Michael Van Landingham:
The House issued a partisan assessment of our intelligence community assessment in 2017. That was recently declassified.
The House took issue with only one judgment. In fact, they said we used proper tradecraft to reach the other judgments about Russian hacking of U.S. political organizations, the Russian influence campaign ordered by President Putin. It was just on the one political motivation.
For us, the primary evidence to get to Putin’s mind-set was a clandestine source that said, essentially, when Putin realized that Clinton would win the election, he ordered an influence campaign against Hillary Clinton because Trump, on whose victory he was counting, seemed less likely to win.
Then we saw a series of events that happened with the hacked U.S. materials by the Russian special services or intelligence services to leak those materials similar to the information a clandestine source had provided. At the same time, we saw lots of members of the Russian media portraying Donald Trump in a more positive light.
Putin also had very negative things to say about Hillary Clinton from his experience with her as secretary of state. And, along with that, there was other information that was collected by the U.S. intelligence community that gave us more confidence in that.
So, over time, looking at those things, having a high-quality, clandestine source telling you that Putin was counting on Trump’s victory, having members of the Russian state saying Trump would be better to work with because of his views on Russia that don’t represent the U.S. establishment, all of those things gave us high confidence that Putin wanted Trump to win, as did his comments in Helsinki in 2018 in July, where, when asked, he said: “Yes, I wanted him to win.”
