“Russia took advantage of members of the Transition Team's relative inexperience in government, opposition to Obama Administration policies, arid Trump's desire to deepen ties with Russia to pursue unofficial channels through which Russia could conduct diplomacy,” concluded the committee.
WASHINGTON — Less than three months before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the Senate Intelligence Committee published its fifth and final volume comprising over three and a half years of investigation, offering a rare bipartisan look at the sitting president’s exposure and vulnerability to compromise by foreign intelligence agencies through his campaign and connections.
Story continuesThe Senate’s report also includes details about WikiLeaks, an online publisher founded by Julian Assange that first gained prominence after it published thousands of leaked documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2010. The summer before the 2016 election, WikiLeaks published a large trove of emails tied to the DNC, purporting not to know any details about the source that provided them — an assertion the committee has now contradicted.
While the committee also concluded that Trump’s foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos “presented a prime intelligence target and potential vector for malign Russian influence,” they assessed he wasn’t a “witting” servant of Russian interests. He also, they wrote, failed to achieve some of his loftier goals, such as a face-to-face meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump, despite the campaign’s support of such efforts.
The committee concluded that the FBI “lacked a formal or considered process for escalating its warnings about the DNC hack within the organization of the DNC,” and noted that FBI gave “unjustified credence” to an unverified document circulating in 2016 concerning the Trump campaign’s compromise by the Russians known as the Steele Dossier, written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
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