Mitt Romney Blasts Trump on Suspected Russian Cyber Attack: ‘Inexcusable Silence and Inaction from the White House’

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Senator Mitt Romney is the rarest of breeds currently serving in the U.S. Senate: an elected Republican willing to criticize President Donald Trump.  The latest example came on Thursday afternoon after news broke of a massive cyberattack reportedly carried out by Russia.

The news came from former Trump administration official Tom Bossert in a Thursday morning New York Times op-ed. “The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate,” he warned. “President Trump is on the verge of leaving behind a federal government, and perhaps a large number of major industries, compromised by the Russian government.”

The news went from bad to worse later on Thursday when Politico’s Natasha Bertrand reported the Energy Department and National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, “have evidence that hackers accessed their networks, officials directly familiar with the matter said.”

There has been relatively little reaction yet to emerge, and it’s something of a surprise that the earliest came from Romney’s Twitter feed, who compared the attack to “Russian bombers … repeatedly flying undetected over our entire country.” He then bulleted current problems, including “Alarming U.S. vulnerability,”  and “inexcusable silence and inaction from the White House.”

Romney was mocked when, during his 2012 bid for the White House, he named Russia as the greatest geopolitical threat facing the United States. The junior senator from Utah was also the only Republican in the senate to vote for Trump’s removal during the impeachment trial of 2020.