Republican Sen. James Lankford said he will “wait and see” what President-elect Donald Trump knows about the Russian hacking in the United States.
Trump stands apart from the US intelligence community over whether Russia was behind the hacking aimed at meddling with the US election.
“It could be somebody else. And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation,” he told reporters on New Year’s Eve. Asked to describe what undisclosed information he knew, Trump said: “You’ll find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.”
Lankford, who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee told CNN’s Erin Burnett on “OutFront” on Monday: “He can come out on Tuesday and Wednesday and get a chance to present that out but at this point I want to just wait and see what that is.”
Lankford added that he has doesn’t have “any doubt” that Russia is responsible for the hacking.
“The Russians have been engaged in hacking for elections … all over Europe, all over Asia, all over their neighbors,” he said. “I don’t have any doubt that it is from Russia,” he said. “This meets the mode that they do all over the world and all over the region already.”
On Monday, former CIA Director James Woolsey, an adviser to Trump on national security issues, told CNN’s Jim Sciutto that determining who was behind the hacks is difficult, but that he believes the Russians — and possibly others — were involved.
“I think the Russians were in there, but it doesn’t mean other people weren’t, too,” Woolsey said. “It’s often not foolproof to say who it is because it is possible and sometimes easy to hide your tracks. There’s lots of tricks.”
