Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) appeared on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, June 25, 2017. (Screen grab from CNN)

(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, says the Obama Administration should have acted more publicly and more forcefully when it learned in August 2016 that Russia, at President Vladimir Putin’s behest, was trying to interfere with the U.S. election with computer hacks and disinformation.

I think they were concerned about being perceived as interfering in the election, trying to tip the scales for Hillary Clinton. I think they were also concerned about not wanting to play into the narrative that Donald Trump was telling, that the election was going to be rigged, even though Donald Trump was talking about a completely different kind of rigging than foreign intervention. But both of those factors did not outweigh, in my view -- and I argued this at the time, did not outweigh the public's need to know. The American people needed to know. And I didn't think it was enough to tell them after the election, but rather given the seriousness of this, I think the administration needed to call out Russia earlier, and needed to act to deter and punish Russia earlier and I think that was a very serious mistake.

Schiff told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday that he and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate intelligence committee, “repeatedly” urged the administration to speak publicly about what Russia was doing.

“And later, after we issued our own statement and they did attribute the conduct to Russia, I was urging that they begin then the process of sanctioning Russia."

According to the Washington Post report, President Obama and his top advisers stayed silent about the Russian activity because they "feared that things could get far worse."

They were concerned that any pre-election response could provoke an escalation from Putin. Moscow’s meddling to that point was seen as deeply concerning but unlikely to materially affect the outcome of the election. Far more worrisome to the Obama team was the prospect of a cyber-assault on voting systems before and on Election Day. They also worried that any action they took would be perceived as political interference in an already volatile campaign. By August, Trump was predicting that the election would be rigged. Obama officials feared providing fuel to such claims, playing into Russia’s efforts to discredit the outcome and potentially contaminating the expected Clinton triumph.

The article says the Obama White House expected Clinton to win the election anyway.

Schiff and other lawmakers were briefed on the Russian interference in September 2016.

“Well, I can't talk about some of the closed meetings, but I can tell that you Senator Feinstein and I were concerned enough about what we were learning to do something that I had never done before and have never done since, and that is to issue a public statement of our own, attributing a foreign hack to a foreign party, based on our intelligence," Schiff said.

"Now we had to vet that with the intelligence community but we took that step because we weren't succeeding in getting the administration to do it itself. But a statement coming from lawmakers doesn't have the power and influence of the American people as a statement coming through the president of the United States and I think that is what the situation really called for."

Host Dana Bash asked Schiff what President Obama should have done:

“Well, I think what he should have done, and what I urged at the time, was he should have spoken out to the American people and said, this is what Russia is doing. Russia has better stop it and more than that we are going to enter into conversations with our European allies who have similarly been the victim of Russian hacking and interference in their elections to embark on a new round of sanctions.



“And I think those sanctions should have been not only imposed earlier but far stronger than the sanctions the Obama administration would ultimately imposed after the election.”