Quote:US intelligence agencies believe Russia acted covertly to boost Donald Trump in the election race, US officials have told leading newspapers. A report in the New York Times says the agencies had "high confidence" about Russian involvement in hacking. A CIA assessment reported by the Washington Post made similar findings. But Mr Trump's team dismissed the CIA line, saying: "These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."

Quote:Legislators overseeing the CIA and other intelligence agencies have told the Guardian they will be vigilant about reprisals from Donald Trump over an internal assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to ensure Trump’s victory. [/url]Fears of retaliation rose within US intelligence agencies over [url=https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/09/us-election-hacking-russia-barack-obama-review]a tense weekend that saw Trump publicly dismiss not only the assessment but the basic competence of the intelligence apparatus.

Quote:In a secret assessment — the content of which has been leaked to the press via high-level officials briefed on the intelligence — the CIA said Russia was not just trying to undermine confidence in the US election process when it hacked into the emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, and the Democratic National Committee. Rather, the report said, the Russians were working toward a specific goal: to hurt Clinton and boost Trump. That assessment was bolstered by the CIA's discovery that the Russians had also breached the Republican National Committee but chose not to release any of the information, lending credence to the idea that the Kremlin made a specific and targeted effort to embarrass Democrats. RNC chair Reince Priebus has denied the committee was hacked.

Quote:A startling report in the Washington Post described Republican and Democratic members of the House of Representatives being briefed in a secure room at the Capitol last week and remarking, out loud, that they appeared not to agree even on basic facts, let alone their interpretation.

Quote:U.S. intelligence officials now believe with "a high level of confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News. Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.

Quote:White House press secretary Josh Earnest suggested that President-elect Donald Trump had advance knowledge of Russia's alleged interference in the US presidential election before Election Day. Earnest made the comments while addressing journalists on Wednesday, The Hill reported, pointing to Trump's own statements on the campaign trail. During a press conference in July, Trump commented on the private email server Hillary Clinton used during her time as secretary of state. That server and the thousands of emails that flowed through it were the subject of a yearlong FBI investigation. Following a line of attack he often employed at his campaign rallies, Trump questioned Clinton's motive for discarding thousands of emails that were deemed to be personal and unrelated to government business. In an unprecedented move, Trump then directly appealed to Russia, live on-air: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 [Clinton] emails that are missing ... I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be nice," Trump said.

Quote:A recent CIA assessment, according to reports, concluded that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump's presidential bid. "If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act?" Trump tweeted Thursday morning. "Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?" The government did actually accuse Russia of hacking the US before the election. The US Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a letter formally accusing the Russian government of hacking Democratic Party organizations to "interfere with the US election process." Internal emails from members of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton's campaign, were leaked online throughout the campaign. In July, Obama said "experts" had tied Russia to the DNC hacking..

Quote:The FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are supporting a CIA assessment that Russia interfered in the US election partly to try to help President-elect Donald Trump win, according to The Washington Post and NBC News..

Quote:In 1972, President Richard Nixon’s White House dispatched burglars to bug Democratic Party offices. That Watergate burglary and related “dirty tricks,” such as releasing mice at a Democratic press conference and paying a woman to strip naked and shout her love for a Democratic candidate, nauseated Americans — and impelled some of us kids at the time to pursue journalism.

Now in 2016 we have a political scandal that in some respects is even more staggering. Russian agents apparently broke into the Democrats’ digital offices and tried to change the election outcome. President Obama on Friday suggested that this was probably directed by Russia’s president, saying, “Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin.”

In Watergate, the break-in didn’t affect the outcome of the election. In 2016, we don’t know for sure. There were other factors, but it’s possible that Russia’s theft and release of the emails provided the margin for Donald Trump’s victory. 

The C.I.A. says it has “high confidence” that Russia was trying to get Trump elected, and, according to The Washington Post, the directors of the F.B.I. and national intelligence agree with that conclusion.

Both Nixon and Trump responded badly to the revelations, Nixon by ordering a cover-up and Trump by denouncing the C.I.A. and, incredibly, defending Russia from the charges that it tried to subvert our election. I never thought I would see a dispute between America’s intelligence community and a murderous foreign dictator in which an American leader sided with the dictator.

Frankly, it’s mystifying that Trump continues to defend Russia and Putin, even as he excoriates everyone else, from C.I.A. officials to a local union leader in Indiana.

Now we come to the most reckless step of all: This Russian poodle is acting in character by giving important government posts to friends of Moscow, in effect rewarding it for its attack on the United States.

Quote:With his success in the US last year, Putin has put opponents on notice that there will be a price to pay for crossing him. Indeed, the complex infrastructure that Russia built to infect public discourse with false or stolen information isn’t going anywhere. It can be unleashed at any time, on any issue, domestic or international. 

This came into sharp relief this weekend when President Trump implied a sort of moral equivalence between the Putin regime and the US, a stunning reversal of long-standing policy. We are no longer talking about how to confront Russia, but whether we should confront it at all – a big win for Putin. Trump and the vice-president, Mike Pence, have also been frighteningly tentative about whether to maintain sanctions against Moscow.

Quote:For years, the Russian propaganda machine—a loose network of hackers and state media outlets, Twitter bots and bloggers—has pumped out a steady stream of digital disinformation aimed at drumming up support at home and destabilizing enemies abroad. But since Trump’s election, experts report, the Kremlin has doubled down on its dissemination of fake news. Sometimes the stories are completely made up. More often they are simply misleading or biased, tidbits of real reporting repackaged to serve Russian goals.

• A false report of a terrorist attack at a NATO base in Turkey
  
• The case of the phony Benghazi email
  
• False claims of pervasive voter fraud
  
• The Swedish attack that wasn’t
  
• Wiretapping claims pushed by a Fox News personality
  
• The murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich
  

Quote:A leaked NSA document which found that hackers connected to Russian military intelligence tried to breach US voting systems days before the 2016 election has national-security experts and former intelligence officials reeling. Russian military intelligence, according to the document, launched an attack on at least one US voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to at least 100 local election officials shortly before the election. In addition to being the strongest indication so far that Russia interfered in the US election, the document also indicates that Russian hackers may have "penetrated further into US voting systems than was previously understood," The Intercept, which first published the document, reported.

Quote:Lavish London mansions. A hand-painted Rolls-Royce. And eight dead friends. For the British fixer Scot Young, working for Vladimir Putin's most vocal critic meant stunning perks – but also constant danger. His gruesome death is one of 14 that US spy agencies have linked to Russia – but the UK police shut down every last case. A bombshell cache of documents today reveals the full story of a ring of death on British soil that the government has ignored.

Quote:To an untrained eye, USAReally might look like any other fledgling news organization vying for attention in a crowded media landscape. Its website publishes a steady stream of stories on hot-button political issues like race, immigration and income inequality. It has reader polls, a video section and a daily podcast. But this is no ordinary media start-up. USAReally is based in Moscow and has received funding from the Federal News Agency, a Russian media conglomerate with ties to the Internet Research Agency, the "troll farm" whose employees were indicted by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

Quote:Over 600,000 Americans followed a series of fake Instagram and Facebook accounts suspected to be linked to Russia that were detected and removed just days before the 2018 midterms. On November 5 — the eve of the contentious midterm elections that saw Democrats take control of the House of Representatives — Facebook announced it had been informed by the FBI about "online activity that they belied was linked to foreign entities," and subsequently took down dozens of accounts and pages.  In an update on Tuesday, Facebook said it has now taken down 99 Instagram accounts, 36 Facebook accounts, and 6 Facebook Pages. 1.25 million Facebook users followed at least one of the Instagram accounts — and 600,000 of these users were in the United States.