President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday he wanted to press U.S. intelligence agencies to make sure they are correct in asserting that Russia was behind a cyberattack aimed at disrupting the 2016 presidential race.

In a brief exchange with reporters on New Year’s Eve at his home in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Trump said that the intelligence community has been wrong before. He made reference to a government assessment before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that the country’s former leader, Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction.

“And if you look at the weapons of mass destruction, that was a disaster and they were wrong,” Mr. Trump said, according to the press pool report. “And so I want them to be sure. I think it’s unfair if they don’t know.”

On Thursday, President Barack Obama announced his long-anticipated response to allegations that Russia hacked into Democratic email accounts in an attempt to scramble the presidential race. Mr. Obama expelled dozens of Russian diplomats from the U.S. and imposed other sanctions as punishment for cyberattacks that he said “could only have been directed by the highest levels of the Russian government.”

 

 

Read the whole story from The Wall Street Journal.