Emerging from a 90-minute briefing with the nation’s intelligence chiefs, Mr. Trump issued a statement acknowledging the hacking of “the cyber-infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee.” But he said it had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”
“While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber-infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines. There were attempts to hack the Republican National Committee, but the R.N.C. had strong hacking defenses and the hackers were unsuccessful.”
The intelligence chiefs showed Mr. Trump their evidence that Russia hacked into the accounts of political organizations and members of the Clinton campaign and that it made their correspondence public in an effort to influence the election. The president-elect was sharply questioning those findings as late as Friday morning.
The briefers included James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, who said on Thursday that he was “more resolute” than ever in the conclusion that Russia was responsible for the hacking, and that it was part of a broader information warfare campaign. The director of the C.I.A., John O. Brennan; the head of the National Security Agency and the United States Cyber Command, Adm. Michael S. Rogers; and the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, also participated, officials said.
The meeting came at a moment of remarkable tension between the intelligence agencies and Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly questioned the conclusions about Russia and suggested that there was political motivation behind the intelligence findings. Mr. Clapper and Admiral Rogers said, somewhat diplomatically, at a Senate hearing on Thursday that while they welcomed skepticism, they believed that questioning the motives of the intelligence officials working on the issue was damaging to morale and to the agencies’ ability to retain top talent.
An unclassified version of the report Mr. Trump will hear about will be made public as early as Friday afternoon. The president-elect will most likely hear the most-classified details, including information about the intercepts of conversation and computer traffic, and the human sources, that the intelligence agencies used to reach their conclusions.
President-elect calls for leak investigation ahead of intelligence briefing
A half-hour before he met with the nation’s top intelligence leaders to hear their evidence that Russia interfered with the election, Mr. Trump demanded a congressional investigation of leaks from the intelligence report.
The post was a reference to an NBC News report that United States intelligence agencies heard senior Russian government officials cheering Mr. Trump’s victory on election night. It was actually first reported by The Washington Post.
Neither the president-elect nor Republican leaders in Congress have warmed to the idea of a special investigation into Russian efforts to swing the election to Mr. Trump. A leak investigation would swing the pressure the other way, toward bottling up evidence of Russian interference.
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