The Senate Intelligence Committee submitted the fifth and final volume of its bipartisan investigation report on Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election to the nation’s top spy agency to be reviewed for classified information.
Chairman Richard Burr, the Republican senator from North Carolina who is stepping down from his post Friday amid an FBI investigation into allegations that he engaged in stock trades based upon classified congressional briefings, and Vice Chairman Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, sent the roughly 1,000-page report over to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to be scrutinized for any classified details before its anticipated release this summer in the midst of the 2020 presidential election contest.
“In addition to submitting the full, classified report, and in order to help facilitate the Intelligence Community’s review, we have also submitted what we assess to be a properly redacted, unclassified version of the report, totaling nearly 1,000 pages,” Burr and Warner said. “It is our hope that ODNI can expeditiously review these documents so that the Committee can consider, vote on, and release the report as soon as possible.”
The senators added that they “want to thank the talented and tireless staff who have contributed to the Committee’s investigation” and that “the work they’ve done has already greatly added to our understanding of and response to foreign threats to our democratic process.”
Burr and Warner want the final volume released to the public before the Senate’s August recess.
The Senate Intelligence Committee statement noted that Rep. John Ratcliffe of Texas, who was renominated by President Trump earlier this year to be director of national intelligence overseeing the intelligence community’s 17 spy agencies, promised during his early May confirmation hearing that he would review and declassify the report quickly if confirmed. Richard Grenell is currently serving as the acting spy chief.
“My views are Russia meddled or interfered with active measures in 2016, they interfered in 2018, and they will attempt to do so in 2020. They have a goal of sowing discord, and they have been successful in sowing discord, fortunately based on the good work of this committee we know they may have been successful in that regard, but they have not been successful in changing any votes or in changing the outcome of any election,” Ratcliffe testified. “I’m for safe, secure, credible elections, and I will do everything that I can as DNI to ensure they are not successful.”
Ratcliffe also committed to informing the Senate if the intelligence community concludes the Russians do start promoting a candidate during the 2020 election. The ODNI briefed lawmakers in March, saying the intelligence community had not assessed that the Kremlin was backing any particular candidate, and stressed that foreign election interference was “not a Russia-only problem.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee noted this fifth volume relates to the “counterintelligence findings” unearthed during the course of its Russia investigation. The findings are expected to cover a wide-range of allegations connected to possible Russian collusion.
Robert Mueller’s special counsel report said the Russians interfered in 2016 in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz criticized the DOJ and the FBI for 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants targeting Trump campaign associate Carter Page and for the bureau’s heavy reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and flawed dossier. Steele was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm.
Declassified footnotes from Horowitz’s report show that the FBI was aware that Russian intelligence services may have compromised Steele’s dossier with Kremlin disinformation.
Recently released witness interview transcripts from the House Intelligence Committee’s own Russia investigation revealed that top Obama national security officials did not have any firm evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.
The first volume released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in July concluded that “Russian government-affiliated cyber actors conducted an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure in the run-up to the 2016” and likely attempted intrusions in all 50 states. The committee found “no evidence” that vote tallies were altered or that voter registry files were deleted or modified.
The second volume, released last October, said Russian operatives working through the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency masqueraded as U.S. citizens online and used ads, fake articles, and false personas to push disinformation to tens of millions of social media users in the United States. It criticized the Obama administration’s failure to properly warn and work with Twitter and Facebook to battle Kremlin-backed trolls interfering in the 2016 election.
The third volume, released in February, criticized the Obama administration for being unprepared to combat Russia’s election interference effort in 2016 and for fumbling the response, finding that “the U.S. government was not well-postured to counter Russian election interference activity with a full range of readily-available policy options.”
The fourth volume, released in April, stated that the panel found no evidence of political pressure on the spy agencies to reach a specific conclusion on Russian interference, and determined the assessment by the CIA, FBI, and NSA “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Senate investigators found “specific intelligence as well as open source assessments” that supported the 2017 assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin “approved and directed aspects of this influence campaign.” The committee defended the intelligence process behind the ICA’s assessment that “Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for” then-candidate Trump.
Those Senate Intelligence Committee findings clash with a 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee, chaired at the time by California Republican Devin Nunes. That assessment concluded that “the majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft,” but found the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.”
