This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The former CIA director and defense secretary Robert Gates has criticised the Obama administration and congressional leaders of both parties for a “somewhat laid-back” response to the discovery of Russian interference in the US presidential election.

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Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Gates said a “thinly disguised” operation by Russia had aimed to undermine the credibility of the American election and was to weaken Hillary Clinton.

“Given the unprecedented nature of it and the magnitude of the effort, I think people seem to have been somewhat laid-back about it,” he said.

The CIA, FBI, the Director of National Intelligence and other agencies agree that Russia sought to influence the election in favour of Donald Trump. This week, the White House said it believed President Vladimir Putin played a direct role.

Trump has rejected and ridiculed such assertions – as has Putin’s government. Barack Obama has ordered a review of all relevant intelligence information.

On Sunday, senators John McCain, Chuck Schumer, Lindsey Graham and Jack Reed repeated their call for an investigation by a bipartisan select committee.

“The fact that they’re hacking our political system and trying to influence the outcome, as it seems to be, that is serious, serious stuff,” Schumer told a press conference in New York.

The senators released an open letter to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, requesting support for the select committee. Gates said he was unsure if the aim was to swing the election to Trump.

“Whether it was intended to help one or other candidate, I don’t know,” he said. “But I think it clearly was aimed at discrediting our elections and I think it was aimed certainly at weakening Mrs Clinton.”

Gates worked for Republican and Democratic presidents, as CIA director under George HW Bush and secretary of defense under George W Bush and Obama. Asked by NBC host Chuck Todd if the White House, leaders of both parties and Trump had shown enough urgency, he answered flatly: “No.”

He added: “It seems pretty clear to me that they’ve developed really reliable information that the Russian government was involved.”

Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, McCain criticized Obama, saying the president had “no strategy and no policy”.

“We need a select committee, we need to get to the bottom of this,” he said. “We need to find out exactly what was done and exactly what the implications of the attacks were, especially if they had an effect on our election. There is no doubt they [the Russians] were interfering.”

On Friday, Obama told a press conference his administration had not acted during the election because it did not want to appear partisan. It has been reported that the White House expected Hillary Clinton to win.



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Obama also said he told Putin to “cut it out” – a month before the first release of hacked Democratic party emails by WikiLeaks. He has promised unspecified retaliation. US intelligence agencies believe Russian or Russian-sponsored actions included the hack of such emails, which were covered extensively in the media.

Gates said Russia had carried out “a thinly disguised, covert operation intended to discredit the American election and to basically allow the Russians to communicate to the rest of the world that our elections are corrupt, incompetent, rigged, whatever, and therefore no more honest than anybody else’s in the world, including theirs”.

Gates – who was involved in Trump’s controversial nomination of the ExxonMobil chief executive, Rex Tillerson, a close associate of Putin, to be secretary of state – repeated criticisms of the gap between Obama’s “rhetoric” and action on foreign policy. Putin, he said, had acted after seeing “the United States withdrawing from around the world”.

McCain detected “a sign of a possible unraveling of the world order that was established after world war two that brought in one of the most peaceful periods in the history of the world”. This, he said, was down to “an absolute failure of American leadership”.

From the Democratic side, Donna Brazile, the acting chair of the Democratic National Committee who was the subject of reports based on the hacked emails, appeared to criticise Obama’s decision not to highlight the cyber-attack during the election, telling ABC’s This Week: “When I saw the president, I was a little disappointed that, you know, we were under constant attack.”

She added: “The attacks did not stop after Obama spoke to Putin.”

One of the main targets of the cyber-attacks, Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, gave his first interview since the election.

“The Russians clearly intervened,” he told NBC. “I think it was distorted. A foreign adversary directly intervened into our democratic institution and tried to tilt the election to Donald Trump.”

Podesta has been critical of the way the FBI handled the cyber-attack and has accused it of putting less emphasis in public on Russian espionage than on its own investigations into Clinton’s use of a private email server.

“I think it had a direct effect on this election,” he said.

Podesta also said it was an “open question” whether Trump advisers colluded with Russia. “It’s very much unknown whether there was collusion,” he said. “I think Russian diplomats have said post-election that they were talking to the Trump campaign.

“Not what Mr Trump knew, but what did ‘Trump Inc’ know and when did they know it? Were they in touch with the Russians? I think those are still open questions.”

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Senior Trump advisers Reince Priebus and Kellyanne Conway rejected such questions. “Even this question is insane,” Priebus told Fox News Sunday. “Of course we don’t interface with the Russians.”

Conway told CBS’s Face the Nation Obama’s intention to retaliate against Russia “seems to be a political response”, due to pressure from the Clinton camp.

In July, Trump suggested that Russia should hack Clinton and reveal the whereabouts of 30,000 “missing” emails.

Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman who will be chief of staff in the Trump White House, has said previously his organization was not hacked.

The electoral college, in which Trump beat Clinton 306-232 despite losing the popular vote by more than 2.8m ballots, will meet to confirm the president on Monday. Prospects of a revolt by sufficient Republican electors to send the choice to the House of Representatives are slim.





