President Barack Obama Tuesday night said he hopes President-elect Donald Trump takes national intelligence "seriously," while refusing comment on new reports concerning unsubstantiated allegations that Russia had gathered compromising personal and financial information about him.
"You know I hadn’t seen the reports, we were on the plane together, and I hadn’t read the news since then and as a matter of principle and national security I don’t comment on classified information," Obama told NBC's Lester Holt after the news broke, reports The Hill.
However, he hopes that now with Congress in possession of both the classified and unclassified reports on Russian interference in the 2016 election that Trump and his administration will take the matters seriously "and now get to work reinforcing those mechanisms that we can use to protect our democracy."
Earlier in the day, CNN reported that Obama and Trump were briefed by the heads of the intelligence community about a report compiled by a former British MI6 agent, and included a two-page synopsis about the agent's report along with its main intelligence report about Russia's attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
According to the British report, Russia had allegedly been gathering professional and personal information about Trump and his aides for years.
Obama said he had "ordered a report about Russia’s involvement in the hacking of the DNC, and passing on that information to WikiLeaks, because I felt it was important now that the election was over for everybody to understand exactly what happened in order to prevent it from happening again."
Further, he wants the nation's Intelligence Community to launch an investigation into the election activities.
Related Stories:
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.