Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections [pdf]
dni.gov
dni.gov
https://sadbastards.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/khomeini-was-pr...
RT is clearly a propaganda organ and Russians are old hands at propaganda. That much is clear. But the germinal issue, the elephant in the room, is that corporate media in our nation serves such a thin gruel of "news" that outfits like RT or (earlier) Al-Jazeera gain a foothold and establish "credibility" simply by publishing what our media refuses to cover. Didn't they get the memo that we have thing called the internet these days and other sources are a click away?
The biggest nugget in this report, imo, is that NSA is not so hot about this assessment. Which reminds me, did the former CIA employee cum whistle blower dish out CIA's dirty secrets as well or did he just dump on the NSA?
How do we do that?
This should be it's own topic. Can you run an "Ask HN"?
My thought would be an information system that is jointly published in by all nation states - like a broadcast Wikipedia. The idea is that out of the chaos in the reporting the facts that every nation agrees on will get through clearly, whereas the opinions, unfounded accusations and the rest will bury themselves in a quagmire of costly effort.
I remain skeptical that merely flagging individual content as 'probable disminformation' will the address issue.
Propaganda is, at its core, a form of psychological manipulation. It doesn't necessarily have to involve overt lies. Omission of facts, tone, phrasing and choice of words, etc. are all effective tools.
There are patterns to propaganda. /That/ is their achilles heel.
http://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/08/archives/young-praises-isl...
Based on my understanding, an accurate claim would be the following: "The New York Times reported that Andrew Young, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, predicted that Ayatollah Khomeini would eventually be hailed as a saint."
This does not diminish the case against Russia. They have helped turn a political fringe into a force in the US, France, UK, Poland and elsewhere. Unless you truly believe open society and liberalism is wrong, Russia is throwing a wrench in the works, and deserves to be punished for doing so.
What's your point?
You left that out both times.
It feels like a lot of US folk are still in the blame-somebody-else stage of grieving.
Is it Russia's fault the US electoral college system allows a minority to elect the president?
If an external country convinced 60% of a population to vote against its establishment (and for the sake of argument, their (the voters) own self interest), it is immune from punishment because it convinced a minority?
We now want to punish countries that say different things than Americans agree with? Speaking Pro-Trumps and Anti-Clinton statements is VERY different than false propaganda.
Including libelous material?
In any case, freedom of the press is already very robust in the US, unlike some other countries.
I also doubt that any country in has ever accepted foreign propaganda, Manchurian candidates who subvert their electoral processes (speaking generally, not about any particular candidate) and mass manipulation of its populace (the fact the the US has engaged in this sort of activity does not make it right either).
I've performed my own analysis of election memes and I independently confirmed a staggering amount of Trump-related traffic with significantly above-average upvotes across several major media platforms.
https://iandennismiller.github.io/election-memes/
I wrote this 2 weeks before the election and even then, I was already looking closely at bot/sock puppet activity. I didn't connect everything at the time, but I now view the shockingly pro-Trump traffic in an even-more-skeptical light.
For some, there will never be enough evidence to prove social media were subverted for the purpose of influencing the election. For my purposes, however, I appreciate the PDF linked in this thread because it is actually relevant to my social media research. I am happy to cite the intelligence report as context for the social media findings I reported on.
I do not consider the book to be "closed" on this matter, but I do condemn all the commenters in this thread who are attempting to shut down the conversation by claiming there's not enough "evidence."
In closing, I quote from the report:
> This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment; its conclusions are identical to those in the highly classified assessment but this version does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the influence campaign.
https://www.rt.com/usa/rt-government-broadcasting-radio/
The seem to be very open about their funding from the Russian government. In fact, comparing it exactly to the BBC.
The little that's backed up by evidence in there is Russia's public propaganda efforts, like Russia Today, which aren't really anything new (though certainly interesting).
What's controversial is the hacking and I haven't seen anything that attributes the hacks to Russia beyond reasonable doubt. If the evidence was taken to a US court and put before a judge and jury, I don't believe a prosecutor could get a conviction.
I understand that the US wouldn't want to give up its intelligence sources but I also don't think that the people of the US should let the government make foreign policy decisions based on hidden evidence. That's how Iraq happened.
> In July 2015, Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee (DNC) networks and maintained that access until at least June 2016.
It's how foreign policy has worked in the past but I think it's demonstrated that it's not how foreign policy should work in the future.
> the solution to that is to elect officials we can trust.
That seems incredibly unlikely to happen. US elections seem to be mostly decided by who has the most political capital and media support rather than trustworthiness or merit.
> When the White House says the CIA has come to them with evidence that must be acted on, the White House can't turn to the populous and ask if there is enough evidence to act. They need to have the autonomy to act as they see fit.
I'd agree that this is the case but I don't think that the agencies themselves can be trusted anymore. The head of the NSA told a blatant lie in front of Congress and worse, got away with it. There's no accountability anymore so I don't think trust is wise.
I think the US as a country can only function when the people trust the government, the government respects the people and the people within the government trust and respect each other. None of these things are currently the case and I suspect things are only going to get worse. What that will cause I have no idea.
The authors addressed your complaint on the final page of the report. Stop confusing this matter by introducing a "burden of proof" fallacy.
They responded to it yes but they haven't resolved the issue I raised, which is that I'm not going to trust their conclusions without seeing verifiable evidence that would be accepted by a court and that I don't think anyone else should accept their claims either.
> Stop confusing this matter by introducing a "burden of proof" fallacy.
According to [0]: "You said that the burden of proof lies not with the person making the claim, but with someone else to disprove."
I'm saying that the burden of proof lies with the party making the claim. How is that fallacious?
There's no good solution to this, it's unfortunate that they proved themselves untrustworthy in the past.
Yes there is, and it is already in place. There has been bipartisan oversight of intelligence from Congress for decades. A subset of the people's representatives with the necessary security clearances make sure that there are no Deep State shenanigans. Yes, it failed in the run up to the Iraq invasion, but it worked for decades before, during the Cold War.
- Partisanship in Congress has resulted in a government so dysfunctional that it's been shut down. We can't trust people who can't even keep the government running to watch over services so accustomed to keeping everyone in the dark.
- The committee may have been effective during the cold war but in recent times, the NSA was engaged in mass surveillance for while this committee was in place and it took an internal whistleblower for it to come to light.
- The head of the NSA lied to Congress. The oversight committee can't oversee if they can't get the truth.
You might be able to argue that this is a solution but you most definitely cannot argue that it's a good solution when it's recently been proven to be ineffective.
First, there's no doubt that RT is Russian propaganda. That's not news, and I'm unsure why it's in this kind of report. Paid russian internet trolls is an old accusation too. I think it's probably true but I don't see any concrete evidence in this report.
The real question here centers on the emails: did some Russian intelligence agency leak the DNC emails to wikileaks? The report asserts that this occurred, but again offers no concrete evidence. Instead it focuses on establishing motive.
We do have concrete evidence (published by crowdstrike) that Russian intel hacked the DNC. But we don't have concrete evidence linking the leaked emails to that hack.
I'm trying to remain objective here. I don't think it's unlikely that Russian intelligence was the source of the emails. I just don't see anything new here to conclusively prove that assertion.
Maybe I'm being too picky about what constitutes concrete evidence.
What I "need" to do is keep a very close eye on government and demand that they be able to justify their decisions.
This is starting to look a lot like some relationship drama, where the mother-in-law constantly sabotages the marriage with tiny annoyances and seeding doubt. "Did you leave the milk carton outside the fridge?". "No, but didn't your husband have coffee earlier?".
I am unmoved by attempts to cast acting in my own interests as feeding into the plans of the boogieman of the month.
This might be the fundamental question. What form of voluntary governance (i.e., not authoritarianism) does not require trust by the governed in the government?
Of course, they could not have it and thus just be lying.
We should be having a discussion about how the desires of the intelligence community to spy have undercut the improvement of general security for personal data in the US. The email infrastructure of the Democratic campaign, seems more or less like a slightly below average standard email infrastructure used by most of the US (that's another shocking issue, but a side discussion at this point too).
The main issues IMHO are a) the intelligence community spying capability did not prevent this hack - why not, and b) we should consider that spying infrastructure requests and the legal implications of them holds back development of better security. Better general security for most private email & communications for citizens and businesses in the US would have been more effective in preventing the issue than spying capability.
But blaming the victim is just doing the aggressor's work. If russian agents broke into a power plant and blew it up, would you be writing about the need to fix the nation's fences.
I also disagree with your assessment that the DNC's security was "slightly below standards". They could have easily enabled two-factor authentication which would have foiled these hacking attempts – and the US agencies' agenda doesn't play into this story at all.
But it wasn't enabled, and that's one specific reason for calling it below standard... of what was even available in commercial technologies..
If you are being honest with your comment, then you are unwittingly committing several logical fallacies:
- burden of proof: demanding confidential information that will never be provided ensures you will never receive "proof"
- moving the goalposts: this report includes several new analyses, but by moving the goalposts it will never be "enough"
- straw man: the issue is not restricted to DNC emails; at a minimum it includes manipulation of US social media platforms.
-The idea that some information is classified and some isn't is silly. There's just information that you're willing to divulge and information you're unwilling to divulge. I see no reason to assume evidence that would implicate Russia must be so sensitive that the government would never divulge it.
-I'm not moving any goalposts. There's only one piece of this puzzle I'm interested in: evidence linking Russia to the leaked emails. I accept that Russia has a broad propaganda network that often attempts to undermine US interests. I don't see that as an extraordinary thing.
-See above. I accept the astonishing amount of propaganda. But the emails are the key piece here, and there's no concrete information in this report.
I don't dismiss the DNI's claims, I just don't see the extraordinary evidence generally required for extraordinary claims.
I would love to see more of their raw data. I research social media and I have specifically investigated 2016 US election memes, so those data are extremely interesting to me. However, the DNI PDF states:
> This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment; its conclusions are identical to those in the highly classified assessment but this version does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the influence campaign.
So, irrespective of yours or my assessment of what the raw evidence might be like, DNI already stated that they think it's too sensitive. This probably isn't going to change for 10-20 years (which is a common lifespan for classified information) so you've just got to figure out a way to analyze this situation without the specific evidence used to create this report. It doesn't mean there isn't other evidence out there. Like I said: I research social media and I have my own evidence stack. Some of it is here:
https://iandennismiller.github.io/election-memes/
I am considering the events of the past 2 months as "moving the goalposts" - and this isn't a personal thing against you or any individual. Originally, we had statements from certain officials, but that wasn't enough. Then we had consensus among intelligence agencies, but again that's not enough. Then we had a statement from the president, but that's not enough. Now we have this report and it's still not enough.
On the straw man, the emails are not the entirety of the DNI argument, so reducing it to that creates the straw man, and dismissing the whole report on the basis of the emails is just how the straw man fallacy works, in practice. I am focused on social media, but you're focused on emails. It's okay to care more about one thing than another, but it is a logical fallacy to dismiss the rest of the report because you're not satisfied with the part you care about.
Lastly, I don't think it's extraordinary at all to claim that Russian intelligence managed hundreds of sock puppet accounts across Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Imgur, Twitter, and other platforms. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that the opposite was true. In fact, none of the claims in the report are extraordinary; it's all extremely plausible.
My (sortof expert) opinion is that I think the DNI social media conclusions are plausible.
Perfectly agreed. The United States and China also have these sock puppets, as do other countries. I think this is one of the reasons why people get into a tiffy whenever I insist on working with the facts and not US propaganda and rumors. Get accused of being a shill for Greece, Turkey, Russia, China, etc all the time.
Social media is swarming with sockpuppets, and now the game has escalated more, with H.R. 5181 passing in NDAA 2017, the Center for Global Engagement will be empowered to experiment with the techniques for social media propaganda developed by DARPA's SMISC program.
Don't know if the clock is moving toward midnight, or if just reddit is going to choke on itself.
Interesting. I hadn't heard of SMISC - thanks!
I know people who first said: "This is a CIA hitjob. The FBI and the NSA will never sign on to these accusations." Of course, now that the NSA has expressed "moderate" confidence and the CIA and FBI have expressed "high confidence" those people have mysteriously found other problems with this narrative.
I don't dismiss this report at all. It has solidified my belief in general Russian meddling (paid trolls, RT, propaganda, etc). But, in my opinion, that is old news (in fact, "Annex A" of the report is from 2012). My favorite piece of Russian propaganda is this "satellite photo" of a Ukrainian fighter firing a missile at MH17: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/11/14/1415993353768_wps_...
So, to me, the fact that Russian propaganda is constantly working to discredit the United States isn't an extraordinary thing: I take it for granted.
What seems extraordinary to me is the allegation that Russian intelligence leaked the emails through wikileaks and dcleaks. I don't think that claim is implausible and I haven't dismissed it, but I was hoping to see more evidence, that's all.
Hopefully I'll be alive in 20 years so when this stuff gets declassified I'll know if I was right or wrong!
This is the source and methods (or what I like to call S&M) debate.
Let's say your nephew wants to come out as gay. He tells only his mother. His mother tells you. Now you write on Facebook, "I just learned my nephew is gay. He will always be my nephew and I love him and his courage." Now your nephew knows his mom (your sister) blabbed.
This could have a ton of effects on your intelligence gathering network. For example, your sister might not want to tell you anything anymore. You just lost a source. Your nephew, feeling betrayed, might cut his mother out of his life. You just burned a source.
These are situations where even revealing judgments could lose sources. In situations where there are multiple sources, it becomes somewhat more difficult for your target to identify the leak, which gives you a larger safety margin.
So the question the intelligence agencies and the administration had to answer with this report is, "Are these judgments worth burning sources? If we reveal specific pieces of evidence, which are highly traceable to the original leak, can those sources be burned?"
Clearly, they made a call that you found unsatisfactory. But I hope you understand why they made that call.
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf p. 4:
> Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign.
> some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015
Of course I can only speculate on the juiciness (or not) of the details in the redacted half. The US government reflexively overclassifies things (perhaps to provide the enemy with an excess of possible targets) but I imagine some of it must be hyper-sensitive.
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/04/washpost-is-richly-rewar...
So instead of complaining about evidence. Assume that the Obama administration is not trying to make their last big story before leaving a lie and refute the motives etc.
Why should we trust their report if they aren't going to show us the evidence? Why should we trust them at all for that matter?
Remains to be seen if he'll be so critical of the future POTUS
To equate organisations like the New York Times and the Washington Post with the Fake News scandals like Pizza Gate is beyond the pale. And sure they make mistakes as all people do but they aren't intentionally doing so which is why Greenwald constantly assumes.
And not sure why you posted this now because nothing in that article refutes the claims that Russia was involved in the US election.
But to that I say - so what? Would Democrats have been just as outraged if it was the Republicans having their info leaked, like say Trump's tax returns?
I remember the Democrats were pretty damn gleeful about Romney's "47 percent" comment, which was recorded without his permission and then leaked to the press. Why didn't Democrats cry that "HEY! We should see Obama's secret recordings, too! It's not fair that only Romney's recordings are being leaked."
Nobody did that, and nobody would've done that if it had happened to Trump, because in reality the reaction is extremely partisan, and has nothing or very little to do with the principle of "influencing the election".
Also, the Democrats have been pissed off about Trump not releasing his tax returns because they thought that by hiding that he was essentially manipulating the public.
I completely agree with that, but now let's turn back to Clinton and admit that Clinton hiding the fact that her team, the DNC, and the media colluded to help her win, was also a manipulation of the public. Something the public should have learned about.
Which party gets the most leaks has little to do with anything, and I also see very few people blame the DNC for having such poor security in the first place.
And I don't follow much right-wing media, perhaps they did cover this a lot, but as far as "mainstream media" goes, I remember they were trying very hard not to cover what was in the emails, and instead kept trying to make the conversation about "Russians hacking the DNC and helping Trump".
So I'm not even sure if the emails influenced the election that much. And most of Sanders' supporters who were engaged in the primary were already aware of the collusion between the DNC and Clinton long before any of the leaks, because it was obvious. Why do you think there were so many protests at the DNC (which were also not covered that well in the media) that embarrassed Democrats?
/s
Besides for the illegal action of actually doing the hack, I don't see how this is any different than all the news stories attacking Trump.
I think social media have been undermined for some time, although previously it was aggressive advertisers who were the culprits. "Astroturfing" is an old word by now. During the US election, this was simply taken to another level, and in a way that had a measurable impact on people's beliefs.
Isn't that "influencing the election" as well? The U.S. needs so many new laws and changes to make its elections more fair (including media regulations during electoral campaigns), I wouldn't even know where to start.
> http://www.campaignlegalcenter.org/news/press-releases/fec-m...
"Correct the Record: The Clinton-supporting super PAC, Correct the Record, asserts it can coordinate directly with the Clinton campaign as long as it doesn’t run paid advertising. Clinton’s attorneys are relying on a narrow 2006 FEC regulation that declared that content posted online for free, such as blogs written by unpaid volunteers, is off limits from regulation. But Correct the Record is not a volunteer blogging operation. It is a $6 million professional opposition research, surrogate training and messaging operation staffed with paid professional employees and operating out of a high-rise Washington, D.C. office building."
There's no indication that Clinton gave them money, is there?
But factcheck.org, for sure.
>“Barrier Breakers accounts are always identified as Correct the Record,” spokesperson Elizabeth Shappell said.
It is claimed by many that CTR publicly claimed their work was to pay for anonymous comments online. This impression has spread far and wide. There is no such claim or statement by the PAC -- that is clearly false.
This is the rabbit hole that so many statist authoritarians want to descend. That will be really bad for the nation. The framers had it right when they said "Congress shall make no law..."
How is this different than "Voice of America" or the BBC for that matter; those media give a lot of space to political opposition in places like China or Russia.
Sure RT have an opinion and a bias wrt. US politics; but it is not like the people watching would be in any doubt that this channel was sponsered by Russia and had "an Russian perspective" on things.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/29/obamas-christmas-gift...
http://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-release...
No, it's not; if you read the Key Judgements section, the part about the "state-run propaganda machine" is the last and least of the four major areas of influence it cites.
Political opposition is suppressed or effectively banned in those countries so its activities are newsworthy. RT does not report on the Russian opposition much or engage in direct criticism of the regime. It's qualitatively different from the BBC and even the VOA.
Russia or China do not allow US or western press operations, government-funded or otherwise, as much freedom of action in their countries as the US allows RT. It simply isn't a level playing field.
Were they gaming Youtube? Did the major news media decide not to engage and invest in their youtube content? Red Herring?
Reminds me of this[0]
Are there any good resources about how to vet truth in whitewash propaganda situations?
My go-to is wikipedia, which isn't perfect, but when you want to answer something like "How much foreign cyber-warfare has America participated in?" and get just the raw data you can trust it to not have an agenda.
It's inconsistent for a foreign government expressing opinion on American politics to be called "propaganda" while we allow corporations to spend any amount of money trying to change peoples opinions via super-pacs. The line between propaganda and political dissent is very blurry.
I suppose I'd say Russia didn't do anything "wrong," (after all Americans foreign interventions are much more heavy-handed than anything described here), but I do now think it's likely Russia did want Trump to win and that Russia would potentially use more advanced meddling techniques if it thought it could get away with it.
Our media stations are propaganda outlets as well. I get my 'news' from many different propaganda sources because I've found that it is very easy to tell when they are outright lying so I can just ignore that, but typically they say something that is close to the truth. The thing is that there is so much truth out there so each propaganda outlet will tell some portion of the truth that fits their narrative the best. If you grab all these different portions of the truth you can begin to piece it all together and have the biggest piece of the truth possible.
And I can't tell if the DNC is supposed to be a private or government entity. If you complain that they cheated and screwed over Bernie, people respond with "well it's a private organization, they can do what they want". But now it's a matter of "election rigging" and "national security" that they've supposedly been hacked.
And if the information released was true, who cares if it was a hack? If the information is true, which it appears to be, then it was a service to our country that it was released.
However, once that information is out there, and verifiable through means like DKIM, we should absolutely scrutinize its content, and every voter should follow reports closely.
More broadly, it serves to normalize propaganda by treating a deliberate attempt to trick us as if it were the same thing as an honest but maybe imperfect attempt at sharing information.
I'm not agreeing to that in any way, and the US doesn't feel the same way about any other election in the world.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/10/13...
1. "DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying."
2. "When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency."
3. "Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency."
4. "Moscow also saw the election of Presidentelect Trump as a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). "
5. "Pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP, on election night in anticipation of Secretary Clinton’s victory, judging from their social media activity."
-- Full stop -- Do they mean Americans who are "Pro-Kremlin" like many progressives and conservatives that are anti-war? Or do they mean paid/covert bloggers? It seems to me they mean Americans? In which case how is that in the report at all?
6. "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries."
7. "RT and Sputnik—another government-funded outlet producing pro-Kremlin radio and online content in a variety of languages for international audiences—consistently cast president-elect Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional US media outlets that they claimed were subservient to a corrupt political establishment. "
-- I actually believe this to be true. I absolutely hate Trump and think he's a despicable man and unfit for the presidency. However, I thought that the media coverage of him was absolutely brutally skewed and over-the-top clearly politically aligned. Anyway I saw this kind of reporting across international media outlets and friends and family and other news media outlets in the US said the same thing.
8. "RT America TV, a Kremlin-financed channel operated from within the United States, has substantially expanded its repertoire of programming that highlights criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties."
-- I think these speak to me because American media will not cover civil rights abuses and curtailments in a non-apologetic fashion. It seems typical to me that state-propaganda criticizes their adversaries' civil liberty abuses, as the US does to Russia and China and as Russia and China do to the US.
The whole section on RT seemed to be completely off topic and distractionary. I only got half way through it.
I did not see any assessment that Podesta's emails were hacked by Russia or shared by Russia. I was hoping to see that because people keep grouping it into the DNC hacks.
Keep sowing that uncertainty and doubt on a report that is backed by classified information. Do you want them to reveal the names and locations of all our spies and detail our sigint methods? The end of the report says what "High Confidence" means.
There's also a difference between "argument from authority" and "argument from a position of known knowledge". Example: radio ad says "Buy milk! We need milk". Will you give it the same credence as your spouse saying the same thing?
1. https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/update-on-s...
I have a throwaway as the anonymous accounts on HN seem to be called that I use for example, not for trolling of course because I care about this community, but I hardly ever use it and it has probably less than 50 points due to that. How can a 150 day account accrue 10 points per day?
But HN has a liberal bias if anything; however I do believe that most people are a bit disappointed with this report. Maybe having hoped that it would clearly provide evidence that the big email collections WikiLeaks had from the democrats were provided by Russian state actors.
Instead we get half a report on RT which anyone could have written.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13341032 and marked it off-topic.
Other than the time the US government pointed the finger at Russia a month before the election?[1] It came up numerous times in the debates. Newsweek had an article about Russia's motives a few days before the election[2].
This is not something that is brand new, why are you acting like it is?
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-departme...
[2] http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-russia-h...
I'll delete this silly rant.
tl;dr : More of 'trust us folks' because KGB, Soviet Union, Emails , Putin , Youtube page views.
1. https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/update-on-s... - the FBI now has enough information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible for these actions.
that still makes the 'conclusion' wrong.
This report is from US Government agencies.
So by definition "full supporting information, including specific intelligence on key elements of the influence campaign" doesn't support the conclusions.[1]
1. Weapons of Mass Destruction
The US has one political party: The Right. Meddling in the affairs of other nations, conducting proxy wars, arming the world, crushing the little guy.
That's how the US Government comes across a lot of the time.
edit: When it came to WMD, most people who were paying attention believed based on the evidence and the inspectors that there wasn't any; but I assumed that the administration had more evidence for the endless detail and droning on than a single angry defector looking for German citizenship. I was wrong.