Kirsters Baish| Former assistant to George W. Bush claimed that the Mueller report makes former President Barack Obama look “just plain bad.”
CNN contributor Scott Jennings wrote an op-ed piece that was published on Friday in which he denounced former President Obama for letting the Russians meddle “on his watch.”
“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,” Jennings said in his piece.
“Jennings, who previously served as a campaign adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), argued that Obama went ‘soft’ on Russia because of the Iran nuclear deal,” explains the Hill.
“Obama wanted Putin in the deal, and to stand up to him on election interference would have, in Obama’s estimation, upset that negotiation,” Jennings went on. “This turned out to be a disastrous policy decision.”
While Obama did punish Russia by placing sanctions on the country following the election for having interfered, Jennings explained that it was a “toothless response to a serious incursion.”
“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,” he wrote of the Democrats trying to “deflect” onto Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell.
The Hill reports:
Jennings also noted that Obama and then-Attorney General Eric Holder declined to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2010. Assange then helped Russia disseminate hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
He called for “subsequent investigations” into how the Obama White House “failed.”
“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,” Jennings wrote.
On Thursday, special counsel Robert Mueller released the more than 400 report, which had been partially redacted. In it were his team’s findings after nearly 2-years-worth of investigating into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election.
The report went into detail about Russian efforts to help the Trump campaign to take the 2016 presidential election, however Mueller’s team found no evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia.
The Hill explains that the report stated that “Trump staffers expected to benefit from Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential race against Hillary Clinton.
Mueller described how a Russian troll farm connected to the Kremlin worked to sow discord among the American public on social media.
The report also detailed how Russian intelligence officers hacked both the Democratic National Committee and Clinton‘s campaign chairman, John Podesta.”
