Friday, February 07, 2020

Obama response to 2016 Russian election meddling had ‘many flaws,’ Senate report finds

The Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday issued its long-awaited report on how former President Barack Obama handled Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The bipartisan report found that the Obama administration was ill-prepared to handle the novel election interference offensive and recommended that in the future the “public should be informed as soon as possible” if a foreign active measures campaign is detected. “After discovering the existence, if not the full scope, of Russia’s election interference efforts in late-2016, the Obama Administration struggled to determine the appropriate response,” the committee’s GOP chairman, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, said in a statement. Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the committee’s top Democrat, said that there were “many flaws” with the Obama administration’s response but noted that “many of those were due to problems with our own system – problems that can and should be corrected.” The Senate Intelligence Committee also concluded that the Russian government sought to bolster Trump’s 2016 election chances.The Senate report released Thursday is the third, out of an expected five, stemming from the committee’s probe into the government’s handling of Russian meddling efforts. The investigation began in 2017 and has proceeded on a largely bipartisan basis, in contrast with parallel congressional inquiries. The committee found that the Obama administration was “not well-postured” to counter the Russian interference campaign and said that while “high-level warnings were delivered to Russian officials, those warnings may or may not have tempered Moscow’s activity.” The committee emphasized that in case of future attacks, the public should be notified “as soon as possible with a clear and succinct statement of the threat.” “If the Administration had informed the public of Russian hacking and dumping earlier than October 7, and had there been bipartisan condemnation of these operations, the public and the press may have reacted differently to the WikiLeaks releases,” the committee wrote...MORE

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