President Obama live Lies News Conference
Reporter: there is a perception that you are letting president clinton to get away -- putin to get away with interference with the u.S. Election. Are you prepared to call out president putin by name, and you agree with what we are expecting now that the hacking was partially responsible for clinton's loss? [indiscernible]
PRESIDENT OBAMA President Obama: first of all, with respect to the transition, I think they would be the first of knowledge we have done everything we can to make sure that they are successful, as I promised, and that will continue. It has just been a few days since I last talked to the president-elect about a whole range of transition issues. That cooperation will continue. There has not been a lot of squabbling. What we have simply said is the facts, which are that based on uniform intelligence assessments, the Russians were responsible for hacking the dnc and that, as a consequence, it is important for us to review all elements of that and make sure that we are preventing that kind of interference through cyber attacks in the future. That should be a bipartisan issue. And my hope is that the president-elect is going to similarly be concerned with making sure that we don't have potential foreign influence in our election process. I do not think any American wants that. And that should not be a source of an argument. I think that part of the challenge is that he gets caught up in the carryover from election season, and I think it is very important for us to this English between the politics of the election and the need for us as a country, both from a national security perspective, but also in terms of the integrity of our election system and our democracy to make sure that we do not create a political football here. Now, with respect to how this thing unfolded last your come let's go to the fact that he quickly. At the beginning of the summer, we were alerted to the possibility that the dnc has been hacked, and I immediately ordered law enforcement as well as our intelligence teams to find out everything about it, investigated thoroughly, to brief the potential victims of this hacking, to brief on a bipartisan basis the leaders of both the house and the senate and the relevant intelligence committees, and once we had clarity and certainty around what in fact had happened, we publicly announced that in fact Russia had hacked into the dnc. And at that time we did not attribute motives or any interpretations of why they had done so. We did not discuss what the effects of it might be. We simply let people know, the public know, just as we had let members of congress know, that this had happened. And as a consequence, all of you wrote a lot of stories about both what had happened and then you interpreted why that might have happened and what effect it was going to have on the election outcomes. We did not. And the reason we did not was because in this hyper partisan atmosphere, at a time when my primary concern was making sure that the integrity of the election process was not in any way damaged, at a time when anything that was said by me or anybody in the white house would immediately be seen through a partisan lens, I wanted to make sure everybody undisturbed we were claimed the think straight, that we were not trying to advantage one side or the other, but let people know that this had taken place and so if you started seeing effects on the election, if you were trying to measure why this was happening and how you should consume the information that was being leaked, that you might want to take this into account. And that is exactly how we should have handled it. Imagine if we had done the opposite. We would have become immediately just one more political scrum, and part of the goal here was to make sure that we did not do the work of the leakers for them I raising more and more questions about the integrity of elections right before the election was taking place, at a time, by the way, when the president-elect was raising questions about the integrity of the election and, finally, it is worth pointing out that the information that was already out. It was in the hands of wikileaks. That was going to come out no matter what. What I was concerned about in particular was making sure that that was not compelled by potential -- compounded by potential hacking that could hamper both effecting the election process itself, and in early September when I saw president putin in china, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that did not happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out, there were going to be some serious cuts went as if he did not. And in fact, we did not see further tampering of the election process. But the leaks through wikileaks had already occurred. So when I look back in terms of how we handled it, I think we handled it the way it should have been handled. We allowed law enforcement and the intelligence community to do its job without little influence. We briefed -- without political influence. We briefed all 11 parties involved in terms of what was taking place. When we had a consensus around what had happened, we announced it, not to the white house, through the intelligence communities that had actually carried out these investigation, and then we allowed you and the American public to make assessments as to how to weigh that going into the election. The truth there was nobody here who did not have some sense of what kind of effect it might have. I am finding it a little curious that somebody is acting surprise that this looked like it was disadvantaging Hillary Clinton, because you guys wrote about it every day, every single leak, about every little juicy tidbit of political gossip., including john podesta's email. This was an accession that dominated the news coverage. So I do think it is worth reflecting how it is that a presidential election of such importance, of such moment, with so many big issues at stake in such a contrast between the candidates came to be dominated by a bunch of these leaks. What is it about our political system that made us vulnerable to these kinds of potential manipulations? Which as I said, were not particularly sophisticated. This was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme. They hacked into some democratic party emails that contained pretty routine stuff, some of it embarrassing or uncomfortable because I suspect that if any of us got our emails hacked into it might be some things that we would not want appearing on the front page of a newspaper great telik cost, -- telecast, even though there was not anything particularly illegal about it, and then it just took off. And that concerns me, and it should concern all of us. But the truth of the matter is is that everybody had the information. It was out there, and we handled it the way we should have. Now, moving forward, I think there are a couple issues that this raises. Number one is just the constant challenge that we are going to have with cyber security throughout our economy and throughout our society. We are a digitalized culture. And there's hacking going on every single day. There is not a company, there is not a major organization, there is not a financial institution, there is not a branch of our government were somebody is not going to be fishing for something or trying to penetrate or put a virus or malware, and this is why for the last eight years I have been assessed how do we continually upgrade our cyber security systems. And this particular concern around Russian hacking is part of a broader set of concerns about how we deal with cyber issues being used in ways that can affect our infrastructure, affect the stability of our financial systems, and affect the integrity of our institutions like our election process. I just received a couple weeks back, it wasn't widely reported on, a report from our cyber security commission that outlines a whole range of strategies to do a better job on this. But it's difficult because it's not all housed -- the target of cyber attacks is not one entity, but it's widely dispersed and a lot of it is private, like the d.N.C. You know, it's not a branch of government. We can't tell people what to do. What we can do is inform them, get best practices. What we can also do is on a bilateral basis warn other countries against these kinds of attacks and we've done that in the past. Just as I told Russia to and indicated there will be consequences if they do it, the Chinese has in the past engaged in cyber attacks directed at our companies to steal trade secrets and proprietary technology, and I had the same conversation with president xi, and what we've seen is some evidence they have reduced but not completely eliminated these activities partly because they can use cutouts. One of the problems with the internet and cyber issues is there's not always a return address. By the time you catch up to it, you know, attributing what happened to a particular thing is not provable in court. What we've also tried to do is to start creating some international norms about this to prevent some sort of cyberarms race because we obviously have offensive capabilities as well as defensive capabilities, and my approach is not a situation which everybody's worse off because folks are constantly attacking each other back and forth, but putting some guardrails around behavior nation states including our adversaries so they understand that whatever they do to us we can potentially do to them. We do have some special challenges because oftentimes our economy is more digitalized. It is more vulnerable partly because we're a wealthier nation, and we're more wired than some of these other countries and we have a more open society and engage in less control and censorship over what happens over the internet which is also part of what makes us special. Last point, and the reason I'm going on here is because I know that you guys have a lot of questions about this and I addressed all of you directly about this. With respect to response, my principal goal leading up to the election was making sure that the election itself went off without a hitch, that it was not tarnished and that it did not feed any sense in the public that somehow tampering had taken place with the actual process of voting and we accomplished that. That does not mean that we are not going to respond. It simply meant we had a set of priorities leading up to the election that were of the utmost importance. Our goal continues to be to send a clear message to Russia or others not to do this to us because we can do stuff to you. But it is also important for us to do that in a thoughtful, methodical way. Some of it we do publicly. Some of it we will do in a way that they know but not everybody will, and I know there have been folks out there that suggests somehow if we went out there and made big announcements and thumped our chests about a bunch of stuff that somehow that would potentially spook the Russians. But keep in mind that we already have enormous numbers of sanctions against the Russians. The relationship between us and Russia has deteriorated, sadly, significantly over the last several years and so how we approach an appropriate response that increases costs for them for behavior like this in the future but does not create problems for us is something that's worth taking the time to think through and figure out. And that's exactly what we've depon. So at a point in time where -- and that's exactly what we've done. So at a point in time where we can divulge publicly we will do so. There are times where the message will be received by the Russians and not publicized. I should point out, by the way, part of why the Russians have been effective on this is because they don't go around announcing what they're doing. It's not like Putin's gone around the world publicly saying look what we didn't. Wasn't that clever? He denies it. So the idea that somehow public shaming is going to be effective I think doesn't read the thought process in Russia very well.Lord he was born a ramblin man
Anyone still awake?
The lying sack of shit.
The problem is that they are sounding a bit like John Belushi when Carrie Fisher catches up with him in The Blues Brothers.
It was the Electoral System.
It was James Comey.
It was Anthony Weiner
It was a Russian hacker.
It was fake news.
It was all the racist Trump supporters.
She won the popular vote…
What is really interesting the same media that was totally disinterested when Obama was caught on an open mic telling Russian President Medvedev: “Tell Vald that I’ll have more flexibility once I am re-elected” is now all up in arms.
“37 percent of Republican voters approve of Vladimir Putin. That’s over one third!”
- the lame duck
Excuses, lies and more boring shuck & jive.
The best part was some woman having to leave because she got sick.
FAKE NEWS! Now he’s talking about that. Shocker.
Thanks for the thread.
Lots of laughs.
I have errands and must first bathe!
I hope The Trump Team drains the swamp of the White House press pool, and Martha Radditz is the first to be flushed.
ZERO IS SUCH AN ASS.
This presser is only tolerable because of this thread.
Delusional.
Am assuming that anything the POS accidently says that's worth hearing will show up here somehow.
Thank God this is now over. “Pathetic” is the one word that best describes this last press conference.
Good riddance to this worthless pus filled piece of rubbish.
Listening to I could help but think...
How do vampires always look so neat and tidy if they can’t see themselves in the mirror?
This is just SO cute! You know, like how obama continues to pretend how he’s going to do stuff and all, and how he pretend like it still matters what he says or does or thinks.