Obama administration lacks proof on Russia election hacking

Washington has accused Moscow of orchestrating cyberattacks against US political organizations to help Donald Trump win the race to the White House. The US intelligence community has released an unclassified report, alleging that the Russian government directed hackers to target various Democratic Party organizations and operatives to influence the outcome of the election. The Kremlin, however, has rejected the claims as baseless and unsubstantiated. Press TV has talked to Marcus Papadopoulos, an editor with Politics First, and Lawrence J. Korb, a US foreign policy and national security analyst, to discuss the reasons why US officials keep accusing Russia of cyberattacks while basically there is no solid evidence to prove that.

Lawrence J. Korb said that such “attacks by Russia” are aimed at undermining the whole democratic process in the United States rather than weakening a particular candidate, something that, according to him, will definitely extend to countries in Europe in the near future.

“What the US is accusing Russia of is basically hacking into the campaigns of both candidates and then revealing it during the campaign to undermine the whole democratic process,” Korb stated. “They're not accusing them of undermining Mr. Trump's claim to victory. What they're saying is ‘If you hack these elections, what does that say about the whole democratic process?’”

He further underlined that the main problem with such cyberattacks is that the countries, which are conducting them, intend to put America’s national security at risk by giving the obtained information to whistleblowers.

“There's no doubt about the fact that countries hack [us]. China has been hacking into our business and military before. The real issue is that they leak them (the information) to the WikiLeaks so that they became part of the discussion during the campaign.

The United States and its allies are concerned that they'll try and do the same thing in Germany for example which is having elections, Poland, Romania, and lots of other countries. So what they're saying is basically ‘you're trying to undermine our democratic process and you're going to pay a price for it,’” he concluded.

 

However, Marcus Papadopoulos, the other panelist on the show, said that the evidence put forward by American intelligence agencies, like the CIA and the NSA, against Russia is at best circumstantial and unsubstantiated, and at worst fanciful and illegitimate.

No proper court of law would accept the evidence which has been put forward by the US agencies, the analyst noted, adding that "only a kangaroo court would accept such groundless allegations."
He exclaimed that ironically “America is making allegation of a foreign country interfering in its internal politics, when of course America is the biggest violator of international law in the world through the way it intervenes in the affairs of independent sovereign countries, and has resulted in many cases in those countries becoming war zones, for example in Syria, Libya, and Ukraine.”

“So, my message to the American intelligence agencies is quite simple: put up or shut up. If you don't have proper evidence to support these allegations against Moscow, then simply keep your mouth closed,” he stated.