Donald Trump Says Apple Should Help FBI Hack San Bernardino iPhone: ‘Who Do They Think They Are?’

Donald Trump has come out in favor of the court decision to demand that Apple grants the FBI access to the phone of one of the San Bernardino killers. The Republican presidential hopeful told "Fox and Friends" Wednesday morning that he fully agreed with the California judge who made the decision. "We have to use common sense," he said, according to CNN.

"To think that Apple won't allow us to get into her cell phone, who do they think they are? No, we have to open it up," Trump said, mistakenly referring to the woman involved in the shooting.

Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, shot and killed 14 people at a holiday party for staff of a local health department, where Farook had worked. The FBI wants to access Farook's iPhone 5c, but he had a passcode that stops others from unlocking the device.

Trump said that Apple should help the FBI bypass the killer's iPhone PIN like the court ordered, dismissing the argument that doing so would create a "backdoor" that could be exploited by criminals. "These are two people radicalized who were given a wedding party by the people they killed! There's something going on. We have to be very careful, we have to be very vigilant," he said.

Apple CEO Tim Cook published a letter Wednesday morning arguing that the court order threatens customer security. "The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe," he said. "We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack."