President-elect Donald Trump has tried to dismiss the bombshell report about Russia’s attempts to help him win the election by dismissing the American intelligence community as useless. But a real national security expert told Fox News this Saturday that the evidence is so clear, “You don’t need the CIA” to tell you.

Eli Lake is a columnist for Bloomberg. His bio says he was “the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.” In other words, he’s no liberal Obama apologist.

Lake was asked by Fox News host Leland Vittert about Trump’s response to yesterday’s report in the Washington Post that Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential election was designed to help Trump win and that Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell threatened to smear Obama if he let the news out during the campaign. Frankly, the Trump transition team's statement was just about as shocking as the Post's report:

“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,’ ” the statement read.

By the way, Trump did not win one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. The fact that his team lied in order to shore up his credibility vs. the CIA is does not help his case.

Regardless, Lake smacked down Trump’s attack on the CIA by saying, essentially, that the news is a no-brainer no matter what you think of the CIA.

LAKE: You don’t need the CIA to do this. There’s a lot of people who are just cyber security who know this very well, who’ve been saying this now for months. I don’t think it’s a controversial issue at this point. It shouldn’t be.

It’s worth noting that Lake made a point of saying he didn’t think Trump won because of the hacking.

Host Leland Vittert pointed out that Trump’s reported pick for secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, has strong ties to Russia.

“One of the people he’s closest with in the world … is Vladimir Putin,” Vittert said.

By the way, this raises another question in addition to what did Trump know about the Russian hacking and when did he know it. If Trump doesn’t want to rely on our intelligence community, whose intelligence will he rely on?

Democrats better be ready to deal with this and deal with it courageously and effectively.

Meanwhile, watch this effective push back to any efforts to delegitimize the CIA’s findings above, from the December 10, 2016 America’s News HQ.

Crossposted at News Hounds.

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