Russia’s influence campaign is driven by a desire to “watch us tear ourselves apart,” a senior FBI official said Monday, comments that come after details of a classified briefing to lawmakers became public in news reports, including a claim by the intelligence community’s top election security official that Moscow is interfering with the goal of helping President Donald Trump.
They also come as CNN is learning that details related to Russia’s preference for Trump were not discussed in another classified briefing with committee staff, which took place prior to the closed-door meeting with lawmakers that has come under scrutiny in recent days.
Speaking at a conference on election security in Washington, David Porter, the assistant section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, said that Russia is waging a “brazen and disruptive” operation against the US aimed at dividing the population and undermining traditional sources of information, like the news media, to make room for misleading narratives.
“Election interference is one of the vectors in this space. It’s designed to degrade confidence at the very foundation of our democratic system and our leaders’ ability to govern,” Porter said.”It’s also designed to weaken the adversary from within by identifying existing
Aaaand, the IC weighs in too:
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence pushed back Monday on reports that a senior intelligence official told lawmakers that the Russian government was actively aiding President Trump’s reelection, though it did not specify what the official did say at a classified, now-contentious briefing before the House Intelligence Committee on February 13.
“During the [February 13] briefing, the Intelligence Community did not state that Russia is aiding the re-election of President Trump,” a senior official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told CBS News. “This was an interagency briefing with pre-coordinated messages that had been briefed to other congressional committees.”
The senior official also said that the briefing, which focused on election security, was broad and covered threats from adversaries beyond Russia.
The official’s pushback was a rare effort by ODNI, which serves as the head of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, to dispel inaccurate accounts that have emerged of an intelligence assessment delivered at the House briefing by Shelby Pierson, the Intelligence Community Election Threats Executive. Pierson, a former national intelligence manager for Russia who coordinated election security efforts in 2018, was accompanied at the briefing by representatives from multiple agencies, including the FBI, CIA and NSA.
If the administration hadn’t been so obvious in strongarming the DOJ and the ODNI, people (other than the media) might be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Anyone with only the slightest bit of common sense knows that Russia favors Trump for obvious reasons. He’s destroying the United States of America. What’s not to like?