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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
She added that Mr. Obama “expects to receive this report before he leaves office.”
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, wascaught.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But this report goes to an enormously sensitive intelligence issue that is also a fraught domestic political issue.
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.
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.”
“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.”
Source: The New York Times.
