Media reports this week inaccurately played up the idea that FBI Director James Comey said Russia was pushing hard for Donald Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton, by omitting a critical portion of the intelligence community’s assessment that said Russia was actually preparing for a Clinton victory, and was seeking to undermine her.
During his testimony, Comey summarized an intelligence report from January that looked at how Russia attempted to interfere in the election.
“We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” the report said. “We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign then focused on undermining her expected presidency.”
Comey paraphrased the report during his testimony. “When Mr. Trump became the nominee, there was some sense that it’d be great if he could win, be great if we could help him,” said Comey. “But we need to hurt her no matter what, and then it shifted to he has no chance, so let’s just focus on undermining her. That was the judgment of the intelligence community.”
Comey added that Putin “hated” Democrat Hillary Clinton “so much” that his preference was “for the person running against the person he hated so much.”
But some articles and columns on Comey’s testimony left out the parts that indicated what animated Russia throughout the campaign was that Putin “hated” Clinton, and that the Kremlin had written Trump’s candidacy off in the final months of the campaign.
Many articles instead framed Comey’s remarks as though Russia was actively rooting for a Trump victory, which, perhaps inadvertently, bolsters the existing suspicion that Trump has ties to the Kremlin.
CNN’s report on the hearing said, “In a dramatic hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, Comey, once again finding himself at the epicenter of a political storm, also said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a clear preference for whom he wanted to see as the next president — and it was not Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.”
A Reuters report said, “Comey refused to back away from his claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin did not simply want Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to lose the election; he wanted Donald Trump to win.”
And the Los Angeles Times wrote that Comey “stood by a Jan. 6 report by the U.S. intelligence community that said Russian President Vladimir Putin had approved the meddling in an effort to hurt Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and to help Trump.”
During the hearing, however, Comey compared Russia’s meddling to a football fan so despising one team that the fan by default wants the opposing team to win.
“Again, I think it’s two closely related sides of the same coin,” he said. “I mean, to put it in a homely metaphor, I hate the New England Patriots and no matter who they play, I’d like them to lose. And so I’m at the same time rooting against the Patriots and hoping their opponent beats them. Because only two teams on the field but what the intelligence community concluded was early on, the hatred for Mrs. Clinton… all the way along.”
Comey did confirm that the FBI is investigating whether the Trump campaign had any direct coordination with Russia’s efforts to undermine the election, though he did would not go into detail.
Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell earlier this month said, “On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all.”
