Bolton: Russia sanctions insufficient; U.S. must ‘make the Russians feel pain’

The sanctions against Russia announced Thursday by the administration of President Barack Obama are likely to fail, former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton said Friday morning, and are an insufficient response for the Kremlin’s “attack on our constitutional system.”

Obama declared that the U.S. will expel 35 Russian diplomats from the country and close two compounds, one in Maryland and another in New York. The moves announced Thursday also include sanctions against Russian intelligence agencies and businesses. The package does not represent “the sum total of our response to Russia’s aggressive activities,” Obama said in a statement accompanying the announcement, but Bolton remained unimpressed nonetheless.


“I don't think they will have much impact at all,” Bolton said of the sanctions package in a Friday morning interview on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.” “The Russians have walked all over the Obama administration for eight years. It's really been a pathetic performance. So what this last burst of activity has to do is hard to say. I do think it's intended to try and box the Trump administration in. I think it will fail. This is simply an executive order. If President Trump decides to reverse it, it's easy enough to do.”

If the sanctions are to serve as successful deterrents, Bolton said, the U.S. must “make the Russians feel pain.”

Bolton accused the Obama administration of having “politicized” intelligence gathering with its public statements both during the presidential campaign and after it. With that in mind, the former U.N. ambassador said, President-elect Donald Trump and any congressional investigations should take care in examining the facts of the case.

Breaking with many in his party, Trump has worked hard to downplay the Russian cyberattacks, dismissing news of them as attempts by Democrats and the media to delegitimize his presidency before it even begins. He has refused to concede the assessment of 17 federal intelligence agencies that Russia was behind the cyberattacks targeting the U.S. electoral system and has taken particular objection to the assessment by the CIA and FBI that those attacks were specifically intended to aid his candidacy.

The Manhattan billionaire, who has promised warmer relations with Russia and praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Thursday night in a statement that “it's time for our country to move on to bigger and better things” and away from the Russian cyberattacks. Nonetheless, Trump said he will be briefed on the situation by the intelligence community next week.

Bolton, who was for a time under consideration to join Trump’s administration at the State Department, was critical — albeit without naming him — of the president-elect’s unwillingness to address Russian cyberattacks head on.

“We really need to get past the politics of this, because if even a piece of what is alleged about this Russian activity is true, it is utterly unacceptable,” Bolton said. “It is an attack on our constitutional system. It is not enough to say, and people should be very careful about this, to say, well, it didn't actually have an impact on the election. You know, the fact that Russian efforts were incompetent or insufficient shouldn't make us feel better.

“If Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor and all of its bombs and torpedoes had missed, no Americans killed, no ships sunk, would we have said no harm, no foul?” Bolton continued. “No, it's the effort that they made, if this is accurate, that should trouble us. Not the fact that it failed.”