Here’s who gave the ‘STAND DOWN’ order on countering Putin’s election hacking

So according to a new book coming out soon, the Obama administration knew that there was Putin hacking on our election in 2018, but when our sooper-smart counter-hackers mounted an attack against their Siberian krokodil-addicted doping keyboard-jockeys, they were told to STAND DOWN.

Here’s who gave the order:

One day in late August, national security adviser Susan Rice called Daniel into her office and demanded he cease and desist from working on the cyber options he was developing. “Don’t get ahead of us,” she warned him. The White House was not prepared to endorse any of these ideas. Daniel and his team in the White House cyber response group were given strict orders: “Stand down.” She told Daniel to “knock it off,” he recalled.

Daniel walked back to his office. “That was one pissed-off national security adviser,” he told one of his aides.

At his morning staff meeting, Daniel matter-of-factly said to his team that it had to stop work on options to counter the Russian attack: “We’ve been told to stand down.” Daniel Prieto, one of Daniel’s top deputies, recalled, “I was incredulous and in disbelief. It took me a moment to process. In my head I was like, ‘Did I hear that correctly?’” Then Prieto spoke up, asking, “Why the hell are we standing down? Michael, can you help us understand?” Daniel informed them that the orders came from both Rice and Monaco. They were concerned that if the options were to leak, it would force Obama to act. “They didn’t want to box the president in,” Prieto subsequently said.

Now the book is Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, who is a foul wretched liberal. So I think we should take it with a grain of salt. But on the other hand I could totally see it being accurate – as a conservative, my best known principle is that government is utterly incompetent. And if that’s the case, then I could definitely see them backing down because they honestly thought Hillary had it in the bag and they didn’t need to push back against Putin. Just another perfect storm ending in a s-storm…


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