There were lots of reports and commentary before and after the 2016 presidential election about possible Russian involvement benefiting Donald Trump and casting doubt on the U.S. electoral process.
The staid, “grown-up” position, epitomized in this New York Times story a week before the election, was that Russia, even if it was actually involved in hacking Democratic political email accounts or interfering with state election websites, just wanted to throw a bit of chaos into the election and undermine trust in American democracy.
Yet explosive new reporting from the Washington Post tells us that the CIA informed U.S. senators last week that it was “quite clear” from a “growing body of intelligence from multiple sources” that Russia’s goal was to elect Trump.
The “consensus view,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators, according to the Post, is that “it is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected.”
The New York Times also reported Friday evening that intelligence agencies have “high confidence” that Russian cyberattacks had the goal of helping Trump because the Republican National Committee was hacked. The data and email traffic was not released. The hacked emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and sent to WikiLeaks gained international headlines for weeks, causing headaches for the Clinton campaign and the resignation of the DNC chair after internal party squabbles became public.
