The US vice-president, Joe Biden, has said it is “absolutely mindless” for Donald Trump not to have confidence in the intelligence community, as the heads of the US agencies prepared to present their findings on Russian election interference to the president-elect.

The unprecedented dispute between Trump and the intelligence services he will soon control 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”.

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Biden 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.

“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.”

James Clapper, the departing director of national intelligence, and the heads of the CIA, NSA and FBI will brief Trump on Russian election interference in Trump Tower on Friday.

It is likely to be a highly charged meeting. Ahead of it on Friday, Trump told the New York Times in a telephone interview that the focus on Russia amounted to a “political witch-hunt”. He said 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 has publicly derided the agencies on the issue, and this week cited a denial by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks that his source for Democratic party emails released during the election was the Russian government or “a state party”.



Trump restated his doubts in a series of tweets on Thursday evening suggesting the FBI investigation was flawed.

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) The Democratic National Committee would not allow the FBI to study or see its computer info after it was supposedly hacked by Russia......

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) So how and why are they so sure about hacking if they never even requested an examination of the computer servers? What is going on?

The report Trump will be briefed on was presented to Barack Obama earlier in the week. US intelligence officials told the Washington Post and NBC that the classified document, said to be more than 50 pages long, says intercepted communications revealed Russian intelligence officials celebrating Trump’s win.

An unclassified version of the report will be published early next week, prepared by the NSA, CIA and FBI and providing additional information for the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia deliberately hacked the Democratic National Committee to aid Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

The CIA has also identified the Russian officials who fed the Democratic party emails to WikiLeaks through the use of third parties, Reuters reported, which allowed Assange to say the Russian government or state agencies were not the source.

Clapper told the Senate armed services committee in a hearing on Thursday into foreign cyber-threats that US intelligence analysts “stand more resolutely” than ever behind their conclusion of “Russian interference in our electoral process”. He said 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.”

Next week’s report will ascribe what Clapper called “more than one motive” to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for the electoral interference.



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”.

“They did not change any vote tallies or anything of that sort,” Clapper said of the Russians. He demurred from considering their intrusion an “act of war” while under questioning from the committee chairman, John McCain, saying that would be a “very heavy policy call” not an intelligence judgment, particularly since the US also penetrates foreign digital networks.

Trump’s confidence in WikiLeaks has shocked and angered intelligence analysts, who consider Assange at the least a hostile actor, and at most a tool of Putin.



On Thursday morning, Trump denied he was “in agreement” with Assange, tweeting: “I simply state what he states, it is for the people to make up their own minds as to the truth.”

He claimed the media “lies to make it look like I am against ‘intelligence’ when in fact I am a big fan”.

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. A leading figure behind the reported reorganisation is said to be Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief whom Clapper fired in 2014. Clapper, who resigned in November and will leave his post when Trump is inaugurated, said the current intelligence leadership had not been consulted on the plan.