By mocking this claim Trump demonstrates collusion with Putin and therefore unfit to be president of the United States. He is at odds with U.S. intelligence agencies as well as rank and file GOP and is frightening the basis of the Republican party at his collusion now with Putin.
It can only be collusion or complete ignorance, neither of which should be in the White House.
begin quote from:
Trump and the national security establishment, with Mr. Trump mocking American intelligence assessments that Russia interfered in the election on his behalf ... had concluded that the R.N.C. had been hacked. “The RNC …
WASHINGTON
— An extraordinary breach has emerged between President-elect Donald J.
Trump and the national security establishment, with Mr. Trump mocking
American intelligence assessments that Russia interfered in the election
on his behalf, and top Republicans vowing investigations into Kremlin
activities.
Mr.
Trump, in a statement issued by his transition team on Friday evening,
expressed complete disbelief in the intelliegence agencies’ assessments.
“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction,” Mr. Trump’s team said, adding that the election was over
and that it was time to “move on.”
Though
Mr. Trump has wasted no time in antagonizing the agencies, to carry out
priorities like combating terrorism and deterring cyberattacks he will
have to rely on them for the sort of espionage activities and analysis
that they spend more than $70 billion a year to perform.
At
this point in a transition, a president-elect is usually delving into
intelligence he has never before seen and learning about C.I.A. and National Security Agency
abilities. But Mr. Trump, who has taken intelligence briefings only
sporadically, is questioning not only analytic conclusions, but also
their underlying facts.
“To
have the president-elect of the United States simply reject the
fact-based narrative that the intelligence community puts together
because it conflicts with his a priori assumptions — wow,” said Michael
V. Hayden, who was the director of the N.S.A. and later the C.I.A. under
President George W. Bush.
With
the partisan emotions on both sides — Mr. Trump’s supporters see a plot
to undermine his presidency, and Hillary Clinton’s supporters see a
conspiracy to keep her from the presidency — the result is an
environment in which even those basic facts become the basis for
dispute.
Mr.
Trump’s team lashed out at the agencies after The Washington Post
reported that the C.I.A. believed that Russia had intervened to undercut
Mrs. Clinton and lift Mr. Trump, and The New York Times reported that
Russia had broken into Republican National Committee computer networks just as they had broken into Democratic ones, but had released documents only on the Democrats.
The
president-elect finds himself in a bind after strenuously rejecting for
months all assertions that Russia was working to help him. While there
is no evidence that the Russian efforts affected the outcome of the
election or the legitimacy of the vote, Mr. Trump and his aides want to
shut the door on any such notion, including the idea that President
Vladimir V. Putin schemed to put him in office.
Instead,
Mr. Trump casts the issue as an unknowable mystery. “It could be
Russia,” he recently told Time magazine. “And it could be China. And it
could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”
The
Republicans who lead the congressional committees overseeing
intelligence, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security take
the opposite view. They say that Russia was behind the election
meddling, but that the scope and intent of the operation need deep
investigation, hearings and public reports.
One
question they may want to explore is why the intelligence agencies
believe that the Republican networks were compromised while the F.B.I.,
which leads domestic cyberinvestigations, has apparently told
Republicans that it has not seen evidence of that breach. Senior
officials say the intelligence agencies’ conclusions are not being
widely shared, even with law enforcement.
“We
cannot allow foreign governments to interfere in our democracy,”
Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who is the chairman of
the Homeland Security Committee and was considered by Mr. Trump for
secretary of Homeland Security, said at the conservative Heritage
Foundation. “When they do, we must respond forcefully, publicly and
decisively.”
He
has promised hearings, saying the Russian activity was “a call to
action,” as has Senator John McCain, one of the few senators left from
the Cold War era, when the Republican Party made opposition to the Soviet Union — and later deep suspicion of Russia — the centerpiece of its foreign policy.
Even
one of Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, Representative Devin
Nunes, a California Republican, said on Friday that he had no doubt
about Russia’s culpability. His complaint was with the intelligence
agencies, which he said had “repeatedly” failed “to anticipate Putin’s
hostile actions,” and with the Obama administration’s lack of a punitive
response.
Mr.
Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that the
intelligence agencies had “ignored pleas by numerous Intelligence
Committee members to take more forceful action against the Kremlin’s
aggression.” He added that the Obama administration had “suddenly awoken
to the threat.”
Like
many Republicans, Mr. Nunes is threading a needle. His statement puts
him in opposition to the position taken by Mr. Trump and his incoming
national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has traveled to Russia as a
private citizen for RT, the state-controlled news operation, and
attended a dinner with Mr. Putin.
Mr.
Nunes’s contention that Mr. Obama was captivated by a desire to “reset”
relations with Russia is also notable, because Mr. Trump has said he is
trying to do the same — though he is avoiding that term, which was made
popular by Mrs. Clinton in her failed effort as secretary of state in
2009.
At
this point, a president-elect is usually sorting out how to evaluate
the evidence presented to him each day in the Presidential Daily Brief.
Mr. Obama, for example, came to question the C.I.A.’s analytic skills
after being briefed not long after the 2010 uprising in Tunisia. Mr.
Obama asked what the chance was that the street protests would spread to
Egypt; he was told “less than 20 percent.” Tahrir Square erupted within
days.
Intelligence
can get politicized, of course, and one of the running debates about
the disastrously mistaken assessments of Iraq that Mr. Trump often cites
is whether the intelligence itself was tainted or whether the Bush
White House read it selectively to support its march to war in 2003.
But
what is unfolding in the argument over the Russian hacking is more
complex, because tracking the origin of cyberattacks is complicated. It
is made all the harder by the fact that the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. do not
want to reveal human sources or technical abilities, including American
software implants in Russian computer networks.
A
spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Sean Spicer, disputed
the report in The Times that the intelligence community had concluded
that the R.N.C. had been hacked.
“The RNC was not ‘hacked,’ ” he said on Twitter. “The @nytimes was told and chose to ignore.” On Friday night, before The Times published its report, the committee had refu 
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