Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani suggested Friday that President-elect Trump should have his own intelligence officials conduct a report on Russia’s hand behind the hacking of Democratic political institutions in the presidential election.
Trump shouldn’t trust the intelligence coming from the Obama administration, Giuliani said on Fox News. He pointed to Obama’s statements in 2012 that Russia isn’t a threat to the United States and that Islamic State is the “JV team” as proof the intelligence he gets isn’t above board.
“The intelligence President Obama has been getting is either politicized or incompetent,” Giuliani said.
Instead of trusting the reports coming from the intelligence community, Trump should wait until he’s in office and then order “his own people do his own intelligence report” and take action based on that, he said.
“I would want my own independent analysis of this and then hit back a lot harder than President Obama hit back,” Giuliani said.
The top Trump surrogate said Obama has been derelict in his duty by waiting so long to take action toward Russia regarding the hacking.
He said the U.S. government has known for 18 months that Russia was attempting to hack top government and political officials and done nothing. The sanctions and expulsions of 35 Russian intelligence officials from the country on Thursday were not enough, he said.
“If the Democrats want to be angry about the hacking here, they should be angry about President Obama doing nothing,” Giuliani said.
He added that Obama’s actions against Russia in the waning days of his administration and Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech on Israeli-Palestinian relations on Wednesday are boxing Trump into a foreign policy corner.
“Petty little actions like this don’t mean much,” Giuliani said. “It’s almost a mockery to say this is too little too late.”
