December 14, 2017

WaPo: Putin Personally Directed Election Interference

Aleksey Nikolskyi/Planet Pix via ZUMA

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This is from a Washington Post story about President Trump’s skepticism toward intelligence showing that Russia had interfered with the 2016 election:

On Jan. 6, two weeks before Trump was sworn in as president, the nation’s top intelligence officials boarded an aircraft at Joint Base Andrews on the outskirts of Washington to travel to New York for one of the most delicate briefings they would deliver in their decades-long careers.

….Trump took a seat at one end of a large table, with Vice President-elect Mike Pence at the other. Among the others present were Priebus, Pompeo and designated national security adviser Michael Flynn. Following a rehearsed plan, Clapper functioned as moderator, yielding to Brennan and others on key points in the briefing, which covered the most highly classified information U.S. spy agencies had assembled, including an extraordinary CIA stream of intelligence that had captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation.

Is this something we’ve heard before? It’s dropped casually into the story in the 41st paragraph, which suggests the authors didn’t think it was especially important. Maybe I just missed it when it was first reported. But do we really have solid intelligence that shows Vladimir Putin personally directing the various hacks of Democratic email servers?

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