On Sunday, White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci shot down the idea Russians hacked the U.S. election with an argument that was passed to President Donald Trump directly from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
During an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday, Scaramucci initially tried to attribute the theory to an anonymous source before revealing that it had actually come from the president.
“Somebody said to me the other day — I don’t want to say who — if the Russian actually hacked this situation and spilled out those emails, you would have never seen it. You would have never had any evidence of them. Meaning that they’re super confident in their deception skills and hacking," Scaramucci said, adding, "How about it’s the president? He called me from Air Force One and basically said to me, ‘This is — maybe they did it, maybe they didn’t do it.'"
In a report later on Sunday, The New York Times explained the origin of the Russian hacker theory.
But when Mr. Trump met Mr. Putin in Hamburg, Germany, two weeks ago, he did not utter similar suspicions, at least in public. In fact, he emerged to tell his aides that the Russian president had offered a compelling rejoinder: Moscow’s cyberoperators are so good at covert computer-network operations that if they had dipped into the Democratic National Committee’s systems, they would not have been caught.
