The US Senate Intelligence Committee concurred with US spy agencies’ findings that Russia sought to boost now-US President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, a bipartisan report declassified and released on Tuesday said.
The report found that the CIA, US National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI had coherent and well-constructed grounds to conclude that Russian President Vladimir Putin aimed to undercut Trump’s 2016 rival, former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Trump, who has consistently bristled at suggestions that foreign interference helped his upset 2016 victory, has sought to discredit the intelligence agencies’ findings as the politically charged work of a “deep state.”
Russia has denied that it was behind any efforts to meddle in US elections.
The Senate report — the fourth of five chapters so far released — found that the CIA and FBI had high confidence in their findings that Russia was trying to boost Trump’s chances, while the NSA was only moderately confident on that point.
It said that interviews with officials who drafted and prepared the intelligence community assessment had “affirmed that analysts were under no political pressure to reach specific conclusions.”
The report comes as Trump seeks re-election in November.
The committee report on the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), is heavily redacted, which sources familiar with the document said was because it is extensively based on documentation and testimony that remain highly classified.
“One of the ICA’s most important conclusions was that Russia’s aggressive interference efforts should be considered ‘the new normal,’” said US Senator Richard Burr, the committee’s chairman.
The committee is still working on a final chapter summarizing its investigation.
Congressional sources said that unlike the first four chapters, which present conclusions agreed upon by the committee’s Republican majority and Democratic minority, the fifth chapter would reflect at least some partisan differences over the extent to which interference by Russia influenced the election.
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