Clapper: Trump Saying We Don’t Know Who Messed With Election Helps Russia

Casting doubt on the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the presidential election, as President Donald Trump frequently does, “helps the Russians,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified Monday.

“Does it serve any purpose for high officials like the President to say, well it could have been somebody else?” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) asked Clapper during a highly-anticipated Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing.

“You could rationalize that it helps the Russians by obfuscating who was actually responsible,” Clapper replied, describing the evidence that Russia was behind cyberhacking and propaganda efforts that influenced the 2016 race as “overwhelming.”

Throughout the campaign and as recently as last week, Trump has said that it was impossible to determine who was behind the effort to hack Democratic organizations’ and operatives’ emails.

“If you don’t catch a hacker, okay, in the act, it’s very hard to say who did the hacking,” the president said in a May 1 interview with CBS “Face the Nation.” “Could have been China, could have been a lot of different groups.”

Trump also suggested during a September presidential debate with Hillary Clinton that “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds” could have been responsible. Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), the chairman of the subcommittee holding Monday’s hearing, skewered that line in his opening statement.

“It was the Russians who hacked Podesta’s e-mails, it was the Russians who broke into the Democratic National Committee, and it was the Russians who helped empower Wikileaks,” Graham said, referring to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager. “From my point of view, there’s no doubt in my mind it was the Russians involved in all the things I just described, not some 400-pound guy sitting on a bed or any other country.”