Putin reportedly told Trump that Russian hackers are too good to get caught. Trump believed him.

President Trump and Russian President Vladmir Putin.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 24 July 2017

A New York Times story published Monday on the Russian sanctions deal made in Congress over the weekend — and President Trump's response to it — relays an anecdote from an unnamed White House aide which sees Trump accepting an argument from Russian President Vladimir Putin that Moscow could not be responsible for 2016 election meddling because Russian hackers are too competent to have their work discovered.

When "Mr. Trump met Mr. Putin in Hamburg, Germany, two weeks ago," the Times reports, Trump "emerged to tell his aides that the Russian president had offered a compelling rejoinder: Moscow's cyberoperators are so good at covert computer-network operations that if they had dipped into the Democratic National Committee's systems, they would not have been caught."

Trump seems to have believed this rationale, as new White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci made the same case in his appearance on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday. Had the Kremlin hacked the DNC, "you would have never seen it," he said. "You would have never had any evidence of them, meaning that they're super-confident in their deception skills and hacking." When CNN's Jake Tapper asked Scaramucci for his source on that claim, Scaramucci cited Trump.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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