Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized influence operations to help then-US president Donald Trump in the US presidential election in November last year, according to a declassified intelligence assessment that found broad efforts by the Kremlin and Iran to shape the outcome of the race, but ultimately no evidence that any foreign actor changed votes or otherwise disrupted the voting process.
The report, released on Tuesday by the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence, represents the most detailed assessment of the array of foreign threats to last year’s election. These included efforts by Iran to undermine confidence in the vote and harm Trump’s re-election prospects, as well as Moscow operations that relied on Trump’s allies to smear then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Despite those threats, intelligence officials found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to interfere in the 2020 US elections by altering any technical aspect of the voting process, including voter registration, ballot casting, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”
The report wades into the politically charged task of ferreting out which foreign adversaries supported which candidates during the election, an issue that dominated headlines last year.
It also says China ultimately did not interfere on either side, and “considered, but did not deploy” influence operations intended to affect the outcome.
US officials said that they believe Beijing prioritized a stable relationship with Washington, and did not consider either election outcome as advantageous enough for it to risk the “blowback” that would ensue if it got caught with interfering.
The primary threats instead came from Russia and Iran, albeit with different intentions and through different means, intelligence officials said.
Moscow sought to undermine Biden’s candidacy because it viewed his presidency as opposed to the Kremlin’s interests, though it took some steps to prepare for a Democratic administration as the election neared, the report said.
It added that Putin authorized influence operations aimed at denigrating Biden, boosting Trump, undermining confidence in the election and exacerbating social divisions in the US.
Central to that effort was reliance on proxies linked to Russian intelligence “to launder influence narratives” by using media organizations, US officials and people close to Trump to push “misleading or unsubstantiated” allegations against Biden.
Intelligence officials did not single out any Trump ally in that effort.
Iran, meanwhile, carried out its own influence campaign aimed at harming Trump’s re-election bid, an effort US officials say was probably approved by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
One “highly targeted operation” — the subject of a new conference in October last year by then-US director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray — involved a flurry of e-mails to Democratic voters in battleground states that falsely purported to be from the Proud Boys group and threatened the recipients if they did not vote for Trump.
Iran’s efforts, which officials say were more aggressive than in past elections and continued even after the contest was over, were focused on sowing discord in the US, likely because Tehran believed that would hurt Trump’s re-election chances.
In Moscow, Russia yesterday described the allegations as baseless.
“The document prepared by the US intelligence community is another set of baseless accusations against our country for interfering in American domestic political processes,” the Russian embassy in the US said in a statement on Facebook.
“The conclusions of the report on Russia conducting influence operations in America are confirmed solely by the confidence of the intelligence services of their self-righteousness. No facts or specific evidence of such claims were provided,” it said.
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