Trump Lying Again Nyt July 18 Cia Briefing Jan 2017
From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Bulletin: Putin Interfered
WASHINGTON — Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir 5. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.
The prove included texts and emails from Russian war machine officers and data gleaned from a superlative-secret source shut to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.
Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. Simply ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to deject the very clear findings that he received on Jan. half dozen, 2017, which his ain intelligence leaders accept unanimously endorsed.
The shifting narrative underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump regularly picks and chooses intelligence to conform his political purposes. That has never been more clear than this week.
On Monday, continuing next to the Russian president in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump said he accepted Mr. Putin's denial of Russian election intrusions. By Tuesday, faced with a bipartisan political outcry, Mr. Trump sought to walk dorsum his words and sided with his intelligence agencies.
On Wednesday, when a reporter asked, "Is Russian federation however targeting the U.S.?" Mr. Trump shot back, "No" — directly contradicting statements made simply days earlier by his director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, who was sitting a few chairs away in the Cabinet Room. (The White Business firm later said he was responding to a different question.)
Hours later, in a CBS News interview, Mr. Trump seemed to opposite course over again. He blamed Mr. Putin personally, simply just indirectly, for the election interference past Russia, "because he's in accuse of the country."
In the run-up to this week'southward ducking and weaving, Mr. Trump has done all he tin can to propose other possible explanations for the hacks into the American political arrangement. His fear, according to ane of his closest aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity, is that any access of fifty-fifty an unsuccessful Russian effort to influence the 2016 vote raises questions about the legitimacy of his presidency.
The January. 6, 2017, meeting, held at Trump Tower, was a prime case. He was briefed that day past John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director; James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence; and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the commander of U.s. Cyber Command.
The F.B.I. managing director, James B. Comey, was also at that place; subsequently the formal conference, he privately told Mr. Trump nearly the "Steele dossier." That report, by a former British intelligence officer, included uncorroborated salacious stories of Mr. Trump's activities during a visit to Moscow, which he denied.
According to nearly a dozen people who either attended the meeting with the president-elect or were after briefed on it, the four primary intelligence officials described the streams of intelligence that convinced them of Mr. Putin's office in the ballot interference.
They included stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee that had been seen in Russian military machine intelligence networks by the British, Dutch and American intelligence services. Officers of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the G.R.U. had plotted with groups like WikiLeaks on how to release the email stash.
And ultimately, several human sources had confirmed Mr. Putin'south own role.
That included 1 specially valuable source, who was considered and so sensitive that Mr. Brennan had declined to refer to it in any way in the Presidential Daily Cursory during the final months of the Obama assistants, as the Russia investigation intensified.
Instead, to go along the information from being shared widely, Mr. Brennan sent reports from the source to Mr. Obama and a small grouping of superlative national security aides in a dissever, white envelope to assure its security.
Mr. Trump and his aides were too given other reasons during the briefing to believe that Russian federation was behind the D.North.C. hacks.
The same Russian groups had been involved in cyberattacks on the State Department and White Firm unclassified email systems in 2014 and 2015, and in an attack on the Articulation Chiefs of Staff. They had aggressively fought the N.Southward.A. confronting being ejected from the White House system, engaging in what the deputy director of the agency later chosen "hand-to-mitt combat" to dig in.
The design of the D.N.C. hacks, and the theft of emails from John D. Podesta, Hillary Clinton'southward campaign chairman, fit the aforementioned pattern.
After the briefings, Mr. Trump issued a statement later that day that sought to spread the arraign for the meddling. He said "Russia, China and other countries, outside groups and countries" were launching cyberattacks against American government, businesses and political organizations — including the D.N.C.
Still, Mr. Trump said in his statement, "in that location was absolutely no issue on the outcome of the election."
Mr. Brennan later told Congress that he had no doubt where the attacks were coming from.
"I was convinced in the summer that the Russians were trying to interfere in the election," he said in testimony in May 2017. "And they were very aggressive."
For Mr. Trump, the messengers were as much a part of the problem as the message they delivered.
Mr. Brennan and Mr. Clapper were both Obama assistants appointees who left the regime the twenty-four hour period Mr. Trump was inaugurated. The new president soon took to portraying them as political hacks who had warped the intelligence to provide Democrats with an excuse for Mrs. Clinton's loss in the election.
Mr. Comey fared little better. He was fired in May 2017 afterwards refusing to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump and pushing forrard on the federal investigation into whether the Trump campaign had cooperated with Russia's election interference.
Only Admiral Rogers, who retired this by May, was extended in office by Mr. Trump. (He, as well, told Congress that he thought the evidence of Russian interference was incontrovertible.)
And the prove suggests Russia continues to be very aggressive in its meddling.
In March, the Department of Homeland Security alleged that Russia was targeting the American electric ability grid, continuing to riddle it with malware that could be used to dispense or shut down critical control systems. Intelligence officials take described it to Congress as a primary threat to American security.
Just final week, Mr. Coats said that current cyberthreats were "blinking red" and called Russian federation the "most ambitious foreign actor, no question."
"And they continue their efforts to undermine our democracy," he said.
Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, also stood house.
"The intelligence community's assessment has not changed," Mr. Wray said on Midweek at the Aspen Security Forum. "My view has not changed, which is that Russia attempted to interfere with the final election and continues to engage in malign influence operations to this twenty-four hours."
The Russian efforts are "aimed at sowing discord and divisiveness in this state," he connected. "We haven't however seen an effort to target specific election infrastructure this time. We could be just a moment away from the next level."
"It'south a threat nosotros need to accept extremely seriously and respond to with vehement decision and focus."
Almost as before long as he took office, Mr. Trump began casting doubts on the intelligence on Russia'south ballot interference, though never taking issue with its specifics.
He dismissed it broadly as a fabrication by Democrats and part of a "witch hunt" against him. He raised unrelated issues, including the state of investigations into Mrs. Clinton'southward home computer server, to distract attending from the primal question of Russia's function — and who, if anyone, in Mr. Trump's firsthand orbit may take worked with them.
In July 2017, just after meeting Mr. Putin for the outset time, Mr. Trump told a New York Times reporter that the Russian president had fabricated a persuasive instance that Moscow's cyberskills were so good that the regime's hackers would never have been caught. Therefore, Mr. Trump recounted from his conversation with Mr. Putin, Russian federation must non have been responsible.
Since then, Mr. Trump has routinely disparaged the intelligence about the Russian election interference. Under public force per unit area — as he was afterward his statements in Helsinki on Monday — he has periodically retreated. But even then, he has expressed confidence in his intelligence briefers, not in the content of their findings.
That is what happened again this calendar week, twice.
Mr. Trump'southward statement in Helsinki led Mr. Coats to reaffirm, in a statement he deliberately did not get cleared at the White Firm, that American intelligence agencies had no dubiety that Russia was backside the 2016 hack.
That contributed to Mr. Trump's conclusion on Tuesday to say that he had misspoken one word, and that he did believe Russia had interfered — although he as well veered off script to declare: "Could exist other people too. A lot of people out there."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/world/europe/trump-intelligence-russian-election-meddling-.html
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