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(Reuters) – US President Donald Trump, in his first remarks about a widespread data breach across the US government, downplayed the cyber-espionage campaign on Saturday and questioned whether Russia was to blame, as his own alleges chief diplomat.
“The Cyber Hack is much bigger in the fake news media than in reality,” Trump said on Twitter on Saturday. “Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority song when something happens because Lamestream is, mainly for financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it could be China (it could be!)”.
Trump’s claim that China may be behind the hacking wave, which has so far affected more than half a dozen federal agencies, including the Departments of Commerce and the Treasury, contradicts comments from his own secretary of state and several legislators informed about the matter.
“We can say quite clearly that it was the Russians who participated in this activity,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in an interview on Friday. Republican lawmaker Mitt Romney said in a tweet Thursday that the attack was “as if Russian bombers had repeatedly been flying undetected over our entire country.”
A State Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
“At this time, the NSC is focused on investigating the circumstances surrounding this incident and working with our interagency partners to mitigate the situation. There will be an appropriate response to the actors behind this conduct, “National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot said in an email.
In addition to the confusion sown by Trump’s tweets, an administration source said White House officials drafted and were ready to release a statement Friday that Russia was behind the massive cyber intrusion.
But those officials were later ordered not to release the statement, the source said on condition of anonymity, without elaborating on who gave the order or why.
Adam Schiff, Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a tweet in reaction to Trump’s comments: “Another day, another outrageous betrayal of our national security by this president. Another dishonest tweet that looks like it could have been written in the Kremlin. “
The Kremlin has denied any involvement.
In his tweet, Trump tagged Pompeo and National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, has yet to publicly comment on who is behind the massive data breach, which exploited software developed by network management company SolarWinds that is widely used in the public and private sectors.
An ODNI spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Daniel Hoffman, a former head of the CIA Moscow station, said the Trump administration needed to quickly explain why Pompeo blamed Russia, while the president questioned that assessment.
He noted that Pompeo served as CIA director before becoming America’s top diplomat, and has “an extremely sophisticated understanding of national security. How is it that you attributed the attack to Russia and the president did not? “
Hoffman said that “based on everything we know,” the attack was led by Russia’s external intelligence service, known as SVR, using APT29, the Russian hacking group known as “Cozy Bear.”
“We don’t want to speculate that it is someone else. We have to be clear when attributing because when you act in response, you must be right, ”Hoffman said.
(Reporting by Christopher Bing; additional reporting by Steve Holland. Edited by Daniel Wallis, Diane Craft, Andrea Ricci and Cynthia Osterman)
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