Senate Intel's newest Russia report undermines pro-Trump conspiracy theories

Source: Politico | October 8, 2019 | Cristiano Lima

The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday unveiled a sweeping new bipartisan report detailing Russian efforts to boost Donald Trump’s White House bid on social media during the 2016 U.S. elections, dealing an indirect blow to a push by the president and his allies to shift focus toward claims of anti-Trump meddling by Ukraine.

The report corroborates past findings by researchers and the intelligence community that the notorious Internet Research Agency troll farm, as the committee wrote, “sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”

The findings mark the second installment of the committee’s five-part report outlining the scope of Russian election meddling in 2016, the result of an expansive investigation that has spanned over two years and included interviews with over 200 witnesses. The committee in July unveiled the first chapter, which detailed Russian efforts to attack state elections systems and spread disinformation. The second installment focuses on the Kremlin’s documented attempts to sow political discord on social media.

The report arrives as Trump and his allies have sought to publicly downplay the role the Kremlin played in the 2016 elections and amp up scrutiny of unsubstantiated theories that Ukraine may have sought to interfere to undermine the president’s candidacy. Some Ukrainian officials have been linked to anti-Trump messaging going into the 2016 election, but there’s no evidence of collusion between Ukraine and U.S. Democrats, as Trump and some of his associates have proposed.

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