Sources: Obama's move in 2016 to expel dozens of Russian diplomats and seize estates was in part due to a brazen Russian operation to breach FBI communications
including Carter Page, who would later act as an unpaid FP adviser to Trump's 2016 campaign. https://news.yahoo.com/... Kim Zetter / @kimzetter : NBC has a good follow-up to today's Yahoo story - sources told NBC they don't believe Russians were actually able to crack the encryption on the FBI radio communications but they were still able to gather other intel https://www.nbcnews.com/... Leigh Drogen / @ldrogen : Obama looks more and more spineless every day with each additional piece of info we get on just how poorly he handled the Russian assault https://twitter.com/... Caroline Orr / @rvawonk : Wow. In Dec 2016, Russia carried out a “brazen” counterintelligence operation targeting FBI communications. The op hampered the FBI's ability to track Russian spies on US soil and forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets. https://news.yahoo.com/... Southpaw / @nycsouthpaw : “According to a former senior CIA officer who served in Moscow, the Russians would often try to disguise a human source as a technical penetration. Ultimately, officials were unable to pinpoint exactly how the Russians pulled off the compromise...” https://news.yahoo.com/... John Schindler / @20committee : Big spy story here. 2 obvious takeaways: FBI COMSEC debacle here. It happens, this is still bad. Obama WH knew about it in 2012 & did...nothing. Kept the “reset” going. Finally acted 4+ years later — after Snowden, after Crimea, after US 2016 election. https://news.yahoo.com/... Sherrilyn Ifill / @sifill_ldf : A really important story. We cannot forget Mueller's most forceful takeaway: the attack and infiltration of U.S. systems by Russia is relentless. https://news.yahoo.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Yahoo News report reframes the December 2016 expulsions: the diplomat expulsions and estate seizures were not only retaliation for the DNC hack that fed WikiLeaks, but a response to a brazen Russian operation against FBI communications itself — one that forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some human assets. NBC's follow-up adds a crucial caveat: sources do not believe the Russians actually cracked the radio encryption, but they still harvested usable intelligence from the breach.
That caveat matters because it lands on an agency already exposed. A year before this reporting, AP revealed the FBI sat for over a year on knowledge that Fancy Bear was targeting hundreds of government officials while warning only a few. The new disclosure suggests the counterintelligence damage ran deeper than the election-hacking story the public knew.
First-order effects
- The FBI and CIA had to cut contact with some assets inside Russia, a direct operational loss from the communications compromise.
- Moscow lost dozens of diplomats and two seized estates overnight, shrinking its US diplomatic and intelligence footprint in the closing weeks of the Obama administration.
Second-order effects
- The FBI faces compounded credibility pressure: the same period when it under-warned Fancy Bear's targets was also when its own comms were being worked, sharpening scrutiny of its internal COMSEC practices.
- Each successive disclosure — the DNC hack, the Fancy Bear warnings, now the comms breach — raises the political cost of the administration's measured initial response, fueling critics like those in the coverage arguing Obama acted too weakly against what the Senate committee would later confirm as a Putin-directed operation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Russian intelligence operations are treated less as discrete incidents and more as continuous campaigns spanning elections, critical infrastructure, and agency communications themselves — the framing behind the US's first public attribution of the power-grid hacking campaign and the later unmasking of GRU Unit 29155.
- The gap between threat and response becomes the durable finding: analysts assessing 2020-era defenses concluded US responses to 2016 interference remained inadequate even as tactics evolved, suggesting structural counterintelligence reform rather than episodic retaliation is the real open question.
The trend: Russian intelligence operations against the US are escalating from election-adjacent hacking toward direct penetration of American agencies' own communications, with each disclosure forcing Washington's response posture to catch up after the fact.