Obama pitches for Clinton’s WH bid

President points to Russia on DNC hack

PHILADELPHIA, July 27, (Agencies): Barack Obama was to add an optimistic pitch on Wednesday to the campaign to elect Hillary Clinton as the first woman US president, as he seeks to hand off the White House to a trusted fellow Democrat and stop Republican Donald Trump.

Clinton formally secured the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination on Tuesday, coming back from a stinging defeat to Obama in her first White House run in 2008 and surviving a bitter primary fight against Bernie Sanders to become the first woman to head the ticket of a major US party. The 68-year-old former secretary of state will accept the nomination on the last day of the party’s convention in Philadelphia on Thursday, becoming the Democratic standard-bearer against Trump in the Nov 8 election.

Obama, was due to address the meeting on Wednesday evening, has been vocally critical of the Republican candidate, and is likely to contrast his optimistic view of the United States with Trump’s darker vision.

The New York businessman has cast America as a place in need of a strong leader, where security threats abound and law and order are breaking down. Trump, 70, has proposed deeply controversial measures such as temporarily banning Muslims from entering the country and building a wall on the Mexico border to stop illegal immigrants.

“I hope my headline (from the speech) is that the president of the United States is profoundly optimistic about America’s future and is 100 percent convinced that Hillary Clinton can be a great president,” Obama said in an interview with NBC News that aired on Wednesday.

His remarks will follow his wife Michelle Obama’s opening night speech to the gathering on Monday, which was a rousing success with delegates. “I’m not going to hit that bar, so let me concede top speech-making already to my wife, but I couldn’t have been prouder of her,” Obama said.

Meanwhile US President Barack Obama warned Democrats Wednesday that anything was possible in the US elections and to “stay worried until all the votes are counted.”

Obama, who is the keynote speaker Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention, was asked in an interview with NBC’s Today Show whether Republican candidate Donald Trump could defeat the Democrat’s Hillary Clinton. “Anything is possible,” he said. “As somebody who has now been in elected office at various levels for about 20 years, I have seen all kinds of crazy stuff happen, and I think everybody that goes into campaigns not running scared can end up losing.

“My advice to Democrats — I don’t have to give this advice to Hillary Clinton because she already knows it — is you stay worried until all the votes are cast and counted, because one of the dangers in an election like this is that people don’t take the challenge seriously, they stay home, and we end up getting something else.” Clinton was proclaimed the Democratic presidential nominee Tuesday night at a star-studded convention in Philadelphia keynoted by husband and former president Bill Clinton.

In related news Russia may have been behind the leak of hacked Democratic National Committee documents, President Barack Obama said Tuesday in his first public comments on the breach.

Asked whether Moscow was trying to influence the presidential election, Obama said, “Anything’s possible.”

Obama, who traditionally avoids commenting on active FBI investigations, broke with that protocol and noted that outside experts have blamed Russia for the leak. He leaned heavily into the notion that President Vladimir Putin may have reason to facilitate the attack.

“What the motives were in terms of the leaks, all that — I can’t say directly,” Obama told NBC News. “What I do know is that Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin.” Obama said he was basing his assessment on Trump’s own comments and the fact that the GOP presidential nominee has “gotten pretty favorable coverage back in Russia.” He added that the US knows that “Russians hack our systems — not just government systems, but private systems.” The FBI hasn’t publicly attributed the attack to Russia, but Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign has, suggesting the goal was to benefit Trump’s campaign. A spokesman for Putin on Tuesday called the allegation “paranoid.”

Followed

Experts who’ve followed the leak say they agree that Moscow had a hand in the hack, lending weight to the extraordinary allegation that the Kremlin is trying to tamper with the US presidential contest.

“You’re left with all the signs pointing to Moscow,” said Matt Tait, a U.K.-based cybersecurity consultant who has put in roughly 20 hours combing through the leaked DNC documents.

Tait and others invoke several categories of evidence. The first was provided by threat intelligence firm crowd strike, an Irvine, California, company that was hired by the Democrats to clean out the party’s network. It delivered a report last month identifying Russia’s intelligence services as being behind two separate electronic break-ins at the DNC. The second category of evidence was provided by electronic fingerprints on some of the documents suggesting the files had been run through Russian language-configured machines.

Most convincing for Tait was evidence that the internet infrastructure tied the DNC hackers to a separate campaign that targeted Germany’s parliament last year. In May, Germany’s domestic intelligence chief took the unusual step of publicly blaming that attack on Moscow, saying the Kremlin wasn’t just spying — it was gearing up for sabotage.

“More than anything else I think (that) really puts to rest the ‘Who is this?’” Tait said Tuesday. “It’s one thing to say that they were typing stuff in Russian or they were coming from a Russian IP (internet protocol) address or their systems were configured in Russian. It’s another thing to say this was being run by the same servers being publicly attributed by German intelligence as being Russian.”

Trump tweeted Tuesday that the Democrats were trying to “deflect the horror and stupidity” of the leak, calling the suggestion “crazy!” wiki leaks founder Julian Assange, who began publishing thousands of the emails last week, said Monday there’s was “no proof” Russia was behind the hack, and on Tuesday told CNN that “a lot more” material was on its way.