Senators were briefed by intelligence officers in recent weeks that Russia had been running a multi-year disinformation campaign to blame Ukraine for election interference in 2016.
Three intelligence officers confirmed that they had alerted several senators that Ukraine was not responsible for the 2016 election meddling or the hacking of the Democratic National Committee emails in recent briefings, according to a Friday report from the New York Times.
Some Republicans, including the president, have continued to inquire about Ukraine’s involvement in 2016. In the July phone call that became the basis for the impeachment hearings, President Trump requested that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky investigate Ukraine’s involvement in election meddling. He hinted at claims that the company CrowdStrike, the firm the DNC hired to investigate its email hack, had ties to Ukraine and was housing a “missing” DNC server.
Trump has since reiterated the accusation that Ukraine was involved in election interference. On Friday morning, he called into Fox & Friends and said, “They gave the server to CrowdStrike or whatever it’s called, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian, and I still want to see that server. That’s what the word is.”
He added, “That’s what I asked actually on my phone call, you know. I asked it very point-blank because we’re looking for corruption. There’s tremendous corruption. Why should we be giving hundreds of millions of dollars to countries when there’s this kind of corruption?”
Trump’s concern over Ukraine bled into the questioning delivered by House Republicans during the impeachment hearings. Top Russian adviser Fiona Hill condemned the theories during her public testimony on Thursday and reiterated the claims made by the intelligence community, explaining that the CrowdStrike theories were part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
During her impeachment testimony, Hill said, “Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country — and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did.”
She continued, “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”
Intelligence officials have generally agreed that Russia is trying to spread claims that Ukraine was responsible for the 2016 election meddling, but have not released an official report on the Russian disinformation strategy.
