Washington: Wikileaks has offered to help US President Barack Obama authenticate CIA’s assessment that Russia was behind the leak of hacked Democratic emails during the presidential election. The CIA had claimed that Russia had interfered in the US elections, in part to help Donald Trump win the White House.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had previously claimed in an interview that Moscow was not the source of the leaked emails.
The whistleblowing website this week tweeted: “Obama should submit any Putin documents to WikiLeaks to be authenticated to our standards if he wants them to be seen as credible.”
Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s top aides on Monday said the president-elect isn’t ready to accept the finding by intelligence officials that Moscow hacked Democratic emails in a bid to elevate Mr Trump. Even if it’s true, they said, Mr Trump still won the White House fair and square.
The pushback comes as members of the Electoral College vote to formally appoint Mr Trump as the 45th president.
While Democrats likely are powerless to stop it, they suggested Mr Trump’s victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton would forever be tainted by Russian meddling. “This whole thing is a spin job,” said Mr Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus. “And I think what the Democrats ought to do is look in the mirror and face the reality that they lost the election.”
Mr Trump tweeted: “If my many supporters acted and threatened people like those who lost the election are doing, they would be scorned & called terrible names!”
