Monday on MSNBC’s “For The Record with Greta,” while discussing Russia hacking, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said his “complaint” President Barack Obama’s handling of the Russian hacking and other nations’ efforts to hack into the U.S. institutions was that he knew it was going on a long time and didn’t act on it.

McCain said, “Everything I have seen indicates that this was an attempt to affect the election. I don’t believe it affected outcome of the election but I think there is overwhelming evidence this was an attempt on Vladimir Putin’s part.”

He continued, “If they were able to destroy the way we elect our government then obviously, that’s a kind of blow to America which would really destroy the fundamentals of democracy. How can you have democracy without fair elections? So in that respect it is a, quote, “war.” But it’s not a nuclear attack. It’s not all thing we normally associate with warfare. So you calibrate the response. It doesn’t mean that just because it’s an act of war that you then launch all the missiles. But it does mean you have to have some kind of response. My complaint about the Obama administration is they know this hacking was going on for a long period of time and they never did anything about it…They said they didn’t want to disturb negotiations about Syria. That they were worried about another reaction by the Russia. That to me is incredible.”

He added, “President Obama said, I told him to ‘cut it out.’ What does that mean? He said we can do some stuff. That sounds like somebody in high school. So there was never — the other problem with this we know attacks had been going on for a long period of time from a bunch of different place including Iran, including China including others and we never had ha policy as to what we do in the case for an attack. Therefore there was no strategy as to how to counterattack. So all of these attacks have taken place while we have almost passive I observing them.”

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