Psaki Pushes False Claim 2016 Election Was ‘Hacked’ in Briefing With TikTok Influencers

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki pushed a false claim that the 2016 election itself was “hacked” during a phone call with TikTok influencers on Thursday.

Taylor Lorenz with the Washington Post reported Psaki spoke to 30 influencers from the app via a Zoom call. The White House enlisted them to spread accurate messaging to advance the White House’s “strategic goals” with relation to Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Lorenz reported:

The White House has been closely watching TikTok’s rise as a dominant news source, leading to its decision to approach a select group of the platform’s most influential names.

This week, the administration began working with Gen Z For Change, a nonprofit advocacy group, to help identify top content creators on the platform to orchestrate a briefing aimed at answering questions about the conflict and the United States’ role in it. Victoria Hammett, deputy executive director of Gen Z For Change, contacted dozens with invitations via email and gathered potential questions for the Biden administration.

Lorenz obtained a full recording of the call, which she posted to SoundCloud.

About 20 minutes into the call, Psaki told her youthful audience:

We recognize how important your platforms are, and how important it is to provide as much accurate information as possible to all the people who are using their voices and their platforms to project accurate information. Because the best antidote to disinformation is the truth. One of the big steps we’ve taken, and made a decision to take is to declassify information over the course of the last several months.

Psaki added (emphasis ours): “If you look back at 2014, and frankly even 2016, when Russia invaded Ukraine and then in 2016, when they, you know, of course, hacked our election here, we did not do that. Right? We did not declassify information.”

Psaki went on to state that the U.S. is now declassifying information, which will presumably make it challenging for Russian disinformation to go unchallenged.

But in her explanation, Psaki spread misinformation to TikTok’s stars. The 2016 election was not “hacked” — not any more than the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

Psaki may have been referring to the Russian hack of the DNC in 2016, and the subsequent release of DNC and Clinton campaign emails by Wikileaks. But a hack of the DNC is not the same as a hack of the actual 2016 election.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence investigated Russia’s influence on the 2016 election in great detail. Investigators found that on social media, Russian actors sought to influence the opinions of potential voters.

“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” a report from the investigation stated. “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate [Hillary Clinton], and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

Additionally, the report concluded that Russian hackers compromised sensitive data related to both candidates. Attempts were also made to breach key election infrastructure, such as voting technology.

But as the report noted:

Russian intelligence accessed elements of multiple state or local electoral boards. Since early 2014, Russian intelligence has researched US electoral processes and related technology and equipment. DHS assesses that the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying.

In other words, Russia failed in its attempts to compromise actual votes in the election.

Russia attempted to influence voters through sophisticated disinformation campaigns. But as the intelligence community clearly found, the election was not hacked.

Psaki appeared to either misspeak in using to word “hack” or repeated an old and debunked claim that Russia used computers to help Trump win.

By all accounts, Clinton lost a fair election to Trump in November of 2016. Four years later, Trump lost a similarly fair election to now-president Joe Biden.