Trump Doubles Down On Blatant Lie About Intelligence Report On Russian Hacking

President-Elect Again Falsely Claims Hacking Didn’t Affect Election Results

President-elect Donald Trump took to Twitter on Saturday morning (above) to repeat what has already been exposed as a blatant lie.

After being briefed by intelligence agencies Friday on Russian hacking of the U.S. election, Trump issued a statement saying the cyberattacks had “absolutely on impact on the outcome of the election.” 

In fact, the agencies that complied the report didn’t attempt to assess the actual impact of President Vladimir Putin’s “influence campaign,” according to a declassified version that was later made public. Rather, they merely determined that Putin had “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary [Hillary] Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

“We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election,” the report concluded. “The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political processes or US public opinion.” 

On Friday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said (video above) that Trump’s apparent willingness to lie to the American public about such a critical matter of U.S. intelligence “puts a shiver down my spine.” Hours later, the president-elect repeated his claim. 

“Intelligence stated very strongly there was absolutely no evidence that hacking affected the election results,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Voting machines not touched!”

It’s true that the intelligence agencies found no evidence of actual tampering with ballots, although they did conclude that the Russians “obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards.”

But it goes without saying that you don’t have to touch voting machines to influence an election — especially one that was decided by only 80,000 people in three states. Reports about hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee dominated media coverage and contributed to Republican conspiracies about Clinton’s use of a private server.  

“Only reason the hacking of the poorly defended DNC is discussed is that the loss by the Dems was so big that they are totally embarrassed!” Trump added. 

Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million.

Reactions from Twitter below. 

This time we know he’s lying because there is a public report. 99% of the time when he’s president, we won’t.

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) January 7, 2017