The assessment was scrapped after the agencies dissented, but the Obama administration proceeded to accuse Moscow.
The FBI and the National Security Agency, in the heat of the 2016 election, dissented from an intelligence community assessment that Russia was behind the leak of more than 19,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
The FBI and NSA instead had “low confidence” in the attribution to Russia, according to a Sept. 12, 2016, intelligence community assessment released to the public for the first time on July 18 as part of a batch of records declassified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
“FBI and NSA, however, have low confidence in the attribution of the data leaks to Russia,” the assessment states. “They agree that the disclosures appear consistent with what we might expect from Russian influence activities but note that we lack sufficient technical details to correlate the information posted online to Russian state-sponsored actors.”
A memo prepared for President Barack Obama, dated two days after the assessment, blames Russia for the hack and leak and does not mention the dissent by the FBI and NSA, according to the newly released documents.
The revelation is the latest twist in the decade-long controversy over the DNC hack, which lies at the very root of the now-discredited Russia collusion narrative, which ensnared the nascent Trump administration in 2017 and metamorphosed into the special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller.
Mueller concluded that investigation with no evidence to support the claim that Russia colluded with then-candidate Donald Trump to influence the election.
The hacking of the DNC was central to the collusion narrative. The FBI’s low confidence in the allegation that Russia was behind the email release is significant because the bureau had received, three weeks prior to dissenting with the assessment, the final report on the hack by CrowdStrike, the private cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to remediate the hack in the spring of 2016. The CrowdStrike reports have never been made public. The company’s then-president, Shawn Henry, told the House Intelligence Committee in late 2017 that his firm had no evidence that files were stolen from the DNC systems.
On Oct. 7, 2016, less than a month after the assessment marked by the FBI and NSA dissent, the United States accused Russia of hacking the DNC and leaking the files with the intent “to interfere with the U.S. election process.” Obama approved the release of that statement, which was made public via a joint release by the ODNI and the Department of Homeland Security.
