Trump blasts Obama for not punishing Russia
Former president sanctioned, warned Russia
Los Angeles Times
For the second time in as many days, President Donald Trump took aim at his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, for what Mr. Trump said was a failure to act on intelligence that Russia was meddling in the 2016 election.
Mr. Trump appeared to quote from a Washington Post report detailing the Obama administration’s struggle to decide how to punish Russia for its alleged interference in the U.S. presidential election. “I feel like we sort of choked,” a former Obama administration official told the paper in describing those deliberations.
The Post report stated that the CIA informed Mr. Obama in August that Russian President Vladimir Putin was directly involved in a hacking campaign to disrupt the election by defeating Hillary Clinton and helping to elect Mr. Trump.
The Obama administration responded by issuing a series of warnings to Russia and later approved a package of punitive measures that included economic sanctions. Mr. Obama also authorized the planting of cyberweapons in Russia’s infrastructure in a measure that was still in its planning stages when he left office, according to the Post report.
The Obama administration first publicly announced Russia’s alleged election meddling on Oct. 7 but stopped short of saying that the efforts were aimed at helping Mr. Trump win.
Administration officials did not act more forcefully against Russia in the days leading up to the Nov. 8 election because they believed that their warnings had been sufficient to compel the country to abandon any plans of further aggression, and because they were concerned that any action could be perceived as political interference in an already heated campaign, according to the Post.
That concern was heightened, the report noted, by the fact that, as a candidate, Mr. Trump had already predicted that the election would be rigged and suggested that he might not accept the legitimacy of the results. The Obama administration’s assumption that Ms. Clinton would be the victor also contributed to its lack of urgency, according to the Post.
Mr. Trump made similar comments the day before, tweeting that the Obama administration knew of Russia’s activities “far in advance” of the election but took no action.
That came after Mr. Trump had, for months, maintained that reports of Russian election meddling amounted to “a scam” cooked up by Democrats as an excuse for losing the election.
His latest tweets came as the Justice Department and at least four congressional committees continue to investigate Russia’s alleged election interference, including possible ties between Russia and members of Trump’s campaign team.
Trump has repeatedly decried those investigations as “a witch hunt.”
Also on Saturday, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Russia “meddled” in last year’s presidential election as part of a decades-long effort to “undermine American democracy.
“I can’t talk about the details of the intelligence, but we have, the intelligence community has said, that this election was meddled with by the Russians in a way that is frankly not particularly original,” Mr. Pompeo said, according to the transcript of an interview with MSNBC broadcast Saturday morning. It was his first interview with a news network since he became Central Intelligence Agency director in January.
Before Mr. Trump took office, the outgoing director of the director of national intelligence released a report concluding that Russia attempted to influence last year’s presidential election under orders from Mr. Putin.
Mr. Pompeo, 53, said it isn’t surprising that Russia would meddle in a U.S. vote.
“They’ve been doing this for an awfully long time. And we are decades into the Russians trying to undermine American democracy,” he said. “So in some ways, there’s no news, but it certainly puts a heightened emphasis on our ability to figure out how to stop them.”
But the spy chief said he couldn’t confirm whether Mr. Putin personally directed the plan.
Asked about the Middle East, Mr. Pompeo said Iran represents a “longer challenge” to the U.S. than Sunni extremists such as the Islamic State, which he said poses an “enormous risk” to America.
“It remains the world’s largest state sponsor of terror,” he said of Iran. “We find it with enormous influence, influence that far outstrips where it was six or seven years ago.”
Mr. Pompeo said North Korea is a “very real danger” that’s getting closer to threatening the U.S. with nuclear weapons.
“For 20 years, America has whistled past the graveyard, hoping on hope that North Korea would turn colors and become part of the Western civilization,” he said. “There’s no evidence that that’s going to take place, absent a very real, very concrete set of policies that put pressure on the North Koreans to denuclearize.”
Mr. Pompeo decried the leaks about U.S. intelligence operations.
In March, the website WikiLeaks released thousands of documents it said contained secrets about how the CIA hacks into smartphones and other devices as part of the agency’s cyper-espionage efforts. Edward Snowden became a celebrity after leaking classified information from the National Security Agency about how the government monitors communications.
“There is a phenomenon, the worship of Edward Snowden, and those who steal American secrets for the purpose of self-aggrandizement or money or for whatever their motivation may be,” Mr. Pompeo said, adding that the trend seems to be accelerating.