Video Transcript

James Barnacle, deputy assistant director, Criminal Investigative Division: Here we are running the National Election Command post in the SIOC—Strategic Information and Operations Center—here at FBI Headquarters, where we will be operating a command post for the next week.

So information arrives here to our command post from either our tip line—it can come in through NTOC—or it can come in through our field offices, either directly to our field offices or through state or local law enforcement or election partners in the states.

So the information will come in either way nationally or through our field offices. It comes to this command post where we assess the information, we triage it, we run a thorough indices, we share it with our partner agencies and we, we talk to DOJ to assess that information and see if there is a violation of federal law.

If there is, we action it. If there is or isn't a violation of federal law we still share that with our field offices. So we're going to send that back out to the 55 field offices—wherever that information originated from. Share it with them, and we'll ask them to share it with their state or local partners.

We feel like we're well positioned to handle and triage information that comes in. So we have the people in place. We've identified the right people at the different agencies. We've developed those partnerships over the last few years. And now we're going to put everyone together, co-located, and we are going to go through a process. We're going to take the information that comes in, and we're going to take it through our process, and we're going to share that information.

We've innovated in the last few years. Our command post posture has changed from one election to the other. I've been involved in elections since 2012, and we've changed. Our response is more robust. We have more people working this command post. I think in 2012, maybe we had 15 to 20 people in that National Election Command Post here at Headquarters; today we have 80.

And so we've grown our response. And we have best practices. So after every election we look at it, we do an after-action assessment to see what we did well, what we didn't do well. And then we make a recommendation in writing for the next command post in two years for the next federal election, or four years for the next presidential election.