Obama says ‘we will’ retaliate against Russia for election hacking

From: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/12/15/obama-says-we-will-retaliate-against-russia-for-election-hacking/?tid=pm_politics_pop&utm_term=.d8c28eeebfae

President Obama said in an interview with NPR on Dec. 15, that, "we need to take action and we will, at the time and place of our own choosing," against Russia for its involvement in cyberattacks during this year's election. (Reuters)

President Obama said the United States will retaliate against Russia over its malicious cyber-activity during this year's election, in an interview that aired Friday on NPR.

“I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections . . . we need to take action,” the president said. “And we will — at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman responded by suggesting that the president and his aides were casting aspersions on Russia without offering any proof.

In a statement carried by Russian news agencies, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the U.S. government should “either stop talking about it or finally produce some evidence, otherwise it all begins to look unseemly.”

In the interview with “Morning Edition” host Steve Inskeep the president did not comment on last week's Washington Post report, later confirmed by other outlets, that the CIA has concluded with high confidence that Russia intervened in the election specifically to help Donald Trump win the White House. Seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies publicly announced in October that they had concluded the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta was undertaken by hackers working for Russia.

[Everything you need to know about Russia’s election hacking]

Obama said that “there are still a whole range of assessments taking place among the agencies” and that he is waiting for the report on cyberattacks he has ordered to be delivered by Jan. 20.

“And so when I receive a final report, you know, we'll be able to, I think, give us a comprehensive and best guess as to those motivations,” Obama said. “But that does not in any way, I think, detract from the basic point that everyone during the election perceived accurately — that in fact what the Russian hack had done was create more problems for the Clinton campaign than it had for the Trump campaign.”

“There's no doubt that it contributed to an atmosphere in which the only focus for weeks at a time, months at a time were Hillary's emails, the Clinton Foundation, political gossip surrounding the DNC,” he added.

The president said he had raised the issue of Russia's cyberattacks during a lengthy meeting with Putin in September on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in China. Russian officials have previously denied any hacking activity aimed at influencing this year's presidential race. Putin's foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said the Russian president gave Obama a "very clear answer" during their talk at the G-20.