The divide has played out as Trump weighs whether to revoke the sanctions that former President Barack Obama imposed on Russia for its suspected interference in the 2016 presidential election. And it worries some experts and lawmakers who say that of the United States’ two big rivals in cyberspace, Russia’s hacking has been far more provocative.
Trump has repeatedly blamed China for a pair of massive hacks that pilfered highly sensitive documents on more than 20 million current and former federal workers — in contrast to the Obama administration’s refusal to publicly point the finger for those thefts. But it took three months for Trump and his aides to accept U.S. intelligence agencies’ conclusions that the Russian government was behind hacks of Democratic Party emails that helped undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
While both cyberattacks were serious, senior lawmakers from both parties have called the election hacks — and subsequent leaks of embarrassing internal documents — an assault on U.S. democracy. But Trump repeatedly scoffed at attempts to pin the blame on Vladimir Putin’s regime, at one point speculating that the hacker who breached the Democrats’ emails “could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”
Continue to politico.com article: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-russia-china-hacking-234301
