President Trump on Sunday said he “hadn’t thought about” asking Russian President Vladimir Putin to extradite the Russian officials indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for conspiring to hack Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers during the 2016 election.
CBS News’s Jeff Glor interviewed Trump at his golf resort in Scotland just ahead of the president’s summit in Finland with Putin.
Glor asked Trump if he would ask Putin to extradite the Russian intelligence officers named in the indictment.
“Well I might. I hadn’t thought of that. But I certainly, I’ll be asking about it,” Trump said.
Trump then quickly deflected blame for the hack.
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“But again, this was during the Obama administration. They were doing whatever it was during the Obama administration,” he continued.
Trump went on to say he’d been told some individuals unsuccessfully tried to hack the Republican National Committee server, too.
“I think the DNC should be ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be hacked,” he said. “They had bad defenses and they were able to be hacked. But I heard they were trying to hack the Republicans too. But, and this may be wrong, but they had much stronger defenses.”
The Justice Department announced on Friday Mueller’s indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers, alleging they interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections in an attempt to help then-candidate Trump win the presidency.
Mueller charged 11 officials with conspiring to hack into the DNC and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee networks and another with conspiring to hack into election systems, including a state elections board website.
Some Democrats have called for the Trump-Putin meeting to be canceled in light of the indictments, citing Trump’s past reluctance to condemn the Russian president over election meddling.