USA – (WARSOOR) – President Trump on Saturday downplayed the impact of a sprawling hack on a litany of government agencies while questioning officials’ conclusion that Russia was behind the attack.
Trump used his first public comments on the cyber intrusion to dismiss the severity of the hack while asserting that the media was playing it up to hurt him. He also questioned who perpetrated it, despite officials such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying that Russia was to blame for the attack.
The president’s comments, issued in a pair of tweets, directly contradicted government officials and outside experts who said the attack that hit the departments of Energy, Homeland Security, State and Treasury, among others, was one of the broadest cyberattacks in recent memory.
“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control. Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!),” Trump tweeted.
“There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA,” he added, echoing his claims that widespread voter fraud and irregularities kept him from winning a second term.
The tweets flew in the face of recent comments from high-ranking officials such as Pompeo who said Friday evening that Russia was behind the intrusion.
“I can’t say much more, as we’re still unpacking precisely what it is, and I’m sure some of it will remain classified. But suffice it to say there was a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embed code inside of U.S. government systems and it now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as well,” Pompeo said on “The Mark Levin Show.”
“This was a very significant effort, and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,” he added.