FBI & Homeland Sec. Issue Report on Russian Hacking

[GMDino]

PE Trump has inside info!


Unless he doesn't....

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/donald-trump-russian-hacking

Quote:TRUMP CLAIMS HE HAS SECRET INFORMATION ABOUT RUSSIAN HACKING

The president-elect says he will reveal “things other people don't know” this week. His own press secretary says otherwise.


Donald Trump has routinely dismissed United States intelligence reports that the Russian government used two major cyber attacks to disrupt the 2016 presidential election and help him win the White House. At various times the president-elect has cast the claims of Kremlin involvement as “ridiculous” and “just another excuse” for Hillary Clinton and her allies. Now, days after President Barack Obama hit Moscow with a series of retaliatory sanctions for its alleged efforts to influence the election, Trump is claiming that he knows “things that other people don’t know,” and that he’ll share those revelations early this week.

“I just want them to be sure because it’s a pretty serious charge,” Trump told reporters outside his Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday, referring to U.S. intelligence agencies, The New York Timesreports. “If you look at the weapons of mass destruction, that was a disaster, and they were wrong,” the president-elect added, referring to the faulty intelligence President George W. Bush used to buttress his decision to go to war in 2003. “So I want them to be sure,” the president-elect said. “I think it’s unfair if they don’t know.”

Trump isn’t entirely wrong that some skepticism is warranted, as it always should be when the White House makes such significant claims. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. both published declassified reports revealing a number of specifics about Russian intelligence operations in the U.S., including some technical details.
Critics have countered that such evidence is insufficient on its own, and the federal government is unlikely to release more compelling information, which could jeopardize its sources and methods, all of which leaves journalists in a tough spot.

But Trump has gone well beyond casting doubt on the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies. The president-elect has received top-secret briefings on what the C.I.A. has found, and has sought instead to publicly discredit the agency and its findings, characterizing the allegations of Russian hacking as a political attack on himself. Rather than call for additional investigations, as another politician would, Trump is claiming to have secret knowledge about the cyberattacks. “I know a lot about hacking. And hacking is a very hard thing to prove. So it could be somebody else,” Trump said Saturday. “And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they can’t be sure of the situation.” (In the past, Trump has suggested that China or “someone sitting on their bed weighing 400 pounds” may have been behind the high-profile hacks of the Democratic National Committee servers and the personal e-mail account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.) When pressed as to when he would share exactly what it is that he knows, but others do not, Trump said,
“You’ll find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.”

Trump, who reportedly has little experience with computers, then went on to warn of the dangers of computers. “I don’t care what they say, no computer is safe,” Trump insisted. “I have a boy who’s 10 years old; he can do anything with a computer. You want something to really go without detection, write it out and have it sent by courier.” Trump’s remarks echo those he made last week during a set of impromptu press conferences, during which he stressed we “ought to get on with our lives” and appeared to credit technology, not the Kremlin, for sowing disinformation during the election. “I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of the computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on,” Trump said outside Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday. “We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I'm not sure we have the kind of security we need.”

On Monday morning, incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer took to CNN’s “New Day” to lower expectations for Trump’s promised revelation. “It’s not a question of necessarily revealing,” he said. “He’s going to talk about his conclusions and where he thinks things stand. He’s not going to reveal anything that was privileged or was shared with him classified. I think he can share with people his conclusions of the report and his understanding of the situation and make sure people understand there’s a lot of questions out there.“

Trump’s promise comes amid heightened tensions between the incoming and outgoing administrations. The amicable and seemingly presidential relationship Trump struck with President Obama in the immediate aftermath of his unexpected victory has unraveled over the past several weeks as the Trump transition team has continued to break with the U.S. intelligence community over their conclusion that Russia sought to tip the scales in the billionaire New Yorker’s favor. The conflict came to a head last week after Obama imposed additional sanctions on the former Soviet country, and Trump’s subsequent decision to praise Vladimir Putin on Twitter after the Russian president announced that he would not respond to Obama’s actions with retaliatory measures. “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!” Trump tweeted.

I think "lowering expectations" is pretty much the theme of the incoming administration....