Russians went after GOP rivals - expert
STATES: Before Russian propaganda and fake news targeted Hillary Clinton, it went after Republican opponents of Donald Trump, including Senators Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, as well as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, according to a cyber security expert who testified before the Senate yesterday.
Clint Watts, of George Washington University’s Centre for Cyber and Homeland Security, said during a break in a rare Senate Intelligence Committee public hearing that the one constant of the Russian campaign was ‘‘pumping up Trump.’’
Watts was one of six experts brought before the committee yesterday
UNITED
as Congress’ efforts to investigate Russian election meddling moved to the Senate after 10 days of drama and chaos in the House Intelligence Committee’s probe that appeared to freeze that investigation.
After a public hearing on March 20 where FBI director James Comey said his agents were investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign, the House committee’s momentum all but disappeared over the actions of its Republican chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, of California. Nunes announced that he had seen classified documents that suggested Trump transition figures’ names had been shared improperly by intelligence officials, then cancelled a public hearing set to take testimony from former Obama officials.
Yesterday, Nunes and Rep. Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the committee, agreed to a new witness list. But a ‘‘dark cloud’’ still hung over the House committee, Schiff said, after The New York Times reported that Nunes had been given the classified documents by two White House officials.
Schiff said the White House had invited him and other senior House leaders to view classified documents to determine if the material had dealt properly with the names of Trump transition team members, but he did not know if they were the same documents Nunes had seen last week.
The leaders of the Senate probe had pledged to avoid similar tension in their investigation, and the first day of public testimony seemed intended to do that, offering testimony from experts to help define the history, scope and methods of Russian, or Soviet, efforts to interfere in US politics.
Committee Chairman Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., introduced the testimony as a way to help Americans ‘‘establish a foundational understanding’’ of Russian activities in the 2016 election. Sen. Mark Warner, D-VA., the committee’s senior Democrat, said the Russians in 2016 hacked into Democratic emails, then used the information they obtained to attack Clinton. They also spread false news reports ‘‘to diminish and undermine our trust in the American media by blurring our faith in what is true, and what is not.’’
‘‘This Russian ‘propaganda on steroids’ was designed to poison the national conversation in America,’’ Warner said. He said that Russian meddling included an intense effort to reduce turnout among likely Clinton voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
During his testimony, Watts also said that the Russians had targeted Rubio, who is a member of the committee, in the first public reference to suggest that the meddling also had taken place during the hard fought Republican primary. He added that Bush and Graham were targeted in the same way.
Russia’s efforts, he said, were a combination of ‘‘pumping up Trump while tamping down the others.’’
Watts said the other Republican presidential candidates were placed at a disadvantage by a constant flow of pieces that painted Trump in a positive light. ‘‘Sure, the Russians put out some negative information on Trump as well, but it was 90 per cent positive. They had to put out some negative pieces to maintain credibility for the positive stories.’’ - TNS