Putin ordered meddling, Trump told

WASHINGTON • Russia carried out a comprehensive cybercampaign to upend the U.S. presidential election, an operation that was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and “aspired to help” elect Donald Trump by discrediting his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a report released Friday.

The report depicts Russian interference as unprecedented in scale, saying that Moscow’s assault represented “a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort” beyond previous electionrelated espionage.

The campaign was ordered by Putin himself and initially sought primarily to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, “denigrate Secretary Clinton” and harm her electoral prospects.

But as the campaign proceeded, Russia “developed a clear preference for president-elect Trump” and repeatedly sought to elevate him by “discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavourably to him.”

The report says that based on Moscow’s social media activity, pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign — called #DemocracyRIP, or Rest in Peace — on election night because they anticipated that Clinton would beat Trump.

The document represents an extraordinarily direct and detailed account of a longstanding U.S. adversary’s multi-pronged intervention in a fundamental pillar of American democracy.

Trump emerged from a briefing on the report by the nation’s top intelligence officials Friday seeming to acknowledge for the first time at least the possibility that Russia was behind electionrelated hacks. But he offered no indication that he was prepared to accept U.S. spy agencies’ conclusion that Moscow sought to help him win.

Instead, Trump said in a statement issued just minutes after the high-level meeting ended that whatever hacking had occurred, “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”

“I had a constructive meeting and conversation with the leaders of the intelligence community,” Trump said. He acknowledged that “Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber-infrastructure of our government institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee.”

Trump’s statement seemed designed to create the impression that this was the view of the intelligence officials, including director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA director John Brennan, who had met with him.

But Clapper testified in a Senate hearing Thursday that U.S. intelligence services “have no way of gauging the impact ... it had on the choices the electorate made. There’s no way for us to gauge that.”