WATCH:
President Barack Obama said in an interview that he did not misjudge the potential threats of Vladimir Putin, despite the U.S. intelligence report that the Russian president personally ordered an “influence campaign” to meddle in the U.S. presidential elections.
“I don’t think I underestimated him,” Obama told ABC News’s “This Week,” according to a transcript of the interview airing Sunday, “but I think that I underestimated the degree to which, in this new information age, it is possible for misinformation, for cyberhacking and so forth, to have an impact on our open societies, our open systems, to insinuate themselves into our democratic practices in ways that I think are accelerating.”
“This Week” host George Stephanopolous reminded Obama that he had dismissed Republican Mitt Romney’s contention during a debate in the 2012 campaign that Russia was the biggest geopolitical threat to the United States. The report released Friday from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said Russian operatives hacked into the emails of Democratic Party officials and released them publicly to harm Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and, ultimately, help Republican Donald Trump, who emerged victorious.
Obama said he ordered the the intelligence review “to make sure that we understand this is something that Putin has been doing for quite some time in Europe, initially in the former satellite states where there are a lot of Russian speakers, but increasingly in Western democracies.”
Trump, who has expressed skepticism over the findings, received a private briefing on the report from U.S. officials Friday in New York. In a statement afterward, Trump acknowledged that foreign actors from China, Russia and other countries attempt to hack into U.S. institutions, but he emphasized that the election outcomes were not altered in any way by foreign actors. The intelligence report stated that officials did not attempt to assess the effect on the outcome.
Obama reiterated his concerns that some Republicans seem “to have more confidence in Vladimir Putin than fellow Americans because those fellow Americans were Democrats. That cannot be.”
Asked if Obama included Trump in that category, the president said: “We have to remind ourselves we’re on the same team. Vladimir Putin’s not on our team. If we get to a point where people in this country feel more affinity with a leader who is an adversary and view the United States and our way of life as a threat to him, then we’re gonna have bigger problems than just cyberhacking.”
(c) 2017, The Washington Post · David Nakamura
{Matzav.com}
12 days to go. He’s uver i’butel. Who cares?
Only the בהמה Kool-Aid drinkers are interested in his garbage.
i started to watch this interview and after a few minutes it was just nauseating listening to these two characters. stephanopolis is nothing more than a hillary/obama mouthpiece and the guy he’s interviewing is nothing more than an anti-semitic, anti-israel so called “commander-in-chief” who, in another 12 days (G-d willing) will be history. this can’t be called an “interview” in the true sense of the word. the interviewer is so biased against Trump and the interviewee is even more biased against Trump. so where is the balanced reporting?