WASHINGTON — President Trump convened his most senior national security advisers last week to discuss the administration’s effort to safeguard November’s elections from Russian interference, the first such meeting he has led on the matter, but issued no new directives to counter or deter the threat.
The meeting, which lasted less than an hour, highlighted all the activities by federal agencies to help state and local election officials, and to investigate and hold accountable Russian hackers seeking to undermine American democracy.
‘‘The president has made it clear that his administration will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections from any nation state or other malicious actors,’’ the White House said in a statement.
Trump’s National Security Council meeting follows his widely criticized news conference this month in Helsinki, where he stood next to Russian President Vladimir Putin and seemed to discount the US intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow interfered in the 2016 US election.
Trump’s remarks were striking, too, since only three days earlier 12 Russian intelligence officers were indicted by the United States on charges of hacking the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
"It was a good meeting,’’ said one senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an event that was closed to media coverage. ‘‘Everybody was on the same page. We’re doing a lot of good work across the administration.'’
There was no discussion of new actions Trump wants or of a coordinated strategy to prevent Russia from interfering in US politics, officials said. Instead, the meeting focused on the activities undertaken so far.
House Democrats issued a statement criticizing Trump for not prioritizing election security sooner.
‘‘This meeting should have happened months ago and the president deserves no special credit for doing what he is charged to do . . . by his oath of office,’’ said Representatives Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, Robert Brady of Pennsylvania, Elijah Cummings of Maryland, and Jerrold Nadler of New York, the ranking Democrats on, respectively, the Homeland Security, House Administration, Oversight and Government Reform, and Judiciary committees.
In the absence of direct guidance from the White House, individual federal agencies have marshaled efforts to detect and counter the threat.
The head of the National Security Agency created a Russia ‘‘small group’’ composed of NSA and military cyber-specialists tasked with detecting and countering Russian efforts to target the elections.
Already, at least three congressional candidates have been targeted by Russian military hackers. None of the attempts was successful, according to an executive with Microsoft, who discussed the operation at a security conference this month. One of the targets was Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, who faces a tough reelection bid.
