The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday said that it agrees with the US intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election to hurt the candidacy of Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and help Republican candidate Donald Trump.
The conclusion is at odds with Republican members of the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who said that while they agreed that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to hamper Clinton’s campaign, that did not mean he wanted to help Trump.
The House committee said the intelligence agencies failed to use “proper analytic tradecraft” when they assessed Putin’s intentions.
Senator Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate panel, said his staff spent 14 months “reviewing the sources, tradecraft and analytic work” conducted by the intelligence agencies.
He said the committee uncovered no reason to dispute the conclusions of the intelligence assessment released last year.
Burr issued his statement after committee members met in a closed session with former US National Intelligence director James Clapper, former CIA director John Brennan and former National Security Agency director Mike Rogers. All three were deeply involved in issuing the intelligence assessment of Russian meddling in the election.
“The Russian effort was extensive, sophisticated and ordered by President Putin himself for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton,” said Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the committee. “In order to protect our democracy from future threats, we must understand what happened in 2016. And while our committee’s investigation remains ongoing, one thing is already abundantly clear: We have to do a better job in the future if we want to protect our elections from foreign interference.”
The top Democrat on the House intelligence committee agreed.
Representative Adam Schiff said evidence fully supports the intelligence agencies’ determination that Russia sought to help the Trump campaign, hurt Clinton and sow discord in the US.
He refuted Republicans on the House committee who said Russia did not aim to assist Trump, saying they now stand in “lonely isolation.”
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.