WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 (UPI) — 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 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 McCainof 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.
