Author and CBS correspondent Jeff Pegues says President Obama didn’t do more publicly to condemn Russia’s actions during the 2016 presidential race because he didn’t want to appear political in his response.
“Do you think it was largely a political calculation for the Obama administration to do less?” Hill.TV co-host Buck Sexton asked Pegues on “Rising.”
{mosads}“I think in hindsight it was,” Pegues responded. “There were concerns at that time that the Obama administration would appear to be putting the thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton at a time when candidate Trump was saying that the election was rigged.”
Still, Pegues said Obama did the one thing that the Trump administration hasn’t: confront Russian President Vladimir Putin directly over the meddling.
“If you talk to intelligence officials, they’ll tell you one thing you have to do is confront whoever’s doing it,” Pegues told Hill.TV. “President Obama did it. You might recall that he said that ‘I told Vlad essentially to cut it out.’”
President Trump said he would bring up Russian hacking during his face-to-face down meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Finland. But, during a joint press conference, Trump refused to say whether he believes his own intelligence agencies or Putin on the question of Russian interference.
Pegeus thinks Russian interference is far from over. In fact, he called it a whole a new kind of warfare.
“It’s taking old espionage tools and updating them for the 21st century, and it’s not something that’s going to stop,” Pegeus told Hill.TV.
Pegues’s new book, “Kompromat,” is out now. Based on interviews with FBI officials and cybersecurity experts, it explores Russia’s influence in the 2016 presidential race.
— Tess Bonn
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