U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch stated Thursday that the United States intelligence community has not found any evidence of “technical interference” on the part of the Russian government on voting machines used in the 2016 election.
Lynch instead referred to Russia hacking into the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Loretta Lynch speaks during a Naturalization Ceremony for new US Citizens at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC on November 17, 2016 (Getty Images)
Speaking at an event hosted by Politico, Lynch explained that U.S. intelligence officers had been investigating the hacks since the summer and weren’t sure what they could “talk about publicly.” (VIDEO: Judge Napolitano Says U.S. Intelligence — Not The Russians — Behind Election Leaks)
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“This is an ongoing process,” she said when asked about what the government is doing to maintain confidence in the election process.
“We’ve been talking about this now for some time since the summer when we began the investigation into the hacks of the DNC and the DCCC and trying to ascertain who was behind that,” she explained. “There’s a number of things we do, a lot of which we talk about publicly, a lot of which we don’t talk about publicly in terms of just investigation and the responses that we have.
The attorney general added that the government wasn’t sure “what [it] could say about this publicly, and so that’s why you saw the intelligence community release a statement in October, a month before the election, letting people know that the intelligence community had determined that Russia was behind the hacks themselves.”
Loretta Lynch attends a roundtable meeting about the US Department of Justice’s Servicemembers and Veterans Initiative in Washington, DC on November 2, 2016 (Getty Images)
“The investigation is ongoing, certainly the review is continuing, but we rarely do that kind of public attribution,” she noted. “But it was important in this instance because the election affects everyone. And it isn’t even a matter of the results. It’s people’s faith in the system.”
Lynch elaborated that after the hacks, “the Department of Homeland Security was very actively engaged in reaching out to every state, to make sure that they had access to every resource they needed to protect the state electoral system as well, and fortunately we didn’t see any sort of technical interference that people had concerns about, in terms of voting machines and the like.”
