I don’t believe President Trump should have suspended John Brennan’s security clearance, but former President Barack Obama’s CIA director should be embarrassed by his New York Times article on Thursday.
In that article, Brennan identifies Russia’s attack on the U.S. 2016 elections, but offers no humility for his administration’s failure to counter that attack.
Brennan begins with confidence, explaining how he rebuked the director of Russia’s FSB domestic security service. “When Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s internal security service, told me during an early August 2016 phone call that Russia wasn’t interfering in our presidential election, I knew he was lying.” Referencing Bortnikov’s harassment of U.S. citizens in Russia (which was far more aggressive than has been reported), Brennan rightly establishes for his readers that Russia was (and is) a top U.S. adversary. It’s a good start.
Unfortunately, Brennan then descends into a strategic abyss. The descent starts when Brennan next says that he “warned Mr. Bortnikov that Russian interference in our election was intolerable and would roil United States-Russia relations for many years…” Good words. The problem?
Brennan fails to explain how the U.S. countered Russia’s aggression when that aggression continued after the phone call. The exigent importance of this concern cannot be discounted nor diminished. After all, there was a gap of two-and-a-half months between the Brennan-Bortnikov phone call and the November elections. And in that period Russian attacks on the election escalated in both scale and aggression.
Of course, there’s a simple reason that Brennan cannot say what the Obama administration did to uphold its explicit pledge to stop the attacks. He cannot, because his administration did not do anything of substance. Indeed, the Obama administration did worse than nothing: it doubled down on its own willful impotence. A month following Brennan’s threat to Bortnikov, and following yet more high-confidence evidence of Russian attacks, Obama used a G-20 summit to warn Putin to back off.
Putin, of course, did no such thing. Instead like any good KGB man, Putin reveled in the charred smell of Obama’s credibility as rendered in the wreckage of MH-17 and the rubble of Aleppo.
Putin doubled down on his aggression. The Russian president assessed that there would be no meaningful consequences for his aggression. No lights turned off and on in the Kremlin, nor cyberstrikes on the GRU mainframes, nor harassment of Russian intelligence officers on U.S. soil. And to the great shame of the Obama administration, Putin was right. It was not until shortly before he left office and more than a month after the election had been held that Obama did anything of substance. And even then, closing Russian intelligence facilities and expulsion of some Russian diplomats, it was hardly the Mattis-style annihilation that Putin’s aggression deserved.
Put simply, what was needed from Brennan and his boss in those 2016 days was a threat rendered and then acted upon. There needed to be a threat in August 2016 that if the Russian attacks continued, America would, to borrow from Shakespeare’s Henry V respond, “In thunder and in earthquake, like a Jove, That, if requiring fail, [America] will compel.”
Instead, the Obama administration did what it knew best: it substituted realist action for meaningless words and made Putin laugh.
