President Trump says he “absolutely” believes waterboarding works — but will leave it up to his national security team whether to use the controversial interrogation technique.

Trump said in an interview with ABC’s David Muir that in the past 24 hours he’s asked “people at the highest level of intelligence…’Does torture work?'”

“The answer was, ‘Yes,'” the president said.

But he said he’s going to defer to his national security team for now.

“If they don’t want to do that’s fine and if they do what to do I will work within that end….but, do I feel it works? Absolutely,” he told Muir.

Trump made clear on the campaign trail that he believed in waterboarding as a technique to use against terrorists. But in November, after interviewing retired Gen. Jim Mattis to be his secretary of defense, the then-president-elect appeared to back off.

“He said, ‘I’ve never found it to be useful,’” Trump said of his conversation with Mattis.

Quoting the general, Trump added, “‘Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I’ll do better.’”

“I was very impressed by that answer,” Trump, who ultimately gave Mattis the job, said at the time.

Meanwhile, The Trump White House denied it has prepared an executive order to begin the process of reopening foreign CIA “black sites” that were used in the Bush administration to detain suspects in the war on terrorism.

President Obama closed the black sites, but a draft executive order calls for a review process that may lead to the reopening of the “black sites” for enemy combatants.

The Associated Press said the draft had been circulating in the Trump administration. But press secretary Sean Spicer was adamant Wednesday that it didn’t come from the White House.

“It is not a White House document,” he said.

The order calls on US officials to “recommend to the president whether to re-initiate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States and whether such program should include the use of detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency,” the AP said.

With Post wires