U.S. spy chiefs presented their
case at Trump Tower on Friday that Russia was behind the hacks that rocked the
2016 presidential election.
But they didn’t help themselves by releasing
a strongly-worded report that
is scant on new evidence—and is, in some cases, a literal rehash of outdated
information.
“There was absolutely no effect
on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering
whatsoever with voting machines,” President-elect Trump said in a statement
right after he met with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA
Director John Brennan, FBI Director Jim Comey, and NSA chief Adm. Michael
Rogers.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin
ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election
[and with]… a clear preference for President-elect Trump,” the intelligence
chiefs announced through an unclassified report released after the meeting that
sounded like it was coming from an alternate universe.
The night-and-day report and
reaction hint at either a difficult relationship to come between the president
and America’s spies, or a cagey response by a future commander in chief who is
only beginning to realize how the chess masters in the Kremlin play the game of
geopolitics.
The unclassified report is
unlikely to convince a single skeptic, as it offers none of the evidence
intelligence officials say they have to back it up—none of those emails or
transcripts of phone calls showing a clear connection between the Russian
government and the political intrusions.
The reason—revealing how U.S. spies
know what they know could endanger U.S. spy operations.
And it contains some outdated
information that seems slapdash considering the attention focused on it.
Errors
in the report were almost inevitable, because of the haste in which it was
prepared, said one U.S. official briefed on the report.
The report comes in
three levels—unclassified, classified and then one so top secret that only a
handful of intelligence professionals was able to view the whole thing.
That
most classified report is the one that went to President Barack Obama, and to
Trump.
The merely classified version will be briefed to lawmakers in the coming
days.
The classification issues alone meant it was “hard to transmit around” to
be fact-checked, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because
he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
“The unclassified report is not
particularly impressive,” Susan Hennessey, a former NSA official, told The
Daily Beast in an email.
“It basically confirms what those who had been paying
attention already know. It may serve to limit Trump for purposes of plausible
deniability.
“But this is a highly risk-averse document that shows deference to
the protection of sources and methods over informing the American people.
“That’s a shame, as certainly more detail could have been safely provided.”
That lack of specificity makes it
easier for Trump to stay in the “see no, hear no, speak no evil” column.
His
post-spy-summit statement seemed to cherry-pick the intelligence, only
mentioning parts of the briefing that confirmed his belief that election vote
tallies were not tampered with, rather than the part that described how the
Democratic National Committee and key Hillary Clinton campaign officials were
hacked, and their emails released to devastating result.
Then again, maybe the scales did
fall from his eyes behind those closed doors, and he did believe the “forensic
evidence” the spies had gathered, as described by current and former U.S.
intelligence officials, including emails between Russian officials celebrating
the results of the election, and intercepted conversations showing they’d hoped
to sow discord and doubt, whoever got elected.
Perhaps the president-elect just
got a crash course in “Moscow Rules,” and is beginning to understand the
world-class hacking machine at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s disposal.
The
rules, established for U.S. spies working in Moscow during the Cold War,
include: Don’t harass the opposition; lull them into a sense of complacency;
and pick the time and place for action.
After all, Trump did call the
meeting with intelligence officials “constructive,” adding that he has
“tremendous respect for the work and service done by the men and women of this
community to our great nation,” after a week of tweets that made derisive references to
U.S. spies.
He also promised to “aggressively
combat and stop cyberattacks,” when he takes office, appointing a team to give
him a plan within 90 days of taking office.
That wasn’t enough for top
Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees.
“The President-Elect’s statement
that the Russian hacking had ‘absolutely no effect on the outcome of the
election’ is not supported by the briefing, report, or common sense,” said
House Intelligence ranking member Adam Schiff (D-CA), in a statement.
“It
is one thing to say that there was no tampering with vote tallying—which is
true—it is another thing to say that the daily dumping of documents disparaging
to Secretary Clinton that was made possible by Russian cyber operations had no
effect on the campaigns.”
Schiff said the election results should stand, but
such interference stopped from ever happening again.
House Speaker Paul Ryan split the
baby in his reaction, both trusting the intelligence community’s conclusions
and toeing the party line that Trump’s election is legitimate despite the
hacking.
“Russia has a track record of
working against our interests, and they clearly tried to meddle in our
political system,” he said in a statement Friday.
“We must also be clear
that there is no evidence that there was any interference in the voting or
balloting process…
“Donald Trump won this election fair and square because
he heard the voices of Americans who felt forgotten.”
This is the second official U.S.
report in eight days to undercut the government’s assertion that Russia was
behind the election-related hacks.
Last week, the Department of Homeland
Security and the FBI released a technical document that was widely criticized
by cybersecurity experts for
being little more than a hodge-podge of random Internet Protocol addresses and
code names for hacker gangs suspected of having ties to Moscow.
The result was
an almost immediate scare that Russian hackers had “penetrated” part of
Vermont’s power grid that was discredited within a matter of hours.
“At every level this report is a
failure,” security researcher Robert M. Lee told The Daily Beast about the
DHS/FBI document.
“It didn’t do what it set out to do, and it didn’t provide
useful data. They’re handing out bad information to the industry when good
information exists.”
And perhaps that’s the strangest
thing about this new Intelligence Community report.
High-profile cybersecurity
firms have publicly released technical and circumstantial evidence that
strongly ties the DNC intrusions to hackers long believed to be
Kremlin-connected.
“We’ve analyzed the tools, the
binaries, and the infrastructure that was used in the attack, and from that we
can confirm that it’s connected to a group” long considered to be an arm of a
Russian intelligence service, Symantec’s
Eric Chien told The Daily Beast.
“From the binary analysis point
of view, I can tell you that the activities of these attackers have been during
Russian working hours,” Eric Chien added.
“They don’t work Russian holidays;
they work Monday to Friday; there are language identifiers inside that are
Russian; when you look at all the victim profiles they would be in interest to
the Russian nation-state.”
Friday’s report, a compilation of
conclusions from 17 different U.S. intelligence agencies, doesn’t add “smoking
gun” details like those.
It’s full of details but doesn’t add much that’s new.
It says Moscow has “a longstanding desire to undermine the U.S.-led liberal
democratic order.”
We learn that Vladimir Putin
never much liked Hillary Clinton and preferred the election of her rival, who
over several years has referred to Putin as “smart,” stronger, and more capable
than the incumbent U.S. president, exonerated him from the killing of political
opponents or the invasion of European territory, and sought to make him his
“best friend.”
We learn that pro-Kremlin trolls
created hashtags designed to undermine faith in American democracy when they
believed Clinton was likely to win, and then stopped calling into question
American democracy when, much to their evident surprise, Trump did.
We learn that, in addition to
cyberespionage campaigns, run separately by both Russia’s domestic and military
intelligence services, the Kremlin resorted to “multifaceted” forms of
information warfare to weaken the Democratic nominee’s standing in the public
imagination.
This included, but was not limited to, instructing its
English-language fake media portals [Really? Have the rest of your own article?], Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, to question
Clinton’s health, her relationship to ISIS, and where the money her charity
raised actually went.
We learn that Russia has spent
$200 million a year in disinformation and propaganda, run through TV and social
media platforms that are overseen or staffed by Russian government officials
and/or the offspring of them and devoted to helping convince credulous
Americans that their country is a plutocratic surveillance state with no free
and fair election of national figures.
Unlike, say, Russia.
We also learn that the intelligence
community is publishing information that is out of date.
The report’s “Annex
A,” focusing on the role of RT, “was originally published on 11 December 2012.”
Because it’s so old, that annex incorrectly lists Aleksey Pushkov as the
“current chair of the Duma Foreign Affairs Committee.” Pushkov is no longer in
the Duma.
It also lists his daughter Darya Pushkova as the current head of RT’s
London Bureau. She used to work for RT years ago, but no longer does and is
certainly not head of the London Bureau.
While the document goes out of
its way not to reveal much about U.S. intelligence’s methodology and sourcing,
there are hints at how spy agencies arrived at their conclusions.
There is a strong suggestion, for
instance, that human intelligence—spies and informants run by the CIA in Moscow
and possibly working within to close to the Russian government—played a
stronger role in determining the U.S. intelligence community judgment of why
Putin ordered the hacking.
All three major intelligence agencies, the NSA, CIA,
and FBI, agree that the Russian government was behind it.
But curiously, the
one in charge of intercepting communications and running cyberoperations (like
piecing together a digital breadcrumb trail back to the hackers) is less
confident than the CIA and FBI about the motive.
The CIA and FBI have “high
confidence” that it was to destroy Clinton and promote Trump; the NSA has only
“moderate confidence” in that assessment.
Furthermore, and not that this
will come as much of a surprise, the document confirms that the contents of
both the DNC and Podesta emails are indeed authentic, noting that WikiLeaks was
chosen by Putin as the designated disseminator of the hacks owing to its
“self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did
not contain any evident forgeries.”
That runs counter to the notion, put
forward by the Hillary Clinton campaign, that the leaked emails might not be
real.
Nevertheless, Friday’s report
leaves “big looming unanswered questions, including the ones no one really
wants to ask,” according to Hennessey, the former NSA official.
“The big one is
whether there is any evidence of a U.S. Person—whether connected or unconnected
with Trump campaign—who had knowledge of or participated in the operation.
“I say it’s the big one because
it is the only thing that could be actually game changing.
“Currently there is
no public evidence of collusion with Trump or his staff, but considering the
President-Elect’s own statements, it’s certainly on people’s minds.
“The U.S.
government should affirmatively put it to rest by either saying there is no
evidence of any misconduct or by acknowledging an ongoing investigation,” she
added.
The government did no such thing
on Friday, however, which means the questions will only continue.
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