President Obama has ordered a full review of the Russian hacking that occurred during the 2016 presidential election.
In October, the intelligence community officially accused Russia of interfering with the election, including the hacks of Democratic groups such as the Democratic National Convention, CNN reports. In addition, there was concern about attempted attacks on voter registration systems—but the intelligence community never said there was strong evidence connecting the Russian government to such attacks.
“The President has directed the Intelligence Community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process. It is to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders,” White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser Lisa Monaco said Friday.
“We may have crossed into a new threshold, and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned,” Monaco continued.
Obama has requested that the review be completed before he leaves office on Jan. 20.
In response, the Russian government has called for evidence of its involvement, and has ultimately denied the United States’ claims.
“We are also very interested in understanding what they accused Russia of. Many times the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Minister Lavrov have asked Americans to provide full information. But never had any response.” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said.
According to The Washington Post, intelligence officials say that Russia has overtaken China as the country of primary concern in the cyberthreat space.
This review comes as President-Elect Donald Trump has continued to dismiss the intelligence community’s findings. Trump told TIME magazine that he doesn’t believe that Russia interfered. The hacking “could be Russia. It could be China. And it could be some guy in New Jersey,” Trump said.
California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, praised the administration for this review and has called on the White House to declassify as much of the information as possible.
“Given President-elect Trump's disturbing refusal to listen to our intelligence community and accept that the hacking was orchestrated by the Kremlin, there is an added urgency to the need for a thorough review before President Obama leaves office next month. More than that, the administration must begin to take steps to respond forcefully to this blatant cyber meddling, and work with our allies in Europe who have been targets of similar attacks to impose costs on the Kremlin; if we do not, we can expect to see a lot more of this in the near future,” Schiff said.
