monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

President-elect Donald Trump said in a statement Friday that he had "tremendous respect" for the work of the intelligence community, despite weeks of tweets and other comments doubting intelligence agencies' conclusion that Russia, through cyberattacks, sought to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

His statement, which came after he received an intelligence briefing on Russian hacking, nonetheless declared that "there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines."

President-elect Donald J. Trump acknowledged the possibility on Friday that Russia had hacked a variety of American targets, including the Democratic National Committee, after an almost two-hour meeting with the nation’s top intelligence officials.

But just hours before, the president-elect had attributed claims of Russian hacking to embarrassed election-year rivals, calling the storm surrounding the cyberattacks a political witch hunt being carried out by his adversaries, who he said were embarrassed by their loss to him in the election last year.

Sounds to me like he listened to teh Intelligence folks but may still be a bit skeptical of their integrity and freedom of action.

As to the "sheltering Russia" question, Cuomo was trying to put words in Conway's mouth, and she was right to reject the question.

"How did NBC get 'an exclusive look into the top secret report he (Obama) was presented?' Who gave them this report and why? Politics!"

"I am asking the chairs of the House and Senate committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing it."

It's a curious posture. Trump doesn't want Congress to investigate a foreign adversary subverting American democracy on his behalf, but he does want Congress to investigate a news organization -- in this case, NBC News -- reporting details he doesn't like.

Paul Ryan yesterday drew a distinction that Trump seems incapable of making. "Russia clearly tried to meddle in our political system. No two ways about it," the House speaker told reporters. He then argued that the hacking did not change the outcome of the election. "He won the election fair and square," Ryan said.

ROGER STONE: It’s kind of interesting to me that the number one progenitor of this theory is CIA Director John Brennan. Brennan is a man who refused to be sworn in using the Bible, who has converted to Wahhabism, who has spent a substantial amount of time in that region, who personally cleansed the passport files of Barack Obama when he was preparing to run for a second term, and, quite frankly, if you believe my friend Wayne Madsen, and I do, is a mole, a Saudi mole. That is who is advocating and pushing the entire false narrative that the Russians have somehow hacked this election.