the president had a view in the campaign. we wanted to make sure that partisan politics did not color state officials reaction to the information, point one. point two is we also knew that the russians wanted to undercut confidence in our electoral system. we did not want to play into their hands. in fact, we didn t. as a result, we had 33 states work with the department of homeland security to scan and strengthen their systems. that ends up being very important to the outcome of the election. if putin s goal was to elect donald trump, then how is it that what you did in 2016 was the right call? look, i m not going to get into whether we know precisely what his goal was or not. you re not as convinced as even mueller s team and the indictment is that the interference was intended to help donald trump? i ll let the indictment speak for itself. what i m going to make is a simple point that says he wanted to do two things.
actions. some of the things that we feared they may do, they did not do. let me play for you what president obama said about talking what you just said, this was in december he was recounting his conversation with putin in september. here it is. i felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out. and, in fact, we did not see further tampering of the election process. based on the mueller indictment of the internet research agency, we now know that that is not true. we know the troll farms were working, particularly there are specific references to october 16th in 2016 november 3rd, at the time the troll farms in russia were pushing and encouraged u.s. minority groups not to vote, things like that. were these things you missed? you didn t know they were doing this at the time? was his comment just about the election systems? i think it is very important to recognize that there s two issues here, chuck.
rogers of the nsa saying the price putin is paying is basically nothing. there is no reason for him not to continue doing what he had been doing in 2018 and 2020. he sabre rattles with the nuclear missile and the president responds with alec baldwin. and mentions the china leader is in there for life. he says that sounds pretty good. maybe i could have the need to be at the center of action. this guy wants to be the president for life. funny you say that, a good transition to guns. that whole public spectacle, look at that! maybe him wanting to be more at the center of the spectacle. i am curious, doesn t look like we would complete the cycle of the gun, massive tragedy and people wringing their hands to do something and teparticles sets in. michael ger son says the
entire second term and he joins me now. mr. mcdonough, welcome back to meet the press. thanks for having me, chuck. as a private citizen, no less. private citizen. let s start with the choke comment. looking back, did you choke? look, we during the course of 2016 became alarmed about what we were seeing and became it became very clear to us what the russians intentions were. so we took a series of pain-staking steps, including the president directly confronting president putin, us going to congress to press them to work with us to make sure that the states were doing everything they could to protect the sanctity of every americans vote, and then ultimately, releasing a very powerful statement from the secretary of homeland security and the director of national intelligence calling attention to this threat. so we did exactly what we think we needed to do. and, in fact, that discussion between president obama and president putin, we believe, was very impactful on the russ
a level that the public might have taken even more seriously. for two reasons, chuck, and i can come back to whether the public had an opportunity through the reporting to understand exactly what was happening. but for two reasons. one, you know how we run our elections and our electoral infrastructure. it s by state and local officials who are partisans, republicans and democrats. we feared that if it looked like the president was involved, that this was a partisan matter. at the time we were in the middle of the campaign. the president had a view in the campaign. we wanted to make sure that partisan politics did not color state officials reaction to the information, point one. point two is we also knew that the russians wanted to undercut confidence in our electoral system. we did not want to play into their hands. in fact, we didn t. as a result, we had 33 states work with the department of homeland security to scan and strengthen their systems. that ends up being very important