Presidential Transition Trump battles for legitimacy A leaked CIA report backs the president-elect into a corner as Democrats pounce.

Donald Trump thinks they’re out to get him.

The president-elect is mounting a furious public defense of his legitimacy, charging that his political adversaries are trying to undermine him before he even takes office -- and they’re using bogus intel to do it.


Pushing back on the CIA’s leaked conclusion that Russian intelligence services had meddled in the Nov. 8 election expressly to help him win, he’s still questioning whether Russia even hacked Democrats’ email accounts at all, denying the consensus among intelligence agencies without evidence. His aides bristle when anyone points out that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.7 million. And they dismiss the rearguard calls for recounts and Electoral College revolts as the work of sore losers who still can’t accept his upset victory.

“Imagine,” Trump asked his 16 million Twitter followers on Monday morning, “if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card. It would be called conspiracy theory!”

The leaks, spokesman Jason Miller told reporters on the transition team’s daily conference call, are nothing more than “an attempt to delegitimize President-elect Trump’s win.”

The president-elect’s skepticism comes amid a fresh wave of concern over Russian cyberattacks targeting the American election system. The intelligence community officially blamed Russia in October for hacking attacks against prominent U.S. political institutions and individuals, a conclusion supported by copious documentation from independent cybersecurity analysts and the full consensus of 17 American intelligence agencies. Remarkably, Trump still refuses to accept that Russian hackers were behind the attacks, though he has offered no evidence to the contrary and in fact has declined to sit for many of the daily intelligence briefings to which the president-elect is entitled.

Concerns over Russian interference were reopened last week when the White House announced it was conducting a review of the evidence -- a surprise move that was quickly followed by a drumbeat of stories revealing the intelligence community’s fierce backstage debate over the Kremlin’s motive. In a nutshell: Was it just to create chaos, or did Russia actually hope to elect Trump?

The CIA’s view, according to a bombshell report in the Washington Post, was Russia’s aim was clearly to put Trump in the Oval Office. In its own report, the New York Times said U.S. intelligence agencies have “high confidence” in their conclusion that Russia sought specifically to boost Trump. (Subsequent reports have made clear that the FBI dissented -- sticking with the earlier consensus view that Russia did meddle, but perhaps only to sow mistrust in the U.S. electoral system.)

The Trump team’s statement blasting the CIA, sent to reporters late Friday, made the legitimacy connection explicit, and again did not offer evidence to support the president-elect's skepticism: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”

Trump kept trashing the agency’s allegedly “ridiculous" finding in an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” telling host Chris Wallace: “I don’t believe it.” Such reports were the work of “very embarrassed” Democrats still upset over Clinton’s loss in the presidential election, he said.

Both in his Fox interview and again on Twitter Monday morning, Trump cast doubt on the idea that it would even be possible to determine a culprit for the cyberattacks without catching the hackers in the act. He made those claims again in the face of the evidence that more than a dozen intelligence agencies have collected to assert that Russia is the culprit.

The leaders of Trump’s own party, meanwhile, are not denying Russia's involvement. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) issued a joint statement Sunday calling for a bipartisan investigation into Russia’s hacking efforts, a proposal that earned the endorsement of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) at his Monday morning press conference.

“The Russians are not our friends,” McConnell told reporters inside the Capitol, stressing that foreign interference in U.S. elections “simply cannot be a partisan issue.” Schumer, too, said the investigation must be carried out in a “fair, nonpartisan, non-finger-pointing way.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan was critical of Russia in a statement released Monday afternoon but stressed, “we should not cast doubt on the clear and decisive outcome of this election.”

“We must condemn and push back forcefully against any state-sponsored cyberattacks on our Democratic process,” Ryan said in his statement. “Any foreign intervention in our elections system is entirely unacceptable. And any intervention by Russia is especially problematic because, under President Putin, Russia has been an aggressor that consistently undermines American interests.”

But Ryan also joined with Trump in positing that the leak of the CIA’s assessment is politically motivated. "[E]xploiting the work of our intelligence community for partisan purposes," he said, "does a grave disservice to those professionals and potentially jeopardizes our national security."

But emotions are raw. On Monday, the Democratic blasted out an email with the subject line, “The Tainted Election.” The email quoted a column by New York Times’ liberal bomb-thrower Paul Krugman that called Trump “the Siberian candidate, installed with the help of and remarkably deferential to a hostile foreign power.”

Feeding into the anti-Russia frenzy: Reports over the weekend that Trump’s likely pick to lead the State Department is Rex Tillerson, the ExxonMobil CEO whose corporate bio proudly lists the Order of Friendship bestowed on him personally by the Kremlin’s own Vladimir Putin in 2013.

Then on Monday, Clinton’s rump campaign operation backed an extraordinary effort by members of the Electoral College to request an intelligence briefing on foreign intervention in the presidential election.

“The bipartisan electors' letter raises very grave issues involving our national security,” top Clinton adviser John Podesta said in a statement Monday. “Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed.”

“Each day that month, our campaign decried the interference of Russia in our campaign and its evident goal of hurting our campaign to aid Donald Trump,” Podesta said. “Despite our protestations, this matter did not receive the attention it deserved by the media in the campaign. We now know that the CIA has determined Russia's interference in our elections was for the purpose of electing Donald Trump. This should distress every American.”

To the shock of some lawmakers in both parties, Trump spoke warmly of Putin during the campaign, calling the autocratic Russian president a “strong leader” and arguing in favor of improving relations with Moscow. At his last formal press conference, held in July, Trump suggested he would consider officially recognizing Crimea as part of Russia, something the U.S. and most other nations have refused to do since the Russian government annexed the region away from Ukraine in 2014.

Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Trump’s transition team and the Manhattan billionaire’s campaign manager, defended her boss’s argument in a series of appearances on Monday morning TV news programs. She told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that Trump “respects the intelligence community” and asserted that he only takes issue with “the specific conclusion that what Russia did led to his victory and Hillary Clinton's defeat,” despite the fact that he also continues to deny that Russia is behind the hacks at all.

The CIA’s assessment that Russia intended to help Trump’s campaign by hurting Clinton’s is just the latest in a string of scapegoats Democrats have blamed for Clinton’s loss, Conway contended. “Vladimir Putin didn't tell Hillary Clinton to ignore Wisconsin and Michigan,” she said on “CBS This Morning.”

On Twitter, too, she played up skepticism of the CIA report, sharing a link to a Newsweek story channeling intelligence veterans who doubt the agency’s assessment. “FBI: ‘fuzzy’, ‘ambiguous’ connection. Did Putin's Russia really try and get Trump elected? CIA veterans urge caution,” she tweeted . (Conway’s Twitter bio says simply, “We won.”)

Other Trump allies followed her lead. Anthony Scaramucci, part of the Trump transition team’s executive committee, called the CIA’s conclusion “a little bit inconclusive” and “a little bit murky” and questioned the leaks' timing.

“One of the things that we're not upset about, but one of the things we're calling into question is: Why is this coming out right now? Is it a White House staffer that's leaking it?” Scaramucci told CNN’s “New Day” Monday morning. “It seems very odd to us that someone inside the CIA, which is the most prominent secret intelligence agency in the United States, would have somebody in there leaking it.”

Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee's communications director and a member of Trump's transition team, made a similar argument, voicing skepticism of reports on the CIA's conclusions while insisting that he is not questioning the wisdom of the agency itself.

"I do think that we've had some concerns about the integrity of the intelligence reporting by sources," Spicer said on MSNBC. "I'm not questioning the CIA; I'm not questioning any other three-letter agency. What I'm questioning is some of the sources that you guys are using."