President Obama and President-elect Trump have dispensed with the post-election pleasantries and begun to trade blows over Russian hacking claims. Despite attempting to ensure a smooth transition of the Trump team to the White House, Obama has now said that the Donald must have known about Moscow's alleged interference in the 2016 election. Shooting back, Trump has flat out denied any prior knowledge and questioned why Obama has chosen to act now, despite him knowing that the Democrat Party had been subject to espionage in September of 2015. And on Thursday, a White House insider claimed that Obama and his team chose to ignore the issue because they assumed that Hillary would win the election. This followed an interview Obama gave to NPR in which he threatened retaliation against Russia and a 'time and place of our choosing'.
He says he's spoken directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin about his feelings about the hacking.
As for why Obama didn't do something when he knew about the hacking before the election, multiple government officials told NBC News it's because the White House thought Hillary Clinton would win and it didn't want to to be seen to be interfering with the election.
'They thought she was going to win, so they were willing to kick the can down the road,' said one official.
But apparently Obama didn't just sit idly by and do nothing. A US official says he confronted Putin at the G-20 summit in China and promised unspecified consequences if the hacks continued, reports the outlet.
But some feel Obama didn't do enough.
'In retrospect it certainly seems as though it was a mistake not to call the Russians sooner and respond to them in a very forceful way,' said retired Admiral James Stavridis, current dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
One official pointed the blame at the media for focusing more on the leaked documents than the Russian hacking that got them leaked.
Trump seemed to finally admit that perhaps someone - maybe even Russia - was hacking
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