By David E. Sanger and Matthew Rosenberg
WASHINGTON
— Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly
classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016
American election.
The evidence
included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information
gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described
to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking
and disinformation.
Mr. Trump
sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended
the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud
the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own
intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.
The
shifting narrative underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump regularly
picks and chooses intelligence to suit his political purposes. That has
never been more clear than this week.
On
Monday, standing next to the Russian president in Helsinki, Finland,
Mr. Trump said he accepted Mr. Putin’s denial of Russian election
intrusions. By Tuesday, faced with a bipartisan political outcry, Mr.
Trump sought to walk back his words and sided with his intelligence
agencies.
On Wednesday, when a
reporter asked, “Is Russia still targeting the U.S.?” Mr. Trump shot
back, “No” — directly contradicting statements made only days earlier by
his director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, who was sitting a few
chairs away in the Cabinet Room. (The White House later said he was
responding to a different question.)
Hours
later, in a CBS News interview, Mr. Trump seemed to reverse course
again. He blamed Mr. Putin personally, but only indirectly, for the
election interference by Russia, “because he’s in charge of the
country.”
In the run-up to this
week’s ducking and weaving, Mr. Trump has done all he can to suggest
other possible explanations for the hacks into the American political
system. His fear, according to one of his closest aides who spoke on the
condition of anonymity, is that any admission of even an unsuccessful
Russian attempt to influence the 2016 vote raises questions about the
legitimacy of his residency.
The
Jan. 6, 2017, meeting, held at Trump Tower, was a prime example. He was
briefed that day by John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director; James R.
Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence; and Adm. Michael S.
Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the commander
of United States Cyber Command.
The
F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was also there; after the formal
briefing, he privately told Mr. Trump about the “Steele dossier.” That
report, by a former British intelligence officer, included
uncorroborated salacious stories of Mr. Trump’s activities during a
visit to Moscow, which he denied.
According
to nearly a dozen people who either attended the meeting with the
president-elect or were later briefed on it, the four primary
intelligence officials described the streams of intelligence that
convinced them of Mr. Putin’s role in the election interference.
They
included stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee that had
been seen in Russian military intelligence networks by the British,
Dutch and American intelligence services. Officers of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the G.R.U. had plotted with groups like WikiLeaks on how to release the email stash.
And ultimately, several human sources had confirmed Mr. Putin’s own role.
That
included one particularly valuable source, who was considered so
sensitive that Mr. Brennan had declined to refer to it in any way in the
Presidential Daily Brief during the final months of the Obama
administration, as the Russia investigation intensified.
Instead,
to keep the information from being shared widely, Mr. Brennan sent
reports from the source to Mr. Obama and a small group of top national
security aides in a separate, white envelope to assure its security.
Mr. Trump and his aides were also given other reasons during the briefing to believe that Russia was behind the D.N.C. hacks.
The
same Russian groups had been involved in cyberattacks on the State
Department and White House unclassified email systems in 2014 and 2015,
and in an attack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
They had aggressively
fought the N.S.A. against being ejected from the White House system,
engaging in what the deputy director of the agency later called
“hand-to-hand combat” to dig in.
The
pattern of the D.N.C. hacks, and the theft of emails from John D.
Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, fit the same pattern.
After
the briefings, Mr. Trump issued a statement later that day that sought
to spread the blame for the meddling. He said “Russia, China and other
countries, outside groups and countries” were launching cyberattacks
against American government, businesses and political organizations —
including the D.N.C.
Still, Mr. Trump said in his statement, “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”
Mr. Brennan later told Congress that he had no doubt where the attacks were coming from.
“I
was convinced in the summer that the Russians were trying to interfere
in the election,” he said in testimony in May 2017. “And they were very
aggressive.”
For Mr. Trump, the messengers were as much a part of the problem as the message they delivered.
Mr.
Brennan and Mr. Clapper were both Obama administration appointees who
left the government the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated. The new resident
soon took to portraying them as political hacks who had warped the
intelligence to provide Democrats with an excuse for Mrs. Clinton’s loss
in the election.
Mr. Comey fared
little better. He was fired in May 2017 after refusing to pledge his
loyalty to Mr. Trump and pushing forward on the federal investigation
into whether the Trump campaign had cooperated with Russia’s election
interference.
Only
Admiral Rogers, who retired this past May, was extended in office by
Mr. Trump. (He, too, told Congress that he thought the evidence of
Russian interference was incontrovertible.)
And the evidence suggests Russia continues to be very aggressive in its meddling.
In March, the Department of Homeland Security declared that Russia was targeting the American electric power grid,
continuing to riddle it with malware that could be used to manipulate
or shut down critical control systems. Intelligence officials have
described it to Congress as a chief threat to American security.
Just
last week, Mr. Coats said that current cyberthreats were “blinking red”
and called Russia the “most aggressive foreign actor, no question.”
“And they continue their efforts to undermine our democracy,” he said.
Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, also stood firm.
“The
intelligence community’s assessment has not changed,” Mr. Wray said on
Wednesday at the Aspen Security Forum. “My view has not changed, which
is that Russia attempted to interfere with the last election and
continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day.”
The
Russian efforts are “aimed at sowing discord and divisiveness in this
country,” he continued. “We haven’t yet seen an effort to target
specific election infrastructure this time. We could be just a moment
away from the next level.”
“It’s a threat we need to take extremely seriously and respond to with fierce determination and focus.”
Almost
as soon as he took office, Mr. Trump began casting doubts on the
intelligence on Russia’s election interference, though never taking
issue with its specifics.
He
dismissed it broadly as a fabrication by Democrats and part of a “witch
hunt” against him. He raised unrelated issues, including the state of
investigations into Mrs. Clinton’s home computer server, to distract
attention from the central question of Russia’s role — and who, if
anyone, in Mr. Trump’s immediate orbit may have worked with them.
In
July 2017, just after meeting Mr. Putin for the first time, Mr. Trump
told a New York Times reporter that the Russian president had made a
persuasive case that Moscow’s cyber-skills were so good that the
government’s hackers would never have been caught. Therefore, Mr. Trump
recounted from his conversation with Mr. Putin, Russia must not have
been responsible.
Since then, Mr.
Trump has routinely disparaged the intelligence about the Russian
election interference. Under public pressure — as he was after his
statements in Helsinki on Monday — he has periodically retreated. But
even then, he has expressed confidence in his intelligence briefers, not
in the content of their findings.
That is what happened again this week, twice.
Mr.
Trump’s statement in Helsinki led Mr. Coats to reaffirm, in a statement
he deliberately did not get cleared at the White House, that American
intelligence agencies had no doubt that Russia was behind the 2016 hack.
That
contributed to Mr. Trump’s decision on Tuesday to say that he had
misspoken one word, and that he did believe Russia had interfered —
although he also veered off script to declare: “Could be other people
also. A lot of people out there.”
Follow David Sanger and Matthew Rosenberg on Twitter: @SangerNYT and @AllMattNYT.
Adam Goldman contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: From Start, Trump Has Muddied Clear Message: Putin Interfered. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
