President-elect Donald Trump called for an investigation of the leak of a top-secret intelligence report to NBC News before he got to see it.
Trump revealed his demand on Twitter just before noon Friday, ahead of his meeting on the subject with the nation's top intelligence officials.
His move came the day after he blasted the leak of the classified report on claims that Russia hacked U.S. systems during November's elections to influence the outcome as "politics."
Earlier Friday, Trump called the controversy about Russian hacking claims"political witch hunt" being carried out by adversaries embarrassed that he trounced them at the polls.
"They got beaten very badly in the election. I won more counties in the election than Ronald Reagan," Trump told The New York Times in a phone interview Friday morning.
"They are very embarrassed about it. To some extent, it's a witch hunt. They just focus on this … China, relatively recently, hacked 20 million government names. How come nobody even talks about that? This is a political witch hunt."
But Trump added "with all that being said, I don’t want countries to be hacking our country. They've hacked the White House. They've hacked Congress. We're like the hacking capital of the world.”
Since his victory in November, Trump has repeatedly questioned intelligence officials' assessments that Russia was behind the hacking.