Allahpundit:
This puts a different spin on the Democratic blame-shifting, doesn’t it? Barack Obama and other Democrats have argued that Hillary Clinton lost the election in part due to “fake news” fueled by Russian propaganda, and that Republicans didn’t want to act to stop it. Politico has its hands on document that shows Senator Tom Cotton wanted to form an intelligence task force in early 2016 to counter those efforts — and the Obama administration shot it down:
The White House opposed a Republican-led push earlier this year to create an executive-branch task force to battle Russia’s covert information operations, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.
Sen. Tom Cotton, a leading GOP defense hawk who has long urged President Barack Obama to take a harder line on Russia, sought to force the White House to create a panel with representatives from a number of government agencies to counter Russian efforts “to exert covert influence,” including by exposing Russian “falsehoods, agents of influence, corruption, human rights abuses, terrorism, and assassinations.”
But the administration rejected the call, saying in a letter to Congress that hasn’t been released publicly that the panel would duplicate existing efforts to battle Russian influence operations — an argument Cotton rejects.
Er … what duplicate efforts? Intelligence analyst John Schindler started warning about a lack of counter-propaganda structure over a year ago, as a nascent State Department effort got dismantled before it ever got going:
Nearly a year ago, the State Department created a Counter-Disinformation Team, inside its Bureau of International Information Programs, as a small, start-up effort to resist Russian disinformation. Consisting of only a handful of staffers, it was supposed to expose the most laughable Moscow lies about America and the West that are disseminated regularly via RT and other outlets. They created a beta website and prepared to wage the struggle for truth online.
Alas, their website never went live. Recently the State Department shut down the tiny Counter-Disinformation Team and any efforts by the Obama administration to resist Putin’s propaganda can now be considered dead before birth. Intelligence Community sources tell me that it was closed out of a deep desire inside the White House “not to upset the Russians.” …
Who killed the Counter-Disinformation Team and why? What did the team produce during the time it existed? What has become of this product? How many people were on it? Does the State Department not consider countering Kremlin disinformation to be in its remit? Does the White House agree? What about the National Security Council? Is anybody in the U.S. government authorized to debunk Putin’s lies – if so, who? If not, why not?
Schindler updated his readers last week with a suggestion:
Democrats are clamoring for a Congressional investigation of clandestine Russian operations which influenced our election this year, and that’s a great idea. At the outset, they should demand that the White House answer the questions I asked a year ago—they are the logical place to start any inquiry into what went wrong in Washington, and why.
It’s past time to ditch wishful thinking and embrace clarity, what spies term “ground truth.” Russian intelligence interfered with American democracy this year. The extent of its impact on our election is debatable, and may not be fully understood for years. However, the blame for Russian disinformation damaging Hillary Clinton and her party—in particular, the lack of any pushback from Washington, which allowed the Kremlin’s deception machine to go into overdrive—lies not with Donald Trump or the Republicans, but with Barack Obama himself.
The Cotton letter would be another piece of evidence of this. If the White House told Congress that they already had efforts in place to counter Russian propaganda that Cotton’s proposal would have duplicated, where was it over the past year? Who led that effort, and have they been held accountable for its apparent failures? Clearly the president himself is dissatisfied with its performance and blames it for the outcome of the election (a highly disputable conclusion, of course), so why hasn’t Obama fired the people responsible for its operation? The answer appears to be that there’s no one to fire — because Obama and his team didn’t take it seriously. Until his party lost an election, that is.
Politico’s Austin Wright got a response from the White House that scoffed at the notion that Republicans had taken a tougher line than Obama on Russia and argued that they wouldn’t respond in October when Obama finally began warning about the threat. In light of this letter and of Schindler’s reporting, that’s clearly nonsense. Not only did Cotton work to build bipartisan support for the proposal, he was attempting months earlier to fill a gap left by the Obama administration.
Putin is more of a man then Obama Putin rides motorcycles,horse’s and such Obama rides on a stupid bicycle while wearing one of those dippy bike helmets