U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, two weeks from taking office, is mocking his political opponents, criticizing the country’s mainstream news media and continuing to question the U.S. intelligence finding that Russia meddled in the presidential election.
Trump, the billionaire real estate mogul turned Republican politician, asked in a string of Twitter comments Wednesday why the Democratic National Committee was “so careless” that thousands of emails of John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s losing presidential campaign, were hacked and why the party did not have “hacking defense” like the Republican National Committee did.
The Podesta emails often revealed embarrassing details of the behind-the-scenes effort to help Clinton, a former U.S. Secretary of State, win the Democratic presidential nomination before she ultimately lost the November national election to Trump.
The president-elect quoted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid facing sexual assault charges in Sweden, as saying that “a 14-year-old could have hacked Podesta” and “also said Russians did not give him the info!”
WikiLeaks released thousands of the Podesta emails in the days leading up to the November 8 election, but has not revealed its source for the information.
Demonstrators make their way around downtown, Monday, July 25, 2016, in Philadelphia, during the first day of the Democratic National Convention after some of the 19,000 emails, presumably stolen from the DNC by hackers, were posted to the website Wikileaks.
Slams democrats
Trump, set to be inaugurated January 20, also assailed Democrats for not responding to revelations in the emails, which he described as “terrible things they did and said.” He cited one instance in which a question was leaked to Clinton ahead of a primary election debate she had with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, whom she defeated for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The incident was widely reported last year, but Trump called it a “total double standard! Media, as usual, gave them a pass.” He quoted Assange as calling U.S. media coverage “very dishonest,” and conservative talk show host Sean Hannity as saying, “more dishonest than anyone knows.”
On Tuesday, Trump used his Twitter account to allege an intelligence briefing “on so-called ‘Russian hacking'” had been delayed until Friday.
Hacking report
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security released a joint report last week blaming Russia’s intelligence agencies for hacks intended to influence the 2016 U.S. election in Trump’s favor.
President Barack Obama imposed sanctions on two Russian agencies, expelled 35 Moscow agents from the United States and closed two facilities in the U.S. housing Russian operations.
Trump has cast doubt on the conclusions and suggested his briefing from U.S. intelligence agencies had been delayed because “more time [is] needed to build a case. Very strange!”
Intelligence officials told multiple news agencies there was no delay and the briefing had always been scheduled to take place Friday.
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