The Bizarre Reason Why Obama Let Russia Screw With the Election

This is quintessential Obama. Go on a late night comedy show to blame others for your own incompetence.

President Obama suggested in a new interview that voters should have cared more about Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential race.

“What is it about the state of our democracy where the leaks of what were frankly not very interesting emails, that didn’t have any explosive information in them, ended up being an obsession?” he asked in an interview on “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah.

“And the fact that the Russians were doing this was not an obsession?”

The actual facts of this are quite a bit different. First, the DNC emails and particularly the John Podesta emails got virtually zero coverage in newspapers and on network news. They were covered in on the right, because we wanted to highlight the corruption endemic in the Democrat party and by the Sanders-fringe of the Democrats for the same reason. But to say that people were obsessing over the emails is an lie of Obama-esque proportions.

But while he’s on the subject, let’s look at the actions the US government took. The US government first became alarmed that there were Russian hacking attempts with political overtones underway in July 2015. Yes, you read that date correctly. And it wasn’t a low level awareness. The White House knew.

By July, law enforcement and intelligence agencies were sure that Russian intelligence hackers had breached the Democratic National Committee. A debate began inside the administration about what to do next.

A month earlier, the hackers had released an opposition file on Trump that had been stolen from the Democrats.

The US and many other nations use cyberhacking to spy on each other. The Russian actions, administration officials determined, had crossed the line because they were releasing documents the administration believed were intended to undermine the US elections.

Over the next three months, during a series of meetings at the White House and on conference calls, national security officials at the White House and other government agencies debated over how to calibrate an appropriate response.

What did they decide to do?

Some officials in the US intelligence agencies warned that the US risked starting a wider cyber-conflict with Russia in which the US had a lot more to lose because more of the US infrastructure and economy is dependent on the Internet, and much of it is vulnerable to attack.

Some State Department officials also worried about the risk to ongoing efforts to make a deal with Russia over Syria. The on-again, off-again talks continued during the summer as the US wrestled with what to do about the hacks.

…
White House officials worried that publicly outing Russia would appear to be an effort to help Clinton, and the deliberations coincided with Trump’s complaints about a rigged election. Administration officials were sure Trump would lose in November and they were worried about giving him any reason to question the election results.

In October, a month before the presidential election, the Director of National Intelligence and the Homeland Security Department for the first time publicly attributed the hacks to Russia.
…
On Tuesday, the White House defended that public statement from the intelligence community as appropriate. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that a “proportional response” was appropriate but at the time the concern was on protecting the integrity of the election.

The answer, of course, is “nothing.” They did jack sh**. They did diddly squat.

If the US public had a reason for not getting exercised about the Russian meddling in the election, they have a good reason. The government of Barack Hussein Obama didn’t care about it. What was Obama’s excuse for not caring? Simple. Russian interference was fine with the White House because they thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. She didn’t. Now it isn’t fine anymore.

The post The Bizarre Reason Why Obama Let Russia Screw With the Election appeared first on RedState.