WASHINGTON--U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered intelligence agencies to review cyber attacks and foreign intervention into the 2016 election and deliver a report before he leaves office on Jan. 20, the White House said on Friday.
In October, the U.S. government formally accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election, and Obama has said he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about consequences for the attacks.
The review and its timeline are a signal that Obama wants the issue addressed before he hands power to President-elect Donald Trump, who cast doubt on Russia's hacking role and praised Putin during the campaign. Obama's homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, told reporters the report's results would be shared with lawmakers and others.
"The president has directed the intelligence community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process ... and to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders, to include the Congress," she said during an event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
White House spokesman Eric Schultz said the review would be a "deep dive" that would look for a pattern of such behaviour over several years during election time, dating as far back as the 2008 presidential election. He noted that Obama wanted the review completed under his watch. "This is a major priority," Schultz said.
During his campaign for the White House, Trump called on Russia to dig up missing emails from his opponent, Hillary Clinton, from her time as secretary of state under Obama, a fellow Democrat. That move prompted critics to accuse him of encouraging foreign actors to conduct espionage.
The New York businessman has said he is not convinced Russia was behind the attacks. "I don't believe they interfered," Trump told Time magazine about Russia in an interview published this week. "That became a laughing point, not a talking point, a laughing point. Any time I do something, they say, 'Oh, Russia interfered.'"
