Anthony Scaramucci quotes anonymous source on Russian hacking, then admits Trump was the source
President Trump reportedly thinks Russia wasn't behind 2016 election hacking because if they did, he thinks they wouldn't have gotten caught.
President Donald Trump's new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, told CNN host Jake Tapper Sunday that Trump
is not convinced that the Russians hacked into the Democratic National Committee last year because if they did, they wouldn't have gotten caught.
"Somebody said to me yesterday that if the Russians actually hacked this situation, and spilled out those emails, you would've never seen it, you would've never had any evidence of that," Scaramucci said in an interview on "State of the Union."
"They're super confident in their deception skills and hacking."
Scaramucci then revealed that the theory came from Trump, who Scaramucci said called him from Air Force One on Saturday and "basically said to me, 'Hey, you know, maybe they did do it, maybe they didn't do it.'"
Many cybersecurity and Russia experts share the view that the Russian hacking and disinformation campaign throughout the election was highly conspicuous.
Digital footprints were left on the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta hacks, which were sloppy and easy to link back to the Kremlin, as state-sponsored Russian news agencies like Russia Today and Sputnik openly backed Donald Trump.
American eavesdroppers, meanwhile, reportedly intercepted calls between foreign nationals and Russian officials discussing the presidential campaign — and between Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak discussing sanctions — a similarly sloppy move, given the open secret that intelligence agencies routinely spy on one another.
Automated Twitter accounts — many of them linked to Russia and
aided by professional trolls being paid by the Kremlin — flooded Twitter with pro-Trump rhetoric and made-up news throughout the campaign and especially in the days leading up to the election.
The bots
favored Trump by five to one, according to Sam Woolley of the Oxford
Internet Institute's computational propaganda research team.