Lucylastic
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The Republicans who lead the congressional committees overseeing intelligence, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security take the opposite view. They say that Russia was behind the election meddling, but that the scope and intent of the operation need deep investigation, hearings and public reports.
One question they may want to explore is why the intelligence agencies believe that the Republican networks were compromised while the F.B.I., which leads domestic cyberinvestigations, has apparently told Republicans that it has not seen evidence of that breach. Senior officials say the intelligence agencies’ conclusions are not being widely shared, even with law enforcement.
“We cannot allow foreign governments to interfere in our democracy,” Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who is the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and was considered by Mr. Trump for secretary of Homeland Security, said at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “When they do, we must respond forcefully, publicly and decisively.”
He has promised hearings, saying the Russian activity was “a call to action,” as has Senator John McCain of Arizona, one of the few senators left from the Cold War era, when the Republican Party made opposition to the Soviet Union — and later deep suspicion of Russia — the centerpiece of its foreign policy.
Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said there was little doubt that the Russian government was involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee. “All of the intelligence analysts who looked at it came to the conclusion that the tradecraft was very similar to the Russians,” he said.
Even one of Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California, said on Friday that he had no doubt about Russia’s culpability. His complaint was with the intelligence agencies, which he said had “repeatedly” failed “to anticipate Putin’s hostile actions,” and with the Obama administration’s lack of a punitive response.
Mr. Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that the intelligence agencies had “ignored pleas by numerous Intelligence Committee members to take more forceful action against the Kremlin’s aggression.” He added that the Obama administration had “suddenly awoken to the threat.”
Like many Republicans, Mr. Nunes is threading a needle. His statement puts him in opposition to the position taken by Mr. Trump and his incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has traveled to Russia as a private citizen for RT, the state-controlled news operation, and attended a dinner with Mr. Putin.
Mr. Nunes’s contention that Mr. Obama was captivated by a desire to “reset” relations with Russia is also notable, because Mr. Trump has said he is trying to do the same — though he is avoiding that term, which was made popular by Mrs. Clinton in her failed effort as secretary of state in 2009.
There are splits both within the intelligence agencies and the congressional committees that oversee them. Officials say the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. have not always shared their findings with the F.B.I., which they often distrust. The question of how vigorously to investigate also has a political tinge: Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, for example, are pushing hard for a broad investigation, while some Republicans are resisting.
Intelligence can also get politicized, of course, and one of the running debates about the disastrously mistaken assessments of Iraq that Mr. Trump often cites is whether the intelligence itself was tainted or whether the Bush White House read it selectively to support its march to war in 2003.
But what is unfolding in the argument over the Russian hacking is more complex, because tracking the origin of cyberattacks is complicated. It is made all the harder by the fact that the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. do not want to reveal human sources or technical abilities, including American software implants in Russian computer networks.
This much is known: In mid-2015, a hacking group long associated with the F.S.B. — the successor to the old Soviet K.G.B. — got inside the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems. The intelligence gathering appeared to be fairly routine, and it was unsurprising: The Chinese, for instance, penetrated Mr. Obama’s and Mr. McCain’s presidential campaign communications in 2008.
In the spring of 2016, a second group of Russian hackers, long associated with the G.R.U., a military intelligence agency, attacked the D.N.C. again, along with the private email accounts of prominent Washington figures like John D. Podesta, the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. Those emails were ultimately published — a step the Russians had never taken before in the United States, though the tactic has been used often in former Soviet states and elsewhere in Europe. That moved the issue from espionage to an “information operation” with a political motive.
One person who attended a classified briefing on the intelligence said that the investigators had explained that the malware used in the cyberattack on the D.N.C. matched tools previously used by hackers with proven ties to the Russian government. That sort of “pattern analysis” is common in cyberinvestigations, though it is not conclusive.
But the intelligence agencies had more: They had managed to identify the individuals from the G.R.U. who oversaw the hacking efforts. That may have come from intercepted conversations, spying efforts, or implants in computer systems that allow the tracking of emails and text messages.
In briefings to Mr. Obama and on Capitol Hill, intelligence agencies have said they now believe that what began as an effort to undermine the credibility of American elections morphed over time into a much more targeted effort to harm Mrs. Clinton, whom Mr. Putin has long accused of interfering in Russian parliamentary elections in 2011.
But to hedge their bets before the election, according to the briefings, the Russians also targeted the Republican National Committee, Republican operatives and prominent members of the Republican establishment, like former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. However, few of those emails have ever surfaced, save for Mr. Powell’s, which were critical of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for trying to draw him into a defense of her use of a private computer server.
A spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Sean Spicer, disputed the report in The Times that the intelligence community had concluded that the R.N.C. had been hacked.
“The RNC was not ‘hacked,’” he said on Twitter. “The @nytimes was told and chose to ignore.” On Friday night, before The Times published its report, the committee had refused to comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/us/politics/trump-mocking-claim-that-russia-hacked-election-at-odds-with-gop.html?emc=edit_th_20161211&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=69606674
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