According to former CIA director John Brennan, who served in that post under Barack Obama, even after Obama had been apprised that Russia was conducting cyber-warfare against the United States he refused to go on the offensive and retaliate against Moscow.

Speaking at the University of California, Berkeley, on Saturday, Brennan admitted that there was a plan to respond and retaliate against Moscow that had been formulated by the intelligence community, but Obama refused to act, instead weakly issuing a verbal warning to Russia. Brennan acknowledged, “President Obama was the ultimate decision-maker on that.”

Brennan said Obama was afraid that if America retaliated, Russia would increase their cyber-warfare against the United States. He stated, “There was consideration about rattling their cages with some type of cyber event.”

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Brennan stated, “We were really trying to strike the right balance between doing everything we could to prevent and thwart as well as to uncover and understand what the Russians were doing without doing anything that would almost advance their interests in trying to disrupt our election.” He added that Obama was concerned that U.S. action against the Russians might be perceived as Obama attempting to influence the 2016 election, saying, “So if we did more things and stood at the hilltops and cried out, ‘The Russians, the Russians are trying to help Trump get elected,’ and if President Obama who is the titular head of the Democratic Party were to do that, I think that there would have been a lot of people would believe, I think with some justification, that the President of the United States was trying to influence the outcome of a presidential election.”