Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is calling on President Obama to retaliate against Russia for interference in the presidential election — meddling the California congressman says is designed both to “sow discord” in American politics and to help elect Donald Trump. “What makes this new and troubling is not just the intelligence-gathering of hacking into a political party,” Schiff told Capital Download on Wednesday, “but the attempt to interfere with the election process by dumping information in an effort, I think, to be disruptive, to sow discord in the United States, to cause people to question both the fairness of elections and maybe even the election results, as well as to potentially tip things in the direction of a favored candidate by the Kremlin.”
Schiff, 56, who has served on the Intelligence Committee for a decade, told USA TODAY’s weekly video newsmaker series it already is clear from publicly disclosed information that computer hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and state election offices in Arizona and Illinois can be traced to the Russian government itself or hackers sanctioned by it.
But the president this week declined to threaten Moscow, or even directly declare it responsible.
“We’ve had problems with cyber-intrusions from Russia in the past, from other countries in the past,” Obama said after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putinduring the G20 conference in China. But he didn’t suggest retaliation. “Our goal is not to suddenly in the cyber-arena duplicate a cycle of escalation that we saw when it comes to other arms races in the past, but rather to start instituting some norms so that everybody’s acting responsibly.”
Full Article: Is Moscow meddling in the presidential election?.