Susan Rice vehemently dismissed Russian President Vladimir Putin's denials that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, during a Sunday morning interview on ABC's "This Week".
Following Putin's comments during a press conference last week that "patriotic minded" private Russian hackers unconnected to the government could be behind major hacks that interfered in other nation's elections...
“If they are patriotically minded, they start making their contributions — which are right, from their point of view — to the fight against those who say bad things about Russia,”
And denials of any Russian government involvement in hacking...
"We don't engage in that at the state level."
The Hill reports that Rice, the former national security adviser to President Obama, said:
"Frankly, he's lying,"
"The reality is — as all of our intelligence agencies have come together to affirm with high confidence — the Russian government at the highest levels was behind the very unprecedented effort to meddle in our 2016 presidential election."
http://abcnews.go.com/video/embed
Extending her allegations into fact, Rice said the country needs to understand how and why that happened. The country also needs to find out whether there is "any evidence to suggest that there were those on the American side who facilitated that meddling," she said, referring to allegations that members of President Trump's campaign colluded with Moscow.
But Rice was not done, turning her attention to President Trump's travel ban, she dismissed claims this would make America safer...
"There's really no evidence to suggest that by banning Muslims, or banning Muslims from a particular set of six countries, that we would make ourselves here in the United States safer,"
"And that's, I believe, one of the major reasons why the courts thus far have been very skeptical of the travel ban."
.@AmbassadorRice calls proposed travel ban "counterproductive": "No evidence...that we would make ourselves here in the United States safer" pic.twitter.com/z7yw3oiCO3
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) June 4, 2017
She also warned against isolating Muslims.
"I think there's a very real risk that by stigmatizing and isolating Muslims from particular countries and Muslims in general," she said, "that we alienate the very communities here in the United States whose cooperation we most need to detect and prevent these homegrown extremists from being able to carry out attacks."
She stressed the importance of cooperation from Muslim-American communities.
"They need to feel that they are valued and part of this challenge that we face together as a nation," she said.
We suspect there are a afew people in Manchester and London tonight who feel "hugging this out" is not the appropriate response.