Ben Sasse Talks to Barr About Dangers of Foreign Interference: ‘You Don’t Need a Bar and a Hooker Anymore’

Republican Sen. Ben Sasse, in his questions for Attorney General Robert Barr on Wednesday, focused a great deal on prevention of future instances of interference with government and electoral process by foreign actors. He made the rather colorful point that, in this day an age, you don’t need prosaic honey pot traps to obtain intel from, or to blackmail, those who may leak or disclose classified information.

Sasse first got into specific detail about the Russians currently known to be involved in the criminal or questionable acts to date. He and Barr talked about Paul Manafort and his ties to Russian oligarchs, about the bribing of U.S. officials by Russians, and what the line is on legality for business dealings with such people. “Is it permissible for someone to be paid by somebody who is basically an enemy of the United States, and then coult that individual just volunteer and start to donate their time and talent and expertise to a campaign in the U.S.?”

Before Barr answered that, Sasse interrupted himself to say that what is “painfully tragic” about a hearing like this is that people will tune it out, or that if they don’t tune it out they’ll think “the only two takeaways you need to know is that a bunch of people were pro-Trump before they came and they stayed pro-Trump, and a bunch of people were anti-Trump before they came, and they stayed anti-Trump, and we didn’t dig into any of what the report actually says.”

“I think these 448 pages say a bunch of really important things about intelligence operations against the United States people and our public and our government and our public trust.,” he said. “And I think it isn’t just about 2016.”

Sasse said a lot of matters about 2016 still matter, but an important takeaway is that we’re going to have to worry about the same type of operations in the future, only they’ll be more sophisticated than Russia’s efforts.

He asked Barr to clarify what is legal and illegal, and what’s appropriate and not appropriate with regard to cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies, and they discussed for several minutes in great detail, and agreed that there must be a lot more education of people in government about such threats.

In closing, Barr added “If I could just say, the pattern is that whenever there is an election, foreign governments and their operatives frequently descend on the people who they think could have a shot at winning. It’s common. The most typical scenario is that they do try to make contacts and so forth.”

Sasse then made his closing remark in the discussion.

“And in a digital cyber era, you don’t need a bar and a hooker anymore. You can surround people digitally much easier,” he said. “And we know that we’re going to be having these kinds of attacks in the future and we need to up our game.”

Committee chair Lindsey Graham said “Minus the bar and the hooker, we’re going to be having hearings about all this stuff,” getting a laugh from Barr before moving on to the next Senator.

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