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President Obama giving a speech at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday. Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times
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Washington — President
Obama has ordered
American intelligence agencies to produce a full report on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential
election, his homeland security adviser said on Friday. He also directed them
to develop a list of “lessons learned” from the broad campaign the United
States has accused Russia of
carrying out to steal emails, publish their contents and probe the
vote-counting system.
“We may have crossed a new
threshold here,” Lisa Monaco, one of Mr. Obama’s closest aides and the former
head of the national security division of the Justice Department, told
reporters Friday. “He expects to receive this report before he leaves office.”
The report, according to
senior administration officials, will trace the attacks on the Democratic
National Committee and on prominent individuals like John D. Podesta, the chairman of Hillary
Clinton’s presidential campaign.
But it is unclear that the
contents of the report will be made public. Intelligence agencies and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, which still has an active investigation of the
hacking underway, have been reluctant to make public any of their findings;
they fear it will reveal sources and methods of how the incursions were traced
back to Russia. After past investigations involving sensitive intelligence
information, declassified versions of reports were sometimes published, with a
classified version sent to congressional committees and some agencies.
President-elect
Donald J. Trump has consistently questioned whether hacking happened, and if it
did whether Russia was responsible. He has suggested that the effort to blame
Russia was, in fact, an effort to discredit him and his call for closer
relations with Moscow.
Mr.
Trump repeated those doubts in a Time magazine interview published this week.
“I don’t believe it,” he said. “I don’t believe they interfered.” He suggested
that American intelligence reports attributing the attacks to Russia were
driven by politics, not facts.
In
early October, after considerable infighting, the director of national
intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., and the secretary of homeland security, Jeh
Johnson, issued a joint statement saying that Russia was behind the hack of the
Democratic Committee. It suggested that the activity had to have been approved
at the highest levels of the Russian government.
But Mr.
Obama has rarely talked publicly about the hacking campaign, even though aides
say it has been a preoccupation of his since last summer. He said far more in
public about North Korea’s hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment two years
ago, a case over which he issued sanctions against the North Korean government.
There have been warnings to Russia but no public penalties over the hacking
accusations.
On
Capitol Hill, the pressure for deeper investigations and a broader release of
intelligence findings is growing. Seven Senate Democrats asked the White House
earlier this week to declassify some of their conclusions, a step that Ms.
Monaco said the intelligence agencies were now considering. Senator John
McCain, Republican of Arizona, has vowed to hold hearings on Russian
activities, including efforts to get into military systems.
Representative
Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Homeland
Security Committee, said earlier this week that the hacking was “a wake-up call
and a call to action,” and said there had to be “consequences.” He has also
promised hearings.