The hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., believes one can draw a straight line between the Obama administration’s years of acquiescence to Russia and Russian interference in this year’s election.
Specifically, today in Politico, he points to a bipartisan panel involving several federal agencies that he and others in Congress tried to create earlier this year. The purpose was “to counter Russian efforts “to exert covert influence,” including by exposing Russian “falsehoods, agents of influence, corruption, human rights abuses, terrorism, and assassinations.” One of the panel’s goals would have been to lay bare Russia’s “funding of agents of influence” — a perhaps important and still-mostly-untold story.
Cotton’s proposal passed the House, but died in the Senate amid White House opposition. It would not have come soon enough to change what happened during this year’s election. But he believes the White House’s flat-out rejection of it at the time (with what he considers a thin rationale) is just one symptom of long-term neglect of a serious problem.
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READ "Cotton: White House blocked my panel to counter Russian influence” via @dcexaminer https://t.co/iT54t0WRiw
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) December 23, 2016
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