Trump calls CIA’s Russia hacking report 'a conspiracy theory'

[Playboy™]

Donald Trump has poured fresh scorn on US intelligence claims of Russian hackers meddling in the US election. He tweeted: "Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card. It would be called conspiracy theory!"

The US president-elect also questioned why the allegations were not widely made public before the election. His remarks set the incoming commander-in-chief against intelligence services that he will preside over.

"Unless you catch "hackers" in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn't this brought up before election?" Mr Trump tweeted on Monday morning. The FBI said in October that it believed Russia was behind the Democratic Party hacks but on Friday the CIA went further by concluding Russia's motive was to help Mr Trump.

His latest Twitter tirade comes a day after he told Fox News the Democrats were disseminating the "ridiculous" hacking reports because they lost the election, and it was "impossible to know" who was behind it.

On Friday, CIA officials told US media they had "high confidence" that Russian hackers had attempted to sway the US election in Mr Trump's favour. The Trump team responded to those reports in a statement: "These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."