Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., says the U.S. should focus less on investigating the alleged Russian hacking of the election, and more on how to keep it from happening again.
Corker, who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked Thursday by reporters whether a full public report would ever be made available regarding the issue. But the Tennessee Republican seemed to downplay the need for such transparency.
“I have to tell you, since we know so much, just being honest, and since it’s so clear, you have to wonder what else there is to do," Corker said. “I mean we’ve all talked about investigations, it seems to me it’s pretty clear."
Corker then added: “We know exactly what happened. So having investigations about that doesn’t seem to me, maybe, to bear a lot of fruit.”
Corker suggested the U.S. instead focus on "how we prevent these kinds of things from happening" in the future.
While the intelligence community has shared details of Russia's alleged meddling in the U.S. election with senators and members of Congress, much of the information has not been made public. Intelligence officials say they cannot reveal to the public what it has shared with lawmakers because in doing so they would also disclose how the information was obtained, thus making intelligence gathering more difficult in the future.
Even President-elect Donald Trump, who at first refused to say whether Russia interfered in the election, now supports the intelligence pinning blame on the Kremlin.
“As far as hacking, I think it was Russia,” Trump said Wednesday during his first full-fledged news conference in months.
However, some still say the intelligence community has not released enough information to convince the American people that, indeed, Russia was behind the email hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta.
A number of Democratic senators last month urged the Obama administration to declassify documents pointing to Russia in an effort to show how they believe Russian President Vladimir Putin helped Trump win, CNN reported.
(H/T: Daily Caller)
