U.S. agents confident Russia behind theft of documents

But whether it was to influence election is not certain.

WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence agencies have told the White House they now have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have been briefed on the evidence.

But intelligence agencies have cautioned that they are uncertain whether the electronic break-in at the committee’s computer systems was intended as fairly routine cyberespionage — of the kind the United States also conducts around the world — or as part of an effort to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.

The emails were released b y W i k i L e a k s , w h o s e founder, Julian Assange has made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency. It is unclear how the documents made their way to the group.

B u t a l a r g e s a m p l i n g was published before the WikiLeaks release by several news organizations and someone who called himself “Guccifer 2.0,” who investigators now believe was an agent of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service.

The assessment by the intelligence community of Russian involvement in the DNC hack, which largely echoes the findings of private cybersecurity firms that have examined the electronic fingerprints left by the intruders, leaves President Barack Obama and his national security aides with a difficult diplomatic and political decision: Whether to publicly accuse the government of President Vladimir Putin with engineering the hack.

Such a public accusation could result in a further deterioration of the already icy relationship between Washing ton and Moscow, at a moment when the administration is trying to reach an accord with Putin on a cease-fire in Syria and on other issues. It could also doom any effort to reach some kind of agreement about acceptable behavior in cyberspace, of the kind the United States has been discussing with China.

Stealing information about another country’s political infighting in hardly new, and the United States has conducted covert collection from allies like Germany and adversaries like Russia for decades.

Publishing the documents — what some have called “weaponizing” them — is a different issue. Clinton’s campaign has suggested that Putin was trying to even the score after the former secretary of state denounced a 2011 Russian election as filled with fraud.

“The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that they were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers,” Putin said at the time. “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal. They heard the signal and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, began active work.”

Campaign officials have also suggested that Putin could be trying to tilt the election to Donald Trump. But they acknowledge that they have no evidence.

Asked on Tuesday at the D e moc r a t i c c o nv e n t i o n in Philadelphia whether “there’s more to the Trump/ Russian relationship that h a s n’ t c o me o u t , ” J o h n Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, said, “Well, he certainly has a bromance with Mr. Putin, so I don’t know.”

Podesta said that while Russia has a “hi story ” of interfering in democratic elections in Europe, it would be “unprecedented in the United States.”

T h e Re p u b l i c a n p l a t - form, adopted last week in Cleveland, calls on the United States to “respond in kind and in greater magnitude” to cyberattacks, saying that “Russia and China see cyberoperations as part of a warfare strategy during peacetime. Our response should be to cause diplomatic, financial and legal pain.”

But the Trump campaign has dismissed the accusations about Russia as a deliberate distraction, meant to draw attention away from the content of nearly 20,000 emails and documents from the Democratic committee that were released by WikiLeaks starting on Friday. They showed efforts to impugn Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in his effort to challenge Clinton for the nomination.

Secretary of State John Kerry raised the attack on the DNC with his Russian counterpart, Sergey L avrov, on Tuesday at a meeting of foreign ministers in Vientiane, Laos. Lavrov dismissed the idea that Russ i a was i nvolve d, t e l l i ng reporters who asked about the charges: “I don’t want to use four-letter words.”

Kerry made no accusations, saying that he had to allow the FBI to “do its work” before he drew “any conclusions in terms of what happened or who’s behind it.”

The federal investigation, involving the FBI and the intelligence agencies, has been going on since the Democratic National Committee first called in a private cybersecurity firm, Crowdstrike, in April.

Preliminary conclusions were discussed on Thursday at a weekly cyberintelligence meeting for senior officials. The Crowdstrike report, supported by several other firms that have examined the same bits of code and telltale “metadata” left on documents that were released before WikiLeaks’ public ation of the larger trove, concludes that the Federal Securit y Service, known as the FSB, entered the committee’s networks last summer.