When it comes to the Russia affair, no one headline captures the whole story but this one from our friends at the Daily Caller comes close:
Susan Rice told NSC Officials to ‘Stand Down’ in Response to Russian Meddling Attempts.
From what we know from official documented sources the following are proven facts:
- Donald Trump was right that his private offices were being surveilled before the election. Though the mainstream media ridiculed Trump as being paranoid, he knew what he was talking about.
- Russians operatives did hack the Democratic National Party and Hillary Clinton’s private email servers.
- Russia did make significant advances in how future attacks might come. Last June, Bloomberg reported that election systems in up to 39 states may have been attacked.
- The Obama Whitehouse and Obama himself did not believe that the Russians had the ability to manipulate the vote count.
- Susan Rice did commit an illegal and probably treasonous act when she when she ordered thesurveillance of Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign aides as part of a political intelligence operation.
In 2016 the Daily Caller reported:
What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals, … The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with … In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.
Most of those in the intelligence community and the White House rather were concerned that hackers could alter registration files, voter rolls.
As we’ve reported previously, Russia’s endgame probably was to undermine confidence in our election system and sow discord among our population.
The mainstream media crafted the narrative to be “Russians back Trump.”
An excerpt from the new book Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump explains that the most likely explanation for Russia’s meddling is that the hacking failed to give Russian operatives the access they needed to change the vote tally because the U.S. has a very decentralized national voting system spread over 7,000 local jurisdictions.
The new book also provides us with an inside look at how President Obama, his National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and the rest of the U.S. intelligence was dealing with the Russia threat before and after the general election. The authors tell a story about Michael Daniel, then White House director of cybersecurity. Reportedly Daniel was adamant that the only way to put an end to the cyberattacks was to give Russia a taste of its own medicine.
According to Daniel multiple plans were in the works to make Putin back off. Some of those included: bombarding Russian news sites with bot traffic to force them to be shut them, to meddle in Russia ’s upcoming national election, and reveal corruption in Putin’s political party.
But while Daniel labored into to the night to come up with an appropriate response, Rice and other chief Obama aides were not on board. According to Daniel, when Rice heard of his ideas she called him for in for a tongue lashing. According to news outlet Mother Jones:
One day in late August, national security adviser Susan Rice called Daniel … demanded he cease and desist from working on the cyber options he was developing. “Don’t get ahead of us,” she warned him. … “Stand down.”
“That was one pissed-off national security adviser,” he told one of his aides.
At his morning staff meeting, Daniel told his team that it had to stop working on options to counter the Russian attack. Daniel Prieto, one of his deputies declared, “Why the hell are we standing down? Michael, can you help us understand?”
To which Daniel said that Rice was concerned that if their plans leaked it “would force Obama to act”.
Obama later took it upon himself to warn Putin in person during a face-to-face meeting telling him to “knock it off” when it came to our election then warning of “unspecified” consequences if it continued.
President Trump tweeted at the end of February of this year:
Obama was President up to, and beyond, the 2016 Election. So why didn’t he do something about Russian meddling?
For a President who actually “does something” about North Korea, it must have been more than frustrating to learn his predecessor was a president whose something was nothing.
~ American Liberty Report
