WASHINGTON – The new, declassified report on Russian efforts to influence the presidential election has a troublesome prediction: Russia isn’t done intruding in US politics and policymaking.
Immediately after Election Day, Russia began a “spear-phishing” campaign to try to trick people into revealing their email passwords, targeting US government employees and think tanks that specialize in national security, defense, and foreign policy, the report released on Friday said.
“This campaign could provide material for future influence efforts as well as foreign intelligence collection on the incoming administration’s goals and plans,” the report said.
That could prove awkward for President-elect Donald Trump. The President-elect wants to warm relations with Russia and has repeatedly denounced the intelligence community’s assessment that the Kremlin interfered in the election. The new report goes even further by explicitly tying Russian President Vladimir Putin to the meddling and saying Russia had a “clear preference” for Trump in his race against Hillary Clinton.
The report, which called Russia’s meddling the “boldest effort yet” to influence a US election, was the most detailed public account to date of Russian efforts to hack the email accounts of the Democratic National Committee and individual Democrats, among them Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
It said that Russian government provided emails to WikiLeaks even though the website’s founder, Julian Assange, has repeatedly denied that it got the emails it released from the Russian government. The report noted that the emails could have been passed through middlemen. (AP)
