The White House escalated its post-election criticism of Donald Trump Thursday, insisting it was plainly obvious to the Republican’s team that Russia was meddling in the US election to bolster their chances of victory.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest dismissed the President-elect’s response as unserious, and encouraged Trump to answer questions about the hacking instead of questioning US intelligence.
“It’s just a fact — you all have it on tape — that the Republican nominee for president was encouraging Russia to hack his opponent because he believed that that would help his campaign,” Earnest said, calling it a “basic fact” of the presidential contest.
He was referencing a remark Trump made over the summer, when he encouraged Moscow to locate emails missing from Hillary Clinton’s private server. At the time, Trump’s aides insisted he was joking, but Earnest declared those excuses unacceptable.
“I don’t think anybody at the White House thinks it’s funny that an adversary of the United States engaged in malicious cyberactivity to destabilize our democracy,” Earnest said. “That’s not a joke. Nobody at the White House thought it was a joke. Nobody in the intelligence community thought it was a joke.”
It was the second day Earnest issued sharp criticism of Trump over the hacking issue, which has prompted fierce debate over the White House’s actions in the months leading up to the election.
Defending the administration against accusations it acted slowly to identify Russia as the culprit and boosting Trump as their motive, Earnest has argued that Moscow’s intentions were clear, including to the Republican nominee.
“I don’t know if it was a staff meeting or if he had access to a briefing or he was just basing his assessment on a large number of published reports, but Mr. Trump obviously knew that Russia was engaged in malicious cyberactivity that was helping him and hurting Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Earnest said.
He even pointed to a tweet from Roger Stone, a Trump ally, saying “of course” Russia hacked Clinton’s campaign.
Trump’s team has disapproved of Earnest’s remarks.
“That is disappointing to hear from the podium of the White House press secretary,” Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, said on Fox News Thursday. “He essentially stated that the President-elect had knowledge of this. Maybe even fanned the flames. It’s incredibly irresponsible and I wonder if his boss, President Obama, agrees.”
Earnest said Trump’s team should answer questions about the matter instead of falling back on the defense that Trump was joking.
“One way to deal with that is to start answering these questions and not relying on a defense suggesting that the rhetoric of the Republican nominee was a joke when nobody thought it was funny and there was plenty of evidence to indicate that he knew what he was talking about,” Earnest said.
“It might be time to not attack the intelligence community but to actually be supportive of a thorough, transparent, rigorous, nonpolitical investigation into what exactly happened,” Earnest said.
Jim McGrath, a close aide to the Bush family, tweeted that the press secretary in the final days of George W. Bush’s presidency was not so critical of the then-President-elect.
“Remember when @DanaPerino trashed Barack Obama from WH podium after George W. Bush pledged full cooperation w the transition? Me neither,” he tweeted.