The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on Tuesday defending 2017’s intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The heavily-redacted 158-page bipartisan report said Senate investigators found no evidence of political pressure to reach a specific conclusion 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.”
Specifically, the tome 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 looked at different intelligence disciplines, open-source reporting on the Kremlin’s policy preferences, and the content of Russian state-run media, all of which “showed that Moscow sought to denigrate” then-candidate Hillary Clinton. The senators found the intelligence community assessment drew on Russian leadership commentary, Kremlin media reports, and “specific intelligence reporting” to support their conclusion that “Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for” then-candidate Donald Trump.
The 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.”
The Senate committee, run by Republican Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina and Democratic Vice Chairman Mark Warner of Virginia, also did not unearth evidence of undue political influence in reaching the conclusions on Russian interference.
“In all the interviews of those who drafted and prepared the ICA, the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under no politically-motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions,” the report stated. “All analysts expressed that they were free to debate, object to content, and assess confidence levels, as is normal and proper for the analytic process.”
The senators also found “the differing confidence levels on one analytic judgment are justified and properly represented.” The committee stated that the decision regarding how to present the differing confidence levels was the responsibility of then-CIA Director John Brennan and retired Adm. Michael Rogers, who was director of the National Security Agency, “both of whom independently expressed to the committee that they reached the final wording openly and with sufficient exchanges of views.”
The January 2017 intelligence community assessment concluded with “high confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” The NSA diverged from the FBI and CIA on one aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” rather than “high confidence” that Putin actively tried to help Trump’s election chances and harm those of Clinton by contrasting her unfavorably.
The newly public report revealed the Intelligence Community Assessment began by the order of President Barack Obama in early December 2016 during a meeting of the National Security Council. The president instructed then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to prepare a comprehensive assessment on Russian interference. The Senate report stated that Obama “directed that the report include everything the IC knew about Russian interference in the 2016 elections.”
Clapper told the Senate committee: “I don’t think we would have mounted the effort we did, probably, to be honest, in the absence of presidential direction, because that kind of cleared the way on sharing all the accesses.”
“In reviewing the ICA, the Senate Intelligence Committee looked at two key questions: First, did the final product meet the initial task given by the president, and second, was the analysis supported by the intelligence presented?” Burr said. “We found the ICA met both criteria. The ICA reflects strong tradecraft, sound analytical reasoning, and proper justification of disagreement in the one analytical line where it occurred. The committee found no reason to dispute the intelligence community’s conclusions.”
The Senate findings were released a week after declassified footnotes from a DOJ watchdog report showed the FBI had been made aware of a Russian disinformation operation which may have infected or compromised portions of British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier, which was used in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
All of this comes amid speculation that U.S. Attorney John Durham’s examination into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation has begun to focus on Brennan and any undue influence he may have had on the 2017 Russian interference assessment. Durham, who was selected by Attorney General William Barr in 2019, is reportedly investigating whether Brennan’s CIA was attempting to keep other agencies in the dark as he pushed for a specific, preconceived analytic assessment about Russia’s true intentions in 2016.
“The ICA summarizing intelligence concerning the 2016 election represented the kind of unbiased and professional work we expect and require from the Intelligence Community,” Warner said in a statement. “The ICA correctly found the Russians interfered in our 2016 election to hurt Secretary Clinton and help the candidacy of Donald Trump. Our review of the highly classified ICA and underlying intelligence found that this and other conclusions were well-supported.”
The Senate report released on Tuesday was the Senate Intelligence Committee’s fourth report on Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election. The fifth and final volume focused on the committee’s counterintelligence findings has not been released yet.
The first volume, released 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. But the committee found “no evidence” that vote tallies were altered or that voter registry files were deleted or modified, though the committee said that the intelligence community’s insight into that issue was limited.
The second volume, released in October, said Russian operatives working through the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency masqueraded as Americans online and used ads, fake articles, and false personas to push disinformation to tens of millions of social media users in the United States to harm Clinton, help Trump, and sow discord. It criticized the Obama administration’s weak response, including its decision to hand over its social media inquiry to a third-party investigator, suggesting the FBI either lacked resources or viewed the work “as not warranting more institutionalized consideration” and never contacted Twitter about possible Russian disinformation operations until the election ended.
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.”
