Adm. Michael Rogers, head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, spoke at a Wall Street Journal forum on Tuesday, and much of the focus of his discussion with WSJ Deputy Editor-in-Chief Rebecca Blumenstein was about joining government and business to fight the scourge of cyber crime. The number of hackers is "so large and diverse" that it's difficult to identify the perpetrators, he said, but roughly two-thirds of them are criminals looking to earn money from stealing personal information, and the remaining third are state-sponsored hackers.

But Blumenstein also asked Rogers about WikiLeaks, and the slow and steady leak of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's gmail account. "There shouldn't be any doubts in anybody's mind: This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily," Rogers said. "This was a conscious effort by a nation state to attempt to achieve a specific effect."

The "nation state" in question is almost certainly Russia, which the U.S. intelligence community blames for the political hacking and distribution of internal Democratic emails throughout the campaign, evidently aimed at harming Clinton and by extension helping Donald Trump. James Bell, who used to work for WikiLeaks, notes just how unusual Rogers' statement is:

By the time WikiLeaks started dribbling out the mostly mundane Podesta emails, any mention of Clinton and emails generated unflattering headlines. Russia and WikiLeaks were not responsible for Clinton using a private server as secretary of state, of course, nor did they force FBI Director James Comey to step into the campaign 11 days before Election Day, and again nine days after that. Clinton said the second intervention, where Comey said two days before the vote that there was nothing incriminating in the emails after all, damaged her campaign more than the earlier letter to Congress. Peter Weber

Conan O'Brien is on a mission to inform the American public about what President Obama and President-elect Donald Trump discuss on their phone calls — or at least the imagined phone chats dreamed up by Conan's writing staff and performed by actors. "It's against the law to release private phone calls — I don't care," Conan said on Friday's show. In this second round of creatively re-enacted phone conversations, Trump asked the president about nominating a horse for education secretary, what he should buy to thank Russian President Vladimir Putin for hacking the DNC, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and building a hamster tunnel between Trump Tower and the White House. It's the last conversation, though, that drew gasps from Conan's audience. Watch below. Peter Weber

President-elect Donald Trump's choice for secretary of state, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, was a director of Exxon's Russian subsidiary, Exxon Neftegas, from its founding in 1998 until 2006, The Guardian reported Sunday, citing documents leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The company is one of 67 registered by ExxonMobil in the Bahamas, a country with laws that favor corporate secrecy and a corporate tax rate of zero. Tillerson's name, RW Tillerson, is listed next to other officers from Houston, Moscow, and the far-eastern Russian island of Sakhalin.

Tillerson's role on the Russian-U.S. oil company doesn't break any laws, but it highlights his close ties to Russia's power elite (skewered by SNL), including President Vladimir Putin — who awarded him the Order of Friendship — and especially Igor Sechin, the former KGB agent who heads Russian state oil company Rosneft. Sechin is personally targeted under the sanctions the Obama administration enacted against Russia after it annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in 2014; Tillerson publicly opposed the sanctions, which also hurt ExxonMobil's business partnerships with Russia. "ExxonMobil's use of offshore regimes — while legal — may also jar with Trump's avowal to put 'America first,'" The Guardian speculates.

Tillerson's confirmation rests first of all with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is split 10-9 between Republicans and Democrats, with two of the majority Republicans expressing skepticism about Tillerson's close dealings with Russia — especially when combined with the Kremlin ties or public sympathies of several top members of Trump's campaign and incoming administration, including Trump's pick for national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The newest Trump selection, David Friedman for ambassador to Israel, also wrote a flattering article about Putin a year ago. If confirmed, Tillerson is expected to sell off his $218 million worth of Exxon stock. Peter Weber

On Sunday night, after three hours of negotiations, Russia and Western powers on the United Nations Security Council agreed on a resolution to authorize U.N. monitoring of the evacuation of civilians and opposition fighters from eastern Aleppo. "We expect to vote unanimously for this text tomorrow at 9 a.m.," New York time, said Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. France had proposed the draft resolution on Sunday, but Russia threatened to kill it with a veto — as it has with six other Syria conflict resolution — as written.

"We had intense negotiations," said France's U.N. ambassador, François Delattre, explaining that the vote was delayed until Monday morning to give diplomats time to consult with their unidentified governments. The text of the compromise measure was not released, but the Russians reportedly insisted that the U.N. and international monitors consult with all parties in the conflict before deploying monitoring teams already in the country. "A requirement to consult and coordinate with Syria's government and involved parties — such as Russia, Iran, and Shiite militia groups—leaves open the possibility that any of those parties could deny the monitors access," The Wall Street Journal notes.

Evacuations of eastern Aleppo started on Thursday under the terms of a ceasefire negotiated between Turkey and Russia, then stalled early Friday as one of the evacuating buses came under fire and militias aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad insisted on reciprocal evacuations of two Shiite towns besieged by rebel forces, Foah and Kefraya. Evacuations began again on Sunday but were halted once more when five buses on their way to Foah and Kefraya were torched; some reports blamed the anti-Assad group Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, formerly called the Nusra Front, for the bus attack, but Lebanese militias fighting alongside the Syrian army said the buses caught fire in fighting between to Islamist groups, including Fatah al-Sham.

The moderate Free Syrian Army condemned the bus fires as a "reckless act endangering the lives of nearly 50,000 people" in eastern Aleppo. Late Sunday, five buses from Aleppo were allowed to leave for rebel-held areas after being held for hours in response to the Foah and Keyfraya bus attack. Peter Weber

President-elect Donald Trump regularly vilifies the news media, has ditched his press pool on at least one occasion, and hasn't held a news conference since July, but on Sunday, he invited some reporters to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for a holiday party. According to the Trump press pool's report, Trump stopped by the party for about half an hour, along with wife Melania, Reince Preibus, Kellyanne Conway, spokesman Jason Miller, and Stephen Miller. The gathering was off the record, but according to media executive Mike Allen, the reporters were served Trump sparking wine and cold cuts — and photos were allowed:

Since the content of Trump's conversations with reporters is verboten, journalists took to Twitter to discuss the ethics and wisdom of chatting and noshing with the president-elect at his Florida estate:

Marc Caputo, currently with Politico, was a rare voice of conditional support for the reporters:

But the photos-or-it-didn't-happen aspect kind of encapsulated Trump's relationship with the news media.

Seriously, look at their eyes. Still, Trump appears to have had a fine time. According to the pool report, after chatting with reporters, Trump "apparently decided as he got in the car that instead of calling it a night he would go to dinner at his private club less than a mile away" with his entourage, "because everyone was dressed up." Peter Weber

Zsa Zsa Gabor, a Hungarian-born socialite who was one of the first celebrities famous for being famous, died of a heart attack on Sunday. She was 99, and had been in poor health since falling and breaking her hip in 2010. "We tried everything, but her heart just stopped and that was it," said husband Frederic von Anhalt. "Even the ambulance tried very hard to get her back, but there was no way." Gabor had been partly paralyzed since a 2002 car accident, suffered a stroke in 2005, and had most of her right leg amputated in 2011 due to gangrene.

Born Sari Gabor in Budapest in 1917, Zsa Zsa (a family nickname) was the second of three sisters, all of whom became famous; Eva, who starred in the TV show Green Acres, died in 1995, and sister Magda died in 1997. Zsa Zsa married and divorced Turkish diplomat Turhan Belge, the first of her eight husbands (nine counting a very brief, maybe never legal 1982 shipboard marriage), while still in Hungary. After emigrating to the U.S. around World War II with her mother and sisters, Gabor gained fame in 1942 by marrying millionaire hotelier Conrad Hilton, with whom she had her only child, Francesca Hilton, who died in 2015. Her other husbands included actor George Sanders, businessman Herbert L. Hutner, and prolific inventor Jack Ryan.

Gabor played minor roles in movies and TV shows, but she was mostly famous for being herself, a wealthy, quick-witted socialite who was not afraid to be in on the joke. "The great aunt of Paris Hilton and a spiritual matriarch to the Kardashians and other tabloid favorites, she was the original hall-of-mirrors celebrity, famous for being famous for being famous," says The Associated Press. You can get a taste of her buoyant self-deprecation in this Late Show video from 1994, in which David Letterman and Gabor drive around Los Angeles eating fast food:

For more on Zsa Zsa through the ages, you can watch this brief AP remembrance. Peter Weber

President Obama said at a press conference Friday that when he met one-on-one with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year, he told Putin to put a stop to hacking attacks on the Democratic National Committee. After that, Obama said, he "did not see further tampering of the election process."

But speaking on ABC's This Week on Sunday, interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile offered a different timeline while speaking with Martha Raddatz:

Raddatz: President Obama also said Friday that the cyber attacks stopped after he warned Putin at an international conference in September. You've been briefed on the party’s computer system. Is that right, they stopped?

Brazile: No, they did not stop. They came after us absolutely every day until the end of the election. They tried to hack into our system repeatedly. We put up the very best cyber security — what I call infrastructure — to stop them, but they constantly — they came after us. [...] They came after us daily, hourly. And there were times when we thought they would penetrate us and we would have another breach. [ABC News]

Brazile demurred to say why Obama would claim the attacks stopped if they didn't — or whether she believes he was misinformed about the situation. "We never felt comfortable," she emphasized. "We didn't know what was coming next. And, you know, this is not just about computers. This is harassment of individuals, it's harassment of our candidates, harassment of our donors." Watch her comments in context below. Bonnie Kristian

Russia will veto a French-drafted United Nations resolution for neutral monitoring of the evacuation process in Aleppo, Syria, Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Sunday, "because this is a disaster."

Churkin framed his country's objection to the measure as a criticism of allowing monitors "to go to wander around the ruins of eastern Aleppo without proper preparation and without informing everybody about what is going to happen," and he argued "there could be another thing which could be adopted today by the Security Council which would accomplish the same goals" without specifying what that second option might be.

As a Security Council member, Russia can single-handedly kill the resolution. In Aleppo itself, the evacuation process — renegotiated on Saturday — stalled Sunday when six evacuation buses were burned. Bonnie Kristian