‘The Russians are not our friends’

U.S. Senate panel to probe alleged election hacking

WASHINGTON • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday strongly condemned any foreign interference with U.S. elections and said the Senate intelligence panel will investigate Russia’s suspected election interference.

“The Russians are not our friends,” McConnell said.

McConnell’s announcement came a day after a group of senators called for a thorough, bipartisan investigation of Russian interference.

“This simply cannot be a partisan issue,” McConnell said.

McConnell declined to address his own role in a September briefing for lawmakers, where he reportedly dismissed intelligence assessments suggesting Russia was trying to sway the election in favour of Donald Trump. But he did express strong support for the intelligence community, putting him at odds with Trump’s public doubts about the reliability of the nation’s intelligence agencies.

“I have the highest confidence in the intelligence community and especially the Central Intelligence Agency,” McConnell said. “The CIA is filled with selfless patriots, many of whom anonymously risk their lives for the American people.”

Trump again emphasized his disbelief with tweets Monday morning:

“Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card. It would be called conspiracy theory!”

“Unless you catch ‘hackers’ in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn’t this brought up before election?”

Trump transition spokesman Jason Miller told reporters on a Monday conference call that talk of Russian interference in the election “might upset some people who are bitter that their candidate lost in November, but that’s not going to slow us down from focusing on going to work for the American people,” he said.

Miller’s comments seemed to suggest the “bitter” talk was coming from the CIA, which has concluded privately that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and individuals close to Hillary Clinton in order to release documents tilting the electorate toward Trump.

McConnell’s calls for a non-partisan approach to the subject echoed the sentiments of the Senate’s new top Democrat, who also vowed Monday to keep any congressional investigation of Russia from devolving into partisan warfare.

“Just the facts” is what incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer pledged any inquiry would focus on.

“We don’t want to point a finger and I don’t want this to turn into a Benghazi investigation, which seemed at least to many people to be highly political,” he said. “This is serious stuff, when a foreign power tries to influence our election or damage our economy, for that matter. This is serious and it’s gotten worse. And a bipartisan investigation that’s not aimed at one specific instance but looks at the broad scope of this is just what’s needed.”

But House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., dismissed calls for such an investigation on Monday, saying that the House Intelligence Committee is already “working diligently on the cyber threats posed by foreign governments and terrorist organizations.”

McConnell announced plans for a Senate probe the day after Schumer and Republican Senators Lindsey O. Graham and John McCain — the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee — and Democrat Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, called for a bipartisan probe.

“You have the CIA saying one thing — I haven’t gotten the briefings yet. The FBI is saying something else. We need to get to the bottom of this in a fair, non-partisan, non-finger-pointing way,” Schumer said.

McCain said that based on information he has seen, he cannot say for certain that he believes the CIA’s assessment that Russia intervened in the election to benefit Trump. But, he added, “there’s no doubt about the hacking — let’s establish that.”