‘Russia was source of leaks’
Intel report confirms hacking allegations
THE CIA has identified the Russian officials who fed material hacked from the Democratic National Committee and party leaders to WikiLeaks at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin through third parties.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the CIA and others had concluded that the Russian government escalated its efforts from discrediting the US election process to assisting President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign.
The intelligence assessment was presented to President Barack Obama on Thursday and briefed to Trump yesterday.
Trump has rejected the broad intelligence community’s assessment that Russia staged cyber attacks during the election campaign to undermine Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Russia has rejected the hacking allegations.
“By October, it had become clear that the Russians were trying to help the Trump campaign,” said one official familiar with the full report.
In some cases, the material followed what was called “a circuitous route” from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, to WikiLeaks in an apparent attempt to make the origins of the material harder to trace, a common practice used by all intelligence agencies.
These handoffs enabled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to say the Russian government or state agencies were not the source of the material published on his site.
In an interview with Fox News this week, Assange said he did not receive e-mails stolen from the DNC and Clinton aide John Podesta from “a state party”. Assange did not rule out the possibility that he got the material from a third party. — Reuters