President Obama sat down with Trevor Noah for Monday's Daily Show, but he wasn't in a joking mood when it came to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race. After the Democratic National Committee's email system was hacked, his administration immediately assigned intelligence and law enforcement agents to investigate, Obama said, "and we determined and announced in October that it was the consensus of all the intelligence agencies and law enforcement that organizations affiliated with Russian intelligence were responsible for the hacking of the DNC materials being leaked." That was a month before the election, he added, so "this was not a secret."
Obama said he called for a review "to gather all the threads of the investigations, the intelligence work that has been done over many months so that the public and our elected representatives going forward can find ways to prevent this kind of interference from having an impact on elections in the future." He seemed puzzled that "the leaks of what were frankly not very interesting emails that didn't have any explosive information in them ended up being an obsession, and the fact that the Russians were doing this was not an obsession," and he didn't crack a smile when Noah snuck in, "The risotto was interesting," a reference to a culinary tip shared by Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
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