When asked about Biden’s meeting with Russian President Putin, John Ratcliffe, former Director of National Intelligence, spoke on Fox News Sunday Morning Futures saying “Vladimir Putin got exactly what he wanted.”
Speaking with host Maria Bartiromo, Ratcliffe said, “I could make an argument that the first five months of the Biden administration have been the best of Vladimir Putin’s political life.”
Ratcliffe went on saying, “Just from an economic standpoint, folks know that Vladimir Putin was 3-0 when it comes to pipelines. Joe Biden shut down the Keystone pipeline. That was a win for Putin. Criminal networks in Russia shut down one of our major pipelines, the Colonial Pipeline. That was a win for Putin. And, of course, Joe Biden responded by giving Vladimir Putin the one thing that he wanted most, which was the Nord Stream II pipeline, the ability to finish that, and, by doing so, to control the flow of energy into Western Europe.”
“So it had already been a great year for Vladimir Putin before he ever got to Geneva. But then Joe Biden gave him a political win. He invited the Russian dictator who governs a country with an economy — a small, dwindling economy the size of the state of Texas, to sit down with him. And, as a result of that, Vladimir Putin was on the world stage with equal billing with the leader of the free world, and he made no concessions. He made no concessions about cyberattacks. He made no concessions about political dissidents. He made no concessions about Russian interference in Ukraine or Belarus. And that’s a political win for Vladimir Putin back home that he could not possibly have dreamed about.”
Ratcliffe went on to talk about the “list” that Biden reportedly gave to Puting, which included sites and/or organizations that, according to Biden, are “off limits” to Russian hacking. Ratcliffe said, “To hand him that kind of list is essentially to hand him a target list, to give your adversary, whatever you do, don’t attack these. These are where we’re most vulnerable, so stay away from that. I mean, that’s how Vladimir Putin would look at that. I don’t know who’s coming up with the strategies. But if you’re going to give Vladimir Putin a list, it should have been a list of our targets. It should have been, hey, if we suffer another major cyberattack, we’re coming after one of these, or, even better, shut down the lights in the Kremlin before you go to the summit, so that Vladimir Putin knows you mean business and that when you say, don’t cross these red lines, or there will be consequences, he knows that you’re serious about that.”
