Obama orders review of
2016 election cyber attacks
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[December 10, 2016]
By Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President
Barack Obama has ordered intelligence agencies to review cyber attacks
and foreign intervention into the 2016 election and deliver a report
before he leaves office on Jan. 20, the White House said on Friday.
In October, the U.S. government formally accused Russia of a campaign of
cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations ahead of the Nov. 8
presidential election, and Obama has said he warned Russian President
Vladimir Putin about consequences for the attacks.
The review and its timeline are a signal that Obama wants the issue
addressed before he hands power to President-elect Donald Trump, who
cast doubt on Russia's hacking role and praised Putin during the
campaign.
Obama's homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, told reporters the
report's results would be shared with lawmakers and others.
"The president has directed the intelligence community to conduct a full
review of what happened during the 2016 election process ... and to
capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of
stakeholders, to include the Congress," she said during an event hosted
by the Christian Science Monitor.
White House spokesman Eric Schultz said the review would be a "deep
dive" that would look for a pattern of such behavior over several years
during election time, dating as far back as the 2008 presidential
election.
He noted that Obama wanted the review completed under his watch. "This
is a major priority," Schultz said.
During his campaign for the White House, Trump called on Russia to dig
up missing emails from his opponent, Hillary Clinton, from her time as
secretary of state under Obama, a fellow Democrat. That move prompted
critics to accuse him of encouraging foreign actors to conduct
espionage.
The New York businessman has said he is not convinced Russia was behind
the attacks.
"I don’t believe they interfered," Trump told Time magazine about Russia
in an interview published this week. "That became a laughing point, not
a talking point, a laughing point. Any time I do something, they say,
‘Oh, Russia interfered.’"
People Trump has nominated for top national security posts in his new
administration have taken a harsher stance toward Moscow.
Russian officials have denied all accusations of interference in the
U.S. election.
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President Barack Obama speaks about counter-terrorism during his
visit to MacDill Air Force Base, home to U.S. Central Command and
U.S. Special Operations Command, in Tampa, Florida, U.S. December 6,
2016. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Obama has come under pressure from Democratic lawmakers to declassify more
intelligence on the alleged hackings.
A government source said the review was sparked in part to respond to those
demands as well as to determine how much material related to the subject could
be made public.
“Given President-elect Trump's disturbing refusal to listen to our intelligence
community and accept that the hacking was orchestrated by the Kremlin, there is
an added urgency to the need for a thorough review before President Obama leaves
office next month,” Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the
House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.
Monaco said cyber attacks were not new but might have crossed a "new threshold"
this year.
When she was working as a senior Federal Bureau of Investigation official in
2008, she said, the agency alerted the presidential campaigns of then-Senator
Obama and Republican Senator John McCain that China had infiltrated their
respective systems.
"We've seen in 2008 and in this last election system malicious cyber activity,"
Monaco said.
Asked if Trump's transition team was not concerned enough about Russia's
influence on the election or about other threats to the United States such as
infectious disease outbreaks, Monaco said it was too soon to say. She noted that
she had not met with her successor because the Trump team had yet to name one.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason in Washington; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball
and Jonathan Landay in Washington; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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