During the course of the 2016 presidential race between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, Wikileaks published a series of hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton's inner circle, damaging her message and putting her team into damage control mode for months. Team Clinton refused to verify whether the emails were authentic and repeatedly pinned the hacks on the Russians. At the time, the FBI expressed concern Russia could be behind the hacks, but Wikileaks denied the information published came from the Kremlin.
Now, President Obama has ordered a full review of election related hacking claims and wants a report delivered before he leaves office on January 20. From POLITICO:
President Barack Obama has ordered a "full review" of hacking-relating activity aimed at disrupting last month's presidential election and he expects that report before he leaves office on Jan. 20, a top White House official said Friday.
"We may be crossed into a new threshold and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what this means, what has happened and to impart those lessons learned," Obama counterterrorism and homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco told reporters at a breakfast arranged by the Christian Science Monitor.
"Full-review" and "election related" can mean a lot of things.
Although Obama's move surrounds email hacking, it also lends unwarranted credibility to Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who has been claiming for weeks voting machines may have been "hacked," giving to many votes to Trump in blue states that were crucial to Clinton winning the White House. She's even gone so far as saying people with floppy disks may have tampered with the systems. Obama's call for a review comes in the same week Stein's efforts for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania have fallen flat. In Michigan, electronic hacking is impossible because vote counting machines aren't connected to the internet.
