“The dishonest media likes saying that I am in Agreement with Julian Assange - wrong," Donald Trump said. | AP Photo Trump: Media are wrong — I'm a 'big fan' of U.S. intel

President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday that it is “the dishonest media,” and not his own rhetoric, that is to blame for any perception that he has taken the side of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“The dishonest media likes saying that I am in Agreement with Julian Assange - wrong. I simply state what he states, it is for the people to make up their own minds as to the truth,” Trump tweeted, splitting his remarks across two posts. “The media lies to make it look like I am against ‘Intelligence’ when in fact I am a big fan!”


While the U.S. intelligence community has said for months that Russia is to blame for cyberattacks that targeted American political targets, Trump, who has promised warmer relations with the Kremlin, has thus far been unwilling to concede that point. The cyberattacks publicly took the form of hacked emails from prominent Democratic individuals and institutions, released by WikiLeaks and other similar sites.

Assange, who has remained inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012 in order to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges, has said that his source for the emails was not a foreign state.

The notion that Trump might find Assange more believable than the U.S. intelligence community he will lead beginning on Jan. 20 stems most directly from his post to Twitter on Wednesday, when he wrote that “Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’ - why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!”

Trump's willingness to cite Assange is a direct about-face from his stance on WikiLeaks in 2010, when the website published thousands of pages of classified information provided to it by Chelsea Manning, an Army private who at the time was known as Bradley Manning. According to a tape uncovered by CNN, Trump told Fox News that "I think it's disgraceful, I think there should be like death penalty or something" when asked by host Brian Kilmeade about WikiLeaks.

Instead of accepting the assessment of the intelligence community, Trump has argued that it would be nearly impossible to identify the true culprit responsible for the cyberattacks and said recently that he possessed information that others did not regarding the cyberattacks, although he did not elaborate on what that might be. He and his team have argued that the assessment of the CIA and the FBI that Russia acted in order to aid Trump’s candidacy and install him as president represents little more than an effort to delegitimize the incoming administration.

The president-elect is scheduled to receive a briefing on Friday from the nation’s top intelligence officials outlining the government’s evidence blaming Russia for the cyberattacks. Trump had previously said that the briefing was scheduled for earlier in the week and wrote on Twitter that “The ‘Intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”

A U.S. official disputed Trump’s claim, telling POLITICO that the president-elect’s briefing was always scheduled for Friday.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who ran against Trump as Democrat Hillary Clinton's vice presidential pick, said Thursday that he was “shocked” that the president-elect might cite Assange as he did on Twitter on Wednesday. While the FBI and CIA are the only two intelligence agencies whose assessments regarding Russia’s motives have been made public, Kaine, a member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, told CNN’s “New Day” that it was the “unanimous conclusion” of the intelligence professionals who had briefed him that Russia had indeed sought to aid Trump’s campaign.

“I note that he doesn't go to his intelligence briefings most days. I do go to my intelligence briefings, and I know what the evidence is. If he went to his intelligence briefings, maybe he’d have a different conclusion about this,” Kaine said in his first national TV interview since the presidential election. “There's something very unusual, indeed even sort of suspicious, about the degree to which he casually kicks aside the intelligence community when he won’t even go to the briefings and again and again takes the Assange-Vladimir Putin line on this important question.”