Ex-sanctions czar bashes Obama administration's 'weak' response to Russian interference

Source: Yahoo News



Michael Isikoff Chief Investigative Correspondent, Yahoo News•April 20, 2018

The former State Department diplomat who oversaw U.S. government sanctions policy said he was “extremely” frustrated when the Obama administration issued “weak” and “frankly inadequate” sanctions against Russia in December 2016 in response to that country’s campaign to disrupt the U.S. presidential election.

Daniel Fried, who retired in 2017 after a 40-year State Department career that included serving as U.S. sanctions “coordinator” under President Obama, offered his sharp critique of the Obama administration’s response to Russian actions during an interview on the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery.”

“The Obama administration — in my view, and I was in it, OK? I was working on sanctions then — did not respond with adequate strength to the Russian interference in our elections,” Fried said. ”What we did in December 2016 was a very light set of sanctions, which I think was frankly inadequate. … We went after some cybertargets, we expelled some diplomats, we sanctioned some of the intel services. But those sanctions are not apt to be terribly effective, and we knew it. This was not enough.”

Fried was referring to a series of sanctions Obama announced in late December 2016. Declaring that “all Americans should be alarmed” by Russia’s actions during the election, Obama said at the time that the actions were “a necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests in violation of established international norms of behavior.”

Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-sanctions-czar-bashes-obama-administrations-weak-response-russian-interference-122944195.html