Trump: Russia May Have Meddled in US Election But Others Might Have Interfered

WASHINGTON — 

President Donald Trump said Thursday that Russia may have meddled in last year's U.S. presidential election to help him win the White House, but said others also might have interfered.

"I think it was Russia and I think it could have been other people and other countries. Could have been a lot of people [who] interfered,” Trump said at a news conference in Warsaw before heading to the G-20 summit of leaders of the world's biggest economies in Hamburg, Germany. "Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows for sure."

Trump's statement is at odds with the more definitive conclusion reached by the U.S. intelligence community that Russia President Vladimir Putin personally directed a campaign to discredit the quadrennial U.S. election and to damage the reputation of Trump's opponent, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The intelligence finding was reached in August, three months before the November election, leading Trump to again question why his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, "did nothing about it."

Trump said, "Why did he do nothing about it? He was told it was Russia by the CIA — as I understand it. It was well reported. And he did nothing about it. They say he choked. Well I don’t think he choked — I think what happened is he thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election and he said let’s not do anything about it. Had he thought the other way — he would have done something about it."

Trump justified his skepticism about the intelligence community's conclusion about the Russian interference in the U.S. election because of its 14-year-old wrong analysis that Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 U.S. invasion toppled him.

"I remember when I was sitting back listening about Iraq — weapons of mass destruction," Trump recalled. "How everyone was 100 percent sure that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Guess what? That led to one big mess. They were wrong. And it led to a mess."

The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russia last year planted fake election-related stories throughout social media outlets in the U.S. and most prominently hacked into the computer files of Clinton's campaign chief, John Podesta.

The file-sharing, anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks subsequently released thousands of Podesta's emails almost every day in the weeks just before the election detailing embarrassing behind-the-scenes efforts by Democratic officials to help Clinton win the party's presidential nomination.

Clinton has said that the release of the emails was one of the reasons she lost the election that national surveys had shown she was about to win.

In a Warsaw speech that followed his news conference, Trump accused Russia of engaging in "destabilizing behavior" in world affairs, a claim Moscow rejected.

Trump is set to meet Putin for the first time Friday on the sidelines of the G-20 summit for face-to-face talks, but it remains uncertain whether the Russian election meddling will be discussed.

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