US: 'We Need To Take Action. And We Will' says Obama On Russian Hacking

US: 'We Need To Take Action. And We Will' says Obama On Russian Hacking

US President Barack Obama said Russia "in fact" had "hacked into the DNC," but that the actual voting process was not compromised. The White House was just trying to "let people know" what was going on, and the media interpreted the reasons, he said.

Photo Source: Reuters

In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep that is airing Friday on Morning Edition, Obama said, "I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections ... we need to take action. And we will — at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be."

Russia responded Friday morning. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin's spokesman, said the U.S. needs to show some proof or quit talking. "It is necessary to either stop talking about it, or finally produce some evidence," he told Interfax, per the New York Times. "Otherwise, it all begins to look quite unseemly."

Addressing reporters at the White House for the year-end press conference, Obama took questions about Syria, China and president-elect Donald Trump's transition team. Mostly, however, he spoke about Russia and the allegations by US intelligence agencies that Moscow had hacked the US election.

His administration allowed the public "to make an assessment" by letting people know that "the Russians were responsible for hacking" the Democratic National Committee earlier this year, Obama said, adding that the intelligence community did its job "without political influence."

Citing alleged cyber security threats to the US, President Obama said he had "told Russia to stop [the attacks] and indicated there would be consequences."

"Some of it we do publicly, some of it we will do in a way that they know but not everybody will," Obama told the media, adding that "the message will be directly received by the Russians and not publicized."

"It's not like Putin is going around the world publicly saying, 'Look what we did, wasn't that clever' – he denies it," Obama said.

When meeting with Russia's President Putin in China in September, Obama said he confronted him directlyon the matter. The US leader told Moscow "to cut it out," and apparently since then Washington "didn't see further tampering with the election process."

By then, however, WikiLeaks had already published the DNC documents. In October they began publishing the emails of Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta, and the media "wrote about it every day," Obama said.