WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump accepts the conclusion by US intelligence agencies that Russia tried to interfere in the election that will soon put him in the White House, a top aide said Sunday.
‘‘He’s not denying that entities in Russia were behind this particular campaign,’’ incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus said.
That’s more than Trump himself has said, and he hasn’t responded to calls for Washington to retaliate. Those are decisions, aides said, that Trump will make after he becomes president on Jan. 20, though he and some of his Cabinet nominees could face sharp questioning this week.
On Wednesday, Trump is expected to hold a long-delayed news conference on how he is organizing his global business empire to avoid conflicts of interest while he’s president. He has taken sporadic questions and done interviews, but it will be his first full-fledged news conference since July 27.
Intelligence officials allege that Moscow directed a series of hacks to help Trump win the White House in the race against Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump has expressed skepticism about Russia’s role and declined to say whether he agrees that the meddling was done on his behalf.
‘‘I think he accepts the findings,’’ said Priebus, who appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and CBS’s “Face the Nation.’’
But Priebus also said it is ‘‘indisputable’’ that the rollout of the report is ‘‘politically motivated to discredit’’ Trump.
On Friday, US intelligence officials briefed the president-elect on their conclusions that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf. Priebus attended along with Trump.
In an interview with the Associated Press after the briefing, Trump said he ‘‘learned a lot’’ from his discussions with intelligence officials, but he declined to say whether he accepted their assertion about Russia’s motives.
Trump has said warm relations with Russia are a good thing and that only ‘‘stupid’’ people would disagree.
‘‘My suspicion is these hopes will be dashed pretty quickly,’’ Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said on “Face the Nation.”
‘‘The Russians are clearly a big adversary,’’ McConnell said. “And they demonstrated it by trying to mess around in our election.’’
An unclassified version of the intelligence report directly tied President Vladimir Putin of Russia to election meddling and said Moscow had a ‘‘clear preference’’ for Trump over Clinton.
Trump and his allies have bristled at any implication that the meddling helped him win the election. He won the Electoral College vote with 306 votes, well over the 270 votes required to become president.
Accepting the findings about Russian hacking would be a positive step, but not enough, said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who is calling for more penalties against Russia.
‘‘He’s going to be the defender of the free world here pretty soon,’’ said Graham, a frequent Trump critic. ‘‘All I’m asking him is to acknowledge that Russia interfered, and push back. It could be Iran next time. It could be China.’’ Graham spoke on NBC’s “Meet the Press.’’
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter also called for a balanced response by the Trump administration that isn’t reliant solely on the military. ‘‘There has to be a response,’’ he said on the NBC program.
Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he understands why Trump would ‘‘want to be buddies’’ with Putin, saying it was no different than President Obama and former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
But Nunes, a member of Trump’s transition team, said on ‘‘Fox News Sunday’’ that he has ‘‘cautioned this administration to be careful with Putin because I think he is a bad actor. It is true we'd like to be friends with Russia, but I'm just not sure it’s possible.’’
Priebus and another Trump adviser, Kellyanne Conway, suggested Sunday that a decision on whether to retaliate against Russia would be made at a later date.
Trump has tried to play down the allegations against Russia, alarming some who see a pattern of skepticism directed at US intelligence agencies and a willingness to embrace Putin.
On Friday, after receiving a classified briefing on the matter, Trump attempted to change the subject to allegations that hadn’t been raised by intelligence agencies. ‘‘Intelligence stated very strongly there was absolutely no evidence that hacking affected the election results. Voting machines not touched!’’
Trump earlier had urged Americans to get on with their lives.
Graham took issue with that: ‘‘Our lives are built around the idea that we’re free people. That we go to the ballot box. That we, you know, have political contests outside of foreign interference.’’
There has been no official comment from Moscow on the report, which was released as Russia observed Orthodox Christmas.
US intelligence officials have said Russia isn’t done intruding in US politics and policymaking.
An unclassified version of the intelligence report said the Russian government provided hacked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks.
The website’s founder, Julian Assange, has denied that it got the e-mails it released from the Russian government. The report noted that the e-mails could have been passed through middlemen.
Russia also used state-funded propaganda and paid ‘‘trolls’’ to make nasty comments on social media services, the report said. Intelligence officials say Moscow will apply lessons learned from its activities in the election to put its thumbprint on future elections in the United States and allied nations.
The public report was minus classified details that intelligence officials shared with Obama on Thursday.
In an interview that aired Sunday, Obama said he did not misjudge the threat from Putin, even though he had dismissed Republican Mitt Romney’s contention during the 2012 campaign that Russia was the United States’ biggest geopolitical threat.
‘‘I don’t think I underestimated him,’’ Obama said on ABC News’ ‘‘This Week,’’ ‘‘but I think that I underestimated the degree to which, in this new information age, it is possible for misinformation, for cyberhacking and so forth, to have an impact on our open societies, our open systems, to insinuate themselves into our democratic practices in ways that I think are accelerating.’’