WASHINGTON (CN) – Russian meddling in U.S. affairs is not a temporary crisis but rather "the new normal," experts told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday during a rare public hearing.
With nothing to stop Russia, Americans could see more interference when they go back to the polls for midterm elections in 2018, and in 2020 to elect the next president, said ranking member Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.
Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election is still under investigation by the committee, which is chaired by Sen. Richard Burr.
Warner and Burr, a North Carolina Republican, said they called today’s hearing to help the public better understand the tactics that the Kremlin uses to undermine democratic processes and institutions.
Highlighting their bipartisan effort, Burr said efforts to politicize the Russia investigation would likely fail, and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, noted that Russian meddling targets both the left and the right.
Experts called to testify this morning did their best to place the Russia’s tactics within Russia's historical context. "Active measures have been a significant weapon in the Russian and Soviet arsenal for over 100 years," said Roy Godson, professor of government emeritus at Georgetown University.
He defined active measures as overt and covert techniques that propagate Russian ideas and political and military preferences, while undermining democratic adversaries.
In contrast to the Cole War era, Russian active measure no longer require boots on the ground in foreign countries. That could be their strength.
"These influence techniques provide their relatively weak economy and insecure political institutions with a strategic and tactical advantage to affect significant political outcomes abroad," Godson said.
Russia, like the Soviets, have built up the infrastructure along with skilled and experienced teams to implement active measures, which have been modernized, he said.
"Some of it is effective, some just a nuisance," he added, noting that Russia is "not 10-feet tall."
Speaking directly to skeptics who doubt the intelligence community assessment that Russia meddled in the U.S. election to hurt Hillary Clinton, Eugene Rumer with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace expressed confidence in the report's conclusions.
"I am convinced that Russian intelligence services, their proxies, and other related actors directly intervened in our election in 2016," he said.
Though he has not seen the classified evidence that supports the findings, Rumer said Russia's effort is in plain sight.
That effort can be seen "in state-sponsored propaganda broadcasts on RT, in countless internet trolls, fake or distorted news spread by fake news services, in the recent Kremlin get-together of Russian president Vladimir Putin with the French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen," Rumer said.
"The list can go on."