Senate Republicans Contradict Trump on Russian Interference – By Fred Kaplan (Slate) / April 21 2020
But the biggest mysteries of the 2016 election remain unsolved.
In what amounts to a sharp rebuke to President Donald Trump’s views on the subject, the Republican-chaired Senate Intelligence Committee released a 158-page report on Tuesday, concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin did interfere in the 2016 election, with the aim of denigrating Hillary Clinton and boosting Trump’s chances of winning.
The report also states that the U.S. intelligence community’s analysis of Putin’s campaign, which came to the same conclusion, was a “sound intelligence product,” written “under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.” (That analysis was ordered by President Barack Obama near the end of his term and finished three weeks before Trump took office.)
Although the report’s authors don’t take issue with Trump’s claims explicitly, Sen. Ron Wyden, the committee’s ranking Democrat, highlights the contrast in a brief minority report. Wyden recalls that Trump had denounced the intelligence community’s findings as a “hoax,” citing as evidence the fact that Putin had “very strongly” denied them. “Trump’s deference to Putin,” Wyden writes, “only serves to further Russian disinformation and undermine efforts to defend the United States” against similar attacks in the upcoming election.
The report dismisses several other assertions that Trump and his allies have made. For instance, Trump has often claimed that the investigation of Russian interference was sparked by the Steele dossier, a report—written by a former British intelligence agent, as part of opposition research—that further charged that Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russians. However, the Senate report concludes, “The Steele material did not in any way inform the analysis in the ICA [Intelligence Community Assessment]—including its key judgments.”
Continue to article: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/senate-intelligence-committee-trump-russia.html
