The leaving president of the United States, Barack Obama, ordered this Friday a full review of the alleged intervention Russia had on the presidential race.
The Democratic POTUS will leave the White House on January 20. He has expressed the urgency for a report regarding what happened with the foreign cyber-attacks that reportedly came from Russia. U.S. intelligence agencies claim that there is no doubt that the attacks that the Democratic Party suffered during the campaign came directly from the Kremlin. Back in October, the Obama Administration accused the European country of being responsible for the attacks and warned Russian President Vladimir Putin of the consequences that these actions must have.
The results of the report will be delivered to lawmakers while the pertinent investigation will go on for further analysis, the Homeland Security Adviser of the White House, Lisa Monaco, told in a Christian Science Monitor event this Friday.
The Russian government has claimed that they are not behind the attacks. However, President Putin stated in November that he is willing to work side by side with Trump to smooth the relation between both nations.
“The president has directed the intelligence community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process and to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders, to include the Congress,” Monaco stated.
Obama is concerned about Trump and Putin
During the Presidential Campaign, President-elect Donald Trump advised Russia to “dig in” Hillary Clinton’s missing emails while she was Secretary of State under the Obama Administration. Critics said it was outrageous that a candidate encouraged a foreign actor to meddle in a national affair.
Trump has said that he doesn’t believe that Moscow is behind the attacks on the Democratic Party, but his fellow Republican team is not so convinced and is concerned about how this could become an espionage scandal.
Trump has stated that the information from the national intelligence agencies is wrong, and this refusal to pay attention to the reports adds “urgency to the need for a thorough review before President Obama leaves office next month,” the Democrat Representative from California, Adam Schiff said in a statement. The latter also added that there is no doubt that the Kremlin is behind this attacks, because of the interests this nation has regarding U.S. internal affairs.
Obama has said that it is very important that this report is completed before he leaves office in January. A spokesman for the White House stated that Obama ordered a “full dive” regarding the investigation and even advised that the study should include the 2008 Presidential Election as well.
In that opportunity, as explained by Monaco, the FBI warned about possible cyberattacks from China that could have affected the Presidential race between Republican Senator John McCain and former Senator Obama. At the time, Monaco was working at the FBI and said that this kind of attacks were not new in any way.
Source: Reuters