Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for a “new national commission” to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election to prevent future cyberattacks.
“We need a national commission to look into what actually really did happen and what could happen in order to protect our elections,” Clinton said Thursday while addressing a crowd at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics.
She also called on “every state to do everything it can” to get to the bottom of what happened within their own elections and prevent hackers from accessing their voting systems in the future.
The Department of Homeland Security notified 21 states, including key battleground states Wisconsin and Virginia, last September that they have found evidence that Russian entities have attempted to hack their voting systems.
Clinton heralded Virginia as a example of a state that has reassessed its vulnerability to hacking as it has turned back to a paper ballot system.
“I worry we don’t know what we don’t know, my friends,” she said. “And you know when they say the Russians got into 21 states and their voter registration files but nothing changed … I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Well, how do we know?’”
The former secretary of state also claimed that states are too embarrassed to admit they were susceptible to Russian interference and said the federal government appears to “care less” because the administration believes the meddling benefited the Trump campaign.
Speaking from her own experience in the State Department, Clinton warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not trustworthy and claimed U.S. officials should not rely on his administration to help in their investigation.
As part of the ongoing investigation into Russian interference, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities last month for meddling in the 2016 election that Clinton lost.
