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Intelligence reports contradict Trump
GOP members break with him at hacking hearing; adviser quits
GOP lawmakers side with evidence presented at congressional hearings on hacking.
WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans broke with the GOP’s incoming president in a nationally televised congressional hearing Thursday, blasting Donald Trump’s skepticism that hackers backed by Russian intelligence agencies had interfered with the 2016 presidential race.
Trump also suffered a break within his transition team as James Woolsey, one of the nation’s leading intelligence experts, resigned as a senior adviser because of growing tensions over Trump’s vision for intelligence agencies.
At Thursday’s hearing, only one of 14 Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, offered a modest defense of Trump, suggesting the presidentelect’s promises to boost military spending and production of oil and gas will serve to block Russian ambitions.
But as three American spymasters testified that only top leaders in the Kremlin, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, could have authorized complex cyberattacks against a U.S. presidential election, there was little pushback from Republican lawmakers who are highly suspicious of Russian intentions and deeply perplexed by Trump’s repeated praise for Putin.
“Russia clearly tried to meddle in our political system, no two ways about it,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan.
With the help of a series of mocking tweets and taunts, Trump’s relations with the intelligence community has been tense for weeks. After the hearing ended, he signaled plans to give the 17 U.S. spy agencies new leadership.
Aides said Trump would name Dan Coats, a former senator from Indiana, as Director of National Intelligence.
Coats would succeed James Clapper, who took note of Trump’s caustic tweets Thursday.
“I think there is an important distinction here between healthy skepticism, which policymakers — to include policymaker number one — should always have for intelligence, but I think there’s a difference between skepticism and disparagement,” Clapper said.
Meanwhile, people close to Woolsey — a veteran of four presidential administrations — said he had been excluded in recent weeks from discussions on intelligence matters with Trump and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the incoming White House national security adviser.
President Barack Obama told NBC Chicago in an interview broadcast Thursday that he hopes Trump’s tensions with intelligence officials will be reduced once Trump receives his own briefings and sees how “professional and effective” the intelligence agencies are.
Trump is to get a briefing Friday on the Russian hacks from a bevy of U.S. intelligence chiefs, including Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan and James Comey, head of the FBI.
They are scheduled to brief Trump in New York about evidence they say confirms the Kremlin approved the hacking and leaking of thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee and from Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, among other targets, last year.
They will be armed with a newly completed classified report that Clapper said would include details of Russia’s motivations — including whether the operation was partly intended to help elect Trump, as U.S. officials have said privately.
Obama ordered up the inter-agency review after Trump repeatedly rejected statements by U.S. intelligence officials about Russia’s role. Aides said Obama was briefed on the findings Thursday.
The full report will be given to Congress on Monday.
Parts will be declassified and released to the public after that, according to the White House.
Intelligence officials will “scrub this report and make as much public as they possibly can,” Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, said Thursday. He called the report “an unvarnished assessment.”
While Clinton and her aides have said the leaked emails damaged her White House bid, Clapper said he had “no way of gauging” if the alleged Russian hacks influenced “the choice the electorate made.”
The operation did not involve changing vote tallies, he said.
Asked about his level of confidence that the theft and disclosure of Democratic Party emails was directed by the Russian government and not done by a teenage hacker pecking away in a basement, as Trump has suggested, Clapper responded: “It’s very high.”
Clapper told the panel Thursday that since the election, Russia has continued to use computer hacks, leaks of pilfered material and fake news stories to erode faith in democratic processes and to try to weaken the U.S. government by portraying it as corrupt and dysfunctional.