President Barack
Obama has ordered a review of alleged hacking incidents related to the November
election. File Pool Photo by Olivier Douliery
WASHINGTON,
President Barack
Obama has ordered a "full review" into alleged cyber hacking by
Russians influencing the 2016 presidential election, a White House adviser said
Friday.
Lisa Monaco, the White House Homeland Security and
Counterterrorism adviser, made the disclosure at a breakfast with reporters sponsored by Christian Science
Monitor.
"The president has directed
the intelligence community to conduct a full review of what happened during the
2016 election process," she said. "It is to capture lessons learned
from that and to report to a range of stakeholders. This is consistent with the
work that we did over the summer to engage Congress on the threats that we were
seeing."
Monaco expects the review to finished before Donald Trump's inauguration on Jan.
20.
She didn't say whether the findings will be made public.
"You want to do so very attentive to not disclosing sources
and methods that would impede our ability to identify and attribute malicious
actors in the future," Monaco said.
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee want Obama to
declassify intelligence on Russia's actions leading up to the election.
On Oct. 7, the U.S. intelligence community, a federation of 17
U.S. government agencies, said in
a report it was "confident that the Russian government directed the recent
compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S.
political organizations."
They included Democratic National Committee and other Democratic
groups' computers. Documents and internal emails, including from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta, appeared on websites that include
WikiLeaks.
Trump and the Russian government have denied Russians were behind
attacks, despite overwhelming consensus from private sector cybersecurity firms
that investigated the hacks and several U.S. government intelligence agencies.
But Republican senators including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John McCain of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee want to launch an investigation.
And this week, Russian
President Vladimir Putin approved an updated security doctrine in a bid to
prevent cyberattacks and foreign influence in his country.
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