Donald Trump has met with Israeli intelligence agencies — proving that the president-elect must have "relationships with a lot of different agencies across the globe," Trump surrogate Pete Hoekstra said Wednesday.
"Yes, Donald Trump has met with the intelligence agencies from Israel," Hoekstra, the former Michigan Republican congressman who once served as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Jim Sciutto on CNN. "It is another source.
"It is another perspective of information available to the president of the United States.
"There's no reason why you have to accept at face value everything that you get from our intelligence community," he said.
Hokestra told Sciutto that Trump doubting American surveillance information — on Russian hacking, for instance — was "putting the intelligence community on notice.
"He expects them to deliver quality information in an unbiased format so that he will be equipped to make the best decisions possible as commander-in-chief.
"Sending that signal to the intelligence community is absolutely fine," Hoekstra said.
On Moscow's role in the U.S. election, he told Sciutto that "the intelligence community has gone public with some of these assessments and hasn't really provided the back-up for the detail in terms of exactly how they got there.
"That's something that Donald Trump and his people are going to dig into," Hoekstra said. "It's something that the Senate has said they are going to dig into — and it's a question that the American people want to have answered."
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