The FBI and the National Security Agency, in the heat of the 2016 election, dissented from an intelligence community assessment that Russia was behind the leak of more than 19,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
“FBI and NSA, however, have low confidence in the attribution of the data leaks to Russia,” the assessment states. “They agree that the disclosures appear consistent with what we might expect from Russian influence activities but note that we lack sufficient technical details to correlate the information posted online to Russian state-sponsored actors.”
A memo prepared for President Barack Obama, dated two days after the assessment, blames Russia for the hack and leak and does not mention the dissent by the FBI and NSA, according to the newly released documents.
The revelation is the latest twist in the decade-long controversy over the DNC hack, which lies at the very root of the now-discredited Russia collusion narrative, which ensnared the nascent Trump administration in 2017 and metamorphosed into the special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller.
Oct. 7 was one of the most eventful days of the 2016 presidential cycle. It was the day of the release of the Access Hollywood audio recording of Trump. It was also the day of the release of the first batch of the emails of former Obama counselor John Podesta.
The newly released documents show that by Dec. 7, 2016, two months after accusing Russia of hacking the DNC, the U.S. intelligence community was still relying on CrowdStrike’s analysis for its assessment.
“The U.S. Intelligence Community has high confidence in its attribution of the intrusions into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) networks, based on the forensic evidence identified by a private cyber-firm and the IC’s review and understanding of cyber activities by the Russian Government,” a memo drafted in preparation for a principals committee meeting states.
At the time of the drafting of the memo, the intelligence community had still not reached a consensus on who leaked the DNC emails. The same memo states that “most IC agencies assess with moderate confidence that Russian services probably orchestrated at least some of the disclosures of U.S. political information.”
A day later, on Dec. 8, 2016, the FBI renewed its dissent with the assessment.
“FBI will be drafting a dissent this afternoon. Please remove our seal an [sic] annotations of co-authorship,” an FBI email to the group preparing the presidential daily brief for Obama states. Obama requested the preparation of the brief to be ready for release on Dec. 9, 2016.
An hour after the FBI expressed its intention to dissent from the assessment, an email from an ODNI official to more than 110 intelligence community recipients stated that the presidential brief would be postponed.
“Based on some new guidance, we are going to push back publication of the PDB. It will not run tomorrow and is not likely to run until next week,” the email from Director PDB/ODNI stated. The acronyms stand for presidential daily brief and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
While the briefing memo was postponed, the principals committee meeting took place as scheduled in the Situation Room at the White House on Dec. 9. In attendance were the head of the key Obama administration agencies, including national security adviser Susan Rice, Secretary of State John Kerry, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, and CIA Director John Brennan, among others.
Notably absent were the directors of the two dissenting agencies: FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Michael Rogers. Instead, attending for the FBI was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and for the NSA, Deputy Director Richard Ledgett, according to a memo titled “Summary of Conclusions for Meeting of the Principals Committee,” dated Dec. 9, 2016.
The conclusion of the memo from the principals committee meeting outlined a list of recommended punitive measures against Russia. The list concludes with a bullet point stating that the principals in the meeting agreed to “publicly release and attribute to Russian intelligence services technical and other information” about the intrusion and a spearphishing campaign.
“The malware sample is old, widely used, and appears to be Ukrainian. It has no apparent relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an indicator of compromise for any website.”
In the days and weeks after the meeting, emails showed officials preparing an intelligence community assessment on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Obama administration officials set a Jan. 6, 2017, deadline to complete the assessment and release it to the public.
The working plan was to brief Obama and President-elect Trump on the assessment on Jan. 3–4; brief the Gang of Eight and the intelligence committees in Congress on Jan. 4–6; and release a version of the assessment to the public on Jan. 6, 2017, the day when Congress was to convene to certify Trump’s election.
One of the fruits of those efforts, a version of the intelligence community assessment dated Jan. 5, states that the FBI had high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered a campaign to meddle with the 2016 election in favor of Trump and that Russian intelligence services hacked the DNC and leaked stolen emails.
It is unclear how the FBI came to change its “low confidence” assessment.
In the years that followed, the FBI’s work on the investigation into Trump was heavily scrutinized by the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Office of Inspector General, and special counsel John Durham.
To date, all of the public findings from these investigations include no further evidence for the assertion that Russia was behind the theft and release of the DNC emails. Instead, the inquiries by the House Intelligence Committee, Inspector General Michael Horowitz, and Durham determined that the evidentiary core of the FBI’s probe consisted of the now-debunked reports by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
While the FBI was ultimately unable to verify any of the Steele reporting, the dossier played a central role in the bureau’s decision to secure surveillance warrants to monitor Carter Page, a Trump campaign associate. An inspector general inquiry into the bureau’s work on securing the warrants found significant failures among the rank-and-file and supervisors involved.
