The Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report on Thursday, criticizing the Obama administration for being unprepared to combat Russia’s election interference in 2016 and for fumbling the response.

The committee’s 54-page heavily redacted report, the third installment in the committee’s investigation into the Kremlin’s foreign influence campaign in 2016, “found the U.S. government was not well-postured to counter Russian election interference activity with a full range of readily-available policy options.”

The report said that, while high-level warnings were delivered to Russian officials, “those warnings may or may not have tempered Moscow’s activity” and “Russia continued disseminating stolen emails, conducting social media-based influence operations, and working to access state voting infrastructure through Election Day 2016.”

Republican Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina said, “After discovering the existence, if not the full scope, of Russia’s election interference efforts in late-2016, the Obama administration struggled to determine the appropriate response. Frozen by ‘paralysis of analysis,’ hamstrung by constraints both real and perceived, Obama officials debated courses of action without truly taking one.”

Added Democratic Vice Chairman Mark Warner of Virginia: “There were many flaws with the U.S. response to the 2016 attack, but it’s worth noting that many of those were due to problems with our own system — problems that can and should be corrected."

The report found that the Obama administration “was constrained in its response by a number of external and internal concerns,” including that “public warnings would themselves undermine confidence in the election."

The Obama administration treated cyber and geopolitical aspects of the Russian active measures campaign as separate issues, the committee said. “This bifurcated approach may have prevented the Administration from understanding the full extent of the threat Russia posed, limiting its ability to respond.”

The committee concluded that “the decision to limit and delay information sharing about the foreign influence threat inadvertently constrained the Obama administration’s ability to respond.”

President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party harshly criticized then-candidate Mitt Romney for his warnings about Russia and Putin in 2012, but blamed the Kremlin as one of the main culprits for President Trump’s victory four years later.

Obama famously drubbed Romney over Russia in an October 2012 debate, saying, “Gov. Romney, I’m glad you recognize that al Qaeda is a threat, because a couple of months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. And the 1980's are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”

Romney, now a junior senator representing Utah, held his ground. “Russia, I indicated, is a geopolitical foe. And I said in the same paragraph that Iran is the greatest national security threat that we face," he said. “I have clear eyes on this. I’m not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia or Mr. Putin.”

Biden derided Romney during the campaign, claiming he was “mired in a Cold War mindset” and calling him a "Cold War holdover" with an “apparent determination to take U.S.-Russian relations back to the 1950s.”

After Obama and Biden defeated Romney and won a second term in 2012, Putin’s Russia annexed Crimea and made military incursions into eastern Ukraine, among other actions.

"Despite the unprecedented scale and sophistication of the 2016 Russian active measures campaign, Moscow has a decades-long history of conducting active measures campaigns against the United States," the Senate Intelligence Committee report noted.

The U.S. intelligence community concluded in 2017 that Russian military intelligence was responsible for hacking thousands of Democratic emails and providing those stolen records to WikiLeaks. An investigation by and indictments from special counsel Robert Mueller bolstered this conclusion, though Mueller did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump and the Russians.

The first volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation, released last July, concluded that “Russian government-affiliated cyber actors conducted an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure in the run-up to the 2016” and likely attempted intrusions in all 50 states. But the committee found “no evidence” that vote tallies were altered or that voter registry files were deleted or modified, though the committee said that the intelligence community’s insight into that is limited.

The second volume, released in October, said Russian operatives working through the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency masqueraded as Americans online and used ads, fake articles, and false personas to push disinformation to tens of millions of social media users in the U.S. to harm Clinton, help Trump, and sow discord. It criticized the Obama administration’s weak response, including its decision to hand over its social media inquiry to a third-party investigator, suggesting the FBI either lacked resources or viewed the work "as not warranting more institutionalized consideration” and never contacted Twitter about possible Russian disinformation operations until the election ended.

