https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/12/...
“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” — statement from the Trump transition team on Washington Post report that the CIA concluded that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump
Donald Trump’s staff dismissed U.S. intelligence conclusions that Russia actively interfered in the presidential election by noting the flawed intelligence cited by the Bush administration in making the case for invading Iraq nearly 14 years ago.
An alternative perspective came from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who pinned the blame on the Bush White House for misrepresenting the intelligence.
Nancy Pelosi @NancyPelosi: The intel didn't state that Iraq had WMDs. The Bush-Cheney WH made that misrepresentation. 12:21 AM - Dec 11, 2016
Trump’s complaint about this semi-ancient history is a bit odd because a) the intelligence analysts who worked on Middle East WMDs are not going to be the same as analysts focused on Russian cyber-behavior; b) the intelligence collection for hacking in the United States by overseas powers would be different from assessing illicit weapons programs in the Middle East; and c) reforms were put in place after the Iraq War to make it harder for suspect intelligence to bubble up to the top ranks without careful scrutiny. (For instance, a new procedure required heads of intelligence agencies to vouch personally for the credibility of any of their own agency’s sources that are used in a major estimate.)
Moreover, the Bush administration appeared determined to attack Iraq for any number of reasons beyond suspicions of WMDs; officials simply seized on WMDs because they concluded that that represented the strongest case for an invasion. “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair in 2003.