The Obama administration will soon announce economic and diplomatic measures to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 elections, the Washington Post reports. Officials are scrambling to revise a 2015 executive order on cyberattacks to fit this situation, since all the way back in 2015 when that order was written, they weren’t thinking about attacks on elections.
Administration officials would also like to make it difficult for President-elect Donald Trump to roll back any action they take.
“Part of the goal here is to make sure that we have as much of the record public or communicated to Congress in a form that would be difficult to simply walk back,” said one senior administration official. [...]
The idea is not only to punish but also to deter.
“As much as I am concerned about what happened to us in the election, I am also concerned about what will happen to us in the future,” a second administration official said. “I am firmly convinced that the Russians and others will say, ‘That worked pretty well in 2016, so let’s keep going.’ We have elections every two years in this country.”
Of course, however difficult the Obama administration makes its actions to roll back, the Trump administration is likely to try to do just that—and to invite a repeat of 2016 in 2018 and 2020.