The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report on Russian hacking Friday that said officials have “high confidence” that Russia tried to hurt Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and hacked into the Democratic National Committee in 18 months ago to do it.
“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” the report said.
“Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” it said. “We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.”
The public version of the report “does not include the full supporting information” for those conclusions, which might disappoint the Democrats who asked President Obama to declassify the intelligence. “Many of the key judgments in this assessment rely on a body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior,” it said.
Instead, the public report narrated the intelligence agencies’ conclusions about when the hacks took place, how the embarrassing information was published, and why.
The long-awaited unclassified report was released following President-elect Trump’s briefing with intelligence officials, who provided him with the details of the full classified version of their findings.
“While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democratic National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines,” Trump said following the briefing.
The report confirmed that the Russians did not engage in cyberattacks against any election systems “involved in vote tallying,” but it described a blended strategy of conducting the hacks while using state-run media networks to amplify the embarrassing information revealed through the leaks.
Russian intelligence officials hacked the Democratic National Committee as early as July of 2015, a year before Hillary Clinton and President-elect Trump clinched their respective party nominations. The “influence campaign” specifically targeting the presidential election began months later, “probably” by March of 2016, the report said. Information taken from Democratic email accounts in that time frame began to be leaked to an anonymous hacker known as Guccifer 2.0, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks.
“Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries,” the report says.
Putin initiated the operation in order to punish the United States for helping expose a Russian doping scheme in the run-up to the 2016 Olympics, it said. He also wanted to embarrass Clinton for critiquing the fairness of the Russian elections that were held in 2011.
Russia’s goals evolved throughout the campaign. By turns, they tried to embarrass Clinton, boost Trump, and then — “when it appeared to Moscow” that Clinton would win — protest that the election had been unfair.
“Before the election, Russian diplomats had publicly denounced the US electoral process and were prepared to publicly call into question the validity of the results,” the report said. “Pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP, on election night in anticipation of Secretary Clinton’s victory, judging from their social media activity.”
The analysts predicted that Russia will try to repeat these operations in other countries and warned that there could be more leaks still to come.
“Immediately after Election Day, we assess Russian intelligence began a spearphishing campaign targeting US Government employees and individuals associated with US think tanks and NGOs in national security, defense, and foreign policy fields,” the report says. “This campaign could provide material for future influence efforts as well as foreign intelligence collection on the incoming administration’s goals and plans.”
