Brennan Admits Obama Refused to Retaliate For Russian Cyber-Warfare Against U.S.

According to former CIA director John Brennan, who served in that post under Barack Obama, even after Obama had been apprised that Russia was conducting cyber-warfare against the United States, he refused to go on the offensive and retaliate against Moscow.

Speaking at the University of California, Berkeley, on Saturday, 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.”

Brennan said Obama was afraid that if America retaliated, Russia would increase their cyber-warfare against the United States. He stated, “There was consideration about rattling their cages with some type of cyber event.”

Obama had already weakened American intelligence; last week, Michelle Van Cleave, a former national counterintelligence executive, said that in 2013 Director of National Intelligence James Clapper reduced the national counterintelligence program authority by directing that all counterspy programs be run by individual departments or agencies. She added:

The national head of counterintelligence was rebranded director of a security and CI center, his duties further dissipated by the fixation on leaks and insider threats driven by the grievous harm done by Snowden, Manning, et al. … Gone was any dedicated strategic [counterintelligence] program, while elite pockets of proactive capabilities died of neglect. Read between the lines of existing CI guidance and you will not find a whiff of a national-level effort left, other than caretaker duties such as taking inventory and writing reports.

Brennan said he had “great confidence” Russian President Vladimir Putin had directed the Russian effort. The Obama Administration first recognized Russian interference in late 2015 and early 2016; Brennan acknowledged Russian operations had been confirmed.

Brennan stated, “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 added that Obama was concerned that U.S. action against the Russians might be perceived as Obama attempting to influence the 2016 election, saying, “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.”

But as Ed Morrissey of HotAir points out, that is a specious argument:

There are only a couple of small holes in Brennan’s argument, though. The first is that Obama did go public with the Russian threat … in October 2016, no less, and it had been leaking out of the Obama administration for months at that point. In fact, the Obama administration also leaked out a CIA plan for massive cyber retaliation in the middle of the same month, just three weeks before the election, a plan which was never activated. Obama was in full “The Russians are coming” mode by that point anyway — so why not make the Russians pay for it?

Second hole: The US picked up on these efforts much earlier than the DNC hack. First, Russia has longstanding disinformation campaigns against Western elections, but as early as 2014, intelligence showed that Moscow was going to put more resources into it. Senator Tom Cotton warned the administration that they were unprepared for the hostile action to come and tried to get Obama to expand counter-propaganda resources in 2015, only to get his proposal shot down by Obama himself.