Washington (CNN) Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Wednesday called out Russian President Vladimir Putin by name for interfering in the 2016 US election, calling it a "direct attack" on US democracy.

"At Vladimir Putin's direction, Moscow launched a brazen, multi-faceted influence campaign to undermine public faith in our democratic process and to distort our presidential election," Nielsen said at George Washington University in Washington. "Although no actual ballots were altered by this campaign, make no mistake: This was a direct attack on our democracy."

Nielsen continued that the administration "will not tolerate" such interference nor "let it happen again."

Nielsen has spoken out repeatedly on election interference but has faltered when asked directly whether the interference was designed to help President Donald Trump get elected. Nielsen has said she "agree(s) with the intel community's assessment, full stop," an assessment that concluded the interference was done with the intention of bolstering Trump and harming his opponent, Hillary Clinton, politically.

But at the Aspen Security Forum in July , she said, "I haven't seen any evidence that the attempts to interfere in our election infrastructure was to favor a particular political party."

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