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Obama Vows Retaliation for Russian Hacking; Putin's Role in Hacks; Clinton Campaign Chairman on FBI; Kremlin on Hacking; First Lady Reflects on Husband's Legacy; Clinton Blames Hacks on Putin Grudge. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired December 16, 2016 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:00:00] BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: Hi there and welcome to CNN NEWSROOM. Thanks so much for joining me. I'm Brianna Keilar

And we are a little more than two hours away from President Obama's last formal news conference of this momentous year and very possibly his last as president. The world would be watching anyway, but now there's added drama over Russian interference in last month's elections and the refusal of the president-elect to acknowledge it, let alone condemn it. A senior administration official tells CNN that the nature of the operation, the hacking, the leaking, the trolling was such that the Kremlin itself, up to and including Vladimir Putin, had to be involved. Moscow, though, doesn't want to hear any of it. A Putin spokesman said today, "they," meaning the U.S., "should either stop talking about that or produce some proof as last. Otherwise it all begins to look unseemly."

Donald Trump is still unmoved as well and now turning scandal back on the Democrats. "Are we talking about the same cyberattack," he tweeted, "where it was revealed that head of the DNC illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate?" On the latest stop of his so- called thank you tour, the next president singled out for ridicule White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, who, for the past two days said Trump had to have known the Russians were trying to hand him the election.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT-ELECT: Although this foolish guy, Josh Earnest, I don't know if he's talking to President Obama. You know, having the right press secretary is so important because he is so bad the way he delivers a message. He can deliver a positive message and it sounds bad. He could say, ladies and gentlemen, today we have totally defeated ISIS, and it wouldn't sound good.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: I turn now to CNN White House correspondent Michelle Kosinski, and our chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto.

And to you first, Michelle, even though we are awaiting this press conference from President Obama here in not too long, we don't have to wait to the know some of what he's thinking about all of this? MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I mean he's

said a few things about it, and so has his administration, talking about their needing to be a proportional response to this hacking. Although what exactly that would be is open for interpretation by analysts right now, before we know what it will be. But it sounds like from what President Obama most recently said in this NPR interview, the government is still working on this potential response. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: 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 a 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.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KOSINSKI: Yes, we heard from President Obama right after he spoke one- on-one with Vladimir Putin. We knew that cyber security was a subject. We don't know how much detail they got into on this particular hack at the time Russia was suspected. But then what - you know, President Obama said afterward that he didn't want to get into some kind of back and forth escalating cyber war with Russia. He called it not wanting it to be like the wild, wild west. So when you think about what a proportional response could be, you know whether it's sanctions or something else, you also have to ask the question, will the next administration go along with that?

Brianna.

KEILAR: Yes, that is a big question. And, Jim, as there are people - certainly in Russia, they're contesting how much their involvement was, what are we learning about Vladimir Putin or very high-level Russian officials involvement in the hacking and also just these anti- Hillary Clinton trolls?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, of course, we shouldn't be surprised that Russia's denying it. They would never admit, right, nor would we if we carried out an attack like that. So there's that.

U.S. intelligence has believed for some time that this would have required the approval of the most senior leaders in Russia. And it - the way Russia works, that means Vladimir Putin. You know, he doesn't have a national security council, right? This is a very top-heavy organization. And you - and you - and you saw that -

KEILAR: And even if he did, you would expect that he would have knowledge of what's going on?

SCIUTTO: Right.

KEILAR: If you were to put this the other way here in the U.S., that you would think that the president would have knowledge? SCIUTTO: Exactly. And remember that statement one month before the

election when the director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security said, we believe Russia, with confidence, is behind these hacks and we believe that it would require the approval of the senior-most Russian leaders. So they were telegraphing that to some degree.

Why are they saying it more confidently now? Our reporting is that they have new information, new intelligence based in part on the kinds of cyber tools that were used for this attack. Sophisticated cyber tools. It's the belief of U.S. intelligence that to use those tools, which are, in effect, let's call them what they are, it's a cyber weapon, right? To use that it would need Putin's approval to do it. And that's why there's increasing confidence.

But to be clear, you've heard from Donald Trump saying, well, this is the first time we've heard of all this. Not true. One, they fingered Russia a month before the election. Two, the idea of Putin being involved. This is not just sort of brought out of the thin air now. It's been a belief for some time, but they have more intelligence to lead them in that direction.

[12:05:11] KEILAR: And even before October, even though the government hadn't come out and said, hey, this is Russia, there was an idea that that's where it was going.

SCIUTTO: Right.

KEILAR: This retaliation the president is talking about, what would that look like?

SCIUTTO: Well, the - you have a whole menu, right, that you could do. And the fact is, the U.S. has already - not quite retaliated, but it has responded in a couple of ways already. The president confronting Putin in China, this was this summer, saying, hey, I know what - I know that you know what you're doing. That kind of thing.

Two, publicly naming and shaming. That's a step. It's something that the U.S. has used with China, for instance, before. That's already happened.

Sanctions are a possibility. You heard Michelle mention that. The Obama administration used sanctions against Russia, is still using them, for its military action in Ukraine, annexation of Crimea. It's caused economic pain, but it hasn't changed the facts on the ground, right?

You also have cyber tools that you could use. I mean we don't know what they're going to do. On the menu could be expose embarrassing information about the Russians, right? You can hack into their e-mails and servers conceivably as well. But then you get - if you escalate beyond that into more consequential stuff, do you go after critical infrastructure in Russia? If you do, you're at war, right, at that point. Can you do something short of that, where you kind of let them know that you're inside the critical infrastructure and, I don't know, make the - KEILAR: We could do this if we wanted to?

SCIUTTO: Well, it's sort of like the analogy will be not turn the lights off in Moscow, but make them flicker, right? I mean these are the things. But, as Michelle said, again, the White House is worried about an escalation.

KEILAR: And, Michelle, tell us about this, because Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman is laying blame, certainly on the Kremlin, on the FBI as well, and maybe not so much on the White House.

KOSINSKI: Yes. And, you know, the FBI has come up again and again also from the administration. Now, from the White House, they tried to be extremely careful with how they're wording things. For example, only referring to things that donald Trump has said and kind of letting people read between the lines as to what they're implying there. And on the - on the hack itself, you know, they keep emphasizing where the impact clearly was. That it was clearly hitting Democrats during the campaign. So when we asked the White House the question, well, are you saying that Russia then rigged this election? They say, well, you know, that's a question for analysts, but some analysts do say that the FBI's announcement of additional looks into Hillary Clinton's e- mails may have had something to do with it.

Now we hear John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, lay it out there very starkly in this op-ed, saying in part, "comparing the FBI's massive response to the overblown e-mail scandal, with the seemingly lackadaisical response to the very real Russian plot to subvert a national election shows that something is deeply broken at the FBI."

I just talked to him coming in for this meeting among former chiefs of staff, and with the incoming chief of staff, and he said it seemed like the FBI just didn't take this hack seriously in the beginning. He also said it should be a very interesting meeting today, and then laughed darkly.

Brianna.

KEILAR: Michelle Kosinski, Jim Sciutto, thanks to both of you.

And I want to bring in now CNN's senior international correspondent Matthew Chance. He is in Moscow to give us really the take on what we're hearing from the Russian government.

What are you learning, Matthew?

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, w, over the past couple of days and over the past couple of months, in fact, the Russians have been categorical in their denial of anything to do with this hacking scandal. I mean the latest word coming from the Kremlin is that it is "indecent," is the word they used, for the United States to keep making this allegation without any proof. The Kremlin spokesman told us earlier, they need to stop talking about this, or finally present some kind of evidence. Very much reflecting, I think it's fair to say, what Donald Trump has been saying. He doesn't see any proof either, despite what U.S. intelligence agencies have been saying about how much confidence they have that the Kremlin was linked with this, the Kremlin ordered this, and this was definitely a Russian hack.

Donald Trump has been casting doubt on that as well. You know, but the Russians and Trump have a point, there isn't any concrete evidence that we've seen that's been made public that we can point to and go, yes, categorically that is absolute proof that Russia did this. But the circumstantial evidence is almost overwhelming. You know, nobody who was a - perceived as being friendly towards Russia has ever been hacked. Only those people who are perceived to to be antagonistic towards Russia, Hillary Clinton, of course, falls into that camp and, of course, Russia had a powerful motive. It didn't want somebody who was seen as anti-Russian taking the presidency. He wanted somebody who was sympathetic to the Russian point of view. And, you know, say whatever you like about Donald Trump, but he has expressed certain views that are very, very sympathetic indeed of Syria, of NATO, over Crimea, that are very much in sync with how the Kremlin sees those issues, too.

KEILAR: Adding to the drama here, Matthew, you have Hillary Clinton, last night, saying that she thinks this was personal with Putin, right?

[12:10:07] CHANCE: Yes. I mean she told this to donors meetings, as I understand it. But, yes, I mean this is something that's been talked about for a long time, that Vladimir Putin has a personal, you know, grudge against Hillary Clinton because of comments she made back in 2011 when there were parliamentary elections here in Russia. There were lots of irregularity, I think is the term we used to describe the voter fraud that went on here in 2011. They were condemned by lots of international observers. Hillary Clinton suggested that the elections may not be entirely free and fair.

And, you know, from that point, really, she fell out of favor with Vladimir Putin, who, you know, believed that she was trying to orchestrate one of these color revolutions to overthrow his regime. And so that's possibly at the root of her concern. It's been floated a lot before. And as she says, she believes this is why that she was targeted in this way by the Kremlin.

KEILAR: Matthew Chance reporting for us from Russia. Thank you.

And my next guests had been in the virtual trenches of cyber espionage and warfare. Bob Baer is a former CIA agent. He's now a CNN intelligence and security analyst. David Kennedy is a former NSA intelligence analyst and cyber security consultant.

To you, Bob, first. This hacking, is this an act of war?

BOB BAER, CNN INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY ANALYST: I think it's an act of war, absolutely, interfering in our elections like this, to think degree, including their interference in congressional elections, only using information against Hillary Clinton, who the Russians despise for what she did in the Ukraine, then 2011 elections in Russia. Yes, they had the motivation and they had the means. And if we had done this to another democracy, whether it was Europe or Africa, they would consider that an act of war. So I don't, you know, especially this would have been considered an act of war during the Cold War. What surprises me is there hasn't been a stronger react to it.

KEILAR: Well, and that's the thing, David, what could the reaction be, but also, it's very clear what the reaction is when you're talking about a military strike, that their reaction is going to be some other sort of military action. It seems more unclear what the retaliation is here.

DAVID KENNEDY, FORMER NSA INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Well, I mean, and I can respect the opinion here. But one thing I want to say is that, I don't necessarily think that this is an act of war. We hack - we hack Russia. We hack China. China hacks us. It's been kind of an underground, you know, unspoken rule around what's currently happening in all of these different types of campaigns. And I mean everybody's hacking each other right now. It's -

KEILAR: Can I ask you something about that, though, because I hear - I hear that and we certainly know that. We've covered that. Is there something different here, though, not just with the hacking to gain intelligence, but the hacking, as some in the intel community have determined, the goal being to interfere?

KENNEDY: Well, do - and I'd like to say that this is all alleged right now, but I do agree. If Russia had direct implications on the election, which we don't know what those implications were. The hacking of DNC e-mails and Podesta e-mails and the releasing of those through WikiLeaks still hasn't been traced back to Russia, but there's allegations towards that, right? And let's just say that that did happen.

KEILAR: Wait, what do you - wait, wait, wait, David, how do you mean it hasn't been traced back to Russia. I mean you read "The New York Times" story this week, right?

KENNEDY: So you've had - you've had Crowd Strike which has come out and said that their platform detected, you know, that it was coming from Russia. Attribution and going back to an individual country is an extremely difficult process. I can make myself look like I'm coming from anywhere. And I'm not saying that Russia wasn't behind any of those in any way, shape or form. The only thing I'm stating is that we really need to be really careful around what we're doing and evidence behind that and presenting that to the world population before we actively go and start retaliating against another major power.

KEILAR: OK.

OK, so, Bob, with that in mind, what David is saying, but what we learned this week, or what we believe to be true, is that the hackers identified as individuals, if not their identity, their online identity, and the fact that they had also hacked the Ukraine, Georgia and other of Russia's enemies. They were operating on Moscow business time. Certainly that is something that you could replicate. But it seems that this was coming from two Russian intelligence agencies and there's a lot of proof to back that up. So what's your response to that?

BAER: I've seen - you know, overwhelmingly, the Russians, looks like they were involved. When you've got 17 U.S. intelligence agencies agreeing, when you have Republican congressmen agreeing as well that the Russians were involved, I just haven't seen anyone say that there's no proof at all. I mean there's - right now it's mounting and it's still going on. And it's true, we do hack Russian communications. We intercept them as well. But this is the first time a foreign country has interfered in American elections and possibly tipped them in one direction. I mean, we have to see that evidence. That evidence has got to be - Trump has to look at it in particular before he makes up his mind, and so do the American people before, you know, we have to decide whether this was a cyberattack that, you know, has influenced our politics and changed the course of our history.

[12:15:16] KENNEDY: Agreed.

BAER: And right now, looking at the newspaper, it has.

KEILAR: David - David, you react to that.

KENNEDY: Well, I mean, I don't - I don't agree that it had a shift. We don't know enough evidence to say that it shifted one way or the other because Russia was able to leak some e-mails. We don't have any evidence of that at all, but -

KEILAR: Sure, that's hard to - hard to quantify for sure.

KENNEDY: Absolutely. And I definitely think there needs to be an investigation of it. I think that we should determine whether or not a different entity, especially a foreign government, had the ability to sway an election. That's a major, major problem in a democracy.

But one thing I want to bring up is, is two weeks before the actual election occurred, President Obama said if there's any disruptions in our election systems or during this period of time, we have already hacked the Kremlin, we have already hacked their communications and we will respond in proportional type of a response to them. So, I mean, President Obama's already saying that we've already hacked Russia. We've already hacked into their infrastructure. We've already hacked (INAUDIBLE). Everybody does the exact same thing. The only difference here, in any way, shape or form, is that Russia was more public about what they were doing in order to sway public opinion in some way, shape or form. So does that rate war? No. It doesn't rate war in any way, shape or form. Does it, you know, rate retaliation? Absolutely. What that means is, is a wide variety of different options that we have on our table, but not necessarily a war.

KEILAR: Not necessarily a war. Well, we'll see. They say they're going to retaliate. That's what the president is saying. So that has yet to play out.

David Kennedy, Bob Baer, thank you so much to both of you.

KENNEDY: Thank you.

KEILAR: And up next, have you heard what Michelle Obama said to Oprah on CBS about the election outcome?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHELLE OBAMA, FIRST LADY: See, now we're feeling what not having hope feels like, you know?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: No more hope? We're going to dig deeper into that coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:20:19] KEILAR: In about two hours, President Obama is going to give his final year-end news conference in the White House Briefing Room. That will start at 2:15 Eastern. CNN is going to bring it to you live. Right now, though, it's his wife, First Lady Michelle Obama, who is making headlines for her comments to Oprah Winfrey in her final White House interview on CBS. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHELLE OBAMA, FIRST LADY: We're feeling what not having hope feels like, you know? Hope is necessary. It's a necessary concept. And Barack didn't just talk about hope because he thought it was just a nice slogan to get votes. I mean he and I and so many believe that if you - what else do you have if you don't have hope?

OPRAH WINFREY: Yes.

OBAMA: What do you give your kids if you can't give them hope?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: I want to bring in my panel now. CNN politics reporter Eugene Scott, CNN political analyst and "USA Today" columnist Kirsten Powers, and CNN political commentator Mary Katharine Ham, she's a senior writer for "The Federalist."

So, Mary Katharine, you have the first lady painting a pretty bleak picture here and yet it should also be pointed out that while no doubt she speaks for many people -

MARY KATHARINE HAM, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Right.

KEILAR: Hope - the hope that Donald Trump is going to be an average, good or great president has actually risen considerably since the election.

HAM: Yes, well, she - she's speaking for the liberal half of my FaceBook feed who does not feel hope right now. But there's a whole other half of my friends who felt like they didn't have hope during the Obama years. And I think the -- the language where - the Obamas pretend they have a - they have the corner - the market cornered on hope I think is false. And so the people in these counties where I used to live in North Carolina, for instance, who voted for Democrats all the way through Obama twice and then switched to Trump, you have to answer the feelings of hopelessness from those people as well.

KEILAR: That's the thing, Kirsten, is some people were very disappointed.

KIRSTEN POWERS, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes.

KEILAR: They felt he didn't deliver or very much for their pocketbook at least and just their everyday life didn't feel like it helped.

POWERS: Yes. What's amazing on both sides is the lack of self- awareness, that there are other completely who just feel completely differently than you do. I mean it's really amazing because, right, I mean if you have a mix of friends, and you would know, right, there are some people who are devastated, in the fetal position the day after the election, and there are some people who are really excited and happy about it and feel hopeful and felt a real lack of hope with President Obama for different reasons. And so, look, she was talking to Oprah Winfrey. I guess she knows the audience she was talking to, but she has a global audience also.

HAM: Yes.

KEILAR: And there are some people who feel shamed because there are people saying how devastating it's going to be, the Trump presidency.

POWERS: Right.

KEILAR: They feel like shamed for who they've supported?

EUGENE SCOTT, CNN POLITICS REPORTER: Yes, I mean, we've seen people come out and say that they are excited with the results but they didn't feel like it was something that they could share publicly. I will say, while we do have tens of millions of people who are now hopeful that Donald Trump was elected, according to the CNN exit polls, about 34 percent of people who voted for Donald Trump are concerned about his presidency. So let's not pretend that everyone who voted for Trump is hopeful.

KEILAR: Yes, they didn't feel like they had a great pick on either side and that's what was clear from what we saw. So she also says to Oprah, the first lady does, that her husband delivered on his campaign message of hope. That she describes there being a grown-up in the White House comforting the nation. That sounds a bit like a pointed message of maybe there's not going to be one? Is that what she's saying, do you think?

SCOTT: Well, when she hit the campaign trail, she very regularly suggested that Donald Trump was not behaving like an adult, and that he would not be the best person to put in control of the nuclear codes because he was behaving so irresponsibly on Twitter. Whether he will change that direction, we don't know yet.

KEILAR: I want to turn to Russia now. The U.S. response to this hacking. Now that there's all of this highlighting going on by the government, and we're seeing that on a very different - every level, from the former Clinton campaign folks to the white House. What is the retaliation that President Obama promising - what could - what could that be?

POWERS: I mean he doesn't obviously have a lot of time to do anything. So a retaliation could theoretically be more sanctions. I don't think there's enough time for that. It could be doing your own cyberattacks. Doing something to try and embarrass them, trying to find information. But there's such a limited to the amount of time. I really don't know what he can do. And then there's the public shaming and calling them out, which he's already done.

KEILAR: But if he's promised it, doesn't he have - he has to do something, or maybe something's already in the works?

HAM: Yes, I mean, he must be working on something, but I think there's an interesting line to walk here, because I think the - the hacking is a problem and we're vulnerable. But I think keep - speaking of adults in the White House, keeping it not a partisan conversation, even though Donald Trump is often not willing to do that, I think is Obama's responsibility if you want to bring Republicans to the table who are willing to confront this with you, then don't use it just as a cudgel to go after Donald Trump.

[12:25:13] POWERS: Yes.

KEILAR: Last night Hillary Clinton, to donors, spoke about all of this, and Vladimir Putin specifically. "The New York Times" obtained the audio and we're going to take a listen to it right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON (D), FORMER PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Vladimir Putin himself directed the covert cyberattacks against our electoral system, against our democracy, apparently because he has a personal beef against me. Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people. And that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election. This is not just an attack against me and my campaign, although that may have added fuel to it. This is an attack against our country. We are well beyond normal political concerns here. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: All right, so that's Hillary Clinton last night where she's saying, look, he had a beef with me. She's saying it's bigger than that. It's about the integrity of the democracy and that's a big issue.

SCOTT: Right.

BALDWIN: But she clearly feels this was very personal.

SCOTT: Yes, she certainly does. I think a lot of people thought maybe they just disagreed on policy issues, maybe that's why they didn't like each other. But Hillary Clinton thinks at the core the election that put Putin in place is illegitimate and therefore does not want to work with him and thinking that no one should. So Donald Trump speaking very favorably about him is a very different position to take.

KEILAR: Is that personal or is that about picking - certainly siding with the guy who you think is going to be more friendly to your country?

HAM: Well, she - well, she also thinks that the election that put Trump in power is illegitimate.

SCOTT: Right.

HAM: And that's the message she's sending as well. And I don't think that's a particularly helpful one and that's what I mean about walking this fine line, being serious about the hacking, but not turning it into an excuse for why she lost and making her supporters believe that's the case, because it's not.

KEILAR: Yes.

POWERS: If it was the case, it would be OK to say it, I think. But the thing is that the Clinton campaign wasn't even saying this right after the campaign. The Clinton campaign was very much focusing on a little bit some of the stuff that they did wrong but on the Comey letter. The really was the main thing, which had nothing to do with the hacking. They weren't saying the WikiLeaks hack necessarily lead to their defeat.

KEILAR: Is that them grasping at something to explain her loss? Is that what you think?

POWERS: It seems like it. It seems like it because I don't think this - this was their focal point and it wasn't their focal point because I don't know that many people who think that it actually did swing the election in any meaningful way. It's still a major problem and it needs to be investigated and dealt with.

KEILAR: Yes.

POWERS: But to suggest that that's why she lost, I don't think there's a lot of facts to back that up.

KEILAR: It's really interesting to hear her speak there. Mary Katharine, Kirsten, Eugene, thank you to all of you.

And up next, the long-awaited exodus from Aleppo is once again stalled by more shooting and shelling. We're going to have an update on this unfolding crisis in Syria just ahead.

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