Really? And here I thought it was Hillary’s behavior.
President Barack Obama, after an intelligence report describing Russian hacking of the 2016 U.S. election campaign, said he’s surprised by the extent to which false information has been able to influence the nation’s democratic processes.
The president, going into his final weeks in the Oval Office, spoke in an interview airing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.”
“I underestimated the degree to which, in this new information age, it is possible for misinformation, for cyber hacking and so forth, to have an impact on our open societies, our open systems,” Obama said, according to a transcript provided by the network.
The interview was conducted Friday.
Obama said the ability of foreign countries to affect the U.S. political debate partly reflected the cynicism many people have toward mainstream news.
“In that kind of environment, where there’s so much skepticism about information that’s coming in, we’re going to have to spend a lot more time thinking about how do we protect our democratic process,” Obama added.
The type of interference that U.S. intelligence agencies linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin has been going on for some time, and could happen again during elections in Europe this year, Obama said. “What is true is that the Russians intended to meddle, and they meddled,” he said. “And it could be another country in the future.”
Obama described his recent conversations with President-elect Donald Trump, whom he termed “very engaging and gregarious.”
The president said he warned Trump about the dangers posed by unfiltered use of social media after his inauguration on Jan. 20: “The day that he is the president of the United States, there are world capitals and financial markets and people all around the world who take really seriously what he says, and in a way that’s just not true before you’re actually sworn in as president.”