The Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that a January Intelligence Community Assessment affirming Russia’s 2016 election interference is a “sound” document, prepared by analysts who were not under political pressure.
That assessment (ICA) said that Vladimir Putin ordered a multifaceted influence campaign aimed at the 2016 presidential election, meant to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” with a preference for Donald Trump.
“The Committee has spent the last 16 months reviewing the sources, tradecraft and analytic work underpinning the Intelligence Community Assessment and sees no reason to dispute the conclusions,” Republican chairman Richard Burr said in a statement accompanying the release of a summary of the panel’s initial findings.
The intelligence panel agreed with the assessment that Vladimir Putin approved the influence campaign. The judgment that Moscow sought to denigrate Clinton, the Senate panel added, is supported by “a body of reporting, to include different intelligence disciplines, open source reporting on Russian leadership policy preferences, and Russian media content.”
The 2017 assessment said that the Kremlin “developed a clear preference” for Trump. Tuesday’s Senate summary says that that judgment is supported by “public Russian leadership commentary, Russian state media reports, public examples of where Russian interests would have aligned with candidates’ policy statements, and a body of intelligence reporting.”
The NSA diverged slightly from the CIA and FBI on one of the document’s judgments, namely that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.” NSA assessed this with moderate confidence, while CIA and FBI assessed it with high confidence.
Tuesday’s summary says that that disagreement “was reasonable, transparent, and openly debated among the agencies and analysts.” Of the judgment itself, the committee says, “the ICA provided intelligence and open source reporting to support this assessment, and information obtained subsequent to publication of the ICA provides further support.”
The Senate committee interviewed those who helped craft the 2017 assessment and concluded that they were not under any “politically motivated pressure to reach any conclusions.” “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 summary reads.
To craft the document released Tuesday, the Senate panel said it “had to rely on agencies that the sensitive information and accesses had been accurately reported.” The committee also interviewed senior intelligence officers, went over “thousands of pages of source documents,” and reviewed analytic procedures.
The panel further said that a dossier compiled by ex-spy Christopher Steele, which the FBI then possessed, “did not in any way inform the analysis” in the 2017 assessment, including its key findings. That’s because “it was unverified information and had not been disseminated asserialized intelligence reporting.”
Aspects of the ICA have been further bolstered since its release, per the summary. The committee said that it has discovered “a far more extensive Russian effort to manipulate social media outlets.”
Tuesday’s summary is part of the committee’s larger ongoing probe into Russian activities related to the 2016 election. It comes amid a continuing probe by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian election interference, including the nature of any potential ties between Trump and the Kremlin. Trump has often denounced the special counsel probe as a “Witch Hunt.”
