we now turn to our senior national and environmental correspondent, ben tracy. good morning to you. >> good morning. >> so, ben, we hear florida's governor desantis say things like this is a 500-year-flood

event. they've never experienced anything like this. what's making the storm hit differently? >> well, i think we have to look at this in the context of climate change. we should say, first off, climate change doesn't cause a hurricane to happen, but scientists increasingly believe that climate change is making hurricanes stronger and more destructive. the reason for that is pretty simple. it's that the ocean waters are much warm are than they used to be and warm ocean water is rocket fuel for a hurricane. so, when one of these storms passes over this warm water, it just turbo charges this thing. it's what they called rapid intensification. we're seeing this more often. they actually believe since 2017, we've had about 30 storms that have rapidly intensified right before they hit the coast. that's a huge issue for people in coastal communities because they don't have as much time to prepare for that. in addition to all of that, climate change is making the atmosphere warmer. that means there's more water. there's more rain when these storms hit. that leads to flooding. >> so, taxpayers just invested this historic amount of money in

trying to control climate change. that's what president biden sold it as and democrats supported. you also have fema sending a record $3.5 billion to states to lessen impacts. is this going where the scientists say it needs to go? >> scientists would say any money that's spent to quickly wean us off fossil fuels, to transition us to renewable forms of energy is where the money is best spent. if you're the governor, you know you have to deal with disaster and the impacts on people and property. you're talking about the historic investment. this is $370 billion for climate initiatives. a very small amount of that, only $4 billion to $5 billion is going for what they call climate resilience. this would go to help some coastal communities rebuild wetlands, rebuild sea walls, the things you need for protection. scientists would say, as long as we keep burning fossil fuelings we're digging a hole and making

that hole bigger. that's why you hear about the renewable energy provisions of this, the electric car credits, the things we can do in our own homes to stop using fossil fuels. >> that's an important part of this story. but, again, immediate versus long term. >> exactly. you're going to see projects all over this country where they're building massive infrastructure projects to try to defend the coast. but the one thing most people never want to talk about is a phenomenon called managed retreat. this is not something americans like to hear but it's this issue of, should we be rebuilding in these areas that are prone to get hit over and over again? and at what point does that just become financially irresponsible if you can't get insurance in these areas? you then have people who lose their homes, their businesses, and they're just left flat broke. >> that's a question for any governor. >> exactly. >> in one of these coastal communities. ben, great context. tank you for joining us. we'll be right back with a lot more "face the nation." stay with us. brightest minds.

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welcome back to "face the naion." we're joined by cyber security infrastructure chris krebs. >> good morning. >> i want to ask you first about hurricane response, because you were involved back in 2017 with the response to hurricane maria, which devastatedreo igge challe you see right now, both for that island and for this devastation in florida? is the devastation, as you mentioned. what structures, what communities can actually take power. i think in general and in speaking with the power restoration task forces, they've done a good job of marshalling resources, getting linemen and crews down into the areas that can actually be restored. as you heard from the mayor and the administrator, there are areas that simply just cannot take power right now. it's going to take time to evaluate, see if they're condemned or otherwise. but again, you know, the power teams have done a good job in florida.

they've actually, i think, done a good job in puerto rico as well after fiona, when you're looking at, you know, ten days after fiona, 90% of the power is restored. maria, that took about seven months. >> and they're still, in many ways, on the recovery track from maria. >> yeah, you know, i think over the last few years, they have done a better job of management, of investment and of maintenance, but now they're in a position where i think they have to think about upgrading the system. they're still fairly antiquated, older system and they have to move forward with that. >> i want to ask you about infrastructure beyond hurricane, of course. we are, what, 36 days from the midterms. you have large displacement now of people in florida. is that going to have an impact on the ability to carry out elections? >> there are plans in place. you know, we heard the senator talk about hurricane michael from 2018, which mexico beach was devastated. there are rules and systems in place that allow for some flexibility in how the elections are conducted. they will ensure that those that

want to vote can vote. if i've seen anything, it's election officials are natural crisis managers and really good at the resilient side of it. >> they have to be right now, given all the pressures on them. switching to the cyber front, so you were in office during the midterms in 2018. and cyber command was pretty explicit, that they went on the offense. >> yes. >> to protect our midterm races at that time. taking out russian operatives, to deter spreading disinformation. >> right. >> we know they're watching what's happening this year. what does that look like? what is protecting our election against foreign interference look like? >> well, you know, as i look at the concerns around the 2022 midterm elections, i have three primary areas of, you know, focus. first is the continued domestic efforts to undermine the process, attack workers. the second is this increase in insider risk. and as that all kind of manifests in political instability domestically, it

gives a lot of opportunity and attack surface for the bad guys. we've seen over the last couple of years the foreign actors, that is, we've seen the iranians, we've seen the russians and even recently we've seen the chinese take some of the russian plans, it's almost russification of chinese operations. what i would look at is more plagiarizing, domestic issues, and driving wedges into the discourse here in the u.s. probably not manufacturing new narratives or anything like that. instead, really hitting on the issues that we're already talking about here and just making them that much more heated. >> meta took down a small chinese network trying to influence elections. this is the facebook sphere. is that the prime platform for disinformation? >> i think they're using a number of different techniques. that's the chinese. again, it's still fairly rudimentary and remedial in terms of the chinese influence operations. once they get a little more sophisticated, i think that's

where they're probably going to have a greater impact. it's not just online. it's not just the social media platforms. they're actually working at the local levels to support individual candidates. and this is some, you know, reporting, i think, that may come out in the near future but the chinese have been very, very active at a local corruption level where the russians are more focused at the top on the more disrupting the election process. a good friend in theintece com , you know, russia is the hurricane, china is climate change in the sense of political interference. >> the sort of slow, creeping, coming up on you. i want to come back. you said insider risk to u.s. elections. >> actually, we're seeing actually election workers that have been swept up in the continued efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election. now they're on the inside. they're posing a risk. we've seen in mesa county, colorado, georgia, michigan, where workers have allowed

access by unauthorized people into the system and access to equipment. just the other day in the primaries, we saw that there was a worker that plugged the usb drive into a machine and now those systems are -- have been rendered or taken out of service. we actually, rather than just the foreign interference threats, i think we really had to think about in '18 and '20, now we have actual insiders. we have election workers that are posing a risk to the process itself. >> well, that's terrifying. so part of the balance for anyone who is in a role like you had, how much do you publicize, how much do you draw attention? at what point does that undermine confidence rather than raist's tchalleng the admtat thhe are a lot of tools right now available to counter both threats to election workers. we continue to see death threats

and under intimidation means against election workers, and election workers themselves that have been swept up into the process. the tools aren't necessarily there. we do need local law enforcement to get more involved in investigating threats, protecting election workers themselves making sure their personal contact information is being released so they get more threats. this is an area that i think congress needs to take a hard look at. are the right deterrence measures in place from criminal statutes and then do we have the investigation techniques? it is -- i personally have received a significant number of death threats and other, you know, other threats. some of them come in through anonymous -- you know, through anonymous means like proton mail. we do need more attention on these threats otherwise we're going to see a shortage of election workers. >> that is quite a warning, chris. thank you for joining us. we'll continue to track that story and turn to yet another crisis right now, which is the

trump administration national security adviser in 2017, retired lieutenant general hr mcmaster who joins us. thank you for updating us on what's happening on the ground in ukraine with the russian invasion. i want to get your reaction to what defense secretary austin called a significant development on the battlefield in the past 48 hours. what do you see happening? what do you forecast is vladimir putin's next move? >> good morning, margaret. it's great to be with you. well, this is a tremendous victory for the ukrainians. it's a victory that i think they could turn into a cascading series of defeats of russian forces. this is the encirclement of the russian forces pulling back, but also in the last two days, ukraine has also simultaneously defeated a russian counterattack

and also made progress further in the south near the strategically important city of kherson. what we might be here is at the precipice of the collapse of the russian army in ukraine. a moral collapse. and i think, you know, they must really be at a breaking point. if you look at just the numbers of casualties, the vast area they're trying to defend, and now, of course, russia is trying to mobilize concrypts and send them to the front untrained. i k it' very important tonderst forces that are in full retreat now were really the first round of mobilization. remember when putin was trying to recruit more and more people with paying about three times the average wages to get so-called volunteers to go forward. those forces were hastily trained, thrown into that front. these are the forces that are collapsing just right now. >> well, and as that happens on

the battlefield, rhetorically you hear president putin raise the volume, again, dangling that nuclear threat on friday. there was another russian leader who talked about using low-yield nuclear weapons. it's not clear what nato or the u.s. response would be if russia used a nuclear tactical weapon on the battlefield in ukraine. what do you think it should be? >> well, i think the message to him is if you use a nuclear weapon, it's a suicide weapon. the response from nato and the united states doesn't have to be nuclear. first of all, i would say, margaret, he's under extreme pressure. you have the failures on the battlefield, which we talked about. but also the mobilization is failing. what he's done is mobilized almost 300,000 people to leave the country. these are men who are fleeing to neighboring counties to escape this conscription and now the russian people saying, i thought this was a special military

operation. putin says, leave it to me. now he's going to bail them out with this mobilization. what you're seeing among the hypernationalist group of bloggers and even on state media is a blaming of the military. what the military is coming back to putin saying, hey, it's not our fault. we just need more troops. it's the cycle he's responding to with the only quiver he has left, which is to threaten the use of a nuclear weapon. i'll tell you, margaret, i don't think a nuclear weapon is usable there. i think we ought to take it seriously. we have to. but we ought to not allow this to cow us in terms of support for the ukrainians. >> the other weapon he has is energy, of course. and tracking the potential sabotage on the gas pipeline. i want to also ask you about, when you were in office back in 2017, which is the first time that the u.s. gave offensive weapons to ukraine, i remember when you were put in that

position of having to explain a conversation then president trump had with russian officials in the oval office, where he mentioned classified information, and you called it holy appropriate at the time. given what's going on now with this investigation into the classified material at mar-a-lago, were you ever uncomfortable with the former president's handling of classified information? >> well, margaret, remember, i left in february-march of 2018. but while i was there, i did not see any problems in handling of classified information. and what you're talking about really is a session in which the president did not disclose classified information, but somebody leaked it, and then it was published in the newspaper. so, the classified information. i think what is important is to go back to that period and that provision of javelins, of the defensive capabilities to the ukrainians was really important. the argument i made to president trump at the time was, hey, these people are telling you it

is provocative to provide ukraine with defensive capabilities. actually, what provokes putin is weakness. he was persuaded by that argument. i think that argument is still relevant today. i mean, as putin is encountering these difficulties, i think it's now time to remove some of the restrictions that we've put on ourselves in terms of the support to give theukinians, iking about long-range surveillance capabilities tied to long-range precision strikes. that's what they need, i think, to maintain the momentum militarily at this stage. >> i have a follow-up question on that, but just to button up the question i asked you, no, you were never comfortable with the handling of classified information? >> no, margaret, there were systems in place. i don't know what happened to those systems. but i was never uncomfrtable with it while i was there. but that was a long time ago now. >> okay. i know when you're in office you never like answering counterfactuals but you're not in office, so was vladimir putin so committed to this invasion

that he would have gone through with it no matter what? >> i don't think so. think about all the support that we've given now to the ukrainians. what if we had done that a few years ago? i think putin may have come to the conclusion, well, ukraine cannot be -- cannot be subassumed at a cost. he was wrong and he's been proven wrong by courageous ukia dending their sovereignty. i think deterrence by denial was a failure by us. in many of the actions we took inheasion almost, i think, inadvertently green lighted it. pulling our forces out of the black sea, listill the th things we weren't going to do. i think the biden administration has recovered from that but i think now is time to lift restrictions on the support we're giving ukrainians so they can finish this fight on their terms. >> h.r. mcmaster, thank you very much for your insight today. we'll be back in a moment.

in october, which means a new supreme court term and new supreme court justice ketanji brown jackson is now on the job. chief legal correspondent jan crawford is here with us. jan, this is a change. how much of a development is it to have on this court? >> we have an historic new justice, first black female supreme court justice. she'll take a spot on the bench. we have four women on the court now, that's never happened before either. what hasn't changed is this is a court firmly turned to the

right. six conservative justices, three liberals. it's a court willing to rethinkg so,es all the histo >> you were here in june aleindi statement in talking about potential political earthquakes coming out of supreme court decisions, like what we saw out of the overturning of roe versus wade. the first key court case is tuesday. what should we be expecting? >> well, i mean, let me just say right off the top, buckle your seat belts because as contentious as the last term was, i think this term has the potential to be equally as divisive. you'll have lgbtq, voting rights, affirmative action, and they're starting on tuesday with a major voting rights challenge from alabama. they say alabama is diluting the power of black voters because

they're packing most of the state's black voters into one legislative district. they say there should be two. alabama is saying, well, we shouldn't even be considering race in drawing legislative districts. that would violate the constitution. if the court agrees with that, that would be a major rethinking of the voting rights act.,s cas significant implications well beyond the state of alabama. >> and you -- >> but that's not on race. at the end of the month we have arva and university of case out north carolina that is asking the supreme court, a group of white and asian american students, to say that any consideration of race in admissions, affirmative action in college admissions, violates the constitution. i expect the court to agree with that decision and end the use of affirmative action. obviously, quite a controversial decision. then they have the case involving a colorado website designer and whether or not she can be forced to design a website for a same-sex couples getting married despite her views that that would be wrong.

she says it violates her free speech rights. if that weren't enough, another case on voting rights. this is all just coming down the pike quickly. another case that could undermine the role of state courts in deciding and reviewing election procedures. so, they'll continue to take more cases, but this is a supreme court that is saying, we're being asked to decide these cases and we're going to do it, even if it means our opinions are unpopular. >> we've seen with public polling there is this perception of a politicized court and gallup's numbers, they hadn't seen a drop like this in confidence since they began asking the question. >> right. you know, we have seen in the past controversial decisions lead to a dip in the court after bush versus gore. the court recovered from that. now the question is the basic legitimacy being questioned at all? can they recover? >> this is going to be a huge question. i know the justices themselves have been making public comments. jan, you're going to be back with us, i can tell you that

much. we'll be back with all of you in just a moment. onalized. based on your goals, whatever they may be. all that planning has paid off. looks like you can make this work. we can make this work. and the feeling of confidence that comes from our advice? i can make this work. that seems to be universal. i can make this work. i can make this work. no wonder more than 9 out of 10 clients are likely to recommend us. because advice worth listening to is advice worth talking about. ameriprise financial.

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it's been a sad week for us here at cbs news. our bill plante, a remarkable journalist, who was part of our family for more than 50 years, died wednesday at the age of 84. in his legendary career, bill covered some of the biggest stories for cbs news in and outside of washington. but for us, bill was a treasurd friend and mentor, particularly to dozens of producers, correspondents, cameramen who worked with him on the white house beat over the 32 years he reported to our tiny little cbs booth down the hall from the briefing room. bill's smile, his booming broadcaster voice -- >> it did you make a mistake in sending arms to tehran, sir? >> no. >> his sense of humor.

>> you're never too old to do something stupid! >> in his never-ending energy and stam ma are all among the things we will miss the most. bill made us better journalists and better people, and he taught us how to take a step back from the pressure of the news of the day to reflect, pause and embrace the experience. he loved life, and we are all grateful to have known him. that's it for us today. thank you for watching. for "face the nation," i'm margaret brennan. meet the rugby captain who is as important to his country as his team.

gillette, cbs news, new york. >> announcer: this is the "cbs overnight news." we begin tonight with hurricane ian's deadly aftermath. officials now say as many as 84 people were killed in the florida and the carolinas. at least 42 of them in lee county, florida, home to the city of fort myers. well, this weekend some homeowners returned to pick through their destroyed homes as the national guard began the long work of cleaning away the debris. officials said it could be months before power is fully restored to the state. right now nearly 1 million customers are without power. cbs's manuel bojorquez, who has

been on the ground all