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Washington, D.C. – At a Senate Foreign Relations hearing today with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) highlighted the DETER Act, which aims to discourage Russian interference in U.S. elections. Secretary Pompeo agreed that such a course of action could raise the costs for Russia as it weighs the benefit of meddling in our elections.
Last week, Rubio and Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) urged the Senate Banking and Foreign Relations Committees to quickly hold a hearing on their DETER Act, which uses the threat of powerful sanctions to dissuade hostile foreign powers from meddling in our elections, continued to build momentum last week.
A video of the exchange is available here. A rough and partial transcript of the exchange is below:
RUBIO: But obviously even that price is not high enough because the Intelligence community continues to tell us they are postured and are actively engaged in both attacking our democracy and posturing to do more of that in the future. So my question is, along the lines of a piece of legislation that Senator Van Hollen and I and a group of other senators have jumped on board on, and it aims to do three things.
One is sort of define interference. It’s not just five Russian guys on Twitter. Define it in terms of its meaning to our Republic. Require that the Director of National Intelligence to issue a report within 30 days of the election about whether or not interference occurred. And then put in statute a menu of very crippling sanctions and the purpose of that would be so that Vladimir Putin knows before he makes this decision going to ’18 or in the future: this is the price I will pay if I do this again.
That’s why it’s called The DETER Act, to get on the front end of it. I don’t ask you to opine on the bill because I know you don’t have before you. But on the concept of building in deterrence on the front end, is that not an approach we can take to hopefully deter him from doing this in the future by making him clearly understand how high the price would be in comparison to the benefit?
POMPEO: Senator, I completely agree with you that there is a cost-benefit calculation that is undertaken before the Russians act. So it follows necessarily that putting on notice with essentially a fail-safe, if you will, about things that will follow has the likelihood of being successful in raising the cost in terms of how he calculates risk associated with a wide range of actions.