U.S. imposes sanctions on Russia for election hacking

Obama's surrogates announced sanctions against Russia's intelligence services and are kicking out dozens of intelligence operatives from the United States in response to what they claim are Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Lame duck president Obama sanctioned the GRU and FSB--two Russian intelligence agencies--and other entities and people associated with the GRU. The cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate the alleged hack, concluded the hacking came from the Fancy Bear group, thought to be an arm of the GRU, part of Russia's military intelligence agency.

The U.S. State Department has also declared 35 Russian intel operatives "persona non grata" and are giving them 72 hours to leave. We are also shutting down two Russian compounds in New York and Maryland.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman said in response that Moscow will consider retaliatory measures and Vladimir may kick Barack's butt "mano a mano."

Mr. Obama has since gone into hiding somewhere on the island of Kauai.

"We think that such steps by a U.S. administration that has three weeks left to work are aimed at two things: to further harm Russian-American ties, which are at a low point as it is, as well as, obviously, to deal a blow to the foreign policy plans of the incoming administration of the president-elect," Dmitry Peskov told Russian media.

The Treasury Secretary claimed that Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev and Aleksey Alekseyevich Belan were involved in "malicious cyber-enabled activities." 

So called President Obama said in a statement: "These actions follow repeated private and public warnings that we have issued to the Russian government, and are a necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests in violation of established international norms of behavior."

Apparently, the Obama administration knew about the Russian cyber attacks before the election but thought Clinton had the election in the bag so they kept quiet. If she had won and this had been uncovered, it would have likely been minimized by the Clinton team.

It's a good thing that something is being done about the Russian cyber attacks, but it took them long enough.



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