Senior White House adviser Ben Rhodes pushed back on Democratic criticism of the administration’s slow response to Russian hacking on Thursday by arguing the White House’s pre-election statement was sufficient.
“President Obama did speak to this. I think it was a powerful thing to have the intelligence community, in that statement, verify Russian meddling in our election,” Rhodes said on MSNBC.
He was referring to an Oct. 7 statement by the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security that blamed Russian-backed groups for executing cyberattacks against “U.S. persons and institutions,” which included the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
“We blew the whistle on Russian meddling. It was available to the media and the American people to evaluate that information,” Rhodes added.
While Republicans have rejected assertions that the Russian hacking was carried out for the express purpose of electing Donald Trump, some Democrats have said that was Russia’s motive, and have begun to question the White House over its seemingly weak response to the Russian interference.
Critics have pointed to Obama’s forceful and direct response to the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures by North Korea when asking why the president did not personally condemn the Russians before Election Day.
“We are reviewing what action we can take in response to Russian hacking,” Rhodes said on Thursday. “We don’t want Russia to feel like they can do this with impunity moving forward.”
Rhodes appeared to confirm reports that the intelligence community has concluded Russian President Vladimir Putin played a direct role in leaking emails and documents obtained through hacking.
“We just don’t think Russia would engage in these activities … without the approvals of the highest levels of government,” he said, noting the administration had said as much prior to Election Day.
“Everything we know about how Russia operates and how Putin controls that government suggests” he would have been personally involved in signing off on those actions, Rhodes added.
President-elect Trump and his team have dismissed reports of the latest hacking-related intelligence, and say the media’s fixation on Russia is just another in a string of attempts to delegitimize his victory.
The CIA reportedly told lawmakers last week during a classified briefing that analysts had concluded Russians hacked Democratic figures in order to boost Trump, but the FBI has reportedly stopped short of ascribing such a motivation to the Russians.
Attempts to break into DNC digital files may have begun as early as summer 2015, long before Trump was considered a serious candidate for the Republican nomination.
