Obama: I Told Putin to 'Cut It Out'

President Obama on Friday vigorously defended his handling of Russian interference in the election, saying he did not retaliate against Moscow because he feared undermining public confidence in the integrity of the vote.

“My principal goal leading up to the election was making sure that the election itself went off without a hitch,” the president said in his final, year-end press conference. “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 were not going to respond,” Obama added. “At a point in time when we’ve taken certain actions that we can divulge publicly, we will do so.” He did not detail what form that retaliation could take, and he acknowledged that the United States might choose not to publicize its response, in the same way that Vladimir Putin has not gone around bragging about the impact he’s had on the American election.

Obama spoke to reporters in the aftermath of reports that both the FBI and the CIA believe that Russia hacked Democratic email accounts and then leaked their contents in a deliberate attempt to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. He described a series of difficult decisions he faced in the midst of a heated campaign, including how much to disclose to the public and whether to hit back at Putin, the Russian president who Obama strongly suggested was behind the cyberattack.

Ultimately, Obama chose to have the director of national intelligence release a statement in October identifying the Russian government as the likely source of the hacks, but intelligence officials did not accuse Moscow  of trying to elect Trump until after the election. Nor did Obama publicly call out Putin or take retaliatory action. Instead, the president said he pulled Putin aside at a global conference and told him to “cut it out and there were going to be serious consequences if he didn’t.”

Why didn’t he take stronger action? Obama suggested his hands were tied by a hyperpolarized political environment and that any statement or action he took would be seen as trying to undermine Trump and aid Clinton. And he feared provoking Putin further. In part, Obama acknowledged, he wanted to make sure the initial meddling “wasn’t compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself.”

The president betrayed no regrets about his own actions.

“Imagine if we had done the opposite,” he said. “It would have become immediately one more political scrum.”

“I think we handled it the way it should have been handled,” Obama added.

Instead, the president wagged his finger at media outlets that amplified the leaked emails on a daily, if not hourly, basis. “You guys wrote about it every single day,” Obama said, his voice rising. “Every single leak about every little juicy tidbit of political gossip. Including John Podesta’s risotto recipe. This was an obsession that dominated the news coverage.”

Obama spoke shortly after The Washington Post reported that the directors of both the FBI and national intelligence concurred with the CIA’s assessment that Russia was trying to help Trump. FBI Director James Comey’s view is noteworthy in light of the criticism he has faced from Democrats for sending a letter to Congress 10 days before the election announcing that investigators were taking a look at new emails linked to Clinton’s private server. Clinton on Thursday night blamed both the letter and the Russian hack for her defeat, telling donors at a party in Manhattan that Putin was getting back at her as part of a years-old “personal beef.”

Obama stopped short of concluding that either Comey or Putin was directly responsible for Clinton’s defeat. “I’m going to let all the political pundits in this town have a long discussion about what happened in this election,” he said. “It was a fascinating election.”

The president declined to directly criticize Trump for his comments in recent days casting doubt on claims of Russian interference. He said his conversations with the president-elect had been “cordial as opposed to defensive in any way.”

But Obama launched a broader critique of a political and media climate that, he argued, had devolved into such partisanship that it allowed Putin to effectively gain influence and enhance his standing among Republican voters. He cited a recent poll in which more than one-third of GOP respondents held a positive view of the former KGB agent. “Ronald Reagan would be rolling over in his grave,” the president said.