At one point the President also threw some shade Putin's way.President Obama on attitudes toward Russia: "Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave" https://t.co/HgDSrjmA1e https://t.co/lcyabIryLY— CNN (@CNN) December 16, 2016
Here are some of his responses courtesy of Politico."They are a small country, they are a weak country, they don't produce anything that anybody wants to buy," @POTUS says of Russia— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) December 16, 2016
On whether he thinks that Putin was directly involved in the hacking:
In response to a question from ABC’s Martha Raddatz, the president confirmed publicly for the first time that he believed Putin personally directed the hacks. “[N]ot much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin,” he said. “I mean, this is a pretty hierarchical operation last I checked. There's not a lot of debate and democratic deliberation, particularly when it comes to policies directed at the United States. We have said and I will confirm that this happened at the highest levels.” It’s not in the habit of Russian officials, Obama said, to “go off rogue and decide to tamper with the U.S. Election process without Vladimir Putin knowing about it.“
I think we could have filed that under "no shit."
On whether that hacking cost Hillary the election: “I'm going to let all the political pundits in this town have a long discussion about what happened in the election,” he said. But he took a shot at the media, which he has faulted for focusing too much on trivia and pseudo-scandals. “I don't think she was treated fairly during the election. I think the coverage of her and the issues was troubling,” he said.
But then Obama added this:
“I am finding a little curious that everyone is acting surprised that this looked like it was disadvantaging Hillary Clinton,” he said, “because you guys wrote about it every day. Every single leak about every little juicy tidbit of political gossip, including John Podesta's risotto recipe. This was an obsession that dominated the news coverage.”
In other words, yes it did hurt Hillary and possibly cost her the election, and the media helped it to hurt Hillary and possibly cost her the election.
On whether he will declassify the evidence which proves that the Russians were behind this cyber attack:
“We will provide evidence that we can safely provide, that does not compromise sources and methods,” he said. “But I'll be honest with you, when you're talking about cybersecurity, a lot of it is classified and we're not going to provide it because the way we catch folks is by knowing certain things about them that they may not want us to know -- and if we're going to monitor this stuff effectively going forward, we don't want them to know that we know.”
Actually I disagree with the President on this point as I am pretty confident that Trump will simply give the Russians whatever confidential information or state secretes that Putin demands from him, so they will no longer need to rely on their ability to hack our computers.
Let's face it, Donald Trump is Putin's bitch, and whatever his master demands of him he will trip over himself to provide.
All I could think when I watched our amazing President today, was that for the first time that I can remember I do not want a new year to begin because I know that what lies ahead is infinitely worse than what is receding behind us.
Source http://ift.tt/2gUeBP2
