Jeh Johnson: If Obama Made a Statement on Russia, We Would Have Been Playing Right into Candidate Trump’s Rhetoric

EXCERPT:

MITCHELL: "Would -- do you think it would have been above the fold if the president and the vice president had said something? Rather than you -- with all due respect, you were a cabinet secretary. If it had come from the Oval Office would it have gotten more attention?"
JOHNSON: "A lot of people have asked that question. And I continue to believe that in that particular campaign, as heated as it was, with one of the candidates saying the outcome is going to be rigged, and all the things we were wrestling with at the time, if President Obama himself had gotten into this and made that statement, in many respects we would have been playing right into candidate Trump’s rhetoric. And so the judgment was made that it should come from the intelligence community and the Homeland Security community, and that’s what we did. The statement was very blunt. It was very plain spoken. But as I pointed out, and I pointed out a number of times, it was overwhelmed, frankly, by 'Access Hollywood', by the video, by the debate two days later, the speculation over the weekend, he’s going to drop out, he can’t possibly withstand this, and it was very little follow-up from journalists, not until December on what we had said."