On Dec. 9, President Obama ordered a CIA review of Russian hacks that took place during the 2016 presidential election, and Donald Trump had something to say on the matter.
After further review, the CIA reported that they had “high confidence” that Russian interferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election were implemented to increase the chances of a Trump presidency. This is a big deal because before, people thought Russia could have just been hacking in order to make U.S. elections seem untrustworthy—not to help a specific candidate. Russia is accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee emails and the emails of other political figureheads, which were then published on Wikileaks.
Instead of directly addressing the CIA reports, the Trump transition team released a statement in efforts to encourage the country to “move on” from the election results:
“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” the statement read. “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.'” NPR points out that Trump’s victory was not one of the biggest Electoral College victories of all time. In fact, it was pretty average.
Once the statement was released, Trump took to Twitter to give an unfiltered perspective on the claims:
Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card. It would be called conspiracy theory!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2016
While the validity of whether the Russian hacks were to increase the chances of Trump winning the presidency continues to be investigated, this is one of the largest hacking scandals of United States elections in U.S. history, and the budding relationship between Trump and Vladimir Putin will certainly continue to receive a lot of scrutiny leading up to the inauguration on Jan. 20.