President Trump admitted he authorized a cyberattack on Russia’s Internet Research Agency two years ago.
In a newly released interview with Washington Post opinion columnist Marc Thiessen, Trump confirmed that he authorized the attack on the troll farm that the United States has blamed for interfering in the 2016 election and 2018 midterm elections.
“Asked whether he had launched the attack, Trump replied: ‘Correct,'” Thiessen wrote.
According to his report, Trump said that in 2016, then-President Barack Obama “knew before the election that Russia was playing around. Or, he was told. Whether or not it was so or not, who knows? And he said nothing. And the reason he said nothing was that he didn’t want to touch it because he thought [Hillary Clinton] was winning because he read phony polls. So, he thought she was going to win. And we had the silent majority that said, ‘No, we like Trump.'”
The U.S. military disrupted internet access to the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency in a cyberattack that had been reported at the time.
“The cyberattack appears to have been the first that was designed to frustrate Moscow’s attempts to interfere with a U.S. election,” Thiessen wrote.
Trump told Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that he disrupted Russia’s cyber capabilities and claimed that unlike Obama, he acted on intelligence. “Look, we stopped it,” Trump said.
