There's another issue going forward.
Is it necessary for the security of the United States that Russia pay some price for doing this?
If as they said -- after you said they did it.
I think there is no doubt
that when any foreign government tries to
impact the integrity of our elections that
we need to take action and we will
-- at a time and place of our own choosing.
Some of it may be explicit and publicized;
some of it may not be.
But Mr. Putin is well aware of my feelings about this,
because I spoke to him directly about it.
And uh,
there is a -- you know, among the big powers,
uh, there has been a traditional understanding of
that everybody is trying to gather intelligence on everybody else.
It's no secret that
Russian intelligence officers, or Chinese, or
for that matter Israeli, or British, or other intelligence agencies.
Uh, their job is to get insight into
the...workings of other countries that they they're not reading in the newspapers everyday.
There's a difference between that and,
uh, the kind of malicious cyber attacks that steal
trade secrets or engage in industrial espionage.
Something that we've seen the Chinese do.
And there's a difference between that and activating intelligence,
in a way that's designed to influence elections.
So, uh, we have been working hard to make sure that what we do is proportional.
That what we do is meaningful.
Uh, one of the things that we're going to have to do over the next decade,
is to ultimately arrive at some rules of what is a new game.
And that is, um, the way in which traditional propaganda
and traditional, um,
covert influence efforts are being turbocharged by the Internet...
uh, and by the cyber world.
Uh, and so the whole issue of cybersecurity, and
how we play defense.
How we think about offense.
And how we avoid an escalation of a major cyber war,
or a cyber arms race,
uh, is something that some of our smartest folks in government
and in the private sector are spending a lot of time thinking about.
Because there is an asymmetry here.
We are more digitalized.
Our economy is more advanced.
It's much wealthier.
And it means that we have certain vulnerabilities that some of our adversaries don't have.
And...this is actually a good example of where,
in addition to whatever actions that we take bilaterally against Russia,
we've got to spend some time working at an international level
to start instituting some norms,
the same way we did with things like nuclear weapons.
Um, because ultimately we can have a situation where everybody's worse off.
That's what we did with China,
uh, when we were seeing repeated hacking primarily for,
uh, industrial espionage purposes. Commercial purposes.
They were stealing, you know, technology and ideas.
And I had a very blunt conversation and President Xi
saying 'If you don't stop it,
here's what we are going to do.'
But what we also did was we mobilized the G-20,
and the G7, and the United Nations,
to start adopting basic rules
saying 'this is not something you do.'
And that can make a difference over time.
Um,  if whatever response you take is not completed by January 20th,
do you have any reason to have confidence that President Trump will continue it?
My view is that this is not a partisan issue.
And part of what we should be doing is to try to
take it out of election season
and move it into governing season.
Uh, the irony of all this, of course is, is that
or most of my presidency
there's been a pretty sizable wing of the Republican Party that has
consistently criticized me for not being tough enough on Russia.
Some of those folks
during the campaign endorsed Donald Trump,
despite the fact that a central tenet of his foreign policy
was we shouldn't be so tough on Russia.
And ... that kind of inconsistency, I think,
makes it appear at least, that
their particular position on Russia on any given day depends on what's politically expedient.
There was a poll that came out a couple of days ago that said that
37 percent of
Republicans have a favorable view of Vladimir Putin.
Think about that.
Over a third of Republican voters think
Putin is a good guy.
This is somebody who --
the former head of the KGB,
who is responsible for crushing democracy in Russia,
muzzling the press,
throwing political dissidents in jail,
countering, uh, American efforts, uh, to expand freedom,
uh, at every turn.
Is currently making decisions that's leading to a slaughter in Syria.
And a big chunk of the Republican Party,
which prided itself during the Reagan era,
and for decades that followed,
as being the bulwark against Russian influence,
now suddenly is embracing him.
And my point here is -- is that
it's very important that we do not let
the inner family argument between Americans, the
domestic political differences between Democrats and Republicans,
uh, obscure the need for us to stand together,
figure out what it is that, uh,
the Russians are interested in doing in terms of influencing our democratic process,
and inoculating ourselves from it. And that requires
us having a clear-eyed view about it.
It requires us not to relitigate the election.
It requires us not to
point fingers.
It requires us to just say “here's what happened, let's be honest about it,
uh and, let's not, uh, use it as a political football,
but let's figure out how we prevent this from happening in the future.”
Because it's not just going to be Russia.
It sounds like you hope any response would continue after January 20.
But do you have any reason to know that it would?
Well, I -- you know I can't, uh,
look into my crystal ball and that's probably
a question better directed at the president-elect.
I can say that I've had a conversation with the president-elect about our foreign policy generally.
And the importance of us, uh,
making sure that,
in how we approach intelligence gathering, in how we think, uh, about
fighting terrorism and keeping, uh, the country secure, in how we think about,
you know, our relationship to multilateral organizations.
That, you know,
we recognize America's exceptionalism, our
indispensability in the world,
in part draws from our values and our ideals and
the fact that even our adversaries generally respect
our adherence to rule of law,
our transparency, our openness.
And if --  if we start losing that.
Uh, if -- if other countries start seeing that
“oh, America doesn't care about these issues”
or it's just a “might makes right” environment,
and -- and we're not speaking out on behalf of,
uh, our values and demonstrating our values,
then, uh, America is going to be significantly weakened.
