There is already a FP Diary on this, but I have some things to to add in extension to what I wrote earlier today laying out the background for this story.
The Unclassified version of the Intel Report on Russia hacking has been released and it makes it quite clear that Russia goal was the discredit Clinton and to elect their preference — Trump.
In "Key Judgments," the report says, "We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump."
The report says that the Russian government tried to help Trump "by discrediting Secretary Clinton." It says that the CIA, the FBI have "high confidence" in this judgment, while the NSA "has moderate confidence." [...]
The report does not offer any assessment about whether the hacking, leaking, and proliferation of fake news stories helped Trump win. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress Thursday that "we have no way of gauging the impact…it had on the choices the electorate made. There's no way for us to gauge that."
Ten minutes after his briefing Trump had this to say.
While Russia, China and other outside groups are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our government institution, businesses and organizations including the Democratic National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the effect there was no tampering with voting machines. There were attempts to hack the Republican National Committee, but the RNC had strong hacking defenses and the hackers were unsuccessful.
I have two key points:
1) You don’t have to hack the voting machines when you’ve already essentially hacked the voters with anti-Clinton propaganda that was distributed via RT and other Kremlin outlets such as Sputnik — much of which was used and parroted word-for-word by Brietbart, Trump and his campaign.
Even as Trump slings propaganda like a pro, he's also susceptible to it. During the first presidential debate, Trump said Google "was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton." He didn't cite a source for that information, but the claim had been kicking around in conservative media outlets, including Breitbart, InfoWars, and Fox. They attributed it back to Sputnik News, a Russian government-controlled news agency, which two weeks before the debate had published a report written by the psychologist Robert Epstein that claimed Google's search suggestions were biased in Clinton's favor.
"Create enough doubt for everything so that when the proof comes it is washed in the same disdain for all alleged truth."
The Sputnik report was prompted by a viral video released in June that claimed Google was actively altering search recommendations to benefit Clinton. (Search engine optimization experts quickly debunked the video.) Interestingly, that video credited a 2015 Wired article about research conducted by the same author of the Sputnik report—Epstein. Nimmo dug into the story and found that a full six months before Sputnik ran the report, both Sputnik and its sister television outlet, Russia Today, started reporting on Epstein's controversial claims as if they were already proven, interviewing him five times before Sputnik released its big report in English and seven other languages.
And 2) the Russians actually did hack the RNC, they just didn't release that information as the report states.
Russia collected on some Republican-affiliated targets but did not conduct a comparable disclosure campaign.
The report also points out that they collected information on several states and election boards as well as on Republicans.
It should be noted they didn’t release everything they gathered from the DNC or John Podesta, the point is that they specifically leaked that which would have harmed Clinton the most and withheld that which could have helped her, or mitigated what they released. Putin personally directed what they did and didn’t release via RT and Sputnik. Releasing embarrassing information about the RNC would have undermined their goal, while holding onto it — and remember part of what they hacked from the DNC was their opposition research on Trump — would make excellent blackmail or counter-propaganda material against Trump if he dares to become a problem for them.
So as usual he’s still full of shit, naturally.
IMO Russia did everything they could to choose our President for us, and it just might have made a critical difference by suppressing Clinton support among Bernie voters and allowing former Obama voters to feel Clinton was too toxic for them to consider. Trump has every reason to remain in denial over this, he’ll never admit it.