Former CIA director John Brennan says President Obama refused to counter cyber warfare from Russia
According to former CIA director John Brennan under President Obama, the administration refused to counter the cyber warfare attacks from Russia, never wanting to go on the offensive and retaliate against Moscow.
Speaking at the University of California, Berkeley, Brennan admitted that there was a plan to respond and retaliate against Moscow that had been formulated by the intelligence community, but Obama refused to act, instead weakly issuing a verbal warning to Russia. Brennan acknowledged, “President Obama was the ultimate decision-maker on that.”
President Barack Obama meets with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at his dacha outside Moscow, Russia 2009 Pete Souza photo
The former CIA director defended the Obama administration’s handling of what is widely viewed as a significant counterintelligence failure during the presidential election.
Free Beacon summarized that “The disclosure that Obama scrapped a cyber plan to retaliate against Moscow for election interference comes as a former senior counterintelligence official, Michelle Van Cleave, revealed in congressional testimony last week that the Obama administration weakened American counterintelligence programs by downgrading a top counterspy office.”
Brennan said he had “great confidence” the Russian influence operation was authorized and directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB intelligence officer. The Russian intelligence services also “know what the mission is, know what their capabilities are, and will apply them to issues that are of interest to Russian national security,” he said.
Brennan called the meddling “unprecedented in terms of its scope and intensity, and made full use of the digital domain.”
Obama also made clear to the CIA that he did not want the agency doing anything “in reality or in perception” that would have advanced the Russian disinformation and propaganda campaign, Brennan said.
“We were really trying to strike the right balance between doing everything we could to prevent and thwart as well as to uncover and understand what the Russians were doing without doing anything that would almost advance their interests in trying to disrupt our election,” he said.
Obama also was afraid any U.S. action against the Russians might be perceived as an outgoing Democratic president working to influence the election outcome.
“So if we did more things and stood at the hilltops and cried out, ‘the Russians, the Russians are trying to help Trump get elected,’ and if President Obama who is the titular head of the Democratic Party were to do that, I think that there would have been a lot of people would believe, I think with some justification, that the President of the United States was trying to influence the outcome of a presidential election,” Brennan said.
Brennan also said the Obama administration opposed aggressive action because of the president’s belief that any effort to punish the Russian might produce stepped up activities.
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