President-elect Donald Trump said Wednesday that within 90 days, the intelligence community is supposed to present him with a major report on hacking.
Trump said that in order to crack down on cybersecurity attacks on the United States, he has compiled a team of “computer people” to discuss security procedures. Trump didn’t explain any specific policies that he or the team were working on.
“The United States is hacked by everybody,” Trump said. “That includes Russia and China and everybody.”
Trump said in a news conference that he disavows the act of hacking but that the benefits outweigh the costs in the hack during the presidential campaign of the Democratic National Committee.
“Hacking is bad and it shouldn’t be done but look at the things that were learned from the hack,” Trump said.
Trump was referring the the information that was leaked from Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and former presidential Counsel John Podesta.
“The Democratic National Committee was totally open to be hacked,” Trump said.
Trump admitted after weeks of dodging questions that the hack was orchestrated by Russia, but acknowledged that the United States also gets breached by other countries. Trump said that Russia had also tried to hack the Republican National Committee, but had been unable to execute the breach. Trump denied that there was any favoritism from Russian officials toward his campaign, saying that the hackers would’ve released any information if there had been a successful beach of the Trump campaign.
Trump once again said that he wouldn’t be releasing his tax returns, because “you can’t learn anything from a tax return,” despite allegations that Trump has conflicting business deals around the world that would influence his actions as president. However, he told the journalists gathered at Trump Tower, “you should go down to Federal elections and look at the numbers,” which implies that Trump still believes that there was mass voter fraud during the presidential election.
Trump also answered questions about the classified report released Tuesday by Buzzfeed, which summarizes allegations that Russian intelligence had compromising personal and financial information on him, blaming the use of surveillance cameras to monitor him while in Moscow.
“It’s all fake news,” Trump said. “It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen.”
