In Mother Jones, David Corn highlights this passage from the Washington Post story about the post-election meeting with Jim Comey, James Clapper, John Brennan, and NSA chief Mike Rogers in which they briefed Trump on the intelligence community’s report that the Russians used cyberwarfare to help Trump become president.
Trump was accompanied at the Trump Tower session by his national security team, as well as by political aides Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer, who were slated to become White House chief of staff and press secretary respectively. Trump asked only one question, Comey writes: “You found there was no impact on the result, right?”
James R. Clapper Jr., then the director of national intelligence, replied that the intelligence community did no such analysis.
Comey recalls being struck that neither Trump nor his advisers asked about the future Russian threat, nor how the United States might prepare to meet it. Rather, he writes, they focused on “how they could spin what we’d just told them.”
With Clapper and then-CIA Director John O. Brennan — both Obama appointees — still in the room, Priebus and other Trump aides strategized for political advantage, Comey writes. The Trump team decided they would emphasize that Russian interference had no impact on the vote — which, Clapper reminded them, the intelligence community had not determined.
So he wasn't surprised that the Russians got him elected. His only reaction was to figure out how to spin it and protect the illusion of his own popularity.
In their book "Russian Roulette," David Corn and Michael Isikoff remind us that after this meeting, Trump tweeted, “Intelligence stated very strongly there was absolutely no evidence that hacking affected the election results.”
The report did not say that. Comey said Clapper told Trump they couldn't say whether it has an effect. But Trump lied anyway.
Which really does speak to what we call "consciousness of guilt." It's as if Trump's reaction was, "Yeah, I knew that, but I didn't know anyone else did, so we have to clean that up."
As Corn says, the real shocker is that Trump obviously doesn't care about the well-being of the country he was just elected to lead.
"It’s good that Comey is telling the public now. But there are others who have witnessed this sort of Trump conduct—Admiral Rogers?—who ought to let their fellow Americans know. That would truly be serving a higher loyalty," he concludes
