The Washington Post reported Thursday evening that senior Russian officials celebrated Donald Trump’s win according to intercepts that U.S. intelligence organizations were able to acquire.
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Senior Russian officials celebrated Donald Trump’s win, U.S. Intercepts Show
The Washington Post story describes high-level Russian government officials celebrating Donald Trump’s election win over Hillary Clinton as a “geopolitical win for Moscow, according to U.S. officials who said that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications in the aftermath of the election in which Russian officials congratulated themselves on the outcome.”
Included in the list of Senior Russian government officials who were overheard celebrating Trump’s win are key officials who the U.S. intelligence community believes had knowledge of the Russian cyber operation to interfere in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win. And the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment is that Russia’s efforts were aimed at least in part at helping Trump win the White House.
The Washington Post report continued:
Other key pieces of information gathered by U.S. spy agencies include the identification of “actors” involved in delivering stolen Democratic emails to the WikiLeaks website, and disparities in the levels of effort Russian intelligence entities devoted to penetrating and exploiting sensitive information stored on Democratic and Republican campaign networks.
Those and other data points are at the heart of an unprecedented intelligence report being circulated in Washington this week that details the evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and catalogues other cyber operations by Moscow against U.S. election systems over the past nine years.
The classified document, which officials said is over 50 pages, was delivered to President Obama on Thursday, and it is expected to be presented to Trump in New York on Friday by the nation’s top spy officials, including Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and CIA Director John Brennan.
Donald Trump has spent a substantial portion of his presidential transition time blasting the U.S. intelligence community trying to bring into question the analysis that Russia acted to help him win the election. And on Wednesday reports started to surface that Donald Trump is now planning to restructure the U.S. intelligence infrastructure, which has raised serious questions about what his motivations are for the restructure.
Russians felt pretty good about what they did
The Washington Post quotes a senior government official as saying “The Russians felt pretty good about what happened on Nov. 8 and they also felt pretty good about what they did.”
And a second senior government official said, “‘There are a variety of different exhibits that make the case, different factors that have provided the intelligence community with high confidence’ that Russia sought in part to help elect Trump.”
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Another section of the Washington Post story describes the significant detail that the intelligence report includes that removes any doubts that the hack was orchestrated at the highest levels of the Russian government.
U.S. officials who have reviewed the new report said it goes far beyond the brief public statement that Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued in October, accusing Russia of having “directed” cyber operations to disrupt the U.S. election, and concluding, in a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin, that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
The new report incorporates material from previous assessments and assembles in a single document details of cyber operations dating back to 2008. Still, U.S. officials said there are no major new bombshell disclosures even in the classified report. A shorter, declassified version is expected to be released to the public early next week.
Russians “were as surprised as the rest of the world”
The reporting indicates that the newly reported Russian communications increase the level of confidence in the U.S. intelligence community that, “Putin’s goals went beyond seeking to undermine confidence in America’s election machinery and ultimately were aimed at tilting a fiercely contested presidential race toward a candidate seen as more in line with Moscow’s foreign policy goals.”
However, the Washington Post report indicated that the even the Russians were surprised by their success. “Russian officials ‘were as surprised as the rest of the world,’ said the second U.S. official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. ‘In this case, you do learn things after the fact based on how they feel about it,” the first official said, adding that the intercepts added to the intelligence community’s ‘shifting level of confidence.'”
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