the white house is refusing to deny vladimir putin s claim that president trump appeared to accept his word that russia did not medal in last year s election. putin made the claim earlier today while talking to the press. later on air force one, white house officials were asked three separate times about putin s remarks. each time they declined to answer. joining me to discuss, republican congressman francis rooney of florida. thanks for being with us. thanks for having me. you served on the foreign affairs committee. are you concerned that white house officials won t come out and say putin is lying? no, i m really not. i think we need to put this into perspective. it appears that russia tried to conduct espionage but weren t successful and until we hear some kind of facts other than cyberattacking the dnc successfully, i think we need to keep perspective on some this
president publicly question the intel community s unanimous conclusion that russia hacked our election on the world stage and then expect to have credibility when he confronts putin about it 24 hours later? well, i guess the other way you could look at this is you can say they tried to penetrate some security barriers and were unsuccessful. so in some ways that is a vehicle tear fictory for us. they were unsuccessful in throwing the election or at least changing any votes. we have heard from the intelligence officials that that did not happen. but at the same time, intelligence officials said that they did successfully hack. but we haven t heard any results that they accomplished out of it. they didn t change any votes. they actually exposed their hand. i ve said before to cnn that i think that they were more interested in making sure that the world knew they could too it than they were in trying to influence the election.
some of the obvious stuff. it s to build relation are ships with business leaders, people who can provide them information. we re told there is a lot of concern that a lot of them are trying to get access to people who may be able to obtain classified information, people who work in the government or some contractors or other maybe energy companies who have access to really sensitive information that they can somehow gain knowledge about or work with people, build relationships to get some information that they can then report back to russia. there is also a concern within education institutions and financial institutions. all right. interesting stuff. thank you very much. coming up, president trump praises china for its help with north korea days after slamming beijing for not helping enough. so which is it in and will we see more cooperation? we ll discussion.
year. that is just false. and in fact so false that nikki haley went on cnn earlier today and said everyone knows russia meddled in u.s. elections. so we clearly need to get the president on the same page. that s correct she will be on state of the yun oig tomorrow and there w state of the union tomorrow and we played a portion of her interview.k you about other takeaways. they say that they are looking forward to working together on important issues like syria. can a positive working russia b good thing? yes. i don t have an objection with having the u.s. improve relations with other countries including russia. my objection is that the white houses and president seems to not have taken the russia interference in u.s. elections last year seriously. that was a really big deal. we don t want that to happen again. but on other issues, we absolutely need russia to cooperate with the u.s. more in
president putin an president trump over this question. so let me read you what the state department spokeswoman jen psaki had to say. quote, you don t get a lot of shots at pressure in ploes and after you ve let youred adversa off the hook, you certainly don t get to apply that pressure again. stars the russians are concerned, the public case is closed. you know the russians and how they rate. do you think putin feels like he is off the hook? i can t tell you that. that is off obviously a personal conjecture on anybody s part. what i can tell you is that sergey lavrov yesterday when he said in fact that president trump had let putin off the hook was clearly exploiting an opening that had taken place in the meeting. he s not a foolish man and he s not he may be given to exannual race, bexan exannual raexaggeration, but no