Mitch Warns Putin Not to Interfere in Our Elections Again
WASHINGTON — Erstwhile White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on Sunday said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell "watered down" a warning nigh Russia'due south attempts to interfere in the 2016 election and defended the Obama administration's response to foreign meddling in the entrada.
The linguistic communication in a September 2016 letter from congressional leaders to state election officials was drastically softened at McConnell's urging, McDonough said in an exclusive interview Sun on NBC's "Run into The Press."
The alarm, written to the National Association of State Election Directors, was signed by the four congressional leaders — McConnell, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — and it told states to "have full advantage of the robust public and private sector resources available to them to ensure that their network infrastructure is secure from attack."
"The president asked the iv leaders in a bipartisan meeting in the Oval Function to join him in asking the states to work with us on this question," McDonough said. "It took over three weeks to go that argument worked out. It was dramatically watered down."
Asked if it was watered down at the insistence of McConnell and only McConnell, McDonough responded, "yes."
The New York Times reported final year that McConnell had questioned the intelligence on ballot interference and agreed to a softer version of the letter that spoke of "malefactors" to be enlightened of only did not specifically mention Russia.
McConnell'due south squad on Sunday responded by pointing to an op-ed in The Washington Post by McDonough concluding summer where he chosen the letter "ultimately successful."
"The White House asked for a alphabetic character about election security — not Russian federation," McConnell spokesman David Popp wrote in an email. "And McDonough said he even asked DEMOCRATS non to practice a public argument well-nigh Russian federation during this same time period. Requite me a break."
McDonough, who served every bit White House chief of staff throughout the Obama administration'south second term, alleged Sunday that they "keep to see to this day" the same lack of urgency from Republican leadership in Congress on the issue that they saw in 2016.
The Obama administration has taken sustained criticism, including from President Donald Trump and even the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, for not doing enough to prevent attempts by Russians to meddle in the election or for expressing enough urgency during the 2016 campaign.
McDonough acknowledged that Obama administration officials were "alarmed" virtually what they were seeing in 2016 and it "became very articulate to us what the Russians' intentions were."
He tried to defend the administration by pointing to "a series of painstaking steps," including the work with Congress to alert states of what was happening, a joint argument from the Department of Homeland Security and the Part of the Managing director of National Intelligence, and a conversation between President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin. That conversation, McDonough said, "was very impactful on the Russia activeness — some of the things that we feared they may do, they did not practise."
Since the 2016 election, Obama administration officials have repeatedly indicated that Obama did not raise more public warning nigh concerns over Russian meddling because the administration didn't want to appear as if they were politicizing the issue.
"Nosotros feared that if it looked like the president was involved, that this was a partisan matter, at the time we were in the middle of the campaign," McDonough said Dominicus. "The president had a view in the entrada. And we wanted to make certain that partisan politics did not color state officials' reaction to the information."
In June, a former senior Obama administration official anonymously told The Washington Mail that the Russia menstruation was the hardest thing about their time in government to defend, telling the paper, "I feel similar we sort of choked."
Asked if there was a single matter the Obama administration would have done differently in retrospect, McDonough didn't voice those kinds of regrets.
"I spent a lot of time worrying about a lot of different things at unlike times," he said. "Working with the information that nosotros had, I remember we've made a series of very important and very good decisions."
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/denis-mcdonough-mcconnell-watered-down-russia-warning-2016-n853016
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