Donald Trump sees FBI admission on hacking bolstering his doubts

Trump calls for a congressional investigation into news leaks reporting about Russian hacking

US President-elect Donald Trump gets his long-awaited briefing from intelligence agencies Friday, as he called for a congressional investigation into news leaks reporting some of their findings about Russian hacking of the presidential election before he got a chance to see them.

"I am asking the chairs of the House and Senate committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing it," Trump wrote on Twitter Friday. NBC News and the Washington Post reported Thursday evening that the report on hacking says US intelligence picked up senior Russian officials celebrating Trump’s win. An unclassified public version of the report may be released later Friday.  

Trump’s comments come a day after his criticism of intelligence agencies was rebuffed on Capitol Hill while fresh questions were raised about the FBI’s investigation into the hacking.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey and Central Intelligence Agency chief John Brennan were scheduled to meet Trump in New York to review the evidence behind their conclusion that senior Russian officials were aware of and directed the computer breaches of Democratic officials and organisations last year.

In an admission seized upon by Trump, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said the Democratic National Committee rebuffed requests by federal agents to inspect computer servers that had been breached last year, forcing them to rely on third-party cyber security data to investigate the hack, the FBI said.

“So how and why are they so sure about hacking if they never even requested an examination of the computer servers?,” Trump said on Twitter late Thursday evening. “What is going on?" In an interview Friday with the New York Times, Trump called the focus on Russian hacking “a political witch hunt.”

“With all that being said, I don’t want countries to be hacking our country,” he added.

Yet Clapper, testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier Thursday, said that the intelligence agencies’ confidence in their findings is now “very high” and they are “even more resolute” in their findings about Russian involvement than when they first weighed in on the issue publicly on Oct. 7. That conclusion would likely be based on a range of intelligence data and sources.

“The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated," the agency said.

Bloomberg