Al Franken Quotes

I don't think anybody can with a straight face say that the Russians did not set out to influence our election, and they did so.

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'm talking about the finding in October that is public now of 17 different intelligence agencies saying Russia tried to meddle with our elections.

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

I have no doubt that Russia tried to meddle in our election. They're going to continue trying to - just like they have my entire lifetime.

As we know the KGB is all over this election [2016].

Russian government attacked our election.

The day after the Republican convention ended, there was another political bomb that was dropped on the U.S. presidential election [2016] from Russia. The day after the Republican convention ended, right before the Democratic Convention began we got what U.S. intelligence agencies believed to be the next big Russian incursion into our election. We got the first WikiLeaks dump.

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

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.

Despite the intelligence community's assessment that Russia interfered in our presidential election, President Donald Trump and Republican leadership seem wholly uninterested in examining how and why Russia targeted us - and what we must do to prevent it from happening again.

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.

We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election.

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.

There have been a lot of questions since the 2016 U.S. election about Russian interference in the electoral process.

We've got [evidence] of direct Russian government connections with the [Donald] Trump campaign, during the campaign, while the Russian government was interfering in our election to try to elect Trump.

I have never met with or had any conversation with any Russians or any foreign officials concerning any type of interference with any campaign or election in the United States.

We have to remember that at the center of all of this is the hacking, is what the Russians did during our election process, their absolute targeting our democracy. And there's President Donald Trump laughing with them. Sergey Lavrov said they did not talk about the charges against Russia. And you still hear President Trump talking as if this may not be true, others may have hacked, as well.

Even heads of our own security agency said, you know, we need to take a deep breath on this. This really doesn't seem to be happening [that Russians are trying to influence American domestic politics ].

Foreign meddling elections is bad whether it's done by the Russians here or by us or anyplace else.

There may be evidence the Russians are trying to tamper with elections. The Russians are trying to infiltrate everything we do, and they've succeeded. They've infiltrated Hollywood, they've infiltrated our universities, probably try to infiltrate elections by who knows what. But the idea that there is evidence that Putin was actively trying to elect Trump, there isn't a morsel of evidence for that, yet it shows up. The truth of the matter is that Putin doesn't care who runs the United States. It doesn't matter to him.