Obama: I Told Russia, China to Stop Hacking

U.S. President Barack Obama says he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin in September about the alleged hacking of the Democratic Party, and that the hacking did not continue after that conversation.

Obama made the comment after giving his annual year-end news conference from the White House Friday.

“What we’ve simply said is the facts, which are that based on uniform intelligence assessments, the Russians were responsible for hacking the DNC and that, as a consequence, it is important for us to review all elements of that and make sure that we are preventing that kind of interference through cyberattacks in the future,” he said.

Obama said his administration took pains not to draw any conclusions about the effects of the hacking, because of the politically charged atmosphere in the lead-up to the election.

“Part of the goal here was to make sure that we did not do the work of the leakers for them by raising more and more questions about the integrity of the election right before the election was taking place,” Obama said.

When asked if he believed the hacking was responsible for the election loss of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, he did not answer directly. Obama said, “I’m going to let all the pundits in this town have a lot of discussions about that.”

Confrontation with Putin

Obama said he spoke with Putin in September at an event in China, telling him to stop the interference.

“I felt that the most effective way to ensure that it did not happen [again] was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out, there were going to be some serious consequences if he did not,” Obama said of Putin. He said after he spoke with the Russian leader, U.S. officials stopped seeing evidence of tampering.

Obama also blamed the media for focusing on the content of the hacked emails from the Democratic Party, rather than looking at the implications of such a development.

“I am finding it a little curious that everybody is suddenly acting surprised that this looked like it was disadvantaging Hillary Clinton, because you guys [the media] wrote about it every day, every single leak about every little juicy tidbit of political gossip, including John Podesta’s risotto recipe,” Obama said to the reporters at his news conference.