On Fox News Sunday, Reince Priebus told host Chris Wallace that Donald Trump is “not denying that entities in Russia were behind this particular hacking campaign."
Reince Priebus has indicated that Donald Trump, does, in fact, accept U.S. intelligence findings about Russian efforts to hack into the accounts of the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, and John Podesta who ran Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
On the January 8 edition of Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Priebus point blank, “Does [Trump] accept that the Russians were behind this hacking campaign, yes or no?”
Priebus responded by saying, “Well sure, I mean, he’s not denying that entities in Russia were behind this particular hacking campaign…”
However, the incoming White House Chief of Staff then seemed to place at least some of the blame on the Democrats, saying, “We have the DNC as a sitting duck...If the DNC allows any foreign entity into their system...well, voila, now you have the biggest dissemination of emails that we’ve ever seen in the history of America…”
Priebus was then pressed about who was really to blame, and he admitted, “The primary actor is the foreign entity that’s perpetrating the crime to begin with, no doubt about it.”
In the past, Trump has expressed skepticism about Russian hacking claims, at one point saying it is “a very hard thing to prove” while later calling it a “political witch hunt.”
But he seemed to be more receptive after intelligence officials briefed him about their report on Friday, calling the meeting “constructive” and vowing to, his words, “aggressively combat and stop cyberattacks.”
However, the following morning on January 7, Trump said on Twitter, “Having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. Only ‘stupid’ people, or fools, would think that it is bad!”
