OBAMA CHOKES ON RUSSIAN HACKING

. (Photo by Alexei Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Images. Photo illustration by Nick Kirkpatrick/The Washington Post.)

The Post just published a detailed, inside look at how the Obama administration sought to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 elections. Here are a few of the most interesting nuggets from the story by national security correspondents Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima and Adam Entous:

“Early last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried ‘eyes only’ instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides." The envelope contained allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin was directly and personally trying to influence the U.S. elections, but went even further: "The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump."

"The material was so sensitive that CIA Director John Brennan kept it out of the President’s Daily Brief, concerned that even that restricted report’s distribution was too broad. The CIA package came with instructions that it be returned immediately after it was read. To guard against leaks, subsequent meetings in the Situation Room followed the same protocols as planning sessions for the Osama bin Laden raid."

“The Obama administration secretly debated dozens of options for deterring or punishing Russia, including cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure, the release of CIA-gathered material that might embarrass Putin and sanctions that officials said could 'crater' the Russian economy ... in late December, Obama approved a modest package combining measures that had been drawn up to punish Russia for other issues."

Some former Obama officials don't think they did enough to stop Putin's meddling. “It is the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend,” said a former senior Obama administration official involved in White House deliberations on Russia. “I feel like we sort of choked.”

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It was not until after Labor Day that Brennan had reached all members of the “Gang of Eight” in Congress. In September, Jeh Johnson, Jim Comey and White House Homeland Security adviser Lisa Monaco briefed congressional leaders, but it quickly "devolved into a partisan squabble" in which Democrats wanted to make the threats public while McConnell was "skeptical."

The Obama administration sent two other warnings to the Kremlin: On Oct. 7, Susan Rice summoned Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak and handed him a message for Putin; and on Oct. 31, there was a final pre-election message sent "via a secure channel to Moscow originally created to avert a nuclear exchange."

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Obama appears to have taken serious and secretive cyber countermeasures against Russia post-election by "authorizing a new covert program involving the NSA, CIA and U.S. Cyber Command”: “The cyber operation is still in its early stages and involves deploying 'implants' in Russian networks deemed 'important to the adversary and that would cause them pain and discomfort if they were disrupted,' a former U.S. official said." (Read the whole story here.)

PAUL WALDMAN, WASHINGTON POST

What comes through again and again is that the Obama administration was terrified of looking partisan or doing anything that might seem like it was putting a thumb on the scale of the election, and the result was paralysis...

Democrats are forever worried about whether they might be criticized, whether Republicans will be mean to them, whether they might look as though they’re being partisan, and whether they might be subjected to a round of stern editorials. Republicans, on the other hand, just don’t care. What they’re worried about is winning, and they don’t let the kinds of criticism that frightens Democrats impede them. It makes Republicans the party of “Yes we can,” while Democrats are the party of “Maybe we shouldn’t.”

So as the full scope of the Russian assault on the American election became clear, two things happened again and again. First, whenever the Obama administration would approach Republicans to try to issue some kind of bipartisan condemnation or coordinate efforts to minimize the effects of the attack, the GOP response was essentially, “To hell with you, Democrats,” after which the administration would slink back and do little or nothing....

“The Dems were, ‘Hey, we have to tell the public,’ ” .... But Republicans resisted, arguing that to warn the public that the election was under attack would further Russia’s aim of sapping confidence in the system....the always-shrewd McConnell knew exactly what button he had to push to get the administration to back off:

According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

In other words, Republicans acted like partisans, and successfully rolled over Democrats who didn’t want to seem like partisans. Within weeks, the administration decided not to take any action against Moscow before the election. “They feared that any action would be seen as political and that Putin, motivated by a seething resentment of Clinton, was prepared to go beyond fake news and email dumps.”

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There are some excuses you can come up with for the Obama administration’s hesitance to act decisively against this threat, both in terms of publicizing it and in retaliating against Russia. It was concerned about setting off an escalating conflict with Russia, and its actions were colored by its assumption that Clinton would win, which was of course the assumption held by nearly everyone, Republican or Democrat. But imagine what would have happened if there were a Republican administration in office, and Russia mounted a full-scale assault on our election with the obvious intent of hamstringing the future Republican president (at a minimum) or getting the Democrat elected. Could anyone who knows anything about today’s GOP actually believe it would have been so tentative?

Not on your life. Every Republican in Washington from the president on down would have been on TV every day saying that the Democratic nominee was a Russian stooge. They would have undertaken a comprehensive package of retaliatory measures immediately, not waiting until after the election was over. They would have talked about nothing else for months.

That’s not because they would have seen it as a profound threat to American sovereignty. We know that, because they don’t care about that threat right now, as real as it is. Heck, the Republican nominee for president not only didn’t condemn the Russian assault, he celebrated it. Donald Trump gleefully brought up Wikileaks 164 times on the campaign trail and publicly implored Russia to hack into his opponent’s email to see if any damaging information might be found there. Republicans have steadfastly resisted any investigation into what happened in the 2016 election.

No, they would have seen it as a threat to their own partisan interests, and responded with the same ferocity that they bring to all partisan conflicts. They wouldn’t have worried about being criticized or being called partisan; they would have fought.

And in that case, it would have been the right thing to do. Instead, Vladimir Putin got just about everything he wanted: a destabilized, delegitimized, demoralized American system, and the election of a president whose advisers are tied up in an intricate web of connections to Russia and who is himself bizarrely solicitous of Putin’s needs and wants.

There’s no way to know whether the election might have turned out differently if the Obama administration had reacted more aggressively to the Russian assault. What we do know is that once again, Democrats were paralyzed by their worries about how things might look. It’s not something Republicans ever concern themselves with — and all you have to do is look at who’s in charge in Washington to see the results.

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“As the United States grapples with the implications of Kremlin interference in American politics, European countries are deploying a variety of bold tactics and tools to expose Russian attempts to sway voters and weaken European unity,” Dana Priest and Michael Birnbaum report. “Across the continent, counterintelligence officials, legislators, researchers and journalists have devoted years — in some cases, decades — to the development of ways to counter Russian disinformation, hacking and trolling. And they are putting them to use as never before. Sweden has launched a nationwide school program to teach students to identify Russian propaganda. In Germany, all political parties have agreed not to employ automated bots in their social media campaigns because such hard-to-detect cyber tools are frequently used by Russia to circulate bogus news accounts. France and Britain have successfully pressured Facebook to disable tens of thousands of automated fake accounts used to sway voters close to election time … Four dozen officials and researchers interviewed recently sounded uniformly more confident about the results of their efforts … than officials grappling with it in the U.S., which one European cyber-official described as ‘like watching ‘House of Cards.’”

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-- The Kremlin has recalled Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak – bringing back to Moscow the longtime diplomat whose meetings with various Trump officials are currently being investigated by the FBI. 

SEN GOP TRYING TO GET TO YES ON TRUMPCARE BILL.

Ted Cruz leaves the Senate floor after a vote yesterday. The Texas senator is one of the holdouts on the health care bill, but he's widely expected to come around. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)

There are not currently the 50 votes necessary to advance the legislation that Mitch McConnell unveiled Thursday. There will need to be concessions and compromises, and there are several ways the push could still fall apart in the coming days.

But pretty much every Republican, including the current holdouts, wants to pass something. And no GOP senator wants to bear the brunt of the blame from the base for inaction. That factor must not be discounted.

-- President Trump, who endorsed the Senate bill last night, also badly wants to get something done, and he’s made clear that he’ll sign whatever makes it through Congress.

-- An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which was in the field earlier this week and published yesterday, helps explain the balancing act we’re seeing from so many Republicans: Only 16 percent of Americans believe that the House health care bill is good, down from 23 percent last month. Even among Republicans, just one in three view the measure positively. But the public is basically split down the middle over Obamacare, with 41 percent saying the 2010 law is a good idea and 38 percent saying it’s a bad idea. Asked if Congress and the president should continue their efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the split is similar: 38 percent say yes, 39 percent say no, and 20 percent have no opinion. But here’s the rub: 71 percent of Republicans want Congress to continue its effort to repeal the ACA, and only 12 percent of GOP voters want to move on. Independents also slightly favor forging ahead with repeal, 38 percent to 32 percent. Those numbers demonstrate why lawmakers are eager to be perceived as extracting concessions (so they can say they made improvements), but the partisan breakdown also shows why most GOP senators are willing to get behind what remains an unpopular piece of legislation. Even as they do so, however, they are carefully positioning themselves. A bunch of Republicans who will vote yes next week released noncommittal statements yesterday suggesting that they are keeping an open mind. McConnell outlines Senate health-care proposal -- McConnell can only afford two defections, and he’s facing objections from the right and the middle. But if anyone can thread this needle, it’s the Senate majority leader. “McConnell unveiled his proposal knowing full well that — as currently written — it lacks the votes to win approval,” congressional correspondent Paul Kane writes. “But using a time-honored tactic of congressional leadership, the Kentucky Republican decided it was time to call the bluff of his GOP colleagues. … Republicans now head into five or six days of intense negotiations … Many GOP senators complained bitterly about the secretive process, while privately breathing a sigh of relief that they didn’t yet have to take a position on the emerging legislation.” Pemiscot Memorial, the public hospital in one of Missouri's poorest counties, depends on Medicaid funding to survive, its CEO says. Bram Sable-Smith/Side Effects Public Media ---- WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE SENATE BILL— -- The Congressional Budget Office said it expects to release a score for the Senate bill “early next week.” -- Despite grumbling from some members of his conference, McConnell still plans on holding a final vote next week. (Sean Sullivan, Kelsey Snell and Juliet Eilperin) -- Democrats have little power to stop the vote from occurring....  Like the bill that passed the House last month, the Senate measure phases out expanded Medicaid funding for states, but it does so more gradually between 2020 and 2024. -- But because of an accounting gimmick, the Senate bill guts Medicaid much more drastically over the long-term than the House bill. Max Ehrenfreund reports... -- The Medicaid cuts in the Senate proposal could disproportionately hurt rural hospitals, 700 of which across the country already teeter on the brink of closure. (NPR’s Bram Sable-Smith) -- The Senate bill would cut almost $1 billion in funding for the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which provides 12 percent of the CDC’s budget, starting this October. Lena H. Sun reports: “The money supports programs to prevent bioterrorism and disease outbreaks, as well as to provide immunizations and screenings for cancer and heart disease … About $625 million goes directly to states and communities to address their most pressing health needs, including drug misuse, infectious diseases, lead poisoning, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cancer and tobacco use.” The Senate bill provides smaller subsidies for less generous health insurance plans with higher deductibles. The Affordable Care Act provides government help to anyone who earns less than 400 percent of the federal poverty line ($47,550 for an individual or $97,200 for a family of four). The people who earn the least get the most help. The Senate bill would make those subsidies much smaller for many people, and only provide the money to those earning less than 350 percent of the poverty line ($41,580 for individuals and $85,050 for a family of four). The Senate bill will tether the size of its tax credits to what it takes to purchase a skimpier health insurance plan than the type of plans Affordable Care Act subsidies were meant to buy. Essentially, these tax credits buy less health insurance -- The bill appropriates only $2 billion in fiscal year 2018 to address the opioid drug epidemic, Vox’s Ella Nilsen reports. This is less than the $45 billion over 10 years that Republican Sens. Rob Portman and Shelley Moore Capito requested and far less than $190 billion over 10 years, which is what a Harvard health economics professor estimated this week was needed to truly address the problem. The Senate bill repeals the individual mandate — and replaces it with a six-month waiting period. The bill gets rid of the Affordable Care Act’s unpopular requirement that nearly all Americans carry health coverage or pay a fine. The most recent version of the proposal includes a six-month waiting period for those who want individual coverage but have had more than a two-month break in coverage in the last year. The bill would cut taxes for the wealthy. Obamacare included tax increases that hit wealthy Americans hardest in order to pay for its coverage expansion. The AHCA would get rid of those taxes. Obamacare was one of the biggest redistributions of wealth from the rich to the poor; the AHCA would reverse that. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The Senate bill defunds Planned Parenthood for one year. This would mean Medicaid patients could no longer seek treatment at Planned Parenthood clinics. Experts expect this would result in low-income Americans getting less medical care and having more unintended pregnancies, as access to contraceptives would decline. All in all, the replacement plan benefits people who are healthy and high-income, and disadvantages those who are sicker and lower-income. The replacement plan would make several changes to what health insurers can charge enrollees who purchase insurance on the individual market, as well as changing what benefits their plans must cover. In aggregate, these changes could be advantageous to younger and healthier enrollees who want skimpier (and cheaper) benefit packages. But they could be costly for older and sicker Obamacare enrollees who rely on the law’s current requirements, and would be asked to pay more for less generous coverage. -- Both House leaders, Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi, argued that the Senate bill is not radically different from what their chamber passed last month.  A protester being removed from outside the office of Mitch McConnell on Thursday .CreditSaul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images ------ -- One way to think about all of this: Obamacare cut the uninsured rate almost in half by redistributing resources from the wealthy to the poor. This bill seeks to undo that redistribution, The New York Times’ Margot Sanger-Katz explains. Sarah Kliff summarizes it this way on Vox: “The bill asks low- and middle-income Americans to spend significantly more for less coverage.” STAKEHOLDERS PANNED THE BILL: -- Hospitals decried the cuts to Medicaid, with the chief executive of the American Hospital Association calling them “unsustainable.” (Juliet Eilperin) -- The AARP said the Senate bill allows insurance companies to charge the elderly up to five times more than young people. The senior’s lobby is mobilizing its membership against what it calls an “age tax.” (The Hill) -- A chorus of providers warned that the Senate bill would “turn back the clock on women’s health.” “This legislation deliberately strips the landmark women’s health gains made by the Affordable Care Act and would severely limit access to care,” the president of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists wrote in a statement. -- One exception: Insurance executives are happy because the Senate bill reverses a provision in Obamacare that penalized their companies for excessively paying top staff. (Ehrenfreund)

THE RUSSIAN INVASION

Mikhail Svetlov for Getty Images

• It’s definitely not the first time Russian hackers have tried to influence US elections, but the 2016 meddling was especially widespread, aggressive, and effective, intelligence officials told senators. [Vox / Alex Ward]

• There’s no question that this was done in an effort to try to help now-President Donald Trump get elected, which US intelligence officials surmised as far back as last summer. [NYT / Eric Lichtblau]
• What remains to be seen — and is the subject of several investigations — is whether the Trump campaign actively worked with the Russians to achieve this result.

John O. Brennan in July when he was the C.I.A. director. Mr. Brennan was said to be so concerned about increasing evidence of Russia’s election meddling that in late August he began a series of individual briefings for eight top members of Congress. CreditAl Drago/The New York Times

• Yesterday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Russian meddling into the 2016 election got a lot less attention than the high-profile ones featuring former FBI Director James Comey, but they were still really important.
• US intelligence officials stated on Thursday that orders for Russian cyberattacks in the 2016 election could be traced all the way up to Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. [WSJ / Byron Tau and Erica Orden]
• Officials also confirmed that voting systems in 21 states were targeted by Russian hackers, a number initially reported by Bloomberg last week. [WSJ / Byron Tau and Erica Orden]
• That number could be even higher; a former FBI cybersecurity official in the Obama administration told reporters that US intelligence assumed the Russians had tried to hack into all 50 states, with varying levels of success. [Time / Massimo Calabresi]
• Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday, administration officials declined to name the states whose election systems were hacked, despite being pressed by senators. [Bloomberg / Steven Dennis, Nafeesa Syeed, and Billy House]
• Arizona and Illinois are two of the states that have publicly acknowledged their voting systems were hacked. In Illinois, hackers were able to access the data of 15 million state residents, including their names, dates of birth, genders, drivers' licenses, and partial Social Security numbers. Hackers reportedly intended to alter or delete the data. [Bloomberg / Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson]
• In the wake of the hacking scandal, relations between the US and Russia have been deteriorating rapidly, especially as the US Congress tries to push tougher new sanctions on the country, to the Trump administration’s chagrin. [NYT / Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Matt Flegenheimer

DEMS REALIZING PEOPLE ARE MORE CONCERNED WITH HEALTH CARE THAN RUSSIA.

Sen. Charles Schumer (AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite)

One main takeaway for Democrats from their loss in Georgia’s special election is that the party has not focused enough on issues that directly impact people’s lives.

Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, told his colleagues during a private meeting yesterday that voters in the 2018 midterm elections will almost certainly be more motivated by an issue like health care than the escalating Russia investigation, and he urged lawmakers to keep their eye on the ball....

The congressman added that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and Donald Trump firing James Comey as FBI director remain important. “But we need to walk and chew gum at the same time and recognize that the issues that really matter to people are the ones that affect their everyday lives,” he said.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)  Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

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Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who as a member of the Intelligence Committee is constantly asked about the Russia investigation, worries that the health debate is not breaking through because Democrats aren’t talking about it enough. “When reporters ask me a question about Russia, I now say, ‘I’m happy to talk about it, but you’re going to have to listen to me talk about the health care challenge ahead first,’” he said during a press conference to talk about the opioid epidemic. 

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The Democratic polling firms Garin-Hart-Yang and Global Strategy Group conducted a national survey for Priorities USA, the Democratic super PAC, last month that found the Comey news and concerns related to Russia are major liabilities for Republicans. But the pollsters found that the health-care issue is a significantly bigger driver of voter behavior. ...

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Tamara Draut, vice president of policy and research for Demos, a liberal advocacy organization, said that focusing on pocketbook issues is the only way Democrats will win back working-class voters who defected from the party last year. She recently conducted focus groups with white working class voters in Columbus, Ohio, who voted for Barack Obama but switched to Trump. “People are desperate for some action to give them some real economic relief,” she said. “The kitchen table concerns are what keep them up at night and give them ulcers. Health care is clearly one of those.”

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“Democrats Should Focus More on Jobs, Less on Russia,” progressive writer Robert Borosage urged his compatriots in a column for The Nation back in March.

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(J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

SO, LET'S TALK ABOUT THE TRUMPCARE BILL IN THE SENATE.

-- Paige Winfield Cunningham, author of our Health 202, obtained a copy of the “discussion draft” that McConnell is going to unveil today: “The Senate GOP leadership plan would roll back the ACA’s taxes, phase down its Medicaid expansion, rejigger its subsidies, give states wider latitude in opting out of its regulations and eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood for one year…

“The bill largely mirrors the House measure that narrowly passed last month but with some significant changes: While the House legislation pegged federal insurance subsidies to age, the Senate bill would link them to income as the ACA does. The Senate proposal cuts off Medicaid expansion more gradually than the House bill, but would enact deeper long-term cuts to the health-care program for low-income Americans. It also removes language restricting federally-subsidized health plans from covering abortions, which may have run afoul of complex budget rules.”

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-- More rank-and-file Republican senators, concerned about political blowback back home, are complaining about the lack of transparency and the rushed timeline. The Wall Street Journal’s Stephanie Armour, Kristina Peterson and Louise Radnofsky report: “Some Republicans, including Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), are calling the timetable too rushed to ensure their support. 

FOR THE DEMOCRATS, A RAINY NIGHT IN GEORGIA.

With all the ballots counted, Republican Karen Handel won the most expensive House race in U.S. history by 3.8 percentage points. 

That’s a larger margin of victory than the 1.5 points that Donald Trump carried Georgia’s 6th Congressional District by last November.

Handel even wound up winning by a greater margin than the GOP candidate in an unexpectedly close special election to replace OMB Director Mick Mulvaney in South Carolina that had not been on the national radar.

The suburban district north of Atlanta is ruby red and has been in GOP hands since Newt Gingrich won it in 1979, but that does not make Jon Ossoff’s defeat any less devastating for Democrats struggling to find their way in the Trump era.

Last night was a wake-up call for Democrats that they still need to home in on an effective anti-Trump message. ...

The results are already prompting Democratic recriminations, as the Bernie Sanders wing of the party pushes the establishment to get behind more liberal candidates. Initially, Ossoff’s mantra was “Make Trump Furious.” But he rarely talked about the president toward the end of the contest because he needed to win over moderate Republicans and didn’t want to motivate low-propensity Trump voters to turn out against him. He modulated his rhetoric, calling for fiscal conservatism in his ads and focusing on jobs. He avoided hot-button issues and called for civility.

Liberal activists and their allied outside groups are grumbling that Ossoff moderated too much...

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The outcome demonstrated that two political fundamentals remain true: Attack ads work, and candidates matter. Democrats pinned their hopes on a 30-year-old who had never run for office before and didn’t even live in the district. Ossoff became more dynamic on the stump as the race dragged on, but his lack of a record made it easy to caricature him. He was a vessel through which Democrats channeled their hopes, but he lacked charisma....

Nancy Pelosi was a huge drag on Ossoff. The most prominent and effective hit on the Democratic candidate was to tie him to the congresswoman from San Francisco....

Handel, 55, has been a fixture of local politics for 15 years. She ...served as Georgia secretary of state and narrowly lost GOP primaries to become governor in 2010 and then senator in 2014. She had the baggage that comes with being a career politician, but her deep roots and relationships certainly helped far more than they hurt. She was a known commodity who came into the race with high name identification.

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Total spending in the race topped $50 million. National Republican groups poured resources into the race to offset Ossoff’s impressive online fundraising. In the end, from the April primary through yesterday’s election, both sides were equally matched on the airwaves...

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A West Wing that has grown accustomed to losing news cycles was in a celebratory mood:

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 GOP leaders on Capitol Hill are relieved that Handel’s win will avert a collective freak-out of the rank-and-file....  “Most immediately, the election result could bring momentum to Senate Republicans’ efforts this week to craft their version of a major revision to the Affordable Care Act. ‘We need to finish the drill on health care,’ Handel said during her victory speech” in Brookhaven, Ga.

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Republican lawmakers who have tough reelection races in 2018 will see Handel’s victory as proof that they can thread the needle when it comes to Trump. Handel hardly mentioned him, yet she was still able to win over his supporters. We saw the same dynamic at play in several 2016 contests, as well. As a political reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer notes:

Bigger picture: Perhaps the GOP House majority isn’t as vulnerable as some people have been saying. But veteran Republican operatives also warn against overreading the lessons of one special election. There are many districts that will be a lot tougher for Republicans to hold than Georgia’s Sixth next November..... A Los Angeles Times reporter puts it more starkly: