In a speech to donors Thursday in Manhattan, Hillary Clinton once again charged Russian hacking influenced the U.S. election, but she insisted the Kremlin’s precise motive wasn’t to help Donald Trump win.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ordered the hacking, she claimed, “because he has a personal beef against me.”
Clinton said Putin had held a grudge against her since she declared in 2011, when she was secretary of state, that Russian parliamentary elections were rigged, the New York Times reported.
“Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election,” Clinton said.
Friday morning, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov said the U.S. must show proof of its hacking claim or stop talking.
“Otherwise, it all begins to look quite unseemly,” he told the Russian news service Interfax.
The Washington Post reported one week ago, citing anonymous sources, that the CIA concluded Russia interfered in the election to help Trump win, including providing WikiLeaks with the more than 50,000 emails from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
But House Intelligence Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said in a letter Monday that the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told his committee on Nov. 17 that the intelligence community had no strong evidence tying Russia to the WikiLeaks emails.
The FBI also has not supported the charge.
Among the many revelations in the Podesta emails were indications that donors to the Clinton Foundation gained special access to former President Bill Clinton and that Clinton had a closer relationship to Wall Street bankers than she publicly admitted during the campaign.
None of the Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks were shown to have been fraudulent, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange insists his organization didn’t obtain them from the Russians.
President Obama, meanwhile, told NPR in an interview that aired Friday morning that the United States will respond to Russian cyberattacks.
“I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections … we need to take action,” he said. “And we will — at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be.”
President-elect Donald Trump has dismissed the claim that Russia influenced the outcome of the election as “ridiculous” and politically motivated.
He noted that one of emails released by WikiLeaks showed Hillary Clinton had received a Democratic primary debate question in advance.
“Are we talking about the same cyberattack where it was revealed that head of the DNC illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate?” Trump wrote on Twitter Friday morning.
Clinton ‘couldn’t get media’s attention’
At the dinner in New York City Thursday night, Clinton told donors and fundraisers, who collectively raised some $1 billion, her campaign “desperately” tried to get media to pay attention to Russian hacking.
It was the first time she publicly addressed the hacks since the Washington Post story Dec. 9.
“This is not just an attack on me and my campaign, although that may have added fuel to it. This is an attack against our country,” she said. “We are well beyond normal political concerns here. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation.”
Clinton said the hacking was one of two “unprecedented” events that led to her defeat, naming as the other FBI Director James Comey’s letter to members of Congress informing them of the discovery of new emails that may require a reopening of the investigation into her handling of classified information.
“Swing-state voters made their decisions in the final days breaking against me because of the F.B.I. letter from Director Comey,” she said.
Clinton’s campaign chairman Podesta wrote an editorial published Thursday by the Washington Post criticizing the FBI’s response to the alleged Russian hacking.
“Comparing the FBI’s massive response to the overblown email scandal with the seemingly lackadaisical response to the very real Russian plot to subvert a national election shows that something is deeply broken at the FBI,” he wrote.
The Wall Street Journal reported that when the Democratic National Committee’s computers were hacked — revealing the DNC’s effort to ensure Hillary Clinton defeated Sen. Bernie Sanders for the nomination — Republican National Committee officials took action and hired a private security firm.
The paper said that the “apparently successful blocking of a Russian espionage operation offers one possible explanation why the GOP’s main political organization didn’t suffer the same fate as its Democratic counterpart — a deluge of leaked emails revealing private correspondence and internal strategy.”
