President Obama tried on Friday to stop short of saying Vladimir Putin was responsible for Russian hacking into Democratic party political data, but he dropped multiple hints—his own spokesman may have called them “not particularly subtle” ones—that the American adversary was behind the activity.
During a year-end news conference in the White House briefing room, Obama recalled a September encounter with his Russian counterpart at the G20 summit when he told Putin to not meddle further with U.S. political affairs.
“What I was concerned about in particular was making sure that [Wikileaks] wasn’t compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself. And so in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that did not happen 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.
The president added later that “not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin,” implying that the Russian leader must have been involved almost by default.
“This is a pretty hierarchical operation. Last I checked, there’s not a lot of debate and democratic deliberation, particularly when it comes to policies directed at the United States. We have said and I will confirm that this happened at the highest levels of the Russian government, and I will let you make that determination as to whether there are high-level Russian officials who go off rogue and decide to tamper with the U.S. election process without Vladimir Putin knowing about it,” he said.
Obama spent much of the press event fielding questions about Russia and its activity in American politics this year. He reiterated his intention to have the United States retaliate against the Eurasian power, “in a thoughtful, methodical way,” and both with and without the public’s knowledge.
The administration and President-elect Donald Trump’s team have traded shots in recent days about Russia’s tampering, with White House spokesman Josh Earnest charging that the incoming commander-in-chief had knowledge of it—in his opinion, a noncontroversial assessment—and Trump aide Kellyanne Conway bristling at the implication that her boss possessed advance information.
