Former CIA Director James Woolsey — appearing on CNN's "The Lead" on Monday — suggested "there's a possibility" that Donald Trump is playing the American people with regards to the Russian hacking scandal.
"Hacking leaves a lot of room for weaving around like this, and Donald Trump is an expert at this sort of weaving around and attracting this sort of attention," Woolsey, an adviser to the president-elect on national security, said. "It's exactly what he did with the campaign."
"This is a behavioral mode that he's perfected," he continued. "I don't think this is a substantial matter. I think it's just dialogue back and forth."
Woolsey added that "it looks from all the indicators that we've read about — the NSA, the CIA, and so forth — is that Russians were there and perhaps even principally there," which, he said, "doesn't mean there isn't somebody else in there, perhaps trying to look like a Russian."
On Saturday, prior to his black tie New Year's Eve gala in Palm Beach, the president-elect told reporters outside Mar-a-Lago that he knew "things that other people don’t know," and that he would wait and reveal this information "on Tuesday or Wednesday."
"I just want them to be sure because it’s a pretty serious charge," he added, citing the CIA's faulty intel on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "That was a disaster, and they were wrong."
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