Not a hoax. Not biased. The GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee issued a bipartisan report Tuesday agreeing with the U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia had interfered in the 2016 elections to boost Donald Trump's election bid.
In a very heavily redacted 158-page report, the committee consistently found the Intelligence Community's original January 2017 assessment of Russian interference to be "sound" and concluded it was reached both without political bias and using "proper analytic standards." Overall, "the Committee found no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions," Republican Intelligence chair Richard Burr said in a statement. The ranking Democrat on the committee, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, also noted that there was “no reason to doubt that the Russians’ success in 2016 is leading them to try again in 2020.”
Throughout the report, the committee offered nothing but praise for the intelligence community's work on the assessment. "In all the interviews of those who drafted and prepared the ICA, the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions," the report stated. "The Committee finds the conclusions of the ICA are sound, and is reassured by the fact that collection and analysis subsequent to the ICA's publication continue to reinforce its assessments."
In a break from the conclusions reached by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, the bipartisan Senate report also said “specific intelligence reporting" supported the ICA conclusion that Russian president Vladimir Putin and his government "demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump." The intelligence also supported the assessment that Putin personally "approved and directed" certain aspects of the Kremlin's interference operation. But by and large, almost the entire section on "Putin's role" is redacted.
This was the fourth installment of the Senate Intelligence Committee's Russia report. The fifth installment will deal specifically with the controversial Steele dossier, which was not actually relied upon for any of the conclusions made in the original January 2017 assessment. The dossier was, however, mentioned in an annex, an inclusion pushed by FBI leadership at the time in part because President Obama had instructed the intelligence community to include all information it had on 2016 Russian interference in the assessment.