Putin Shaking in His Boots as Obama Threatens to Retaliate for Election Hacking
Oh man. Putin is shaking in his boots. Okay, probably not.
However, in an interview with NPR on Thursday, President Obama said:
“We need to take action and we will, at the time and place of our choosing” –against Russia for its involvement with the cyberattacks during this year’s elections.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, responded to President Obama’s comments by saying that the U.S. government should “either stop talking about it or finally produce some evidence, otherwise it all begins to look unseemly.”
Seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies publicly announced in October that they had concluded the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta was undertaken by hackers working for Russia.
However, in telephone conversations with Donald Trump, FBI Director James Comey assured the president-elect there was no credible evidence that Russia influenced the outcome of the recent U.S. presidential election by hacking the Democratic National Committee and the emails of John Podesta.
Obama also stated that “there are still a whole range of assessments taking place among the agencies” and that he is waiting for the report on cyberattacks he has ordered to be delivered by Jan. 20.
The president added:
“And so when I receive a final report, you know, we’ll be able to, I think, give us a comprehensive and best guess as to those motivations. But that does not in any way, I think, detract from the basic point that everyone during the election perceived accurately — that in fact what the Russian hack had done was create more problems for the Clinton campaign than it had for the Trump campaign. There’s no doubt that it contributed to an atmosphere in which the only focus for weeks at a time, months at a time were Hillary’s emails, the Clinton Foundation, political gossip surrounding the DNC.”
The Democrats have not denied any of the damning information leaked in the emails.
Yet, WikiLeaks Founder, Julian Assange dropped a bombshell on the Sean Hannity radio show Thursday when he said:
“Our source is not the Russian government.”
Assange also claimed that the leak came from someone within the DNC.
Also, there still is no proof that the Russians actually hacked into voting machines or tampered with the election results.
