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CNN Op-Ed Admits "Mueller's Report Looks Bad For Obama"

Nutty Cortez

Dummy (D) NY
The partisan warfare over the Mueller report will rage, but one thing cannot be denied: Former President Barack Obama looks just plain bad. On his watch, the Russians meddled in our democracy while his administration did nothing about it.

The Mueller report flatly states that Russia began interfering in American democracy in 2014. Over the next couple of years, the effort blossomed into a robust attempt to interfere in our 2016 presidential election. The Obama administration knew this was going on and yet did nothing. In 2016, Obama's National Security Adviser Susan Rice told her staff to "stand down" and "knock it off" as they drew up plans to "strike back" against the Russians, according to an account from Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump".

Is this some kind of penance on this holy weekend for CNN's past sins of omission? Perhaps. But Jennings then asked the hard question: Why did Obama go soft on Russia?

My opinion is that it was because he was singularly focused on the nuclear deal with Iran. Obama wanted Putin in the deal, and to stand up to him on election interference would have, in Obama's estimation, upset that negotiation. This turned out to be a disastrous policy decision.

Obama's supporters claim he did stand up to Russia by deploying sanctions after the election to punish them for their actions. But, Obama, according to the Washington Post, "approved a modest package... with economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic." In other words, a toothless response to a serious incursion.

But don't just take my word for it that Obama failed. Congressman Adam Schiff, who disgraced himself in this process by claiming collusion when Mueller found that none exists, once said that "the Obama administration should have done a lot more." The Washington Post reported that a senior Obama administration official said they "sort of choked" in failing to stop the Russian government's brazen activities. And Obama's ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said, "The punishment did not fit the crime" about the weak sanctions rolled out after the 2016 election.

A legitimate question Republicans are asking is whether the potential "collusion" narrative was invented to cover up the Obama administration's failures. Two years have been spent fomenting the idea that Russia only interfered because it had a willing, colluding partner: Trump. Now that Mueller has popped that balloon, we must ask why this collusion narrative was invented in the first place.

Given Obama's record on Russia, one operating theory is that his people needed a smokescreen to obscure just how wrong they were. They've blamed Trump. They've even blamed Mitch McConnell, in some twisted attempt to deflect blame to another branch of government. Joe Biden once claimed McConnellrefused to sign a letter condemning the Russians during the 2016 election. But McConnell's office counters that the White House asked him to sign a letter urging state electors to accept federal help in securing local elections -- and he did. You can read it here.

I guess if I had failed to stop Russia from marching into Crimea, making a mess in Syria, and hacking our democracy I'd be looking to blame someone else, too.

But the Mueller report makes it clear that the Russian interference failure was Obama's alone. He was the commander-in-chief when all of this happened. In 2010, he and Eric Holder, his Attorney General, declined to prosecute Julian Assange, who then went on to help Russia hack the Democratic National Committee's emails in 2016. He arguably chose to prioritize his relationship with Putin vis-à-vis Iran over pushing back against Russian election interference that had been going on for at least two years.

If you consider Russian election interference a crisis for our democracy, then you cannot read the Mueller report, adding it to the available public evidence, and conclude anything other than Barack Obama spectacularly failed America. Subsequent investigations of this matter should explore how and why Obama's White House failed, and whether they invented the collusion narrative to cover up those failures.

As President Trump just commented, this hoax was "...a big, fat, waste of time, energy and money - $30,000,000 to be exact."

"It is now finally time to turn the tables and bring justice to some very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying or Treason.

This should never happen again!"
 
D

Deleted member 21794

Guest
I think Obama went easy on Russia because he loves ANYTHING that weakens and destroys America.
 

FakeName

Governor
The partisan warfare over the Mueller report will rage, but one thing cannot be denied: Former President Barack Obama looks just plain bad. On his watch, the Russians meddled in our democracy while his administration did nothing about it.

The Mueller report flatly states that Russia began interfering in American democracy in 2014. Over the next couple of years, the effort blossomed into a robust attempt to interfere in our 2016 presidential election. The Obama administration knew this was going on and yet did nothing. In 2016, Obama's National Security Adviser Susan Rice told her staff to "stand down" and "knock it off" as they drew up plans to "strike back" against the Russians, according to an account from Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump".

Is this some kind of penance on this holy weekend for CNN's past sins of omission? Perhaps. But Jennings then asked the hard question: Why did Obama go soft on Russia?

My opinion is that it was because he was singularly focused on the nuclear deal with Iran. Obama wanted Putin in the deal, and to stand up to him on election interference would have, in Obama's estimation, upset that negotiation. This turned out to be a disastrous policy decision.

Obama's supporters claim he did stand up to Russia by deploying sanctions after the election to punish them for their actions. But, Obama, according to the Washington Post, "approved a modest package... with economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic." In other words, a toothless response to a serious incursion.

But don't just take my word for it that Obama failed. Congressman Adam Schiff, who disgraced himself in this process by claiming collusion when Mueller found that none exists, once said that "the Obama administration should have done a lot more." The Washington Post reported that a senior Obama administration official said they "sort of choked" in failing to stop the Russian government's brazen activities. And Obama's ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said, "The punishment did not fit the crime" about the weak sanctions rolled out after the 2016 election.

A legitimate question Republicans are asking is whether the potential "collusion" narrative was invented to cover up the Obama administration's failures. Two years have been spent fomenting the idea that Russia only interfered because it had a willing, colluding partner: Trump. Now that Mueller has popped that balloon, we must ask why this collusion narrative was invented in the first place.

Given Obama's record on Russia, one operating theory is that his people needed a smokescreen to obscure just how wrong they were. They've blamed Trump. They've even blamed Mitch McConnell, in some twisted attempt to deflect blame to another branch of government. Joe Biden once claimed McConnellrefused to sign a letter condemning the Russians during the 2016 election. But McConnell's office counters that the White House asked him to sign a letter urging state electors to accept federal help in securing local elections -- and he did. You can read it here.

I guess if I had failed to stop Russia from marching into Crimea, making a mess in Syria, and hacking our democracy I'd be looking to blame someone else, too.

But the Mueller report makes it clear that the Russian interference failure was Obama's alone. He was the commander-in-chief when all of this happened. In 2010, he and Eric Holder, his Attorney General, declined to prosecute Julian Assange, who then went on to help Russia hack the Democratic National Committee's emails in 2016. He arguably chose to prioritize his relationship with Putin vis-à-vis Iran over pushing back against Russian election interference that had been going on for at least two years.

If you consider Russian election interference a crisis for our democracy, then you cannot read the Mueller report, adding it to the available public evidence, and conclude anything other than Barack Obama spectacularly failed America. Subsequent investigations of this matter should explore how and why Obama's White House failed, and whether they invented the collusion narrative to cover up those failures.

As President Trump just commented, this hoax was "...a big, fat, waste of time, energy and money - $30,000,000 to be exact."

"It is now finally time to turn the tables and bring justice to some very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying or Treason.

This should never happen again!"
"Look over there!"
 

Days

Commentator
Have you started reading the report yet?

Still too afraid of facts?
the report is 400 pages, this editor at the Hill read it, and here's what he says it says...

The Mueller report concludes it was not needed (Link)
By Kevin Brock, opinion contributor — 04/20/19 01:30 PM EDT

How would you like to spend two years and $30 million assembling a report that concludes you were not needed in the first place? Voilà: the Mueller report. Nice work if you can get it.

The report is appropriately thick, D.C. thick. It takes more than 400 pages to state the obvious: There was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians to swing the 2016 election. Zip. Nada. Nothing to see here.

It goes on to tee up a question about obstruction of justice that the special counsel was not asked to investigate — and then doesn’t answer it. Wait. What?

These are some of the most elite prosecutors in the country, and they went full Hamlet on a legal determination a third-year law student would knock down between Budweisers. This is what we get for $30 million? Make a call; that’s your job as prosecutors.

It doesn’t seem the special counsel team is fooling anyone. It showed that it would indict a ham sandwich if it could. The obvious answer is that it had no confidence in a criminal obstruction case.

Instead, it punted to the Trump-appointed attorney general. One gets the sense this may have been by design.

Well, what about all the Russians who were indicted by Mueller’s team for trying to interfere with the election? Those were chip-shot FBI counterintelligence investigations that were well in flow when the special counsel took them over. They didn’t need special counsel magic.

Had they remained FBI-controlled cases, the indictments would have been sealed and the subjects arrested when they likely returned to the United States for more mischief in 2020. We can forget about that now.

Attorney General William Barr during his press conference early Thursday said that the “bottom line” is that no American coordinated, conspired or colluded with the Russian government to interfere in the presidential election. America should be grateful, he added.

No, America should be disgusted. Here’s a real bottom line: A cabal of politicians and bureaucrats frivolously and cynically manipulated the levers of government to further their own political greed and lust for power by trying to exploit a falsehood. It cost us over $30 million and needlessly pitted Americans against one another.

This is where Barr will find some truly grateful people: the Kremlin in Moscow. Russian intelligence, with little sweat equity, grabbed an opportunity to feed fantastical disinformation to a former British spy hired by operatives of the Clinton campaign. The return on this modest investment has been spectacular for Mr. Putin.

The Russian ploy was seized upon by U.S. bureaucrats and politicians who were either breathtakingly naive about these sorts of things or purposefully duplicitous.

So let’s be clear: Any intersection by a Russian with either presidential campaign was part of Russian intelligence objectives. No one can use the “naive excuse” any longer.

Anyone who continues to attempt to exploit empty allegations, including obstruction, in light of the Mueller report findings is purposefully cooperating with and continuing a Russian active measures campaign that has roiled this country for nearly three years.

But perhaps the greatest tragedy, confirmed by implication in the Mueller report, is that a great institution, the FBI — indeed, a cornerstone agency in the continual struggle to ensure the integrity of our democratic republic — was hijacked by an irresponsible director and deputy director who insulated themselves from the rest of that seasoned, sober organization and embarked on a foolish misadventure fueled by either their stupidity or political bias. It looks like it was a combination of both.

They were egged on, like gullible dupes, by a politically motivated CIA director and director of national intelligence. Former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and the team they assembled on the seventh floor of FBI headquarters started an investigation based on insufficient cause and the obvious Russian active-measures operation.

They likely used investigative techniques that violated established guidelines, ran informants against U.S. persons in violation of established guidelines and misused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process to deeply invade the privacy of an American citizen.

And they did all this against the campaign of a person running for president of the United States. When the attorney general characterized this as “unprecedented,” he was simply stating a fact.

It will take a special kind of courage to now hold accountable those who misused the positions entrusted to them to further a made-up and costly theory of collusion. There is a sense that the attorney general is serious about seeing true justice done.

AG Barr is taking flak but hopefully will stand firm. The triumph of rule of law over political thuggery is at stake. This is vitally important for future presidential administrations of both parties, and true statesmen will recognize that.

Kevin R. Brock, former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI, was an FBI special agent for 24 years and principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He is a founder and principal of NewStreet Global Solutions, which consults with private companies and public safety agencies on strategic mission technologies.
 
Last edited:

Nutty Cortez

Dummy (D) NY
So you haven't started reading the report?

The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.
 

Boca

Governor
The partisan warfare over the Mueller report will rage, but one thing cannot be denied: Former President Barack Obama looks just plain bad. On his watch, the Russians meddled in our democracy while his administration did nothing about it.

The Mueller report flatly states that Russia began interfering in American democracy in 2014. Over the next couple of years, the effort blossomed into a robust attempt to interfere in our 2016 presidential election. The Obama administration knew this was going on and yet did nothing. In 2016, Obama's National Security Adviser Susan Rice told her staff to "stand down" and "knock it off" as they drew up plans to "strike back" against the Russians, according to an account from Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump".

Is this some kind of penance on this holy weekend for CNN's past sins of omission? Perhaps. But Jennings then asked the hard question: Why did Obama go soft on Russia?

My opinion is that it was because he was singularly focused on the nuclear deal with Iran. Obama wanted Putin in the deal, and to stand up to him on election interference would have, in Obama's estimation, upset that negotiation. This turned out to be a disastrous policy decision.

Obama's supporters claim he did stand up to Russia by deploying sanctions after the election to punish them for their actions. But, Obama, according to the Washington Post, "approved a modest package... with economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic." In other words, a toothless response to a serious incursion.

But don't just take my word for it that Obama failed. Congressman Adam Schiff, who disgraced himself in this process by claiming collusion when Mueller found that none exists, once said that "the Obama administration should have done a lot more." The Washington Post reported that a senior Obama administration official said they "sort of choked" in failing to stop the Russian government's brazen activities. And Obama's ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said, "The punishment did not fit the crime" about the weak sanctions rolled out after the 2016 election.

A legitimate question Republicans are asking is whether the potential "collusion" narrative was invented to cover up the Obama administration's failures. Two years have been spent fomenting the idea that Russia only interfered because it had a willing, colluding partner: Trump. Now that Mueller has popped that balloon, we must ask why this collusion narrative was invented in the first place.

Given Obama's record on Russia, one operating theory is that his people needed a smokescreen to obscure just how wrong they were. They've blamed Trump. They've even blamed Mitch McConnell, in some twisted attempt to deflect blame to another branch of government. Joe Biden once claimed McConnellrefused to sign a letter condemning the Russians during the 2016 election. But McConnell's office counters that the White House asked him to sign a letter urging state electors to accept federal help in securing local elections -- and he did. You can read it here.

I guess if I had failed to stop Russia from marching into Crimea, making a mess in Syria, and hacking our democracy I'd be looking to blame someone else, too.

But the Mueller report makes it clear that the Russian interference failure was Obama's alone. He was the commander-in-chief when all of this happened. In 2010, he and Eric Holder, his Attorney General, declined to prosecute Julian Assange, who then went on to help Russia hack the Democratic National Committee's emails in 2016. He arguably chose to prioritize his relationship with Putin vis-à-vis Iran over pushing back against Russian election interference that had been going on for at least two years.

If you consider Russian election interference a crisis for our democracy, then you cannot read the Mueller report, adding it to the available public evidence, and conclude anything other than Barack Obama spectacularly failed America. Subsequent investigations of this matter should explore how and why Obama's White House failed, and whether they invented the collusion narrative to cover up those failures.

As President Trump just commented, this hoax was "...a big, fat, waste of time, energy and money - $30,000,000 to be exact."

"It is now finally time to turn the tables and bring justice to some very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying or Treason.

This should never happen again!"
Whatever the motive, covering for failures, or maligning a populist opposition candidate. the plain and simple truth is Barack Obama was at the helm in steering the country into these waters. He and those very few in the highest levels of government that assisted. To include the Attorney General, the Directors of the CIA, National Intelligence and FBI.

In all our history there has been nothing comparable or potentially devastating to the Republic.

A price must be paid.
 
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