It is "total baloney" to suggest Russian hacking affected the presidential election, when Americans made their decisions during a tough campaign, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Friday.
However, an overall congressional probe into the United States' vulnerability to cyber attacks "would be a very good thing,"
"[Voters] had a very good understanding of the two candidates," Gingrich told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" co-host Bill Hemmer. "Donald Trump carried the Electoral College by a huge margin and won under the rules of the game, period. He is the next president."
However, Gingrich said that by looking back at different cyber attack capabilities, including the 2014 cyberattack on Sony Pictures by North Korea, there is a serious problem concerning the threat of hackers' attacking U.S. interests.
"I do think that when you talk to the experts how much criminal cyber behavior there is, how much robbery there is, there are a whole series of layers here," Gingrich said. "For Congress to do a serious investigation, not just a one-time, let's look at this election, but rather, let's look at America's vulnerabilities on the cyber front, I think [that] would be a very good thing."
Meanwhile, Gingrich, like many in President-elect Donald Trump's camp, said he finds it "amazing" the Obama administration did not intervene when evidence surfaced about Russia's hacking, if it was done to intervene in favor of Trump's election.
"Are our cyber systems really that inadequate, something that, according Democrats, is this massive?" Gingrich asked."As you know there is a real argument underway between different parts of the intelligence community over whether or not it even happened. So, you know, again I'm not saying that the WikiLeaks didn't happen. There is real argument whether or not it was Russian-directed."
However, Gingrich said that the "whole campaign from the [Hillary] Clinton side has always been weird," and Chairman John Podesta, whose emails were hacked and released, is desperately trying to find someone to blame for the Democratic nominee's loss.
"'It wasn't my fault I was a stupid campaign manager, somebody else did it to us,'" Gingrich said, mocking Podesta. "'It is beyond my control.' Nice try. In the end reality Hillary Clinton lost. The reality nobody made her put a server in her basement. Nobody made her delete 33,000 emails. Nobody made her be vulnerable to hacking."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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