CIA confirms Russia interfered in US election to help Donald Trump win, according to reports
Washington Post reports CIA agents told the lawmakers it was ‘quite clear’ that electing Trump was Russia’s goal
A secret CIA assessment has found that Russia sought to tip last month’s US presidential election in Donald Trump’s favour, The Washington Post has reported, a conclusion that drew an extraordinary rebuke from the US president-elect’s camp.
“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” Trump’s transition team said, launching a broadside against the spy agency. “The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”
It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again’
The newspaper cited officials briefed on the matter as saying that individuals with connections to Moscow provided anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks with emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief and others.
Those emails were steadily leaked out via WikiLeaks in the months before the election, damaging Clinton’s White House run.
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favour one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” the newspaper quoted a senior US official briefed on an intelligence presentation last week to key senators as saying. “That’s the consensus view.”