Jen Psaki to TikTok Influencers: Russians Hacked the 2016 Election

White House press secretary Jen Psaki spread disinformation about the 2016 election during a special briefing with TikTok influencers on the dangers of Russian disinformation.

“When I heard this briefing was happening, I basically crashed and invited myself,” Jen Psaki said at the beginning of the briefing with TikTok content creators.

During the briefing, posted in full by the Washington Post‘s Taylor Lorenz, Psaki spoke about the importance of the federal government declassifying and calling out the Russians for spreading false information online.

“If you look back at 2014, and even frankly even 2016 when Russia invaded Ukraine and 2016 when they hacked our election here, we did not do that, we did not declassify information,” she said.

Although Russians targeted election systems in the United States, there is no evidence that their efforts affected the vote count, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia report.

But Psaki pointed to the “disinformation war” leveled by the Russians in Ukraine, pointing out the importance of calling it out and declassifying information as quickly as possible.

“We’ve called them these sort of ‘false flags’ or setting up false pretexts, which is basically their effort to justify an invasion and justify all of the military action you’ve seen them take,”

Psaki also spent time denying the administration’s responsibility for rising gas prices and inflation.

“Let me just go down a nerd rabbit hole for like 30 seconds and then I’ll come back out I promise, but I feel like this is a safe nerd place,” she said.

She warned of higher inflation in future months, blaming Russian president Vladimir Putin for the price of gas spiking after he further invaded Ukraine.

“Right now. Inflation is supposed to moderate, and that means come back down at the end of the year,” Psaki said.

She also reminded TikTok influencers that they were making a moral stand by paying more money for gas.

“It’s because of what President Putin is doing but also because you live in a country where we are rallying the world to stand up against that and that is part of our values and that is part of who we are,” she said.

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