Tapper Grills Conway: If WikiLeaks Didn’t Influence the Election, Why Did Trump Invoke Them So Much?
CNN’s Jake Tapper had Kellyanne Conway on State of the Union, where he asked the Donald Trump adviser about the President-elect’s response to the intelligence that Russia meddled with the 2016 election
Tapper started things off by asking Trump’s former campaign manager about whether the mogul will admit that Russia launched an active campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton during the election. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper voiced his suspicions of Russia last week, though Conway argued that Clapper said at the time that “any attempt, any aspiration to influence our elections failed.”
Tapper pointed out that there was a difference between penetrating voter machines and hacking political networks in order to influence the thinking that drove the election. Tapper also noted how frequently Trump cited the leaked emails obtained by WikiLeaks when he was making his case against Clinton in the election’s final months.
“How can you say that the hacking had no impact on the election,” Tapper asked, “when Mr. Trump kept invoking WikiLeaks which was printing, publishing things that the Russians had hacked?”
Conway argued Trump’s team didn’t need WikiLeaks to release the results of the “alleged attacks” on the Democratic National Committee in order to win. Tapper kept pressing Conway about how often the Trump campaign invoked WikiLeaks’ information, and eventually, Conway suggested that Americans should actually be infuriated that NBC received confirmation about the contents of Trump’s intelligence briefing before the president-elect sat down for it on Friday.
Trump suggested last week that Congress ought to investigate NBC over how they became privy to information from the intelligence community.
Watch above, via CNN.
[Image via screengrab]
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