Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Wednesday he doesn’t recall instructing aides to keep discussions about election security off President Donald Trump’s radar, after The New York Times reported Mulvaney had said the topic “should be kept below his level.”
The Times reported that the subject of Russian election meddling was such a sensitive subject for the president that in one meeting involving former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen the acting chief “made it clear that Mr. Trump still equated any public discussion of malign Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his victory.”
A senior administration official told the Times that Mulvaney said discussing efforts to secure the 2020 presidential election with Trump “wasn’t a great subject and should be kept below his level.”
“I don’t recall anything along those lines happening in any meeting,” Mulvaney said in a statement Wednesday, and he said the White House is working to ensure neither Russia nor any other foreign adversary interferes in the 2020 vote.