The Trump administration have said that they believe Hillary Clinton should be punished for illegally trying to influence the outcome of the election.
Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, said that Putin and Russia are being wrongly blamed for unduly influencing the US elections, and said that the blame should lie squarely with the Clinton Campaign.
“Why aren’t we talking about the other influences on the election? Why aren’t we talking about Hillary Clinton getting debate questions ahead of time?”
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Thinkprogress.org reports:
“No one is asking those questions. The fact is that everyone wants to make Donald Trump admit to certain things. When do we talk about the other side, which is what did Hillary Clinton do to influence the election? Is she being punished?”
Spicer, to be clear, is referring to information from the Russian hacks themselves — the apparent revelation that during the Democratic primary, Donna Brazile, formerly a CNN contributor, passed Clinton’s campaign debate questions.
While Spicer says that “no one” is asking those questions, when the hacked information was released by Wikileaks the story dominated media coverage. It also became one of Trump’s favorite talking points. Trump used it to bolster his claim that the election was being “rigged” by the Democrats.
Trump and his team are avoiding questions about the intelligence assessment that Russia attempted to swing the election in Trump’s favor.
On Thursday, Trump said that instead of discussing the hacks, “we ought to get on with our lives.”
At New Year’s Eve celebrations at Mar-A-Lago on Saturday, he cast doubt on the U.S. intelligence community’s abilities and conclusions, saying, “if you look at the weapons of mass destruction, that was a disaster, and they were wrong,” referring to information used in 2003 by President George W. Bush to support the Iraq war that was later proved faulty.
Trump then suggested that he was a hacking expert with more information than the CIA.
“I know a lot about hacking. And hacking is a very hard thing to prove. So it could be somebody else. And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.”
He refused to say what his secret information was, promising a reveal on “Tuesday or Wednesday.”
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that one of Russia’s top intelligence agencies ordered a Kremlin-approved attack on the DNC and other political organizations. In response, President Obama imposed sanctions on Russia and expelled 35 suspected Russian operatives from the United States. Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin on Twitter for not retaliating immediately.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/814919370711461890
Sean Adl-Tabatabai
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