Kellyanne Conway asserted that whether President Trump believes Ukraine or Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016 is not an important issue for voters.
Conway, who works in the White House as a counselor to the president, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday to discuss Trump’s relationship with Ukraine and defended the president against Democrat allegations that he abused his office for political gain.
Guest host Dana Bash asked Conway about Trump’s relationship with his administration’s intelligence agencies. The U.S. intelligence community has accused Russia of attempting to interfere in U.S. elections. Ex-special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election found that Russian military intelligence had hacked the DNC’s email system and provided those emails to Wikileaks to release.
However, Trump appeared to doubt the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies and Mueller’s team of investigators in a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump asked Zelensky to investigate whether a server containing DNC emails is located in Ukraine and repeated the debunked suggestion that Ukraine may have been involved in the operation to influence U.S. elections.
“Who cares?” Conway told Bash. “We know what the president believes. He’s tweeted it many times. He said it could be Russia, could be Ukraine, could be some guy in New Jersey.”
Bash pushed back against Conway based on newly released memos that show Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort blamed Ukraine for hacking the DNC’s email servers. Bash pointed out that Trump has shown some support for the conspiracy in his statements on election interference.
“What [Trump] is talking about is interference overall. In other words, we don’t want anyone to interfere in these elections. We don’t want Russia, Ukraine, the media to put their thumbs on scale, or Adam Schiff, these people working in secret. Let the people decide who their president is,” Conway said.
