Angus King Quotes

The one thing that the president continues to diminish, which I think is unfortunate, is the fact that the Russian government, at the highest level, deliberately interfered with our election in 2016, and according to all of our experts in the intelligence community, they are coming back with more force in 2018 and 2020.

Americans cannot afford to turn a blind eye to Russian interference in our democracy. We need to get to the facts and learn lessons to prevent future misconduct by foreign governments.

The Intelligence Community Assessment concluded first that President Putin directed and influenced a campaign to erode the faith and confidence of the American people in our presidential election process. Second, that he did so to demean Secretary Clinton, and third, that he sought to advantage Mr. Trump.

I think that Russian meddling in the election is an important issue.

The Russians sought to interfere with the election process - that the cyber hacking that took place by the Russians was part of that campaign, and that they had a clear preference in terms of outcomes.

We do know from our intelligence community that Russia had a design to discredit the U.S. elections, and took sides in favor of Mr. Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. We do now that they engaged individuals and entities to do cyber-attacks to get as much information as they possibly could, and of course, also used WikiLeaks to accumulate information, and released it in a strategic way that could affect our election, and certainly the credibility of our election.

The Russians have a long history of interfering in elections - theirs and other people's.

What the Russians did in the election in 2016 was clearly short of war, yet it was a pretty aggressive act to go into another country's voting system.

Donald Trump, for years, had been working with the Russians. He brought people on his campaign who had ties to the Russians.

Full disclosure: the Russians did not tell Hillary Clinton, 'Don't go to Wisconsin.'

We do need to get to the bottom of what Russia did and their interference in the election. And we need to also figure out how the Obama administration failed so miserably to allow Russia to have this type of impact in our country.

Intelligence agencies, congressional leaders, and outside experts have all assessed that Russia was responsible for a sweeping attack on the US election in 2016. Trump has given lip service to this assessment, saying he accepts the intelligence community's conclusions, while acting like he does not.

Regardless of President Trump's involvement, the unredacted portions of Mueller's report make it clear - Russia carried out a coordinated campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election and undermine our democracy.

I do not have any firsthand knowledge of foreign interference in the 2016 election.

I think it's important for people to believe their elections are on the up and up and they aren't being tampered with by anyone, and in this particular instance there's a large body of evidence that at a minimum Russia tried to tamper with our election.

One might have thought that Brexit would be a wake-up call for the American media. Yet, just as in the U.K. referendum, 'Russia' became the buzzword in the U.S. election that the political and media establishments thought would scare people into voting for the status quo.

Why do you think [Russians] hacked into our election? Because they have to make sure that Donald Trump got elected so that he could help them with what I think is a huuuuge deal, not only to lift these sanctions, but to take over, y'know, all of these Soviet countries and pull 'em back into the Soviet Union, so that they could have access it to all of these resources. It's clear to me!

The Russians didn't hack the DNC servers. The Russians didn't interfere in the election [2016]. And if you get a Democrat in the know to sit down and honestly tell you off the record, they'll admit it.

I think that what is true is that the Russians intended to meddle, and they meddled. And it could be another country in the future.

I notice anytime anything wrong happens, establishment politicians like to say the Russians.

I'm deeply concerned. And I think, in many ways, the Trump presidency poses a clear and present danger to our country and to the world.

The Russians succeeded, I believe, beyond their wildest expectations. Their first objective in the election was to sow discontent, discord, and disruption in our political life, and they have succeeded to a fare-thee-well. They have accelerated, amplified the polarization and the divisiveness in this country and they've undermined our democratic system. They wanted to create doubt in the minds of the public about our government and about our system; and they succeeded to a fare-thee-well. They've been emboldened and they will continue to do this.

We have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election, and, believe me, they're not doing it to get me elected. They're doing it to try to influence the election for Donald Trump. Now, maybe because he has praised Putin, maybe because he says he agrees with a lot of what Putin wants to do, maybe because he wants to do business in Moscow, I don't know the reasons.

We know that Russian intelligence services, which is part of the Russian government which is under the firm control of Vladimir Putin, hacked into the DNC. And we know that he arranged for a lot of those emails to be released.

Russia and other countries have been hacking and attempting to attack American institutions for years, that Russia's attack on American elections has been going back for over 50 years. So this is nothing new. And the fact that this particular hack was perpetrated by Russian entities is something that no one is disputing.