A CIA officer was quoted as saying, ‘We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected.’
A declassified House Intelligence Committee report dated Sept. 18, 2020, found that several intelligence reports that suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin aspired to help then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election were “substandard.”
Specifically, three reports published internally by the CIA after the election contained information that was potentially biased, implausible, unclear, or of uncertain origin, the House Intelligence Committee said in the report that was released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Wednesday.
“One scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” the panel stated.
The reports were used as foundational sources for an intelligence community assessment made public in January 2017.
The intelligence community “ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged—and in some cases undermined—judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump” and failed to consider plausible alternative explanations, the House report stated.
Trump defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Gabbard declassified the House report and published it online.
In the intelligence community document released in 2017, the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency stated that Putin and the Russian government “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”
The CIA and FBI were described as having high confidence in the judgment, while the security agency had moderate confidence.
The House Intelligence Committee examined the agencies’ sources and determined that the conclusion that Russia backed Trump did not meet the standards of proper tradecraft, according to the declassified report.
The conclusion that Putin tried to help Trump win rested on a questionable interpretation of an unclear fragment of a sentence that referenced how Putin allegedly chose to leak Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails that officials say Russia stole in a hack, according to the report.
“Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory,” the source sentence stated, according to the committee.
