Coats’ statement indicates the assessment, which has not been made public, largely conforms to an informal analysis made by the Department of Homeland Security days after the November elections.
(MORE: US intelligence officials to review midterms for signs of foreign interference)
The intelligence community is made up of some 17 government organizations, including several with investigative or espionage capabilities related to foreign threats like the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.
In the run-up to the midterms, Christopher Krebs, a top election security official at Homeland Security, said the U.S. government was on the lookout for the three major methods of interference: a hack-and-leak campaign, like the one that splashed the contents of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails across the internet; the probing of election infrastructure systems through cyber activity, as U.S. officials say Russia likely did to systems in all 50 states in the last election; and the online influence campaign in which a Russian troll factory purportedly set up hundreds of fake social media accounts, pretending to be Americans in an effort to stoke political divides and sow chaos online.
Naira Davlashyan/AP, FILEA view of the four-story building known as the “troll factory” in St. Petersburg, Russia, Feb. 17, 2018.
Krebs said that while Russian trolls — and some Iranian operators –- appeared to remain active online and social media, the department did not see significant evidence of the first two tactics. When it comes to election infrastructure, a DHS official said on election night that there was extensive scanning of election systems, but nothing that was out of the usual or anything that the government could attribute to any foreign power. A DHS official told ABC News in the days after the election that the assessment still stood.
(MORE: Russia targeted African-American vote, made Instagram ‘key battleground’ in propaganda war: Researchers)
John Cohen, a former senior DHS official and current ABC News consultant, warned Friday that “one doesn’t have to hack an election system to impact the results of an election.”
“If Russia was able to use misinformation to influence the opinion of voters prior to voting, then they influenced the outcome of the election,” he said.
Joshua Roberts/Reuters, FILEDirector of National Intelligence Dan Coats arrives for a closed senators-only Capitol Hill briefing on election security at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Aug. 22, 2018.
Friday’s report did not attempt to measure what effect, if any, the influence operations had on the vote.
“The U.S. intelligence community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze U.S. political processes or U.S. public opinion,” Coats said.
(MORE: Russian firm wants to disclose ‘sensitive’ US government info in court fight with Mueller)
In the Sept. 12 executive order that mandated regular election assessments, Trump declared a “national emergency” to deal with election interference and mandated that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and others in the intelligence community assess any evidence of interference, as “foreign powers have historically sought to exploit America’s free and open political system.”
White House National Security Council spokesperson Garrett Marquis said that the Trump administration is currently reviewing the intelligence community’s assessment and expects another report on election infrastructure integrity from the Department of Justice and Homeland Security.
Sourse: abcnews.go.com
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