Trump is doubling down on his refusal to embrace the idea that Russia tried to interfere in our elections, calling the focus on Russia a ‘political witch hunt’:
THE HILL – President-elect Donald Trump on Friday dismissed the firestorm surrounding allegations Russia intervened in the presidential election as a “witch hunt” carried out by bitter political opponents.
“They got beaten very badly in the election,” Trump said in an interview with The New York Times.
“I won more counties in the election than Ronald Reagan,” he continued. “They are very embarrassed about it. To some extent, it’s a witch hunt. They just focus on this.”
Trump’s comments came just hours before he was scheduled to receive a classified briefing from top intelligence and national security officials on the extent of Russian hacking tied to U.S. elections.
But Trump claimed the focus on Russia is political, pointing to what he said was a tamer response to China’s 2014 hack of the Office of Personnel Management.
“China, relatively recently, hacked 20 million government names,” he said. “How come nobody even talks about that? This is a political witch hunt.”
In some ways I agree with Trump that the media is obsessing over Russia and some are trying to use it to delegitimize his victory over Hillary.
But as John Bolton said a few days ago, it doesn’t matter if Russia was successful or not at actually influencing the election. The simple fact that they tried, should the evidence show that, means we must take serious action against them to prevent them from doing this in the future. And this is something that Trump doesn’t seem willing to entertain.
I totally get Trump wanting to keep the media and Democrats from smearing his election, but there really is middle ground here. But his refusal to even come to the middle is in part what is perpetuating the media’s obsession with this.