Russia aimed to help Donald Trump win the election using covert techniques, according to the declassified intelligence report released Friday. Ken Dilanian writes:
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."
"High confidence" is about as definitive as it gets in intelligence parlance. Naturally, that wasn't good enough for Trump, who issued his own statement 10 minutes after completing his briefing with intelligence officials. He reached a different conclusion:
"There was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the elections including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines," he wrote.
"Whatsoever!" says the popular vote loser.