Investing.com - President Barack Obama told reporters at his final White House press conference that "based on uniform intelligence assessments" the Russians were responsible for hacking the e-mail of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) prior to the presidential election this fall.
"As a consequence, it is important for us to review all elements of that," said Obama. "That should be a bi-partisan issue. My hope is that the president-elect also wants to make sure we don't have foreign impact on our election. Need to make sure we don't create a political football here."
Obama said that his administration had previously let the public know that this hacking had occurred, but that the integrity of the election process was not damaged. "I wanted to make sure that everyone knew we were playing this thing straight," said the president. "That's exactly how we should have handled that. We did not want to do the work of the leakers for them. The information was out there -- in the hands of WikiLeaks. That was going to come out, no matter what."
President Obama said that he personally spoke with Vladimir Putin, and after that, U.S. intelligence did "not see further tampering with the election process."
"I'm finding it a little curious that this is disadvantaging Hillary Clinton, because you guys wrote about it every day, every juicy piece of gossip," said Obama. "This was an obsession."
President Putin has denied the allegations, and today demanded proof of them. But Obama said, "this is not something that can be proven in court."
There was no hacking of voting machines, or other electronic voting tabulation computing. Obama also noted that the DNC is "not a branch of government," and that the government cannot force the Democratic party to adopt sound cybersecurity measures.
"There is not a company, a major organization, a financial organization, or government agency, where someone is not going to be phishing for information every day," said the president.
The president has, during his tenure in office, held a pre-Christmas news conference, before heading off to Hawaii to vacation with his wife and children. "I could not be prouder to be your president," said Obama. "After I leave office, I intend to work on issues where progress has been made."