you re president. you ve got to do something. show us what you have. you re going to propose legislation. we ll get to debate it. let the public decide. let them vote in congress. let s see what happens. it s going to be much clearer what he s for and against and what we re for and against now that it s going to get down to actually discussing in detail these issues that affect people s lives. whatever he chooses to make of that advice, he s about to get a grown-up briefing from the heads of the cia, fbi, and director of national intelligence. jim acosta has more on that. tweets from to trump tonight, what does he say? despite that admonishment from the vice president, more tweets tonight from donald trump going right after this intelligence that is being released by the intelligence community saying that russia was behind that hacking in the election last november. let s put those tweets on
much discussion about anything is very unusual and dangerous. for donald trump, democrats point to and the intelligence community clearly views as a form of disparagement, he tweets out the word intelligence in quotes, russian hacking in quotes, intelligence community in quotes, does that raise questions to you? he s toeing a fine line. mike rogers said yesterday i don t feel he s disparaged the intelligence community yet but he is walking a very thin line of doing so. and i think he would be wise to take the approach senator tom cotton, a staunch ally of trump, took today. he began his questioning of the intel community by first saying i respect you guys, you guys are heroes, i want you to know that from the outset. then he proceeded to grill them with tough questions not about whether russia did this. i think it s indisputable that they did. but he pressed them on the motive aspect. i think that is the approach the president-elect should take. he should do what tom cotton did tod
think you have to accept that because the 17 branchs in the intelligence community, they re not trying to delegitimize the trump election. democrats are. you have to be able to separate it. can t there be a middle road that you can agree or believe that russia was behind the hacking and it went to the highest levels of the government and that they released information selectively and wanted to influence the election and also believe that donald trump won legitimately and is the legitimate president and that it s not it wasn t a hacking of the voting machines or anything like that, no evidence of that, democrats early on raised all sorts of the specter of that, that did not occur as far as we know, so isn t there a middle ground? i think so but i m not unsympathetic to donald trump s feeling in making that argument. it can be construed to mean he wouldn t have won had it not been for the involvement of the russians, and i think he doesn t want to believe that. he wants to believe
head. and so was donald trump, actually, himself. it s a bit surreal. we re in a situation where we have a president-elect who s on a collision course with his own intelligence community upon which he s going to have to rely to make decisions about our national security. and on a collision course with senior republicans in congress who believe the hacking was real and who want to establish very serious sanctions against russia. lindsey graham said he wants to throw not a pebble at russia as barack obama did, but a rock. donald trump is saying prove it to me. why should i believe it? i believe his problem is that he believes this is all questioning the legitimacy of his presidency. if i were going in there to brief him tomorrow, i would say to those intelligence folks, put
identifications of the go betweens the russians used to provide the stolen e-mails to wikileaks. just to be clear on the congratulatory messages, no smoking gun in any of these messages saying oh, our hacking worked or anything. we re told from our sources while they took on a congratulatory tone, they were happy and celebrating, there s no smoking gun where someone is definitively saying, yes, here s exactly what we did, here s how we did it. we helped donald trump win. and these go-betweens are, in fact, third parties that somehow get information from russia to wikileaks, allegedly? right. you ll recall the wikileaks founder julian assange confirming that the russian government never gave him the never gave wikileaks the stolen documents. but the way russia works in covert operations like this would be to have people do the work for them, not connected to the government. so these are go-between people, also called cutouts.