Sally Yates: Trump’s Russia denial ‘hinders our ability’ to prevent future attacks

Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates tweeted Friday that President Trump’s refusal to accept Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election “insults” the intelligence community and “hinders our ability to prevent” such attacks in the future.

POTUS’ inexplicable refusal to confirm Russian election interference insults career intel pros & hinders our ability to prevent in future.

— Sally Yates (@SallyQYates) July 7, 2017

It was only Yates’s second tweet as a private citizen since being fired from the Justice Department in January over her refusal to enforce the first version of Trump’s travel ban.

{mosads}Yates said she believed the ban was unconstitutional. After court defeats, Trump later abandoned the original executive order for a second, more tempered rewrite, which is set for review by the Supreme Court. 

On Thursday, during a stop in Poland on the way to the Group of 20 summit in Germany, Trump was asked about hacks targeting Democratic groups during the presidential race.

“I think it was Russia, but I think it was probably other people and/or countries, I see nothing wrong with that statement. Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows for sure.”

U.S. intelligence agencies appear to be unanimous in their assessment that Russia was behind the hacks.

Trump brought up intelligence mishaps during the build-up to the war in Iraq to justify his skepticism, despite it emerging after the war began that the intelligence community had not been in agreement about the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

“I remember when I was sitting back listening about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, how everybody was 100 percent certain that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Guess what? That led to one big mess. They were wrong, and it led to a mess.”  

Outside experts interviewed by The Hill agree that Trump’s statements could be detrimental to Trump’s relationship with the intelligence community and ultimately hinder U.S. cybersecurity.

“He not just in a minority anymore” with his take on Russia, said Laura Galante, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative and the former director of global intelligence at FireEye.

“He’s in an extreme minority. The people who study this field are not just strongly convinced but in complete clarity.”