SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE BACKS FINDING THAT RUSSIA TRIED TO HELP TRUMP

Senate Intelligence committee backs finding that Russia tried to help Trump

By Dan Boylan - The Washington Times - Tuesday, July 3, 2018

The U.S. intelligence community’s initial assessment that Russia secretly tried to interfere with the 2016 election to boost Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton was “well-supported,” the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday in an unclassified report.

Congress’ leading probe into the Russian meddling issue released a summary of its initial findings, which found that the “overall judgments” made by the country’s leading intelligence agencies “were well-supported and the tradecraft was strong.”

“The Committee has spent the last 16 months reviewing the sources, tradecraft and analytic work underpinning the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) and sees no reason to dispute the conclusions,” committee Chairman Richard Burr, North Carolina Republican, said in a statement.

Sen. Mark Warner, the panel’s top Democrat, concurred.

“As numerous intelligence and national security officials in the Trump administration have since unanimously reaffirmed, the ICA findings were accurate and on-point,” Mr. Warner said. “The Russian effort was extensive and sophisticated, and its goals were to undermine public faith in the democratic process, to hurt Secretary Clinton and to help Donald Trump.”

The Senate panel disagreed with findings from the House Intelligence Committee probe, which ended its investigation into the issue this spring with the conclusion that Kremlin operatives intended to spread discord across the U.S. electorate, but not specifically help Mr. Trump.

The January 2017 intelligence consensus report was considered significant because never before had the CIA, National Security Agency and FBI — the assessment’s joint authors — asserted that a foreign government interfered so extensively in a U.S. election to help one candidate and discredit another.

Ever since its release, Mr. Trump has dismissed the 15-page report’s findings and pointed to it as evidence that an “American deep state” — consisting of establishment Washington figures and agencies — has conspired to undermine his presidency with a politically motivated “witch hunt.”

Russian officials have also repeatedly denied any meddling in the 2016 election, which U.S. officials say included cyber operations, the planting of false news stories and the use of social media “trolls” orchestrated by the Kremlin.

In May, Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner revealed similar conclusions after a closed-door hearing on the issue with the top Obama administration officials who authorized the release of the ICA report made public just two weeks before Mr. Trump took office in January 2017.

Many leading Republicans maintain that the entire Russian-meddling narrative was an invention pushed by the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Mr. Trump and his closest advisers in the heat of a tightening presidential race.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jul/3/senate-intel-backs-finding-russia-helped-trump/?