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Russia aimed to influence US election, top spies tell Trump – and rot won't go away

Paul McGeough

Washington: It was a heart-stopping moment at the intersection of American politics and intelligence – three spy chiefs confronting a Republican President-elect who for months has been mocking them, to tell him that yes, despite all his bluster, Russia had been rooting for him to defeat his Democratic challenger.

The historic sense of a face-off that likely will inform one of the most vital relationships in Donald Trump's presidency was captured in a blunt observation by former Obama-appointed CIA chief Leon Panetta, who told NBC: "I've never seen anything like this in my lifetime, [with a President-elect] undermining the credibility of the very intelligence agencies that have to provide information to him in order for him to be president of the United States."

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Russia hacks: Intel chief pushes back at Trump

Speaking to a Senate panel, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper pushed back on President-elect Donald Trump's suggestion the intelligence community did not have solid evidence that Vladimir Putin's Russia was responsible for email hacks during the 2016 election.

And to a point, it seemed that Trump might have seen the wisdom of outgoing Vice-President Joe Biden's advice that it was "absolutely mindless" for a new president to feud with the intelligence services – the President-elect was not too vigorous in his comments after the intelligence showdown at Trump Tower in Manhattan.

The guts of the report, by the CIA, FBI and the National Security Agency, was the most detailed formal account to date of what, much to Trump's fury, has been leaked in dribs and drabs in the weeks – that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered a huge cyber attack and influence campaign aiming to deny Hillary Clinton the White House.

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This was unprecedented stuff – the spooks were effectively putting a question mark over the legitimacy of the man they will serve as president before he takes the oath of office on January 20.

The Russian objective – according to a 25-page, sanitised version of the agencies' classified report – was not to manipulate the actual vote so much as to mess with voters' minds by generating negative coverage of Clinton.

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"Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavourably to him," the report by the nation's intelligence agencies concluded.

Without revealing how they acquired the information, the agencies concluded "with high confidence" that Moscow's military intelligence unit, the GRU, had crafted a "persona" called Guccifer 2.0 and a website, DCLeaks.com, to release damaging emails harvested from the Democrats' computers – and when the release of the emails on DCLeaks.com failed to draw media attention, they were subsequently dumped through WikiLeaks.

Just hours before Friday's intelligence briefing at Trump Tower in Manhattan, the President-elect was spinning his usual line, telling The New York Times that efforts to prove Russian interference was "a political witch-hunt".

Just as Trump refuses to accept that he lost the popular national vote by as many as 3 million, he bitterly resents any suggestion that his campaign might have had a Russian leg-up – but a statement he issued after Friday's briefing was notable for the absence of his customary mockery of the intelligence services and the inclusion of an oblique concession that the Russians had intervened.

In a separate statement, Vice-President-elect Mike Pence said the new administration would act "to combat cyber attacks and protect the security of the American people from this type of intrusion in the future".

In its generality, the report is politically damaging for Trump. And in its particulars it is damaging for his newly appointed national security adviser Michael Flynn – Flynn has a close relationship with RT, the Russian English-language news organisation that American intelligence says is a Kremlin propaganda operation pressed into service in the campaign to cripple Clinton.

Intriguingly, in ascribing motives, the agencies conclude that Putin held a grudge against Clinton who, he believed, had denigrated him when, as US secretary of state, she had encouraged pro-democracy protests in Moscow in 2011. He also believed that the US was responsible for the leaking of the so-called Panama Papers, which had embarrassed Putin associates; and for revelations on Russian Olympians' abuse of performance-enhancing drugs.

The "Russians did it!" row will not go away any time soon. But it remains to be seen just where the intelligence agencies' report fits in to it.

"This is big: CIA, NSA & FBI publish perhaps the most high-profile intelligence community assessment in US history," Thomas Rid, a professor at King's College London and an expert on cyber warfare, wrote on Twitter.

Maybe.

Susan Hennessey, a former intelligence agency lawyer who now runs the online journal Lawfare, wrote: "The unclassified report is underwhelming at best. There is essentially no new information for those who have been paying attention."

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