Daniel and his team were tasked in developing options to handle Russia’s cyber attacks on the United States and our elections. Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee servers in 2015 and the voter registration systems of several U.S. states in 2016. No real harm was ever done to the Democrats, but it certainly prepped the attack on President Trump.
It is widely held that the Obama administration failed to adequately piece together intelligence about the Russian campaign and develop a forceful response. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the ranking Democrat on the panel, said in an opening statement that “we were caught flat-footed at the outset and our collective response was inadequate to meet Russia’s escalation.” Really? That’s the best you’ve got? Because it’s your job to not get surprised by stuff like this.
That conclusion was reinforced by another witness, Victoria Nuland, who served as assistant secretary of state for Europe during the Obama administration. She told the panel that she had been briefed as early as December 2015 about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, long before senior DNC officials were aware of it, and that the intrusion had all the hallmarks of a Russian operation. As she and other State Department officials became “more alarmed” about what the Russians were up to in the spring of 2016, they were authorized by then Secretary of State John Kerry to develop proposals for ways to deter the Russians. But most of those steps were never taken because officials assumed they would be taken up by the next administration. “I believe there were deterrence measures we could have taken and should have taken,” Nuland testified. It was a setup.
We know for a fact that foreign agents hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails. They won’t tell us who exactly, but it is a good bet that Russia, China, Iran and North Korea all got a look-see and the Dems seemed to have been fine with that. It went towards their “greater good.” All of this was laid out as an elaborate trap for Trump and it failed spectacularly. But they are still trying to sandbag him with Russia. If there was real justice here, Obama, Clinton, Rice, Kerry, and others would all be prosecuted for trying to overthrow our government and all the crimes that go with that. But here we are.