President-elect Trump suggested Sunday morning he endorses the idea of keeping politics out of intelligence, offering a potential easing of tensions with intelligence agencies.
Amid a burst of tweets on Sunday morning, Trump quoted his counselor Kellyanne Conway saying in a television appearance Sunday that “we certainly don’t want intelligence interfering with politics and we don’t want politics interfering with intelligence.”
Conway’s quip represents the latest statement of the Trump team’s posture toward intelligence agencies that have warned about the likelihood that the Russian government was behind the hacking of Democratic Party emails during the election.
Trump, who received a highly-anticipated briefing from the agencies about the hacks on Friday, has previously criticized those findings, as well as the intelligence community’s track record. A report in the Wall Street Journal indicated Trump will revamp the structure of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence when he takes the presidency, though the Trump camp has denied it.
Those factors have combined to generate unusual tension between Trump and the agencies even before he takes office.
In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Conway asserted that Russia’s attempted interference in the election did not succeed in swaying the outcome. A clip of that appearance was also retweeted by Trump’s account.
Trump, however, appeared not to be satisfied with the show’s treatment of his counselor and former campaign manager.
“Dishonest media cut out 9 of her 10 minutes,” he remarked in another tweet. “Terrible!”
A representative for “Meet the Press” said that Trump’s team had been made aware beforehand that only a soundbite from Conway’s interview would be used in Sunday’s show.
