A former Obama State Department official suggested Friday that the administration would have “done more” about Russian election interference if it had been clearer earlier that one of the Kremlin’s central objectives was to denigrate Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.
The remarks from former Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken come amid mounting controversy about the months that went by before the Obama administration formally accused and later punished the Kremlin for its multifaceted influence campaign.
“Given first of all, again, the perception that Russia’s main objective was to undermine confidence in the elections, that was really one thing that motivated us to be careful about how we played this in public,” Blinken said on CNN. “It turned out, it was really only later, that there was a consensus view that not only were they trying to undermine confidence in the elections, they were actually trying to defeat Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump.”
“Now if that picture had been clearer sooner, maybe we would’ve done more.”
Blinken The Washington Post reported Friday that Obama and his senior aides knew in August that the Kremlin wanted to do all three: undermine faith in the democratic process, help Trump, and discredit Clinton. But the assumption that Clinton would win played into a “lack of urgency” in terms of punishing the Kremlin for its meddling, according to the Post.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD reached out to Blinken, asking why the Obama administration have “done more” if officials had known earlier that Putin was trying to elect Trump and hurt Clinton and how politics played a role. Blinken clarified his earlier statement on CNN without addressing the aspect of Putin helping Trump.
“The point I was trying to make perhaps inelegantly is that when we thought the purpose of Russian meddling was to undermine public confidence in our institutions, as opposed to producing a particular outcome, the more we publicized what Russia was trying to do the more we would be doing their work for them, that is further fueling doubt about our electoral system & institutions,” he said in an email.
He also suggested that then-candidate Trump’s claiming that the election would be “rigged” were “echoing exactly what RT and Sputnik were peddling.”
The administration formally accused the Russian government of hacking into the DNC and other “political organziations” with the intention of disrupting the election process in October. Democratic lawmakers had pushed the administration to make a public statement about the coordinated Russian effort in weeks prior.
Former Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson defended the timing of that announcement before lawmakers this week, citing concerns that it would appear the Obama team was “taking sides.”
“One of the candidates, as you’ll recall, was predicting that the election was going to be rigged in some way,” Johnson said, referring to Donald Trump. “We were very concerned that we not be perceived as taking sides in the election, injecting ourselves into a very heated campaign or taking steps to delegitimize the election process and undermine the integrity of the election process.”
The October statement did not receive much attention, Johnson and Blinken said, because of a simultaneously breaking story about vulgar comments Trump made in a 2005 Access Hollywood video.
Obama issued a crop of targeted sanctions in response to the Kremlin’s cyber-campaign in late December.
Blinken added Friday that officials were concerned public declarations about the meddling could play into the Kremlin’s efforts to sow doubt about the election. The administration focused on preventive measures, he said.
“President Obama issued a very stark warning to President Putin in September at the G-20 conference in China,” Blinken said. “We thought we had deterred them from doing more, and then the thought was, we’ll wait until after the election to look at how we can punish them.”
