USA TODAY International Edition
Trump blames Obama for Russian hackings
LONDON – President Donald Trump blamed his predecessor Saturday for not doing more to prevent and punish Russia’s cyberattack on Democratic email servers in an attempt to influence the 2016 election.
“The stories you heard about the 12 Russians yesterday took place during the Obama Administration, not the Trump Administration,” Trump tweeted, his first response to the indictments of Russian intelligence officers in the hacking scheme.
That indictment, unsealed Friday, accuses the Russian operatives of a far-ranging plot to disrupt the democratic process by stealing tens of thousands of emails from Democratic Party officials and Clinton campaign operatives, and then leaking them via a website called DCLeaks.
Those leaked emails became the source for countless news stories portraying Clinton in unflattering terms.
But Trump said the Obama administration could have stopped the leaks. “Why didn’t they do something about it, especially when it was reported that President Obama was informed by the FBI in September, before the Election?”
Obama ordered an investigation into the hackings and confronted Putin about the cyberattacks in September 2016. But the White House was hesitant to go public because of worries Obama would be seen as trying to influence the election himself.
Trump also advanced a vague and unsourced conspiracy theory: “Where is the DNC Server, and why didn’t the FBI take possession of it? Deep State?”
The response was almost identical to Trump’s reaction in February to the indictment of 16 Russians accused of carrying out a social media propaganda campaign to influence the election.
But this time, the indictments have thrown a new variable into the already uncertain agenda when Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday in Helsinki.
A group of top Senate Democrats on Saturday wrote to Trump, urging him not to meet Putin one-on-one without other Americans in the room, and to cancel the meeting if the Russian cyberattack on the U.S. election won’t be the meeting’s top issue.
The senators called on Trump to “advance a well-coordinated U.S. message,” supported by senior administration leaders, to hold Russia accountable and urged him not to “wing it.”