'Putin ordered effort to undermine faith in election and help Trump win, U.S. says' WaPo
"Russia carried out a comprehensive cyber campaign to sabotage the U.S. presidential election, an operation that was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and ultimately sought to help elect Donald Trump, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a remarkably blunt assessment released Friday.
The report depicts Russian interference as unprecedented in scale, saying that Moscow’s role represented “a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort” beyond previous election-related espionage.
The campaign initially sought to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, “denigrate” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and damage her expected presidency. But in time, Russia “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump” and repeatedly sought to artificially boost his election chances.
The report released to the public is an abbreviated version of a highly classified multiagency assessment requested by President Obama. Even so, it amounts to an extraordinary postmortem of a Russian assault on a pillar of American democracy.
The 14-page document made public also serves as an explicit rebuttal to Trump’s repeated assertions that U.S. spy agencies cannot determine who was responsible for a hacking operation that extracted thousands of emails from Democratic Party computer networks and dumped them into public view via the WikiLeaks website."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...=.b230fcba4e13
Wow, this is like some far out John le Carré novel. Putin directs the GRU to hack the DNC and gives the material to WikiLeaks so they can carry out Assange's vendetta against Clinton. SMH.