President-elect Donald Trump's transition team on Sunday doubled down on its claim that Democrats allowed their email accounts to be hacked, dismissing an intelligence report on Russian meddling in the US presidential election.
The comments come two days after the Republican president-elect met the country's leading intelligence agency chiefs, who told him that Russian President Vladimir Putin directed a vast cyberattack and leaking campaign aimed at helping install him in the White House.
Although Trump accepted the possibility that Moscow was involved in hacking US targets including the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the president-elect has held fast to his rejection of the intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the election, and has called the accusations part of a "political witch-hunt" against him.
Trump's senior aide Kellyanne Conway repeated that line on Sunday, telling CNN that "any attempt, any aspiration to influence our elections failed."
"They were not successful in doing that, and it's a very important point," she said of the Russians, blaming Democrats instead for allowing their accounts to be hacked.
"We're talking about this because we had embarrassing leaks from the DNC e-mails," she said.
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