Michael Daniel was the cybersecurity coordinator for the Obama Administration in 2016, the year that the Obama types were voted out of office in the person of his surrogate, Hillary Clinton. Since that time, the left has obsessed over the non-story that Russians had interfered with the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win.
When he did win, of course, the Hillary apologists, who could not imagine that she could lose, were all over the Russia non-story, claiming that the Russians were the reason she'd lost, not the fact that she was an abysmal candidate with no message and had disrespected wide swaths of the electorate with her "deplorables" comment.
We are still in the midst of a special counsel investigation that is racking up many millions of taxpayer dollars but has no evidence that Russian tampering changed a single vote, nor that it influenced a single voter, nor that the Trump team conspired with Russians to do so. But that all goes on.
So ... we have scads of "Democrat strategists" who keep going on the news shows talking about Russia. More to the point, every time they are confronted with difficult questions about why that investigation continues, despite zero evidence after a year-plus of trying, they come back to the tagline that President Trump "appears not to care about Russian meddling in the 2016 election."
Now, whether he cares or not, people in government are certainly investigating, starting with the Special Counsel.
But if that is what the Democrat strategists are concerned about, they must be really troubled about Michael Daniel. Mr. Daniel -- again, the cybersecurity expert for the Obama White House -- was actually doing such an investigation in 2016 because there was concern even in the Obama years (though not in his White House, we guess) about Russian meddling in the election here.
And last Wednesday, in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. Daniel testified that he was given the order to stand down from that investigation, in 2016. That order came from none other than Susan Rice, Obama's National Security Adviser, meaning that it came from Obama himself.
In a rare show of candor from Obama officials, but under oath, Daniel stated that that order had, indeed, been made to him and his team. In other words, the Obama White House had stopped the team from investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the exact complaint that the Democrats have of the Trump Administration's approach to Russian meddling.
"It is the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend,” a former senior Obama administration official, who was involved in White House Russia discussions, said of the administration's inaction. “I feel like we sort of choked."
And yet it was not "choking." It was an intentional stifling of an investigation that cyber experts in the Obama Administration deemed necessary to conduct.
So why, pray tell?
Why did they stop the investigation? Why did they not want to know about Russian meddling?
The conventional wisdom, at least from the left, is that the Russians wanted Donald Trump to win for some reason. Yet it was Hillary Clinton who had shown herself corruptible as Secretary of State, and who had allowed the same Russians to walk of with a quarter of USA uranium. She was the one they wanted in the White House, not Trump, logically.
So Obama, through the known liar Susan Rice, who famously lied to the American public about Benghazi, ordered his cyber people to stop the investigation into Russian election meddling while they were in power. We surmise that the Russians wanted Hillary Clinton to win. So does it not make it sound like Obama was perfectly happy with the Russians helping her try to win the election, not Trump?
Obama was willing to have "his" FBI spy on the Trump campaign and try to make it look like they, not the Clinton team, was working with Russians.
So at what point, with flat-out testimony under oath that Obama stopped his own team's investigation into Russian meddling, does the press start actually airing the story?
Wait and see.
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton