Gene Lyons - Did Obama "Choke" When Kremlin Attacked Our Election?

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Following the publication of a highly-detailed, blockbuster Washington Post story about what the Obama administration knew about “President Vladi­mir Putin’s direct involvement” in the conspiracy to damage Hillary Clinton and make him president, Trump came up with a whole new response: Yes, Russian cyber hackers and spies interfered directly in an American presidential election: but it was all Barack Obama’s fault.

“Just out,” the president tweeted, “The Obama Administration knew far in advance of November 8th about election meddling by Russia. Did nothing about it. WHY?”

Trump soon came up with an answer: “The reason that President Obama did NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling is that he expected Clinton would win.. and did not want to ‘rock the boat. He didn’t ‘choke,’ he colluded or obstructed, and it did the Dems and Crooked Hillary no good.”

If almost hysterically false—the Obama administration made repeated attempts to inform the voting public about Russian interference, most explicitly, as bad luck would have it, on October 8, 2016, the day Trump’s boasts about grabbing women’s genitals first aired—but there’s a half-truth in his tweet, too.

It says here that President Obama did, indeed, “choke,” as one anonymous administration official told Post reporters, and we’re all paying the price.

As happened more than once during his presidency, Obama appears to have over-thought the situation to the point of paralysis—pursing the will-‘o-the-wisp of patriotic bipartisanship long after it had become obvious that not only Trump, but key Republican leaders, had long since put party above country.

Could anybody be surprised that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), for example, would stonewall any effort to inform voters that a hostile foreign power was brazenly taking Trump’s side in the election?

Obama was.

In effect, congressional Republicans had chosen Putin over Hillary Clinton. By August, let us recall, Trump himself was not only openly urging Russian hackers to search for Clinton’s emails—barefaced collusion—but predicting that the election was going to be rigged against him.

Obama could have done in August what he did after the election in December: hit Russia with sanctions and expelled Russian diplomats. But he reportedly feared that without GOP support, any vigorous action could easily backfire.

“Obama’s approach,” sources told the Post, “often seemed reducible to a single imperative: Don’t make things worse. As brazen as the Russian attacks on the election seemed, Obama and his top advisers feared that things could get far worse.”

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