Trump averts attention from Russia over 2016 alleged hacking
US President Donald Trump questions claims that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, saying China or other countries could be behind hacking in the run-up to the vote.
Inside the United States, Moscow has been accused of resorting to hacking to intervene in the November 2016 presidential election, which yielded President Trump.
"Knowing something about hacking, if you don't catch a hacker, okay, in the act, it's very hard to say who did the hacking," Trump told CBS in an interview broadcast Sunday. "With that being said, I'll go along with Russia. Could've been China, could've been a lot of different groups."
In a declassified report released in January, the intelligence community concluded that Russia helped with the New York billionaire’s campaign effort ahead of winning the White House, an allegation dismissed both by Moscow and Trump.
The allegations triggered three investigations, one by the US House, another by the Senate, and a third one by the FBI.
"The concept of Russia with respect to us is a total phony story," said the president. "Of course, it's a total phony story."
Trump also talked about John Podesta, the campaign chairman of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Emails from the Clinton campaign, including Podesta’s, were regularly released in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election to expose the inner workings of the Democratic Party.
"Nobody ever talks about that. But I don't know--because the FBI was not allowed by Podesta to go in and check all of the records on their servers and everything else that you would normally have to check," said the president.
Ahead of the November 8 election, Clinton repeatedly accused the Russians of undermining her campaign through hacking of emails, a move Trump urged them to continue.
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