Trump acknowledges Russia's role in US election hacking

President-elect Donald Trump accepts the US intelligence community's conclusion that Russia engaged in cyber attacks during the US presidential election and may take action in response, his incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus said on Sunday.

Priebus said Trump believed Russia was behind the intrusions into the Democratic Party organisations.

“He is not denying that entities in Russia were behind this particular hacking campaign,” he said on Fox News Sunday.

“I think he accepts the findings,” Priebus said, referring to an FBI, CIA and NSA report on Russian interference in the election. A declassified version was released to the public on Friday, asserting that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, “ordered” the operation to get Trump elected. Trump received a classified briefing earlier that day.

The report, commissioned by Democratic President Barack Obama in December, concluded vote tallies were not affected by Russian interference, but did not assess whether it influenced the outcome of the vote in other ways.

However, Priebus did not clarify whether the President-elect agreed that the hacks were directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It was the first acknowledgment from a senior member of the Republican President-elect's team that Trump had accepted that Russia directed the hacking and subsequent disclosure of Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential election.

Trump had rebuffed allegations that Russia was behind the hacks or was trying to help him win, saying the intrusions could have been carried out by China or a 400-pound hacker on his bed.

With less than two weeks until his 20 January inauguration, Trump has come under increasing pressure from fellow Republicans to accept intelligence community findings on Russian hacking and other attempts by Moscow to influence the 8 November election. A crucial test of Republican support for Trump comes this week with the first confirmation hearings for his Cabinet picks.