Earnest: Trump may have known Russia behind hacking before Election Day

The White House on Wednesday suggested Donald Trump knew Russia was behind a series of hacks that interfered with the U.S. presidential election when he invited Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

The president-elect has continued to deny U.S. intelligence assessments that highlight Russia as the culprit behind infiltrations of Democratic institutions, including the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s personal email account.


But White House press secretary Josh Earnest contended Wednesday that it’s entirely feasible that Trump was well aware of Russia’s interference well before the intelligence community confirmed as much in October, a month before the election.

“There’s ample evidence that was known long before the election and in most cases long before October about the Trump campaign and Russia — everything from the Republican nominee himself calling on Russia to hack his opponent,” Earnest told reporters. “It might be an indication that he was obviously aware and concluded, based on whatever facts or sources he had available to him, that Russia was involved and their involvement was having a negative impact on his opponent’s campaign.”

“That’s why he was encouraging them to keep doing it,” Earnest continued, referring to the then-GOP presidential candidate’s invitation during a late-July news conference for Russia to find Clinton’s missing emails. At the time, Trump added that Russia would “probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

If reports of CIA leaks that Russia interfered in the American White House race to boost Trump into the White House are true, Trump may have been right.

The New York Times this week reported that “every major publication … published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”

Earnest on Wednesday also reminded reporters that Trump has praised Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s leadership and chose a campaign chairman in Paul Manafort who had “extensive, lucrative, personal financial ties to the Kremlin.”

“It was obvious to those who were covering the race that the hack-and-leak strategy that had been operationalized was not being equally applied to the two parties and to the two campaigns,” he said. “There’s one side that was bearing the brunt of that strategy and another side that was clearly benefiting from it. Now, I know there’s a lot of reporting that there may be some disagreement in the intelligence community about whether or not that was the intent — that’s a question that they should ask and a question that they may attempt to answer — but there certainly was no doubt about the effect.”

In a “Fox News Sunday” interview, Trump claimed Democrats were responsible for saying Russia meddled in the election to help him “because they suffered one of the greatest defeats in the history of politics in this country” but ultimately concluded that no one knows who's behind the hacks, despite the consensus in the intelligence community.

On Monday, he argued in a couple of tweets that claims of Russian interference would have been dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” had his campaign blamed that nation for his loss.

“Unless you catch ‘hackers’ in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking,” Trump wrote. “Why wasn't this brought up before election?”

Of course, reports of Russian meddling surfaced well before the election, and the intelligence community and Department of Homeland Security formally blamed Russia a month out from Election Day.

But none of that stopped Trump from reading aloud what he considered to be some of the most damaging revelations from WikiLeaks hacks of Podesta’s personal account at his massive campaign rallies and encouraging supporters to view the hacked emails themselves because, he said, the media weren't reporting on it, although they were.

Earnest praised President Barack Obama for going “to great lengths to protect the intelligence community form even the appearance of being used as a political weapon,” warning that doing so would create long-term consequences for future presidents.

Given the political environment, Earnest said, it would have been “inappropriate” for any administration officials to pressure the intelligence community to release its conclusion sooner. Earnest explained that such logic is why it was the intelligence community, not the president himself, that made the formal announcement.

“It would have been inappropriate for White House figures, including the president of the United States, to be rushing the intelligence community to expedite their analysis of the of this situation because we were concerned about the negative impact it was having on the president’s preferred candidate in the presidential election,” he said.

“That would have been all the more damaging in an environment in which you have the Republican nominee without evidence suggesting that the election is rigged.”

But Earnest lamented the fact that that the official revelation didn’t stop any media organizations from reporting on what essentially amounted to stolen and leaked information provided by Russian agents to influence American voters.

“I don’t think there’s any evidence to indicate that editorial decisions changed as a result of this statement. So I think we actually do have an opportunity to evaluate that claim,” Earnest said.

“So I think it actually is an open question about whether it would have made a difference,” he added, responding to a question of whether having the intelligence community release its conclusion sooner would have impacted the way the hacks were covered. “It didn’t make a difference when we put out the statement a month before the election in the way that this was handled by news organizations.”