Declassified assessment says Russia ‘had
clear preference’ for Trump, who met with US intelligence chiefs on Friday but
refused to endorse their findings
By
Spencer Ackerman and Sam Thielman
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The
report found that a multifaceted Russian campaign, going beyond the
high-profile
data breaches, included state-owned media and social media
campaigns.
Photograph: Alexander Utkin/AFP/Getty Images
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Russian president Vladimir Putin interfered
in the US presidential election to aid Donald Trump, according to a
declassified assessment by the NSA, CIA and FBI.
“Russia’s goals were to undermine public
faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and
harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the
Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump,” the
agencies found in a long-awaited report that stands to hang over the head of
the incoming Trump administration.
The report (pdf), for weeks the subject of
leaks that have incensed and vexed Trump, contradicts the contention from his
transition team that Russia did not prefer him in the 2016 election, as well as
Trump’s insistence that the culprits behind the hacks of Democratic political
figures are fundamentally unknowable.
The report keeps classified any crucial
technical data demonstrating Russian culpability, which means the release of
the report is unlikely to persuade skeptics that the intelligence agencies have
definitively proven their case. Nor does the intelligence assessment claim that
Russian interference was decisive in the election.
However, the three US intelligence agencies
assessed with “high confidence” that Russian military intelligence was behind
anonymous hacking entities Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks.com, and relayed to
WikiLeaks data stolen from prominent Democrats. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange has
denied receiving any material from the Russians.
“Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because
of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through
WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries,” the agencies found.
The intelligence assessment found that a
multifaceted Russian influence campaign, going beyond the data breaches at the
Democratic National Committee, began as an effort to undermine Hillary
Clinton’s “expected presidency” and included state-owned media and social media
campaigns. It foreshadowed “future influence efforts worldwide, including
against US allies and their election processes”.
“We also assess Putin and the Russian
Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when
possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably
to him,” the report said.
While Russian influence campaigns against
western powers and Russia’s neighbors have been seen before, and are “designed
to be deniable”, the intelligence agencies called the public release of the
stolen data “unprecedented”.
Russia also “collected on some
Republican-affiliated targets,” the report claims, without elaboration, but
“did not conduct a comparable disclosure campaign”.
After meeting with US intelligence officials
at Trump Tower, Trump did not endorse the conclusion of Russian interference
but said he would task his administration with devising a new plan to
“aggressively combat and and stop cyber attacks”.
Trump, in a statement following his meeting
with intelligence chiefs, discussed digital intrusions in a generic sense,
referring to “Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people” that
engage in digital theft, remaining agnostic on the intelligence agencies’
conclusion of Russian interference.
He said it was ultimately irrelevant,
describing the data penetration and leak as having “absolutely no effect on the
outcome of the election”.
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Several US cybersecurity firms, including
CrowdStrike and FireEye, have released public reports over several months
attributing the data breaches and disclosures to groups in Russia, providing
vastly more technical detail and analysis than does the declassified report.
Brian Bartholomew of Russia-based security
firm Kaspersky believes the hacks were the work of a group known by several
code names, among them Fancy Bear, Sofacy and APT 29.
Bartholomew told the Guardian yesterday that
while Kaspersky tends to shy away from attribution and focus on deterrence and
analysis, it had already become difficult to reach any other conclusion than
that Russian state actors are behind the Fancy Bear hacks.
“[Julian] Assange said it could have been a
14-year-old hacker – if you look at the collective operations of this group,
there’s no way a 14-year-old has this much money, time and effort to conduct
all of these operations together,” Bartholomew said.
Kaspersky believes Fancy Bear controlled
several operations attributed to Isis and other international groups, among
them hacks on TV5Monde, the German Bundestag, and the DNC. Those attacks look
sloppy and public by design, Bartholomew said.
“What it came down to was essentially
plausible deniability,” he said. “You have an espionage group that is linked to
a nation-state group; if you have a group that is targeting media or election
systems, that’s taking it past the line that traditional groups used to
follow.”
The fronts for Fancy Bear allowed a more
organized and well-funded actor to pretend to be a gang of dissidents that just
happened to act in a way that furthered the interests of the group backing
them. “It all forms a line with the Russian sphere of influence,” said
Bartholomew.
Bartholomew said he hoped the new report
would contain at least some new technical details, but it is entirely free of
specifics. Instead, it contains an analysis of Russian state news outlet Russia
Today dating back more than four years, and the detail that among other
tactics, the GRU is said to have hired Twitter trolls.
“Pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter
campaign, #DemocracyRIP, on election night in anticipation of Secretary
Clinton’s victory, judging from their social media activity,” analysts wrote in
the declassified report.
Hours before the release of the declassified
report, Trump derided the intense political focus on the hack as a “political
witch-hunt”, engineered to delegitimize his presidency before it begins.
“To some extent, it’s a witch-hunt. They just
focus on this,” Trump told the New York Times ahead of a Friday briefing on the
hack by senior US intelligence officials. Trump and Putin have expressed mutual
respect, and Trump has said he desires a warmer relationship with Russia – a
desire shared by predecessors George W Bush and Barack Obama whose achievement
was thwarted by divergent national interests.
It was the latest turbulence in what is
shaping up to be an acrimonious relationship with US intelligence agencies.
Trump has repeatedly dismissed the Russian hacking assessment for months, even
putting out a dismissive December statement saying its authors were “the same
people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction”, and this week
cited Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, a hated figure in US intelligence circles,
casting doubt on Russian culpability.
By mid-Friday, Trump tweeted that he wanted
the House and Senate intelligence committees to investigate “top secret
intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing it”.
In a Senate hearing on Thursday, the NSA
director warned that intelligence officers perceiving disrespect or irrelevance
from a Trump White House might “walk”. The outgoing director of national
intelligence testified that US intelligence has only grown more confident in
attributing the DNC hack to Russia since initially releasing its assessment in
October.
Leon Panetta, a former CIA director and
Pentagon chief in the Obama administration, told the Today show he has “never
seen anything like this in my lifetime,” with a president elect “undermining
the credibility of the very intelligence agencies that have to provide
information to him in order for him to be president of the United States”. The
outgoing vice-president, Joseph Biden, said it was “absolutely mindless” for
Trump to feud with the intelligence apparatus.
Ahead of the report’s release, 176 Democratic
members of the House of Representatives threw their support to a push, opposed
by GOP leadership, to create an independent commission to investigate the
electoral interference and recommend measures to prevent future breaches.
“If we do nothing, we are telling the world
our elections are open for influence by the most aggressive meddler,” said Eric
Swalwell of California, a senior member of the intelligence committee and
co-sponsor of the effort.
Trump struck a conciliatory tone after his
“constructive” meeting with Clapper and other senior intelligence officials.
“I have tremendous respect for the work and
service done by the men and women of this community to our great nation,” Trump
said in a statement.
