...and savages CIA over claims Kremlin helped to elect him
DonALD Trump dismissed CIA claims that the Kremlin tried to help him win the presidential election as ‘ridiculous’ last night.
And he insisted he doesn’t need daily intelligence briefings because he’s a ‘smart person’.
The President-elect escalated his attacks on America’s main intelligence agency, prompting worried spies to warn he could be ‘worse than Richard nixon’.
mr Trump told Fox news Sunday that claims Kremlin hackers worked to ensure he became President were ‘just another excuse’ for Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat.
Although he insisted he didn’t necessarily disagree with Barack obama’s probe into election hacking, mr Trump claimed it was wrong to assume only Russia was guilty, saying China could be to blame. He said: ‘It could be somebody sitting in a bed some place.’
But CIA insiders insist they have ‘high confidence’ that the Kremlin tried to help mr Trump win, releasing thousands of hacked Clinton campaign emails.
The CIA believes state-sponsored Russian hackers accessed both the Republican and Democrat campaigns but only passed the latter to anti-privacy website Wikileaks. Russia’s state media was overtly pro-Trump.
mr Trump looked increasingly isolated last night in his defence of the Putin regime’s involvement. John mcCain warned that the CIA’s conclusions ‘should alarm every American’. Peter King, a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, said there was little doubt that the Russians were responsible. mr Trump retorted that ‘these are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction’.
While other incoming presidents usually have daily CIA briefings in the run-up to taking over at the White House, mr Trump boasted of getting by with just one a week.
‘I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years,’ he said.
Intelligence chiefs are reportedly despairing of how they will work with such a hostile President.
Paul Pillar, ex-deputy director of counterterrorism at the CIA, said ‘everything Trump has indicated with regard to his character and tendencies for vindictiveness might be worse’ than Richard nixon, who also had a dysfunctional relationship with his spies.