President Trump on Friday confirmed that the U.S. Internet cyber-attack on the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) in 2018.
Trump confirmed the attack in a two-part interview with the Washington Post's Mark Thissen. Asked if the U.S. had attacked the troll form-IRA, which led the effort to spread chaos around the 2016 presidential election and the 2018 midterm elections, Trump said it was "right."
The cyber-attack was first reported by the Washington Post in 2019, but the Trump administration has not publicly confirmed that U.S. cyber command, USA 2018 damaged Internet access to a building in St. Petersburg. On the night of the by-elections, IRA efforts came to a standstill. It did not spread as Americans went to the polls.
Trump has criticized former President Obama for not taking similar action before the 2016 presidential election, saying he dealt with intelligence about Russia's intervention in mid - 2018 for a cyber attack.
"Look, we stopped it," Trump told Thissen, "no one in Russia is tougher than I am."
Trump has said Obama did not take steps to benefit Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
According to Trump, Obama said, "Obama knew before the election that Russia was playing around. Or, they were told. Is it like that, who knows? And they said nothing."
"And the reason for everything he said was that he didn't want to touch it because he [Hillary Clinton] felt like he had won because he read the phony poll," he continued. "So, she thought she was going to win. And we have a quiet majority, 'No, we like Trump.'
In a bilateral report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2016, officials in the Obama administration determined that Russia was "not in the right position" to respond to hacking and intervention attempts and that the U.S. government had Russians to respond to, with no policy options. Attempts to interfere in elections
Obama took action after Election Day in 2016, expelling agencies involved in efforts to ban and interfere with Russian individuals, expelling dozens of Russian diplomats and allowing elections to be classified as important infrastructure, safe voting process, and more.
According to former special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee, Russian agents have targeted electoral infrastructure in all 50 states to successfully access voter registration databases in Illinois and Florida, although there is no evidence that votes have not changed.
The Russia-backed IRA, which launched in 2014, has launched a "bonanza" and sweeping campaign for the 2016 Trump election, according to Miller. Facebook later estimated that 150 million users in the U.S. were exposed to IRA positions before the 2016 presidential election.
The IRA was funded by Yevgeny Prigogine, which the Russian media Kremlin often referred to as "Putin's chef". Prigogine was approved by the Treasury last year, and Mueller, along with the IRA and dozens of other Russians, was inspired to intervene in the 2016 US election.
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