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President Barack Obama will be holding his final press conference as Commander in Chief on December 16. It is scheduled to start at 2:15 p.m. ET. You can watch the live stream from the official White House YouTube page above.
Obama, who has seen his approval ratings go up since becoming a lame duck president, will likely be asked about Russia’s alleged involvement in influencing the 2016 presidential election. The president already ordered the intelligence community to make a full assessment of Russia’s hacking.
On December 9, The Washington Post reported that a secret CIA assessment concluded that Russia was motivated to see Donald Trump become the next President. A senior U.S. official briefed on the intelligence presentation made to Senators told the Post that this is the “consensus view” in the CIA.
On December 15, NBC News reported that U.S. intelligence officials have a “high level of confidence” in their belief that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally involved in Russia’s interference in the election. An official told NBC News that Putin has a “vendetta” against Hillary Clinton and that morphed into an attempt to show corruption in U.S. politics and to “split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn’t depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore.”
Hours before the press conference, Obama vowed in an interview with NPR that the U.S. needs to take action and will.
“There are still a whole range of assessments taking place among the agencies,” Obama told NPR without endorsing the CIA assessment the Post reported on. “And so when I receive a final report, you know, we’ll be able to, I think, give us a comprehensive and best guess as to those motivations. But that does not in any way, I think, detract from the basic point that everyone during the election perceived accurately — that in fact what the Russian hack had done was create more problems for the Clinton campaign than it had for the Trump campaign.”
Obama also told NPR, “There’s no doubt that it contributed to an atmosphere in which the only focus for weeks at a time, months at a time were Hillary’s emails, the Clinton Foundation, political gossip surrounding the DNC.”
Obama hopes to have the assessment of the cyberattacks during the election completed before Trump is inaugurated on January 20.
Daniel S. Levine is entertainment and news contributor to Heavy, and former editor at TheCelebrityCafe.com. Graduate of Hofstra University, plus classic movie and Star Wars geek. Follow him on Twitter at @dsl89 and contact him at daniel.levine@heavy.com.December 16, 2016 12:00 pm
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