President Obama says he underestimated the digital risk to democracy, not Vladimir Putin

(Image credit: Pool/Getty Images)

last updated 9 January 2017

President Obama did not misjudge possible threats from Russia, he said Sunday in an interview with ABC News, but did not realize the risk of digital election interference.

"I don't think I underestimated [Russian President Vladimir Putin]," Obama mused, "but I think that I underestimated the degree to which, in this new information age, it is possible for misinformation, for cyberhacking and so forth, to have an impact on our open societies, our open systems, to insinuate themselves into our democratic practices in ways that I think are accelerating."

Obama was speaking in response to this week's report from the FBI, NSA, and CIA that the Russian government hacked Democratic targets in an effort to manipulate the U.S. presidential election, a conclusion Trump rejected until Sunday. Obama also expressed his concern that some Republicans have "more confidence in Vladimir Putin than fellow Americans because those fellow Americans were Democrats. That cannot be."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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