President Obama says no one should be shocked by the Central Intelligence Agency’s assessment that Russia interfered in the U.S. presidential election in an effort to help Donald Trump win the White House.
“None of this should be a big surprise,” Obama told “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah in an interview that aired Monday night. “This was reported on before the election. I don’t think there was any doubt among anybody in the media or among members of Congress as to who was being advantaged or disadvantaged by the political gossip that was being put out in drip, drip, drip fashion up to the election.”
The president argued that the more important issue — the perpetrator of the cyberattack that led to the emails being leaked — went under the radar in the media’s coverage of the race.
“What is it about the state of our democracy where the leaks of what were, frankly, not very interesting emails, that didn’t have any explosive information in them, ended up being an obsession? And the fact that the Russians were doing this was not an obsession?” Obama said.
In October, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, officially concluded that Russia was behind the hack that officials characterized as an attempt to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system. On Friday, the Washington Post reported that the CIA says it is now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal.
President-elect Donald Trump trashed the reported assessment, calling it “just another excuse” pushed by the Democrats to undercut his stunning victory.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I don’t believe it.”
On Monday, Trump doubled down.
“Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card,” Trump tweeted on Monday. “It would be called conspiracy theory!”
During the campaign, it was Trump who invited such a conspiracy by publicly encouraging Russia to hack Clinton’s emails to locate messages from the personal server she used while she was secretary of state.
“I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said at a news conference in July. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
In his “Daily Show” interview, Obama seized on Trump’s Russian outreach.
“The president-elect, in some of his political events, specifically said to the Russians, ‘Hack Hillary’s emails so that we can finally find out what’s going on and confirm our conspiracy theories,’” Obama said. “You had what was very clear relationships between members of the president-elect’s campaign team and Russians, and a professed shared view on a bunch of issues.”
Obama continued: “The real question that I think we all have to reflect on is what’s happened to our political system where some emails that were hacked and released ended up being the overwhelming story and the constant source of coverage, breathless coverage, that was depicted as somehow damning in all sorts of ways — when the truth of the matter was it was fairly routine stuff.”
The president also addressed Trump’s assertion that he doesn’t need daily intelligence briefings because he’s a “smart person” who doesn’t “have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.”
“Well, I think the president-elect may say one thing and do another once he’s here,” Obama said. “Because the truth of the matter is that it’s a big, complicated world. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, you have to have the best information possible to make the best decisions possible.”
