Obama: Election Hacks Stopped in September After I Told Putin to ‘Cut It Out’

Concludes Putin Must've Been Involved

Addressing the allegations of Russia “hacking the US election” during his year-end news conference, President Obama provided considerable new details about the official government narrative of what happened. Unsurprisingly, the new details don’t add up, nor fit into the narrative as previously offered.

Obama once again provided no evidence of Russia’s involvement in the hacks, starting once again with the assumption that Russia did what he conceded was a “not particularly sophisticated” hacking attack, and then drew the conclusion that because Putin has a lot of pull in Russia, he must’ve been directly involved.

The most curious aspect of Obama’s narrative, however, is that he claims the hacking attacks stopped entirely in early September after a single direct warning to Putin. Obama claimed to have spoken directly to Putin in early September, when both were in China, and told him to “cut it out.”

Obama insisted after this single warning “we did not see further tampering of the election process” by anyone afterwards. This doesn’t at all fit into the previously provided storyline, which claimed repeated and serious efforts to hack the election.

It also doesn’t make a lot of sense that the US kept making public threats to Russia through the week of the election itself. Obama’s comments would suggest the administration kept hyping the matter and making additional public threats for no reason, despite having obviously handled the matter months ago.

If the hacking stopped way back in September, it also doesn’t make sense that officials continue to hack the hypes as an ongoing thing, nor does it make sense that the story has gained so much more attention in the past week, despite being long over.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.