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

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.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up