President promises payback for Russian interference
WASHINGTON President Barack Obama has put Russia’s Vladimir Putin on notice that the United States could use offensive cyber muscle to retaliate for interference in the US presidential election, his strongest suggestion to date that Putin was well aware of campaign email hacking.
‘‘Whatever they do to us, we can potentially do to them,’’ Obama declared yesterday, as he closed out the year at a White House news conference. Afterwards, he left for the family’s annual vacation in Hawaii.
Caught in the middle of a postelection controversy over Russian hacking, Obama strongly defended his administration’s response, including his refusal before the vote to ascribe motive to the meddling or to discuss now what effect it might have had.
US intelligence assessments say the hacking was aimed at least in part to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, and some Democrats say it may have tipped the results in his favour.
Obama declined to state explicitly that Putin knew about the email hacking, but he left no doubt as to who he felt was responsible. He said that ‘‘not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin’’, and repeated a US intelligence assessment ‘‘that this happened at the highest levels of the Russian government’’.
Obama said he confronted Putin in September, telling the former KGB chief to ‘‘cut it out’’. This was one month before the US publicly pointed the finger at Russia.
Suggesting his directive to Putin had been effective, Obama said the US ‘‘did not see further tampering’’ after that date.
The president has promised a ‘‘proportional’’ yet unspecified response to the hacking of the Democratic Party and Clinton’s campaign chairman. Emails stolen during the campaign were released in the final weeks of the campaign by WikiLeaks.
Yesterday, CIA Director John Brennan said the FBI agreed with the CIA’s conclusion that Russia’s goal was to help Trump win.
Trump has dismissed the CIA’s assessment and talk about Russian hacking as ‘‘ridiculous’’.
Clinton even more directly cited Russian interference. ‘‘Putin himself directed the covert cyberattacks against our electoral system, against our democracy, apparently because he has a personal beef against me.’’ AP