Republican Sen. Richard Burr, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview last week that the United States is in a new Cold War with Russia.
The North Carolina senator made the comments during an interview on North Carolina public television station UNC-TV’s “Front Row with Marc Rotterman.”
Asked if the US is in a “new Cold War” with Russia, Burr answered, “We are.”
“It mirrors very much what we saw in the 1980s, except for the fact that Russia, just like China, has used technology to leverage what they can do offensively in a way that even the United States hadn’t leveraged,” Burr said. “We have a very antiquated procurement process in the military. They have bypassed that and they’ve truly taken this birth of technology and they’ve incorporated it in their offensive R&D of weaponry.”
Burr noted that his committee was looking into possible cooperation and interaction between Russia and the Trump campaign and added that Russia was involved in spreading fake news during the election.
“There’s no question that Russia was actively in a campaign of fake news. They produced things in a way that made the real news outlets around the world believe that there was a news story that had thousands of people looking at it, when in fact that was a myth. When news outlets see that many people globally looking at something, then they feel like that’s a headline.”
Burr later noted it was hard for him to believe that Russia did not know in advance about Syria’s use of chemical weapons.
