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Obama Orders Intelligence Report on Russian Election Hacking Russia Hacked Republican Committee, U.S. Concludes
(about 1 hour later)
WASHINGTON — President Obama has ordered American intelligence agencies to produce a full report on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, a move some of his aides said is aimed at presenting President-elect Donald J. Trump with definitive proof of Russia’s involvement. WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.
Mr. Trump has suggested that American intelligence reports attributing the hacking attacks to Russia were driven by politics, not facts. “I don’t believe it,” he said in an interview with Time that was published this week. “I don’t believe they interfered.” They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.
The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., and the secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, issued a joint statement in October saying that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. It concluded that the activity had to have been approved at the highest levels of the Russian government. In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.
But Mr. Trump has consistently questioned whether any coordinated effort to influence the campaign happened, and if it did whether Russia was responsible. Before the election he suggested that the effort to blame Russia was, in fact, an effort to discredit him and his call for closer relations with Moscow. Republicans have a different explanation for why no documents from their networks were ever released. Over the past several months, officials from the Republican committee have consistently said that their networks were not compromised, asserting that only the accounts of individual Republicans were attacked. On Friday, a senior committee official said he had no comment.
Until now, intelligence findings have been scattered in fragmentary reports, some delivered in closed testimony to Congress, others in the Presidential Daily Brief, and in documents prepared for the most senior government officials. Mr. Trump’s transition office issued a statement Friday evening reflecting the deep divisions that emerged between his campaign and the intelligence agencies over Russian meddling in the election. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” the statement said. “The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”
In announcing the study, Lisa Monaco, one of Mr. Obama’s closest aides who once led the national security division of the Justice Department, said the entry of a foreign power into a national election was a historic moment — a threat to the electoral system that would have to be addressed by future administrations. One senior government official, who had been briefed on an F.B.I. investigation into the matter, said that while there were attempts to penetrate the Republican committee’s systems, they were not successful.
“We may have crossed into a new threshold here,” Ms. Monaco said. “It is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned.” But the intelligence agencies’ conclusions that the hacking efforts were successful, which have been presented to President Obama and other senior officials, add a complex wrinkle to the question of what the Kremlin’s evolving objectives were in intervening in the American presidential election.
She added that Mr. Obama “expects to receive this report before he leaves office.” “We now have high confidence that they hacked the D.N.C. and the R.N.C., and conspicuously released no documents” from the Republican organization, one senior administration official said, referring to the Russians.
Russia has denied any involvement in the attacks, which appeared to involve hacking groups linked to at least two, sometimes competing, Russian intelligence agencies. One, the F.S.B., was the first to break into the Democratic National Committee, but went undetected for a lengthy period of time. The other, the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, was caught. It is unclear how many files were stolen from the Republican committee; in some cases, investigators never get a clear picture. It is also far from clear that Russia’s original intent was to support Mr. Trump, and many intelligence officials — and former officials in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — believe that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.
The fruits of its hacking, largely into emails, were published throughout the summer and fall, forcing the resignation of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the head of the D.N.C. Later, the emails of John D. Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, were released, in batches, by WikiLeaks, which has never said how it obtained them. The Russians were as surprised as everyone else at Mr. Trump’s victory, intelligence officials said. Had Mrs. Clinton won, they believe, emails stolen from the Democratic committee and from senior members of her campaign could have been used to undercut her legitimacy. The intelligence agencies’ conclusion was first reported by The Washington Post.
The report, according to senior administration officials, will trace the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and on prominent individuals like Mr. Podesta. But aides said it may also examine the slow speed at which the government responded. In briefings to the White House and Congress, intelligence officials, including those from the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, have identified individual Russian officials they believe were responsible. But none have been publicly penalized.
Whether the contents of the report will be made public is unclear. Intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which still has an active investigation of the hacking underway, have been reluctant to make public any of their findings; they are concerned about revealing sources and methods of how the incursions were traced back to Russia. It is possible that in hacking into the Republican committee, Russian agents were simply hedging their bets. The attack took place in the spring, the senior officials said, about the same time that a group of hackers believed to be linked to the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, stole the emails of senior officials of the Democratic National Committee. Intelligence agencies believe that the Republican committee hack was carried out by the same Russians who penetrated the Democratic committee and other Democratic groups.
After past investigations involving sensitive intelligence information, declassified versions of reports were sometimes published, with a classified version sent to congressional committees and some agencies. The finding about the Republican committee is expected to be included in a detailed report of “lessons learned” that Mr. Obama has ordered intelligence agencies to assemble before he leaves office on Jan. 20. That report is intended, in part, to create a comprehensive history of the Russian effort to influence the election, and to solidify the intelligence findings before Mr. Trump is sworn in.
But the rush to make sure the report is done by noon on Jan. 20, when Mr. Obama leaves office, is also driven, some officials acknowledged, by a concern that once Mr. Trump takes office there may be no appetite for an official intelligence assessment of Russia’s motivations, or even a timeline of events. Mr. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt about any intelligence suggesting a Russian effort to influence the election. “I don’t believe they interfered,” he told Time magazine in an interview published this week. He suggested that hackers could come from China, or that “it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”
Ms. Monaco is one of several White House officials who led the effort to investigate the report of Russian efforts to influence the election, and a crash initiative to help states secure their voting equipment and voter databases. Intelligence officials and private cybersecurity companies believe that the Democratic National Committee was hacked by two different Russian cyberunits. One, called “Cozy Bear” or “A.P.T. 29” by some Western security experts, is believed to have spent months inside the D.N.C. computer network, as well as other government and political institutions, but never made public any of the documents it took. (A.P.T. stands for “Advanced Persistent Threat,” which usually describes a sophisticated state-sponsored cyberintruder.)
But when questioned by reporters on Friday, she said little about what the Obama administration had done to ensure that President Vladimir V. Putin, or other senior Russian officials, had paid a price for their actions. The other, the G.R.U.-controlled unit known as “Fancy Bear,” or “A.P.T. 28,” is believed to have created two outlets on the internet, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, to make Democratic documents public. Many of the documents were also provided to WikiLeaks, which released them over many weeks before the Nov. 8 election.
Before the election, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had suggested that Mr. Putin would feel the effects of American retaliation, but perhaps in a form not visible to the outside world. So far, there are no public indicators of any covert retaliation, in the form of cyberattacks or even sanctions. Representative Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said on CNN in September that the R.N.C. had been hacked by Russia, but then quickly withdrew the claim.
Mr. Obama has rarely talked publicly about the hacking campaign, even though aides say it has been a preoccupation of his since last summer. He said far more in public about North Korea’s hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment two years ago, which led to him issuing sanctions against the North Korean government. That case led to an executive order that created a new category of sanctions that the president could use in response to cyberattacks, though since creating that power in April 2015, Mr. Obama has never used it. Mr. McCaul, who was considered by Mr. Trump for secretary of Homeland Security, initially told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “It’s important to note, Wolf, that they have not only hacked into the D.N.C. but also into the R.N.C.” He added that “the Russians have basically hacked into both parties at the national level, and that gives us all concern about what their motivations are.”
But Russia poses a far more complex case for Mr. Obama. The United States has extensive diplomatic interests with Moscow, and Russia has far more capability to retaliate against the United States in cyberspace or on the edges of Europe. Minutes later, the R.N.C. issued a statement denying that it had been hacked. Mr. McCaul subsequently said that he had misspoken, but that it was true that “Republican political operatives” had been the target of Russian hacking. So were establishment Republicans with no ties to the campaign, including former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
Mr. Obama has told aides he is deeply concerned about what he sees as Mr. Trump’s willingness to apologize for the Russians, and his refusal to denounce Russian efforts to undermine Western democracies. The report appears to be part of an effort to ensure the 2016 campaign activity is thoroughly documented and will not be written off as soon as Mr. Trump takes office. Mr. McCaul may have had in mind a collection of more than 200 emails of Republican officials and activists that appeared this year on the website DCLeaks.com. That website got far more attention for the many Democratic Party documents it posted.
Intelligence reviews and “lessons learned” projects are nothing new: There were extensive studies and commissions examining how the intelligence agencies erred in assessing that Saddam Hussein possessed or was developing weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. The same happened after the failures to predict the Arab Spring in 2011, and the American failure to understand the progress made in the Pakistani nuclear weapons programs in the 1990s. The messages stolen from Republicans have drawn little attention because most are routine business emails from local Republican Party officials in several states, congressional staff members and party activists.
But this report goes to an enormously sensitive intelligence issue that is also a fraught domestic political issue. Among those whose emails were posted was Peter W. Smith, who runs a venture capital firm in Chicago and has long been active in “opposition research” for the Republican Party. He said he was unaware that his emails had been hacked until he was called by a reporter on Thursday.
On Capitol Hill, the pressure for deeper investigations into the hacking is growing. Seven Senate Democrats asked the White House this week to declassify some of their conclusions, a step that Ms. Monaco said the intelligence agencies were now considering. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, has vowed to hold hearings on Russian activities, including efforts to get into military systems. He said he believes that his material came from a hack of the Illinois Republican Party.
Representative Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said this week that the hacking was “a wake-up call and a call to action,” and that there had to be “consequences.” “I’m not upset at all,” he said. “I try in my communications, quite frankly, not to say anything that would be embarrassing if made public.”
“What’s worse, our democracy itself is still being targeted,” Mr. McCaul said. . “We can’t allow foreign governments to interfere in our democracy, and when they do, we must call them out on it and respond forcefully, publicly and decisively.”