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Sen. Angus KingAngus KingGOP chairman admonishes intel chiefs Senator blasts NSA chief: What you feel isnt relevant, admiral The Hill's 12:30 Report MORE (I-Maine) snapped at the head of the National Security Agency (NSA) in a contentious moment of a Senate hearing on Wednesday that delved into questions over Russias meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

King, known as one of the Senates more genial members, reached a breaking point more than an hour into the hearing after Michael Rogers repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether President Trump tried to interfere in the FBIs investigation into Russias actions and possible collusion with his campaign.

Rogers declined to answer questions about reports of his interactions with Trump throughout the morning, telling a visibly frustrated King that he didnt feel it was appropriate.

What you feel isnt relevant, admiral, King said back at the NSA chief.

Later, when Rogers said he did not mean for his answer to King's question to sound confrontational, King said he did mean to sound confrontational.

Why are you not answering these questions? Is there an invocation of executive privilege? King demanded. Im not satisfied with, I do not believe its appropriate or I do not believe I should answer.

Im not sure I have a legal basis, Coats said at one point, adding that he would provide as much information as he was able behind closed doors.

Rogers indicated that while he and Coats have had conversations with the White House about a potential claim of executive privilege, he said that they had not gotten a definitive answer.

McCabe and Rosenstein both cited the ongoing federal investigation, led by special counsel Robert Mueller, arguing that it is longstanding Justice Department procedure not to discuss anything that might be under active investigation.

I dont understand why the special counsels lane takes precedence over the lane of the United States Congress, King said.

At issue was whether any of the officials had any evidence that Trump may have inappropriately attempted to curtail the FBI's investigation.

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Trump had asked Coats to intervene with then-FBI Director James Comey to limit the probe.

Both Coats and Rogers deniedfeeling pressured by Trump to intervene in the handling of intelligence in any inappropriate way but refused to answer specific questions about their interactions with the president.

Im willing to come before the committee and tell you what I know and dont know, Coats said. What Im not willing to do is share information I think ought to be protected in an opening hearing.

In a clear sign of the level of frustration in the room, Democrats repeatedly interrupted and talked over officials claims that they couldnt respond to certain lines of questioning. The argumentative exchanges on more than one occasion prompted Sen. John McCainJohn McCainSenator blasts NSA chief: What you feel isnt relevant, admiral Senate trying to insert Russia sanctions into popular Iran bill OPINION: Why President Trump should fear John McCain MORE (R-Ariz.) to grab his microphone and request that witnesses be allowed to answer.

In a previous and equally tense moment, Sen. Martin HeinrichMartin HeinrichSenator blasts NSA chief: What you feel isnt relevant, admiral Unemployment rate hits 16-year low as just 138K jobs added Intel chief has not talked with Trump about reported disclosure of classified info MORE (D-N.M.) cut off Rosenstein by saying, At this point you filibuster better than most of my colleagues.

Chairman Richard BurrRichard BurrWarren encourages Kamala Harris after shes scolded in hearing GOP senator threatens to subpoena Comey GOP chairman admonishes intel chiefs MORE (R-N.C.), clearly aggravated, eventually intervened. The committee is on notice, he snapped, pointing a finger and demanding that members provide the witnesses the courtesy to respond.

Comey is set to testify before the Senate Intelligence panel on Thursday in what may be the most highly anticipated congressional hearing since the Senate Judiciary Committee heard from Anita Hill, who had accused then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.

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Senator blasts NSA chief: 'What you feel isn't relevant, admiral' - The Hill

Lincolnton -- The Augusta woman who has been arrested in the National Security Agency leak investigation is being held at a small county jail here, about 40 miles northwest of Augusta.

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter spotted Reality Leigh Winner Wednesday afternoon as she was standing in an outdoor area of the Lincoln County Jail. She was pacing in the fenced-in area, wearing an orange jumpsuit.

Winner, 25, is receiving three meals a day and has access to a phone to call her family, said Sheriff Bruce Beggs. A doctor is on call and a nurse comes twice a day, partly to dispense medication.

As far as I know, she is fine, Beggs said. We have not had any problems.

Winner has been charged with sending to the news media a classified government report about Russias meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The U.S. Justice Department announced her arrest Monday, about an hour after The Intercept reported that it had obtained a top-secret NSA report about Russias interference. The intelligence report, according to The Intercept, says Russian military intelligence officials tried to hack into the U.S. voting system just before last Novembers election.

Beggs would not permit The AJC to see the inside the jail, citing security concerns. But he gave an AJC reporter a tour of the brick facility from the outside.

Originally built in 1991, the jail can hold up to 90 detainees. Of the 50 who were being held there Wednesday, fewer than 15 were women, Beggs said. Men and women are separated from each other in the jail, which includes medium and maximum security wings. The federal government reimburses the jail for holding and transporting its detainees. On average, two-thirds of those being held there are facing federal charges.

They get served decent meals, said Beggs, a Lincolnton native and a veteran of the Lincoln Sheriffs Office. They get adequate medical care.

Beggs said he has received up to 20 phone calls from reporters from across the country about Winners case.

I dont know anything about her background, he said, or really what she is charged with.

Gary Davis, stepfather of Reality Leigh Winner, says the depiction of Winner through social media is not an an accurate portrayal of my daughter." Winner, who lives in Augusta, Ga., is accused of leaking national security information on Russia hac

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Suspect in NSA leak being held in Lincolnton jail - Atlanta Journal Constitution

The publication that revealed a classified National Security Agency report on alleged Russian attempts to hack US election-related systems treats the report as possible evidence that Russia tried to rig the vote. More likely, however, the Kremlin expected the vote to be rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton.

According to the leaked report, the Russian military intelligence, GRU, ran a spear-phishing campaign targeting the employees of VR Systems, a voting hardware and software producer. At least one of its employee accounts apparently was compromised. Then the hackers used the harvested credentials to trap local government officials in charge of organizing elections. Emails, coming credibly from a VR Systems employee, contained malware that would have allowed the GRU (although the report provides no clues as to how the attribution was made) to control the computers of these local officials. The NSA doesnt seem to have determined whether the hackers managed that with any of their targets.

Reality Winner, 25, the NSA contractor accused of leaking the report to the Intercept, an online news organization, had an apparent motive: Her Twitter feed (under the name Sara Winners) shows she was disappointed when Donald Trump won the election.

So far, Russias alleged help to Trump in the 2016 election has amounted to Russian sources stealing and publishing emails and documents related to the Clinton campaign. Thats not particularly dangerous to Trump unless it can be shown that his campaign colluded with the hackers or that Russia tried to influence the actual vote count. The report appears to imply just that.

In reality, even if the allegedly GRU-affiliated hackers got into the computers of local officials in the states where VR Systems technology was used, they couldnt have changed the election outcome.

VR doesnt actually make voting machines. It makes electronic poll books that make paper voter rolls unnecessary. They allow an election worker to check a voters personal data against the rolls and issue a ballot. By messing with such a system, hackers could produce confusion, making it difficult for voter names to be verified. They could even enable ineligible people to vote but for such a ploy to work, there would need to be large numbers of such ineligible people available for a massive fraud operation on voting day.

The Intercept story suggests the same local officials who handle the electronic voter rolls also manually install updates on the voting machines. If so, they could inadvertently infect the voting equipment with malware. But even if that happened, it didnt swing any states Trumps way.

Results in the states that use VR equipment and software Florida, Illinois, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia were not challenged. They yielded no surprises compared with polling data. The big surprises came in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where VR Systems isnt present.

I have written that its not impossible to rig a US presidential election (and was ridiculed for saying so). The rigging, however, would require a vast conspiracy spanning the entire country and involving local election officials the kind that exists in Russia.

Trump, with his cheap, hastily thrown together campaign infrastructure, could have achieved nothing of the kind, but as the campaign drew to a close, he appeared to fear such an effort from the Obama administration.

Experts pooh-poohed this conspiracy talk, pointing out how disparate the US election system was and what a massive clandestine effort would be required to subvert it. In Moscow, there were people telling President Vladimir Putin that Clinton had all the levers (financial and intelligence service contacts) to falsify a vote.

In other words, hacking VR Systems and the local officials would have been much more useful to the GRU if it had been conducting an intelligence operation to detect pro-Clinton fraud than if it had been planning to rig the election.

The NSA report at best provides additional evidence of Putins skepticism of Trumps ability to beat the US establishment, not of his meddling with vote results.

Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

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NSA leak proves nothing about possible Russian hacking - New York Post

If the Reality Winner story sounds like a James Bond movie, Stephen Colbert says that makes Donald Trump "Smallfinger."(Photo: Richard Boeth/CBS)

TV's late night hosts spent the beginning of Tuesday night's show explaining the latest development in the Russian election-meddling scandal for viewers after a contractor from the NSAwas arrested for leaking a top-secret document.

"Daysbefore (the election)?" an incredulousColbert said of the hackers' timing. "Come on,Guccifer.That's just poor planning. You can't leave your hacking to the last minute! Put some thought into it. Nobody wants an election you picked up at Walgreens!"

That said, the CBS host is worried aboutthe Russian hackers' attempts to trick local government employees into opening documents that were infected with malware: "This is how democracy ends: With a fake email sent to the ancient cat lady manning the polling station at your high school gym."

He then got into the arrest of NSA contractor Reality Winner ("It's official: The Trump administration is at war with reality").

"So a young female spy named Reality Winner steals intelligence from the Pluribus Corporation?That sounds like a James Bond movie, which of course makes Trump "Smallfinger!" he sang in his best Shirley Bassey voice.

"This is a confusing story so let me try to break it down," Meyers saidas the show's technical director rapidly switched out photos of the players involved. "Reality Winner leaked information about a reality denier (Putin) who tried to influence the election to support a reality host (Trump) who is detached from reality. So now the (Reality) Winner is the loser and this loser (Putin) who helped this loser (Trump) win is the winner and that's our reality."

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NSA leak: Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers explain our new 'reality' - USA TODAY

Experts say the U.S. election system remains profoundly vulnerable to trickery or sabotage.

HOUSTON A leaked intelligence document outlining alleged attempts by Russian military intelligence to hack into U.S. election systems is the latest evidence suggesting a broad and sophisticated foreign attack on the integrity of the nation's elections.

And it underscores the contention of security experts and computer scientists that the highly decentralized, often ramshackle U.S. election system remains profoundly vulnerable to trickery or sabotage .

The document, purportedly produced by the U.S. National Security Agency, does not indicate whether actual vote-tampering occurred. But it adds significant new detail to previous U.S. intelligence assessments that alleged Russia-backed hackers had compromised elements of America's electoral machinery. It also suggests that attackers may also have been laying groundwork for future subversive activity.

The operation described in the document could have given attackers "a foothold into the IT systems of elections offices around the country that they could use to infect machines and launch a vote-stealing attack," said J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer scientist. "We don't have evidence that that happened," he said, "but that's a very real possibility."

Computer scientists have proven in the lab that once sophisticated attackers are inside an election network, they could manipulate pre-election programming of its systems and alter results without leaving a trace.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said Tuesday that hacking into state voting systems ahead of the Nov. 8 vote was more widespread than has been disclosed.

Attempts by Russia to "break into a number of our state voting processes" was "broad-based," he said, without offering details. In Moscow, a Kremlin spokesman categorically denied Tuesday that Moscow had tried to hack the U.S. elections.

Warner did not directly address the classified intelligence report published Monday by The Intercept, an online news outlet. The Associated Press has not independently verified the authenticity of the report, although its apparent leaker, an NSA contract worker, was arrested last weekend in Georgia.

The NSA document says Russian military intelligence first targeted employees of a Florida voting systems supplier in August. Apparently exploiting technical data obtained in that operation, the cyber spies later sent phishing emails to more than 100 local U.S. election officials just days ahead of the Nov. 8 vote, intent on stealing their login credentials and breaking into the their systems, the document says.

The emails packed malware into Microsoft Word documents and were forged to give the appearance of being sent by the system vendor, VR Systems of Tallahassee, Florida.

The Department of Homeland Security knew in September that hackers believed to be Russian agents had targeted the voter registration systems of more than 20 states. To date, no evidence of tampering with vote tallies or registration rolls has emerged.

The U.S. elections system is a patchwork of more than 3,000 jurisdictions overseen by the states with almost no federal oversight or standards. The attack sketched out in the NSA document appears designed specifically to cope with that sprawl.

The NSA document did not name any of the states where local officials were targeted by the emails masquerading as being from VR Systems.

But in September, the FBI held a conference call with all 67 county elections supervisors in the battleground state of Florida to inform them of infiltration of VR Systems without naming the company. Ion Sancho, who retired as Leon County supervisor in December, said he later learned from industry contacts that it was VR Systems.

VR Systems officials did not respond directly to questions emailed by the AP. In a statement, the company said it only knows of a "handful" of customers who received the fraudulent email, adding that it had "no indication" that anyone had clicked on the malware. The NSA document says at least one account was likely compromised.

The company makes software for on-site voter registration at polling stations and backend systems for voting management, according to its website, which says it has customers in California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.

VR Systems' electronic poll books electronic systems used to verify registered voters at polling places experienced problems on Nov. 8 in Durham County, North Carolina. The issue forced officials to abandon the system, issue paper ballots and extend voting hours.

North Carolina's state elections director said Tuesday that officials would investigate to see if officials in Durham County were targeted and possibly compromised.

Iowa University's Douglas Jones is among computer scientists who say voter registration systems are particularly vulnerable to tampering, in part because they are on the internet.

Someone trying to cause chaos and discredit an election could delete names from registration rolls prior to voting or request absentee ballots en masse. In the latter case, a voter showing up at the polls on Election Day would be recorded as having already cast their ballot. That could force voters to file provisional ballots, and provoke long lines.

There is no evidence any of that happened last Election Day.

___

Satter reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann in Washington, D.C., and Emery D'Alesio in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.

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Leaked NSA doc highlights deep flaws in US election system - Gainesville Sun