But some of Trump’s closest allies, by contrast, aren’t just trying to push back on investigations, and they’re aren’t just skeptical of the intelligence, like Trump, who flatly rejected it on Sunday: “I think it’s ridiculous. I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it.” (Incidentally, he also copped to skipping intelligence briefings, saying, “You know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.”) The president-elect seems to have forgotten that he publicly asked Russia to hack Clinton’s emails.

Instead, these are making a very public claim that the hacking is a false-flag attack, which has either fooled the CIA and other American intelligence agencies or, even worse, in which they may be complicit.

Appearing on Fox News Sunday evening, John Bolton suggested that someone might have tried to imitate the Russians so as to shift blame onto the Kremlin for the hacks. “It is not at all clear to me, viewing this from the outside, that this hacking into the DNC and the RNC computers was not a false flag operation,” Bolton said, adding that “a really sophisticated foreign intelligence service would not leave any fingerprints.” Fox’s Eric Shawn pressed Bolton to say who he thought might be behind such an attack. Bolton seemed to imply an inside job, saying, “We just don’t know. But I believe that intelligence has been politicized in the Obama administration to a very significant degree.” Monday morning, Bolton told Fox and Friends he did not mean to suggest that the administration itself was behind the false flag. Bolton did, however, break with Trump in suggesting an investigation into the matter.

Bolton isn’t just some commentator, and he’s also not just the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He’s also reportedly Trump’s likely pick as deputy secretary of state. Another possible Trump appointee is former GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, who met with Trump today and is reportedly under consideration for director of national intelligence.

Upon emerging from her meeting with Trump, Fiorina, offered a rather opaque, brief statement, which could be read as suggesting China was the culprit. “We ... spent a fair amount of time talking about China as probably our most important adversary and a rising adversary,” she said. “We talked about hacking, whether it's Chinese hacking or purported Russian hacking.” She may also have been referring to prior cases of U.S. officials concluding China had hacked government computers.

Meanwhile, Carter Page, a former Trump adviser whom the FBI reportedly investigated him for communicating with senior Russian officials, has been in Moscow recently. On Monday, he spoke at a Russian state-owned media company. Page spent large chunks of his 30-minute address railing against what he called “fake news,” though his definition seemed to encompass plenty of reporting he simply didn’t like or agree with, rather than made-up, intentionally fictional content, as well as Wikipedia, which is not a news site at all. During a question-and-answer session afterwards, he was asked about reports of Russian hacking. His answer, flagged by the Times’ Ivan Nechepurenko, was that he suspected a false flag.