President-elect still does not publicly support conclusion of Russia interference in US election but calls the meeting ‘constructive’

Donald Trump struck a conciliatory tone with US intelligence officials after meeting with their leadership, but did not publicly support their conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential contest.

In a statement issued ahead of the release of a declassified version of the intelligence assessment, Trump said he had “tremendous respect for the work and service done by the men and women of this community”, describing his meeting with James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and other senior intelligence officials, as “constructive”.

His comments came after an extraordinary public feud between Trump and leaders of the intelligence apparatus he will soon control. However, Trump discussed the hack and leak of embarrassing Democratic National Committee data in generic terms, suggesting he had not moved away from his earlier statements casting attribution for the data breach as unknowable.

“Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations,” Trump said in a Friday afternoon statement, and underlined “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines”.

In a statement issued after the New York meeting, Trump pledged to task his administration with creating a 90-day plan to “combat and stop cyberattacks”.

Trump and his deputies have treated discussion of potential foreign interference in a US election as an effort merely to delegitimize his presidency before it begins.

In an interview with the New York Times hours before the meeting, the president-elect derided the concentration on Moscow as a “political witch-hunt” by bitter political opponents. “They got beaten very badly in the election,” he said.

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The interview emerged just as Clapper, CIA director John Brennan and FBI director James Comey arrived at Trump Tower to present detailed findings and likely motives for Moscow’s alleged interference.

Barack Obama was given the same briefing on Thursday, while senior Democrats and Republicans in Washington received it on Friday morning. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, said the intelligence report was “quite a stunning disclosure” and parts would be made public later on Friday.

US intelligence officials told the Washington Post and broadcaster NBC that the classified document, said to be more than 50 pages long, says intercepted communications revealed senior Russian intelligence officials celebrating Trump’s win.

Trump called for lawmakers to investigate the leak to the media. “I am asking the chairs of the House and Senate committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing it,” he tweeted on Friday.

Asked about Trump’s tweet, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, noted that Trump had earlier this week made a “steadfast defence” of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, suggesting that this raised questions over his true motives. The president-elect had cited a denial by Assange that his source for Democratic party emails released during the election was the Russian government or “a state party”.

Trump argued in a phone interview with the New York Times on Friday that China had, “relatively recently, hacked 20 million government names ... how come nobody even talks about that? This is a political witch-hunt.”

The president-elect also cited reports this week that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had refused to give the FBI access to its computer servers after it was hacked. “The DNC wouldn’t let them see the servers,” Trump told the paper. “How can you be sure about hacking when you can’t even get to the servers?”

The DNC has previously claimed that the FBI did not ask to examine the servers themselves.

The unprecedented dispute broke into the open at a congressional hearing on Thursday as the head of US intelligence publicly defended his analysts, who he said “stand more resolutely” than ever behind their conclusion of “Russian interference in our electoral process”.

Clapper told the Senate armed services committee that there was a “difference between scepticism and disparagement”.

Clapper and Adm Michael Rogers, the director of the NSA, expressed concerns about intelligence analysts’ morale after Trump’s perceived disparagement of their work, with Rogers suggesting some may quit.

Clapper said Russia “has clearly assumed an even more aggressive cyber posture”, and described the assault on the 2016 election as “multifaceted”.

“Hacking was only one part of it,” he said. “It also entailed classical propaganda, disinformation and fake news.”

Clapper, who has in the past signalled his discomfort with public intelligence testimony – and who has apologised for previous false statements to the Senate on the scope of domestic NSA surveillance – said he intended to “push the envelope as much as I can on the unclassified version” of the report “because I think the public should know as much of this as possible”.

The US vice-president, Joe Biden, also weighed in. He said it would be legitimate to question intelligence and ask for more detail or disagree but “dangerous” to publicly criticise the agencies and claim to know more than them. “For a president not to have confidence in, not to be prepared to listen to, the myriad intelligence agencies, from defence intelligence to the CIA, is absolutely mindless,” he said in an interview with PBS.

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“The idea that you may know more than the intelligence community knows – it’s like saying I know more about physics than my professor. I didn’t read the book, I just know I know more.”

Several advisers due to join Trump and Vice-president elect Mike Pence for Friday’s intelligence briefing included incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus; incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn; incoming deputy national security adviser K T McFarland; Thomas Bossert, Trump’s pick for homeland security adviser; and representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas, Trump’s choice to head the CIA.

Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary, insisted that Trump would go into Friday’s meeting “prepared to listen and understand how they got to the conclusions”. Asked on ABC’s Good Morning America if Trump would have an open mind, Spicer replied: “100%.”

He added: “The president-elect, I think, has a healthy scepticism on everything.” He added that “a rush to judgment is not in the country’s best interest”.

The Trump transition team has sought to weaken the impact of the intelligence findings on Russia meddling in the election by highlighting the US intelligence community’s failures over Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. Clapper claimed that US intelligence collection and analysis had vastly improved since then.

“We do make mistakes, but we try to learn from them and make changes,” he said, insisting that the contrast between US intelligence then and now was “the difference of night and day”.

Amid the background of distrust is a plan Trump is reportedly considering to reorganise the US intelligence apparatus. According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the proposal, Trump is considering diminishing the role of the director of national intelligence and returning the CIA directorship, under Trump’s pick, Mike Pompeo, to its prime role within the intelligence community. Trump’s incoming press secretary Sean Spicer called the report “100% false”.

Since Trump’s election, some career US intelligence officials have told the Guardian they fear retaliation for their assessment of Russian electoral interference. Clapper, who resigned in November and will leave his post when Trump is inaugurated, said the current intelligence leadership had not been consulted any reorganisation plan.



Also on Friday, before his meeting with intelligence bosses, Trump met with editors of Condé Nast, whose titles include Vogue, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. He tweeted to say he had been asked to meet with them by Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, who backed Hillary Clinton during the election.