DHS head of cyber security says that the Russians DID penetrate voter registration rolls in several states.

Courtesy of NBC News:  

The U.S. official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several U.S. states prior to the 2016 presidential election. 

In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn't talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, "We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated." 

Jeh Johnson, who was DHS secretary during the Russian intrusions, said, "2016 was a wake-up call and now it's incumbent upon states and the Feds to do something about it before our democracy is attacked again.

"We were able to determine that the scanning and probing of voter registration databases was coming from the Russian government." 

NBC News reported in Sept. 2016 that more than 20 states had been targeted by the Russians.

Of course this reporting is followed up by the disclaimer that there is no evidence that the Russians altered the voting rolls in any way, but I am having a harder and harder time buying that.

First off why would the Russians work so hard to penetrate these voter rolls and then simply leave them untouched?

Secondly how do we know they were not altered since these are the main data bases? Is there a hard copy of these voter's names, compiled before the hacks, that these lists can be compared against?

Clearly the Russians were desperate to defeat Hillary Clinton and to put Donald Trump into the White House, and since he entered that building he has done nothing but undermine our democracy, sabotage our government, and attack the free press.

In other words he is doing precisely as Putin has commanded.

And here we sit doing nothing to prevent it. 

Even Fox News cannot buy that Secretary of Homeland Security, who was in the room when Trump made that "sh*thole" comment, can't remember it.

DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen was in the room, but says can't recall whether Trump made "shithole countries" remark pic.twitter.com/lLbijwmlep

— Axios (@axios) January 14, 2018

What kind of language was being bandied about in that room for "shithole" to not catch your attention, and sear itself into your memory?

This is the person responsible for responding to actionable intelligence that suggests a terrorist attack.

You would think that somebody like this would constantly pay close attention to conversations happening around her, in all circumstances.

Well perhaps her hearing and memory fail when it has anything to do with controversial comments made by her boss.

Or maybe since she is part of Trump's Administration she is simply following the "Lie About Everything" rule book. 

So how do we know that the Russians did not change vote tallies in the 2016 election? We don't.

Ex-DHS secretary: We saw “scanning and probing around voter registration databases, which concerned us greatly” https://t.co/mWMU53tq9U

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 21, 2017

The Actind DHS Undersecretary also had this to add:

Acting DHS Undersecretary Jeanette Manfra confirmed in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing what has been previously reported: that Russian operatives tried to interfere with the U.S. electoral infrastructure itself. 

“We have evidence of election-related systems in 21 states that were targeted,” Manfra testified, declining to disclose which specific states were targeted. 

Manfra also said she would not share which states had data “exfiltrated” from their voting systems in an open hearing.

 You know we keep learning that the Russian cyber attacks were more widespread and consequential than previously reported almost every week.

I keep waiting for the day that it is finally reported that "Yes, the Russians stole the election and made Donald Trump the president."

However perhaps the reason we have not yet heard that statement is because DHS has not bothered to really look into it.

Courtesy of The Daily Beast:  

Despite assurances from the U.S. intelligence community that Russian hacking only influenced the 2016 U.S. election—and didn’t change vote tallies—there was never actually a formal federal audit of those systems, the Department of Homeland Security said. 

And while DHS offered free security scans to any state that wanted them, many states—even ones that took up the DHS offer, like Michigan and Maine—either use audit procedures that are considered inadequate or don’t audit their election results at all. 

“I think there’s a presumption amongst both the general public and lawmakers that DHS did some sort of investigation,” said Susan Greenhalgh, who serves as Elections Specialist at Verified Voting, a nonprofit devoted to U.S. election integrity. 

“It didn’t happen. That doesn’t mean that something happened, but it also means it wasn’t investigated.”

The article goes on to say that not only has DHS not done an intensive audit to determine if any election tallies were tampered with, it may not even be able to do that.

So again, WHY exactly are we so convinced that the Russians did not change the vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected?