Robert O’Brien says he has not seen evidence Russia is boosting Trump but seizes on report Moscow is backing Bernie Sanders

Donald Trump’s national security adviser has said he has not “seen any intelligence that Russia is doing anything” to get the president re-elected, but also seemed to accept reports that Russia is backing Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary.

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In response, one senior Democrat slammed the “politicisation of intelligence” by the Trump administration and said Robert O’Brien should “stay out of politics”.

O’Brien’s claim, in an interview with ABC’s This Week, came at the end of a week in which it was reported that US officials briefed the House intelligence committee that Russia was again trying to help get Trump elected.

Reports of Trump’s furious reaction were followed by the departure of Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, and his replacement by Richard Grenell, formerly ambassador to Germany and a Trump loyalist. The president has tweeted extensively on the subject, blaming Democrats and the media for “disinformation hoax number 7”.

It was also reported this week that Trump, congressional leaders and Sanders himself were briefed that Moscow was repeating another tactic from 2016 and backing the Vermont senator.

Sanders told Russia to stay out of US elections, then won convincingly in Nevada.

O’Brien said Russian backing for Sanders would be “no surprise. He honeymooned in Moscow.”

Sanders has described a 10-day visit to the then Soviet capital in 1988 as “a very strange honeymoon”. O’Brien was repeating a line used by Trump at campaign events.

Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, said O’Brien had made a “political statement” and as national security adviser should “stay out of politics”.

Asked if he had seen analysis showing a Russian aim in its election interference efforts was to help the president, O’Brien said: “I have not seen that, and … the national security adviser gets pretty good access to our intelligence. I haven’t seen any intelligence that Russia is doing anything to attempt to get President Trump re-elected.”

O’Brien said he was not making a distinction between seeing actual intelligence material and seeing analysis of it.

“No, I haven’t seen any intelligence on that,” he said. “And I haven’t seen any analysis on that.”

He also said Grenell and the CIA director, Gina Haspel, had not seen such material and contended: “President Trump has rebuilt the American military to an extent we haven’t seen since Ronald Reagan. So I don’t think it’s any surprise that Russia or China or Iran would want somebody other than President Trump.”

Murphy countered that it “stands to reason” that Russia “wants Trump elected because he has been a gift to Russia. He has essentially ceded the Middle East to Russian interests, he has accomplished more in undermining Nato than Russia has in the last 20 years and he continues to effectively deny that they have an ongoing political operation here in the United States that by and large is an attempt to support Donald Trump.”

US intelligence concluded that Russia ran interference efforts through the 2016 election, aiming to boost Trump against Hillary Clinton and stoke divisions in US society.

Trump has rejected such conclusions, including standing with the Russian leader in Helsinki in July 2018 and saying: “I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

O’Brien, Trump’s fourth national security adviser, is a lawyer and former hostage negotiator who according to a New York Times report runs National Security Council meetings that include printouts of presidential tweets. Like the president, he said reports about the House briefing were based on leaks. Speaking to reporters on Sunday as he left Washington for a visit to India, Trump accused the House intelligence chair, Adam Schiff, of leaking the information about Russia and Sanders. He also said he had not been briefed about the Sanders link.

O’Brien said he had “seen the reports from that briefing at the intel committee [and] also heard that from the briefers that that’s not what they intended the story to be. So, look … I haven’t seen any evidence that Russia is doing anything to attempt to get President Trump re-elected. And our message to the Russians is stay out of the US elections. We’ve been very tough on Russia and we’ve been great on election security.”

Senate Republicans this month blocked three bills meant to strengthen election security, shortly after being told by intelligence agencies the US was not doing enough to guard against a repeat of 2016. O’Brien said the White House was “working very hard with the states”.

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“We’re going to paper ballots in many cases to harden our election infrastructure,” he said, “to make sure that not only is there not election influence through trolls and Twitter and that sort of thing, but to make sure that countries can’t hack into our secretaries of state in our 50 states and change election results or cause mischief on election day.”

Reports of Trump’s fury at Maguire were incorrect, O’Brien added, saying the acting director’s time in the role had simply expired.

“We needed a Senate-confirmed official to come in and replace him,” O’Brien said. “And so we went with a highly qualified person, Ambassador Grenell.”

Most observers think Grenell is not qualified and would not be confirmed by the Senate. Filling the role in an acting capacity – as many Trump aides do – lets him avoid that hurdle.

O’Brien said Trump would “move quickly” to make a permanent appointment but Murphy said Grenell’s move made him “worried about the politicisation of intelligence by this administration”.

“The new acting head of intelligence has no background in intel,” he said. “He is a Trump loyalist. And I think we all worry about this administration controlling massive amounts of intelligence, massive amounts of classified information, and leaking it out to the press when it advantages them.”