Calif. Rep. Schiff calls on Trump to talk plainly about hacking intel
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, is calling on Donald Trump to say plainly whether or not he accepts the conclusions of the intelligence community about Russian hacking and the U.S. election.
He told CBSN’s “Red & Blue” that he was not satisfied with incoming Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus’ contention that the president-elect does accept their findings.
“The president-elect is not the least bit shy about expressing his views on Twitter or elsewhere,” Schiff told “Red & Blue” anchor Elaine Quijano. “If the president really does accept the conclusions the intelligence community has reached, he ought to say so, and he ought to say so in very plain terms because we need to be able to work with him to fashion a response. And thus far it’s been a lot of deflection and denial but not much acceptance of the reality.”
Schiff believes that Mr. Trump should “make it clear to the Kremlin we won’t stand for any more Russian interference in our elections and we’re going to push back tooth and nail” over what they did to our elections -- and make sure there’s not a repeat performance in our allies’ upcoming elections, among them, France and Germany.
The president suggested in an interview with ABC News’ “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday that while he did not underestimate Russian President Vladimir Putin, he did underestimate “the degree to which, in this new information age, it is possible for misinformation for cyber hacking and so forth to have an impact on our open societies, our open systems, to insinuate themselves into our democratic practices in ways that I think are accelerating.”
Schiff agreed with that assessment and said that the outcome was that “too few of the American people understood the seriousness of what the Russians were doing and how it was impacting our democracy.”
“Red and Blue” airs Mondays through Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on CBSN.