A key part of emergency response is public messaging.

Tonight, the U.S. government is under live attack, by Russia.

Trump is tweeting diatribes not at Putin, but at Democrats.

2. Public messaging is just one of the pieces of navigating this crisis. The U.S. government can multitask, and they likely have multiple lines of effort underway.

3. While the USG tries to stop the attack they also need to investigate the scale/ scope of the damage.

4. Concurrently, the U.S. government also needs to develop a strong strategic response to Russia's catastrophic cyber attack.

5. But that response needs to be well-informed so that we don't end up in a tit-for-tat, escalatory cycle.

6. Trump has not proven himself to be a strategic thinker on Russia, to put it mildly.

7. Publicly attributing the attack and condemning the attackers is the bare minimum. By this time we should have been able to declassify intelligence about the perpetrator.

8. Other measures - to punish Putin and deter future attacks - need careful consideration. Misguided or off the cuff responses could misfire. Trump knows this won't be his problem in a few weeks, but his remaining experts do.

9. Those measures could include sanctions (don't have much teeth unless multilateralized), ramped up offensive US cyber attacks, and more.

10. But there needs to be a credible diplomatic message delivered too about the costs of trying this again - Trump's not well positioned to deliver that message, even if he wanted to.

11. @JoeBiden 's statement today laid out some strong messages about the gravity of this moment, and how he will approach cyberattacks https://buildbackbetter.gov/press-releases/statement-by-president-elect-joe-biden-on-cybersecurity/ via @Transition46

12. He is, according to this statement, getting briefed on what we know. It is critical that the current team continues briefing Biden, @KamalaHarris and other officials in the incoming Admin as they will have to deal with this crises as soon as Biden assumes the Presidency.

13. Sidenote: Trump spreading divisions and disinformation tonight is prime content for another kind of Russian attack - influence operations.

14. It seems unlikely that we don’t have declassified intelligence about Russian attribution for this attack that could be sharing publicly.

15. I’m not holding my breath for Trump to announce attribution - he prob doesn’t want to be pushed into personally admitting that he’s leaving office with the USG under live attack.

And he never condemns Russia.