Longtime Trump confidante Hope Hicks told special counsel Robert Mueller’s office that the president’s Achilles heel was the United States intelligence community’s assessment that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
“Trump thought the fact that the intelligence community assessed the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election was his Achilles heel,” FBI investigators say Hicks told them in March 2018. “Even if it had no impact on the election, Trump thought that was what people would think. He thought the assessment took away from what he did.”
This statement by the Trump White House’s former communications director was part of 295 pages of heavily redacted FBI interview notes released Monday evening as a result of a successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by BuzzFeed.
The intelligence community’s assessment in January 2017 concluded, “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election” with the goal of undermining faith in the U.S. democratic process while hurting Hillary Clinton and helping Trump. Mueller’s July 2018 indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officers laid out details about the various Russian cyber tactics, and his April 2019 report provided more information about the GRU units responsible, detailing how Russia stole Democratic emails, then provided them to WikiLeaks for dissemination.
Bipartisan congressional reports shed light on Russia’s efforts — from state election system intrusion attempts to social media disinformation campaigns — in addition to Mueller concluding Russia interfered “in sweeping and systematic fashion.”
Trump has periodically cast doubt on U.S. claims that Russia interfered in 2016, including seeming to dispute the findings during a July 2018 press conference in Helsinki with Putin.
For years, Trump has pushed a conspiracy theory about CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that first determined the Democratic National Committee had been hacked by Russia, wrongly claiming the company is owned by a Ukrainian and hid a DNC server in Ukraine.
Trump’s CrowdStrike conspiracy theory figured prominently in the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that sparked a whistleblower complaint and impeachment proceedings. Immediately after Zelensky expressed interest in purchasing anti-tank weaponry, known as Javelins, from the U.S., Trump asked Zelensky “to do us a favor, though,” which was to look into CrowdStrike and any possible Ukrainian election interference in 2016. Trump urged Zelensky later in the call to investigate “the other thing,” referring to allegations of corruption related to Joe and Hunter Biden, telling Zelensky to speak with Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr.
Trump’s Justice Department defended the role played by CrowdStrike, stating the FBI was able to carry out its own investigation into Russian interference. A top DOJ official assured the House Judiciary Committee in October that the department got the information required for its investigation, noting it is common for the DOJ to work with outside security vendors.
In its case against Trump associate Roger Stone, the DOJ argued that Mueller’s investigation did not rely solely on CrowdStrike, claiming its investigation “gathered evidence showing that GRU officers hacked the DNC systems as well as the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] and email accounts of people working for the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, published hacked information pseudonymously, and transferred stolen data to Organization 1 [WikiLeaks].”
