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President Obama orders review of Russian hacking during the election

 
President Barack Obama shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin before a bilateral meeting on Sept. 28, 2015, at United Nations headquarters. Obama has ordered intelligence officials to conduct a broad review on the election-season hacking that rattled the presidential campaign and raised new concerns about foreign meddling in U.S. elections, a White House official said Friday. 
White House counterterrorism and Homeland Security adviser Lisa Monaco said Obama ordered officials to report on the hacking of Democratic officials' email accounts and Russia's involvement. [Associated Press]
President Barack Obama shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin before a bilateral meeting on Sept. 28, 2015, at United Nations headquarters. Obama has ordered intelligence officials to conduct a broad review on the election-season hacking that rattled the presidential campaign and raised new concerns about foreign meddling in U.S. elections, a White House official said Friday. White House counterterrorism and Homeland Security adviser Lisa Monaco said Obama ordered officials to report on the hacking of Democratic officials' email accounts and Russia's involvement. [Associated Press]
Published Dec. 10, 2016

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to produce a full report on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, his Homeland Security adviser said Friday. He also directed them to develop a list of "lessons learned" from the broad campaign the United States has accused Russia of carrying out to steal emails, publish their contents and probe the vote-counting system.

"We may have crossed a new threshold here," Lisa Monaco, one of Obama's closest aides and the former head of the national security division of the Justice Department, told reporters Friday. "He expects to receive this report before he leaves office."

The report, senior administration officials told the New York Times, will trace the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and on prominent individuals like John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

"This is not an effort to challenge the outcome of the election," White House spokesman Eric Schultz said.

The review comes as President-elect Donald Trump has again questioned whether hacking happened, and if it did whether Russia was responsible. He has suggested that the effort to blame Russia was, in fact, an effort to discredit him and his call for closer relations with Moscow.

Trump repeated those doubts in a Time magazine interview published this week. "I don't believe it," he said. "I don't believe they interfered." He suggested that U.S. intelligence reports attributing the attacks to Russia were driven by politics, not facts.

The hacking, he said, "could be Russia. It could be China. And it could be some guy in New Jersey."

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Friday, "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."

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said the president sought the investigation as a way of improving U.S. defenses against cyberattacks and was not intending to question the legitimacy of Trump's victory.

On Oct. 7, after considerable infighting, the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., and the secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, issued a joint statement saying that Russia was behind the hack of the Democratic Committee. It suggested that the activity had to have been approved at the highest levels of the Russian government.

But Obama has rarely talked publicly about the hacking campaign, even though aides say it has been a preoccupation of his since last summer. He said far more in public about North Korea's hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment two years ago, a case over which he issued sanctions against the North Korean government. There have been warnings to Russia, but no public penalties over the hacking accusations.

On Capitol Hill, the pressure for deeper investigations and a broader release of intelligence findings is growing. Seven Senate Democrats asked the White House earlier this week to declassify some of their conclusions, a step that Monaco said the intelligence agencies were now considering. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has vowed to hold hearings on Russian activities, including efforts to get into military systems.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said earlier this week that the hacking was "a wake-up call and a call to action," and said there had to be "consequences." He has also promised hearings.

The White House said it would make portions of the report public and would brief lawmakers and relevant state officials.

It emphasized the report would not focus solely on Russian operations or hacks involving Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and Democratic National Committee accounts. Schultz stressed officials would be reviewing incidents going back to the 2008 presidential campaign, when the campaigns of Sen. John McCain and Obama were breached by hackers.

Intelligence officials have said Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney were targets of Chinese cyberattacks four years later.

Intelligence agencies and the FBI have been reluctant to make public any of their findings. They fear it will reveal sources and methods of how the incursions were traced back to Russia. After past investigations involving sensitive intelligence information, declassified versions of reports were sometimes published, with a classified version sent to congressional committees and some agencies.

Information from the Associated Press and Washington Post was used in this report.