President-elect Trump repeatedly attacked the focus on Russia's hacks and called it a "political witch hunt" perpetrated by his rivals, who are upset he won the election.
In an interview with the NY Times a few hours before he was set to have an intelligence briefing today Trump said, "China, relatively recently, hacked 20 million government names,” he said, referring to the breach of computers at the Office of Personnel Management in late 2014 and early 2015. “How come nobody even talks about that? This is a political witch hunt.”
This continued the practice by the Trump camp to deflect, deny and blame somebody else when it comes to news they don't feel is favorable to the Donald.
(Kellyanne Conway gave a master class in this technique to CNN's Chris Cuomo earlier this morning.)
The Times reports that Trump repeatedly brought up other instances of possible hacking by foreign government as a way to try and buffer himself from the perception that a foreign government aided his presidential campaign.
After rambling on about how mean we are being to his BFF Putin, Trump then acknowledged, “With all that being said, I don’t want countries to be hacking our country.”
Isn't that big of him?
He continued his assault on the intelligence community by saying, "a lot of mistakes were made” by the intelligence community in the past, noting in particular the attacks on the World Trade Center and saying that “weapons of mass destruction was one of the great mistakes of all time.”
I'd like to point out that it was the Bush administration that colored the intelligence to fit their narrative that Saddam had WMD's, while Dick Cheney used the media to plant stories and then promote those stories to convince the American people to go to war with Iraq.
And it was the intelligence communities that warned President Bush of a possible terrorist attack perpetrated with planes in a PBA entitled “Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.”
Right, Donald?
