We will hit back – Obama
President promises ‘thoughtful, methodical’ retaliation for Russian interference, including the hacking of emails, that may have swayed the US presidential election in favour of Donald Trump.
Promise of payback for ■ Russian role in presidential vote You’ll miss Barack when he’s gone, says Michelle Britain says Russia is up to the same tricks there as well Whatever they do to us, we can potentially do to them. President Barack Obama
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.
Accusations of Russian interference have heightened the already tense relationship between Washington and Moscow.
Though Obama avoided criticising President-elect Trump by name, he called out Republicans who he said failed even now to acknowledge the seriousness of Russia’s involvement in US elections.
He expressed bewilderment about GOP lawmakers and voters who now say they approve of Putin, and said that unless this changed, the US would be vulnerable to foreign influence.
‘‘Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave,’’ he said.
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 has even more directly cited Russian interference. She said on Friday: ‘‘Vladimir Putin himself directed the covert cyberattacks against our electoral system, against our democracy, apparently because he has a personal beef against me.’’
The Senate intelligence committee said yesterday it would conduct a bipartisan investigation and hold hearings about what led the intelligence agencies’ finding.
Obama said he would leave it to political pundits to debate the question of whether the hacking swayed the election outcome. He did, however, chide the media for what he called an ‘‘obsession’’ with the emails that were made public.
He said his reticence to detail publicly the US response to Russia reflected a need to retaliate ‘‘in a thoughtful, methodical way’’.
Separately, Obama blamed Russia for standing in the way of international efforts to stop the civil war in Syria, where government forces have beaten back rebels in Aleppo.
Obama said he felt ‘‘responsible’’ for some of the suffering in Syria, but he defended his decision to avoid significant military action there. He said that while military options short of invasion were tempting, it was ‘‘impossible to do this on the cheap’’.
He pinned the bulk of the blame on Russia, as well as Iran, for propping up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
‘‘This blood and these atrocities are on their hands,’’ he said.
Meanwhile, Obama rejected any notion that the dispute over hacking was disrupting efforts to smoothly transfer power to Trump.
Despite fiercely criticising each other during the election, Obama and Trump have spoken multiple times since the campaign ended.
‘‘He has listened,’’ Obama said of Trump.
‘‘I can’t say he will end up implementing. But the conversations themselves have been cordial.’’
Obama advised Trump to ‘‘think it through’’ before making changes in the One-China policy, in which the US recognises Taiwan as part of China.