HONORABLE FASTIDIOUSNESS, BUT A MISTAKE:

Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, asked about a "Russian Roulette" passage in which one of Daniel's staff members, Daniel Prieto, recounted a staff meeting shortly after the cyber coordinator was ordered by Susan Rice, President Obama's national security adviser, to stop his efforts and "stand down." This order was in part because Rice feared the options would leak and "box the president in."

"I was incredulous and in disbelief," Prieto is quoted as saying in the book. "It took me a moment to process. In my head, I was like, did I hear that correctly?" Prieto told the authors he then spoke up, asking Daniel: "Why the hell are we standing down? Michael, can you help us understand?"

Daniel has confirmed that the account was "an accurate rendering of what happened" in his staff meeting. He said his bosses at the NSC -- he did not specifically mention Rice in his testimony -- had concerns about "how many people were working on the options" so the "decision" from his superiors at the Obama White House was to "neck down the number of people that were involved in developing our ongoing response options."

Daniel added that "it's not accurate to say that all activity ceased at that point." He and his staff "shifted our focus" to assisting state governments to protect against Russian cyberattacks against state and local election systems.

But as for his work on developing cyber deterrence measures, "those actions were put on a back burner and that was not the focus of our activity during that time period."

Instead, Obama officials chose another course of action after becoming frustrated that Republican leaders on Capitol Hill would not endorse a bipartisan statement condemning Russian interference and fearful that any unilateral action by them would feed then candidate Donald Trump's claims that the election was rigged. They chose a private "stern" warning by Obama to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in China in early September 2016 to stop his country's campaign to disrupt the U.S. election.

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