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Thursday March 28, 2024

Russia helped Trump win election: CIA

By our correspondents
December 11, 2016

Emails were hacked and provided to WikiLeaks; their release damaged Hillary’s campaign; Obama orders inquiry; Russia rejects accusations; Assange denies links with Kremlin; Trump team says these (CIA) are same people who said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction

WASHINGTON: The CIA has concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help President-elect Donald Trump win the White House, and not just to undermine confidence in the US electoral system, a senior US official said on Friday.

US intelligence agencies have assessed that as the 2016 presidential campaign drew on, Russian government officials devoted increasing attention to assisting Donald Trump’s effort to win the election, a US official familiar with the finding told Reuters on Friday night on condition of anonymity.

The CIA conclusion drew an extraordinary rebuke from the president-elect’s camp. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” Trump’s transition team said, launching a broadside against the spy agency, The Washington Post reported.

“The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”

As summer turned to fall, Russian hackers turned almost all their attention to the Democrats. Virtually all the emails they released publicly were potentially damaging to Clinton and the Democrats, the official told Reuters.

“That was a major clue to their intent,” the official said.“If all they wanted to do was discredit our political system, why publicise the failings of just one party, especially when you have a target like Trump?”

The Washington Post report comes after President Barack Obama ordered a review of all cyber attacks that took place during the 2016 election cycle, amid growing calls from Congress for more information on the extent of Russian interference in the campaign.

The newspaper cited officials briefed on the matter as saying that individuals with connections to Moscow provided anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks with emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief and others.

Those emails were steadily leaked out via WikiLeaks in the months before the election, damaging Clinton’s White House run.The Russians’ aim was to help Donald Trump win and not just undermine the US electoral process, the paper reported.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” the newspaper quoted a senior US official briefed on an intelligence presentation last week to key senators as saying. “That’s the consensus view.”

CIA agents told the lawmakers it was “quite clear” thatelecting Trump was Russia’s goal, according to officials who spoke to the Post, citing growing evidence from multiple sources.

However, some questions remain unanswered and the CIA’s assessment fell short of a formal US assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies, the newspaper said.

For example, intelligence agents don’t have proof that Russian officials directed the identified individuals to supply WikiLeaks with the hacked Democratic emails.WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has denied links with Russia’s government.

Those individuals were “one step” removed from the Russian government, which is consistent with past practices by Moscow to use “middlemen” in sensitive intelligence operations to preserve plausible deniability, the report said.

At the White House, Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Obama called for the cyber attacks review earlier this week to ensure “the integrity of our elections”.

“This report will dig into this pattern of malicious cyber activity timed to our elections, take stock of our defensive capabilities and capture lessons learned to make sure that we brief members of Congress and stakeholders as appropriate,” Schultz said

Obama wants the report completed before his term ends on January 20.“We are going to make public as much as we can,” the spokesman added. “This is a major priority for the president.”

The move comes after Democrats in Congress pressed the White House to reveal details, to Congress or to the public, of Russian hacking and disinformation in the election.

On October 7, one month before the election, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence announced that “the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organisations.”

“These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process,” they said.Trump dismissed those findings in an interview published on Wednesday by Time magazine for its “Person of the Year” award. Asked if the intelligence was politicised, Trump answered: “I think so.”

“I don’t believe they interfered,” he said. “It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”Worried that Trump will sweep the issue under the rug after his inauguration, seven Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee called on November 29 for the White House to declassify what it knows about Russian interference.

A second official familiar with the report said the intelligence analysts’ conclusion about Russia´s motives does not mean the intelligence community believes that Moscow’s efforts altered or significantly affected the outcome of the election.

Russian officials have denied all accusations of interference in the US election.A CIA spokeswoman said the agency had no comment on the matter.The hacked emails passed to WikiLeaks were a regular source of embarrassment to the Clinton campaign during the race for the presidency.

US intelligence analysts have assessed “with high confidence” that at some point in the extended presidential campaign Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government had decided to try to bolster Trump’s chances of winning.

The Russians appear to have concluded that Trump had a shot at winning and that he would be much friendlier to Russia than Clinton would be, especially on issues such as maintaining economic sanctions and imposing additional ones, the official said.

Moscow is launching a similar effort to influence the next German election, following an escalating campaign to promote far-right and nationalist political parties and individuals in Europe that began more than a decade ago, the official said.

In both cases, said the official, Putin’s campaigns in both Europe and the United States are intended to disrupt and discredit the Western concept of democracy by promoting extremist candidates, parties, and political figures.

In October, the US government formally accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organisations ahead of the Nov 8 presidential election.Obama has said he warned Putin about consequences for the attacks.