President Donald Trump clarified his comments concerning Russian meddling after broad outrage over the remarks he made during the summit with Vladimir Putin on Monday in Helsinki, Finland.
Trump asserted that he misspoke during the summit and believes the U.S. intelligence finding which states the Russians meddled in the 2016 presidential election. “I have on numerous occasions noted our intelligence findings that Russia attempted to interfere in our elections,” Trump said.
The president then took the hammer to his predecessor President Barack Obama for not preventing the Russian attacks which happened under his watch.
“We will do anything to prevent that interference in 2018. We have lots of power, and as you know President Obama the last election in 2016, and they decided not to start doing anything about it,” Trump said. “That was pretty obvious to all. They thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election and they didn’t think it was a big deal. When I won the election they thought it was a big deal. All of a sudden they went into action.”
“President Obama along with Brennan and Clapper … they knew about Russia’s attempt to interfere in the election in September. And they totally buried it,” President Trump concluded. “They buried it because they thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win. But it didn’t happen that way. By contrast, my administration has taken a very firm stance, a very firm stance on a strong action. We are going to take strong action to secure our election systems in the process.”
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