GOP-Led Intelligence Committee Issues Report Confirming Russia Interfered On Donald Trump’s Behalf In 2016
The GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on Tuesday that supports the Intelligence Community’s opinion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump. Los Angeles Times White House reporter Chris Megerian linked to the Senate’s findings on Twitter, which unanimously concluded that Russia helped Trump win the White House.
This is the fourth report issued by the committee, and its findings were both bipartisan and unanimous, arguing that the Intelligence Community Assessment, which was released in December 2016, was accurate. The committee was led by North Carolina Senator Richard M. Burr, a Republican.
“The Committee found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” the report reads.
The New York Times reveals that the highly-redacted 158-page report, which was blacked out by the Trump administration, disagrees with a 2018 investigation led by Republicans, which found that the Kremlin didn’t attempt to help Trump win the election.
This latest report found “specific intelligence reporting to support the assessment that Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump.”
The report also concluded that the initial findings were not based on the infamous Steele dossier, something that Trump’s conservatives allies have argued.
The dossier “was not used in the body of the I.C.A. or to support any of its analytic judgments,” the report concluded.
The Steele dossier was a document compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, that was concluded to have unverified accusations. Some conservatives have argued that the flaws in the dossier invalidate the larger argument that Russia sought to help Trump win the 2016 election.
The committee will release a final volume in the next few months of their findings after it has been reviewed by intelligence agencies. It’s expected that the findings will echo those of special prosecutor Robert Mueller and his team’s findings.
The findings undercut the argument out of the Trump White House and among his allies that the FBI and other agencies were biased against him and their findings about Russian interference were tainted by their political motives.
The Trump administration has been examining both the FBI and the CIA to determine if either agency has been tainted by partisanship in their findings over Russian interference. Republican allies have argued that the intelligence community has exaggerated Russian’s involvement in the situation and say that President Vladimir Putin was likely trying to sow chaos in the United States rather than trying to bolster either individual in the 2016 election.
