Senate Intel report confirms Russia aimed to help Trump in 2016

Senators and committee aides examined everything from the sources and methods used for the intelligence-gathering, to the Kremlin’s actions itself. The 158-page report is heavily redacted, with dozens of pages blacked out entirely. But its final conclusions were unambiguous.

“The committee found no reason to dispute the intelligence community’s conclusions,” Burr said in a statement, adding that the intelligence community’s conclusions reflect “strong tradecraft” and “sound analytical reasoning.”

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the committee’s vice chairman, praised the intelligence agencies’ “unbiased and professional work,” and warned that there was “no reason to doubt that the Russians’ success in 2016 is leading them to try again in 2020.”

The panel's findings are in line with a previously issued bipartisan statement in which Senate Intelligence leaders endorsed the January 2017 assessment by the clandestine community. The newest conclusions come in the fourth of five reports the committee is releasing on Moscow’s interference in the 2016 campaign. The committee last month approved the report unanimously.

“The fact that you have a committee with members that range from John Cornyn and Tom Cotton to Dianne Feinstein and Ron Wyden coming to a unanimous conclusion that that report was correct and was soundly based, I think is very significant in light of the continuing questions about what did the Russians do and how did they do it,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), a member of the intelligence panel, said in an interview.

“This puts it to rest,” he added.

The report devotes “additional attention” to the disagreements among some intelligence agencies about the Russian government’s intentions in meddling in the 2016 campaign. The report states that “the analytic disagreement was reasonable, transparent, and openly debated among the agencies and analysts.”

It also notes that the committee interviewed officials involved in drafting the January 2017 assessment, which came out days before Trump's inauguration, and states that they were not subject to political pressure.

The January 2017 assessment found that “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.”

Notably, according to the Senate’s report, the initial assessment did not include information from or citations based on former British spy Christopher Steele’s unverified dossier of claims about Trump’s relationship with Russia. It noted that the FBI’s senior leadership insisted, though, that the dossier be mentioned in an annex. The Steele dossier is expected to be addressed in the committee’s fifth and final report.

King, who has read the unredacted version of the 158-page report, said the heavy redactions were not intended to shield the committee’s findings — rather, to protect the sources and methods of the U.S. intelligence community.

“It’s easy to look at something like that and say, ‘holy smokes, what are they hiding,’” King said. “I can assure you that nothing’s being hidden except material that would be useful to our adversaries in terms of determining the nature and extent of our intelligence capability.”

Beyond its possible political impact, the report represents a confidence-booster to the country’s intelligence community at a time of great uncertainty.

Trump has openly criticized the intelligence community’s work, both as a presidential candidate and as commander in chief. His fury has only intensified since its inspector general alerted Congress last year of a whistleblower complaint regarding the president’s posture toward Ukraine, a process that resulted in his impeachment.

The president is still rejecting intelligence officials' more recent warnings — delivered to lawmakers last month — that Russia is interfering in this year's election and that Moscow has a preference for Trump.

In February, the president replaced acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire with U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, who previously had not served in any U.S. intelligence agency. The change set off more personnel moves that prompted fears among career clandestine officials of a widespread loyalty purge — a suspicion that was heightened earlier this month when Trump fired Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general, who had first alerted the congressional intelligence committees about the whistleblower complaint.

The latest report from the Senate panel is an open rebuke to the House GOP’s report issued in early 2018, which faulted the intelligence community's assertion that Putin had developed a preference for a Trump victory in 2016. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee said at the time that this conclusion was the result of “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the [assessment’s] judgments regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin's strategic objectives for disrupting the U.S. election.”

But Burr immediately spiked this conclusion, broadly hailing the intelligence community's tradecraft. The new report, too, dismisses the suggestion that the Putin findings were flawed.

“The committee found that reporting from multiple intelligence disciplines was used as evidence to support this analytic line, and that the analytic tradecraft was transparent,” according to the findings.

The Senate panel’s fifth and final installment in its exhaustive review of the 2016 interference is in the “editing stages,” a committee spokesperson said. The final product is expected to be around 950 pages long, according to sources familiar with the matter.

That report will focus on the counterintelligence aspects of the government’s Russia investigation, including allegations that Trump campaign officials coordinated with Russian operatives. Former special counsel Robert Mueller said last year that his probe “did not establish” such coordination.

The exact timing of the final release remains in flux with committee aides largely working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic. The panel’s work is almost exclusively conducted in a sensitive classified facility on Capitol Hill.

Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.