Russia 'tried to help' donald trump win

Russia 'tried to help' Donald

Trump win the election

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-russia-helped-hackers-us-election-2016-a7466926.html




The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has

determined that Russia did in fact try to help Donald Trump win the US presidency rather than work to simply interfere with the election, according to a secret report conducted by the agency.

US intelligence officials from multiple agencies have found connections between the Kremlin and Wikileaks. The former provided the latter with countless hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, and many others, the Washington Post reported.

Russia 'tried to help' Trump

The spectre of an ongoing email controversy lurked over

Ms Clinton’s campaign from the onset of her candidacy. But in the final months, the massive leak of thousands of emails closed the gap between the former Secretary of State and Mr Trump by double digits. Cybersecurity experts, as well as intelligence officials, had found evidence that linked the hacks to Russia.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favour one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” a senior US intelligence official briefed on information shared with US senators told the Post. “That’s the consensus view.”


In a perplexing response, the Trump transition

team outright dismissed the validity of the report and the intelligence committee they will soon be running.

“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” the team incorrectly said in a statement. “The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It's now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again’.”


Officials held a secret briefing with congressional

leaders in September, but House Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doubted the legitimacy of the assessment. Additionally, the Post says Mr McConnell made his opposition to such intelligence clear, and if the White House spoke publicly about the Russians' role in the hacks, he would simply consider it a partisan political stunt.

In a briefing held with Senate leaders last week, agency officials said it was "quite clear" that Russia's goal was to get Mr Trump elected, the officials told the Post on the condition of anonymity.


Still, there is some disagreement among some of

the officials from all 17 intelligence agencies. They lacked evidence that showed a direct connection between Russia and Wikileaks. The actors they found were "one step" removed from the Russian government, the officials said.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had said Russia was not the source of the leaks in an interview published on the state-owned broadcaster Russia Today.


"The Clinton camp has been able to

project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything," he said. "Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications.

"That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source."


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Russia 'tried to help' donald trump win