(Newswire.net — December 19, 2016) — Obama has no doubt that Russia is behind the DNC hack. However, he has told the media that “the actual voting process was not compromised’’.
Addressing reporters at the White House for the year-end press conference, Obama talked about Syria, China and Trump’s transition team. However, he spent most of the time speaking about Russia’s meddling in the US election.
Though Obama didn’t directly criticize Donald Trump for refusing to accept the US intelligence report that put Kremlin behind the DNC hack, he said that the US will send a clear message to Russia. When asked what exactly this message would be, Obama said it may not be publicized.
“Our goal continues to be to send a clear message to Russia or others not to do this to us, because we can do stuff to you,” he informed the media. Obama said: “Some of it we do publicly, some of it we will do in a way that they know but not everybody will”.
In his reply to Obama’s citing of the US intelligence findings, Donald Trump slammed those reports as yet another fabrication of evidence. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction”, Trump referred to the US intelligence report, and called on President Obama to “move on”.
“The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and `Make America Great Again’”, stated the Trump’s transition team as they criticized President Obama’s order for a full-scale review of cyber-attacks allegedly linked to Russia. The Washington Post reported Friday that the CIA has concluded that Russia directly helped Trump win the presidency by hacking Hillary’s emails and releasing them through WikiLeaks.
Analysts concluded that even if the allegations are true, which is highly unlikely, Hillary indeed lost because her wrongdoings surfaced, but the focus is on what she did and not on how people found out about it.
Elaborating on exactly how the hacking helped Trump win the elections, President Obama alleged that it had influenced the media, which in turn shaped the electoral body’s opinion. By September, WikiLeaks had published the DNC documents. In October, they began publishingemails from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. The media followed this through as they “wrote about it every day,” according to Obama.
The truth, however, is that during the campaign, the majority of mainstream media in the US criticized Donald Trump on his controversial stance towards Mexicans, Arabs and other minorities, and especially his outrageous comments regarding women.
Disregarding the real issue of the Podesta e-mails and the fact the media was mainly taking Clinton’s side, Obama told journalists that Hillary had a “disadvantage” in the presidential campaign because of the way in which the US media had covered her.