Brennan Admits Obama Refused To Retaliate For Russian Cyber-Warfare Attacks On U.S.

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton | NoisyRoom.net

Former CIA director John Brennan has admitted that not only was Barack Obama aware of cyber-attacks by the Russians, he refused to go on the offensive and retaliate against Moscow. He was afraid that the Russians would attack us even harder. That’s what Brennan claims stopped Obama. He stated, “There was consideration about rattling their cages with some type of cyber event.” The way that Obama acted during his tenure as president, he might as well have been a Russian or Iranian plant. Brennan was hardly any better and many claim he secretly converted to Islam, which would explain his hatred of Israel. Both of these men are deeply immoral and frankly, evil.

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.” This is not something we didn’t already know, but now Brennan doesn’t care who knows. Instead of protecting the U.S., Obama groveled before our enemies.

Obama notoriously weakened our intelligence agencies. He crippled them and they now need a full reboot after being cleaned out. Too many spies, traitors, sycophants and political radicals are in the ranks. 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. When you do that, you weaken the overall agency and keep intelligence agents from working together. It’s a recipe for a national security catastrophe.

Van Cleave 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, Clapper and Obama in essence destroyed our intelligence capabilities.

Brennan does get it right when he says 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. But instead of doing something about them, they ignored them and gave Putin the green light to continue violating our networks. They gave limp, vague warnings to the Russians at best. Brennan called the meddling “unprecedented in terms of its scope and intensity, and made full use of the digital domain.”

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.”

So instead, Obama disrupted the election by spying on Republicans and Trump and targeting people on the right. All the while covering for Hillary Clinton’s crimes. And as Ed Morrissey at HotAir points out, Obama did go public with the Russian threat in October of 2016… to influence the election.

From Ed Morrissey:

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.

After the election, Obama ordered the expulsion of 35 Russian intelligence officers. And he deftly dumped the mess in Trump’s lap and it still has not been sufficiently addressed or dealt with. Both the FBI and CIA are charged with the conducting counterintelligence–detecting and thwarting hostile intelligence operations. Both agencies failed to halt the Russians in 2016 either in the United States or abroad. U.S. officials have said the targeting of U.S. and foreign elections by Russia is continuing. And after the latest Syrian strike, we now fear a massive infrastructure cyber-attack.

From The Washington Free Beacon:

Intelligence agencies concluded in a report issued in early 2017 that Russian civilian and military intelligence agencies conducted an aggressive operation to sow social discord during the 2016 election by opposing Hillary Clinton while seeking to boost Donald Trump’s campaign.

The Russian operation included the use of advertising on social media platforms like Facebook, and cyber attacks involving the cyber theft of emails and postings online using covert internet personas.

In February, 13 Russians were indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for running a St. Petersburg, Russia-based internet troll farm that carried out influence operations during the elections.

So far, no action has been taken against the Russian hackers engaged in email thefts.

And one wonders exactly why.

Kenneth deGraffenreid, who is a former deputy national counterintelligence executive, said Obama’s inaction was a major counterintelligence failure. “If Brennan’s claims are true, the Obama administration’s inaction in the face of this Russian cyber aggression represents a serious counterintelligence failure that has had terrible consequences,” deGraffenreid said. “Good counterintelligence requires an active element beyond collecting and analyzing the secret information that has been uncovered–namely countering this serious foreign intelligence threat in an effective way. The U.S. has the sophisticated tools to do this. There simply is no excuse for not doing so,” he added. “Our national security depends on American leaders taking the action required.”

And remember, in 2016, Brennan disclosed that in 1976 he voted for the Moscow-backed Communist Party USA candidate for president, Gus Hall, during the height of the Cold War. He should never have headed the CIA to begin with. That should have disqualified him. We have a major issue with background checks and clearing people to be in positions of power it would seem.

Tantamount to this though has to do with an American president deferring to Putin, who is a former KGB thug, a current FSB strongman, a dictator and a murderer. Russia is one of our greatest enemies and cyber-attacks are acts of war. Perhaps our leaders need reminding of that.

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