions. “I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber assaults on our nation,” he said.
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