Donald Trump said on Sunday that a CIA conclusion that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election was “ridiculous”, and that he did not believe that the Kremlin had tried to bolster his candidacy.



The president-elect said the CIA’s assessment was “just another excuse” for his stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton last month.



“I don’t believe it,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News Sunday. “Every week it’s another excuse.”



Two days earlier, the Washington Post reported that in a secret assessment, the CIA had concluded the Russian government sought to influence the election by hacking into Democratic party emails.

During the campaign, the intelligence community accused Russia-backed actors of hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.

Thousands of the emails, which intelligence officials said were provided by individuals with ties to the Russian government, were published by WikiLeaks. At the time officials said Russia hoped to undermine confidence in the election, but did not explicitly say the Kremlin favored Trump, as the CIA later concluded.

This week, Barack Obama ordered what the White House called a “full review” of Russia’s role in the hacks and cyber-attacks by Chinese hackers in the 2008 and 2012 campaign cycles.

Trump refused to believe the CIA’s findings, saying on Sunday: “Nobody really knows, and hacking is very interesting.

“Once they hack, if you don’t catch them in the act you’re not going to catch them. They have no idea if it’s Russia or China or somebody. It could be somebody sitting in a bed some place.”

On Sunday John Bolton, a former ambassador to the UN said any foreign government trying to influence an American election should face “very grave consequences” but questioned whether the hacking of DNC and the RNC computers was “a false flag operation”.

Asked by Fox News’s Eric Shawn whether he was accusing someone in the administration or intelligence community of trying to throw something, he replied: “We just don’t know. But I believe that intelligence has been politicized in the Obama administration to a very significant degree.”

On Saturday, Trump’s transition team issued a statement that invoked the faulty intelligence used to justify the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” the statement read.

The split was reflective of a growing rift between the CIA and Trump, who has declined daily intelligence briefings. The president-elect, who receives intelligence briefings just once a week claimed on Sunday he could skip the briefings because: “I’m, like, a smart person.”

“I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day,” he added.

Senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said the CIA’s findings about the election were “unfounded” and undercut the peaceful transition of power. In an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, she said Democrats were refusing to accept responsibility for their loss.

“They did a recount,” she said, alluding to a campaign funded by the Green party. “They’re vilifying [FBI director] Jim Comey. It’s everybody’s false but Hillary Clinton’s.”

But a bipartisan group of senators, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two of the most outspoken Republicans on foreign policy, echoed the concerns of the intelligence community.

“This cannot become a partisan issue,” the senators said in a statement. “The stakes are too high for our country.”

McCain later told CBS: “It’s clear the Russians interfered. Whether they intended to interfere to the degree that they were trying to elect a certain candidate, I think that’s a subject of investigation.

“But facts are stubborn things. They did hack into this campaign.”

McCain said he hoped to create a select committee to investigate the interference. He also expressed doubts over Trump’s reported decision to nominate Exxon Mobil’s CEO, Rex Tillerson, as his secretary of state.

“It’s a matter of concern to me that he has such a close personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. And obviously they’ve done enormous deals together,” McCain said, referring to a 2011 deal to access Arctic oil, potentially worth $300bn.

“That … would color his approach to Vladimir Putin and the Russian threat.”

McCain nonetheless said Trump’s appointees would be given a fair hearing in the Senate, where they must first clear relevant committees before receiving a vote in the broader chamber.

On Sunday, Trump said he had not made a final decision on Tillerson, tweeting: “Whether I choose him or not for ‘State’ – Rex Tillerson, the chairman & CEO of ExxonMobil, is a world class player and dealmaker. Stay tuned!”

Tillerson has engineered deals around the world and is close to Igor Sechin, the head of Russia’s state-owned oil giant Rosneft. In 2013, Tillerson was given the Order of Friendship award. In 2014, he called for the US to lift economic sanctions on Russia and leaders such as Sechin.

Vladimir Putin and Rex Tillerson during a signing ceremony for an arctic oil exploration deal between Exxon Mobil and Rosneft in 2011. Photograph: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

Reports of the possible nomination of Tillerson stirred criticism even among some Republicans, including two members of the Senate foreign relations committee, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul.

“Being a ‘friend of Vladimir’ is not an attribute I am hoping for from a #SecretaryOfState,” Rubio said on Twitter. Paul said he was concerned should reports be confirmed that Trump plans to nominate former UN ambassador John Bolton, a leading supporter of the Iraq invasion, as the undersecretary of state.

Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, insisted that the decision was not yet final.

“It’s amazing to me that immediately everyone’s just jumping the shark on this,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Poking this prematurely is something that just isn’t … helpful. But it’s also not accurate.

“I mean this is a guy who has business relationships in every continent in the entire world.”

Priebus also denied that Trump lacked confidence in US intelligence, saying the president-elect was rejecting unnamed sources in newspaper reports.

But Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said it was clear “what the Russians were after”.

“Plainly they were after discord and in this they were spectacularly successful,” Schiff said on NBC. “But it wasn’t alone to try and sow discord.

“They had a candidate with pro-Putin, pro-Russian views who belittled Nato, who was willing to potentially remove sanctions on Russia and by contrast they had in Secretary Clinton a candidate very tough on Russia.”







