The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released Thursday the first installment of its highly anticipated and largely declassified bipartisan reports on Russian election interference during the 2016 presidential election, a day after former special counsel Robert Mueller testified to the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees.
This first volume, “Russian Efforts Against Election Infrastructure,” concluded “the Russian government directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure at the state and local level.” The report notes, however, that there is “no evidence that any votes were changed or that any voting machines were manipulated.”
Other major conclusions reached by the intelligence committee in its laregly unredacted 67-page investigative findings include that the Russians “exploited the seams” between federal authorities and the states and that warnings from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI to states in the summer and fall of 2016 were woefully insufficient and “did not provide enough information or go to the appropriate people.” The committee said that DHS has increased its efforts to “build trust with the states and deploy resources to assist in securing elections.”
And the committee said that Russia’s malign influence should result in “renewed attention to vulnerabilities in U.S. voting infrastructure” and that the U.S. “must create effective deterrence” to prevent this from happening again in 2020 and beyond.
“In 2016, the U.S. was unprepared at all levels of government for a concerted attack from a determined foreign adversary on our election infrastructure,” said Republican Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina. “Since then, we have learned much more about the nature of Russia’s cyber activities and better understand the real and urgent threat they pose.”
“When the Russians attacked elections systems in 2016, neither the federal government nor the states were adequately prepared,” said Democratic Vice Chairman Mark Warner of Virginia. “Our bipartisan investigation identified multiple problems and information gaps that hindered our ability to effectively respond and defend against the Russian attack in 2016.”
Burr said that he hoped this report would “provide the American people with valuable insight into the election security threats still facing our nation and the ways we can address them.”
And Warner hoped the findings would “underscore to the White House and all of our colleagues, regardless of political party, that this threat remains urgent, and we have a responsibility to defend our democracy against it.”
The committee also promised to release further volumes of investigative findings which examined the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian election interference in 2016, looked into how the Obama administration responded to that foreign interference, and analyzed the role that social media disinformation campaigns played in that interference. The impending report on social media is being reviewed for declassification, and the committee says it intends to release its remaining installments this fall.
The committee said its further reports would also answer “remaining counterintelligence questions.”
In its press release, the Senate Intelligence Committee said that its investigation “has spanned more than 15 open hearings, more than 200 witness interviews, and nearly 400,000 documents.”
Today’s detailed report shines greater detail on the committee’s yearslong work. The committee had previously released a summary of the findings in May 2018.
