WASHINGTON_ Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election "altered the outcome," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said Sunday, adding that classified briefings had laid out a "very sophisticated effort" by Moscow to impede Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Feinstein did not specifically say whether she thought Clinton would have won absent the Russian actions, but strongly suggested that she believed Clinton would have.
"It altered the outcome _ that's what I believe," Feinstein said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I have been astonished at what has been a two-year effort at Russia to spearfish, to hack, to provide disinformation, propaganda, wherever it really could. And I think this has been a very sophisticated effort."
A pending Senate investigation into the matter must be "full and robust," she said. If it is not, she and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, would push for an outside investigator.
"We cannot ignore what has happened," she said. "To ignore it is really to commit ourselves to a very bad future,"
Feinstein said that the declassified version of the report _ which she is allowed to discuss publicly _ showed that Russian entities hacked both parties "but with the aim of hurting Hillary Clinton."
"Look, I'm certainly not going to leave this in limbo. Because this is the future of America. It's the future of democracy. And if we can't carry out an election without disinformation being pumped into it by another country, we've got a huge destruction of our system going on."
The senator said that she also blamed Clinton's defeat in part on the actions of FBI Director James B. Comey, who 11 days before the election announced a renewed investigation into Clinton's emails.
Two days before the election, Comey acknowledged that the renewed investigation had turned up nothing of significance.
Feinstein said that she was "not yet" prepared to say that Comey should be fired for his actions, which the Justice Department's inspector general is now investigating. Comey's term runs until fall of 2023.
"The director, I think, was torn. I think he did what he thought was right. In my view, it turned out very much not to be right, because the FBI doesn't announce investigations," she said.
Whether to keep Comey in place is "a decision to come when everybody learns much more about what drove this," she said.
