Donald Trump is now an expert on hacking, according to remarks he made to reporters outside his Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve bash, the New York Times reports.
When probed about Russia’s role in hacking the election, which both the CIA and FBI have confirmed, Trump said that he has information on the matter that others don’t. “I know a lot about hacking,” he said. “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.”
Trump promised to reveal what he knows on “Tuesday or Wednesday.”
The president-elect’s comments come just days after President Obama levied sanctions against Russia for their role in the hacking scandal. Putin meanwhile, did not retaliate to the sanctions, a move Trump praised as “very smart.” That pro-Russian sentiment echoes Trump’s previous assertions that the U.S. intelligence community’s findings are wrong, and that the country as a whole should “move on.”
On Saturday, Trump backed off those beliefs just a little bit, and said that intelligence agencies need to be sure of who hacked the election because it’s “a pretty serious charge.” He cited the Bush administration’s faulty intelligence on Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, that led to the Iraq war in 2003 as an example of intelligence gone wrong. “So I want them to be sure,” he added. “I think it’s unfair if they don’t know.”
Trump also discussed his overall distrust of computers, and said that important communications should be “delivered by courier, the old-fashioned way,” adding that “no computer is safe.”
“I have a boy who’s 10 years old; he can do anything with a computer,” Trump explained. “You want something to really go without detection, write it out and have it sent by courier.”
