Both Russia and Iran attempted to undermine a U.S. presidential candidate in the lead-up to last November’s presidential election, according to the intelligence community.
A report published on Tuesday, which is a declassified version of the one provided to then-President Donald Trump and other officials on Jan. 7, assessed that the Kremlin aimed to hurt President Biden while Tehran worked to damage Biden’s candidacy. Neither one manipulated any of the election results, U.S. officials determined.
“We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 U.S. elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” the 15-page document said.
Putin authorized Russian government organizations to conduct operations “denigrating” Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party while supporting Trump, the assessment found. But “unlike in 2016,” U.S. intelligence officials said they “did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure.” The report said officials had “high confidence” in this assessment.
Iran “carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former president Trump’s reelection prospects,” but Tehran did not do so by “directly promoting his rivals,” the report said. U.S. officials said they had “high confidence” in that assessment and believe Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, authorized the operation.
Another “key judgment” noted by the document was that China “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy interference efforts intended to change the outcome” of the election. That assessment was made with “high confidence.”
Expected in December, the classified version of the assessment was delayed as senior intelligence officials clashed over the role played by China and as the then-director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, sought to include more viewpoints in the final analysis.
Barry Zulauf, an analytic ombudsman and longtime intelligence official, issued a 14-page report that found politicization problems exist in U.S. spy agency assessments on foreign influence in the 2020 U.S. election, including analysts who appeared to hold back information on Chinese interference efforts because they disagreed with the Trump administration’s policies.
“Given analytic differences in the way Russia and China analysts examined their targets, China analysts appeared hesitant to assess Chinese actions as undue influence or interference. The analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tend to disagree with the administration’s policies, saying in effect, I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies,” Zulauf concluded, saying this behavior violated analytic standards requiring independence from political considerations.
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In its declassified report, the intelligence community also noted that Lebanon, Cuba, and Venezuela “took steps to attempt to influence the election,” but those were “smaller in scale than the influence efforts conducted by other actions this election cycle.”
The declassified version differs from the classified one in that it does not discuss intelligence reports, sources, or methods, which experts often say, if exposed, could jeopardize lives and national security.
In addition to this report, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency assessed in November that there was no evidence that voting systems were compromised in the 2020 election. The agency stood by this determination in December even after Trump fired its director, Chris Krebs, claiming that his statement “on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud.”
