Russia stoked Ukraine allegations, used Trump allies to undermine Biden, U.S. intel agencies say

Russia tried again last year to help former President Donald Trump win the White House, the U.S. intelligence community said Tuesday in a long-awaited postmortem — adding that a "primary" tactic in that effort was the spreading of corruption allegations involving Democratic challenge Joe Biden and Ukraine that included influencing people close to the Oval Office.

Russia sought to "launder" its anti-Biden messages through "prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration," the declassified report states.

The document does not specifically name the individuals. But it does call out Andrii Derkach, a Kremlin-linked Ukrainian lawmaker who has cooperated with Trump's former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime business associate of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chair.

They and their associates contacted "established U.S. media figures" and even "helped produce a documentary that aired on a US television network in late January 2020," the clandestine community found.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “had purview over" Derkach's activities, who the U.S. has sanctioned as a Russia agent. Giuliani met with Derkach in Ukraine in 2019 and 2020 as he looked to publicly release material he believed would hurt Biden's candidacy.

The Russians also tried to hack Democratic-aligned organizations after the 2018 midterms and "unsuccessfully targeted U.S. political actors in 2019 and 2020," and ran a phishing campaign against Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, which the former president urged Kyiv to investigate ties between it and Biden's son, Hunter.

Yet all the extensive Russian hacking of state and local governments that attracted attention before the election was probably not aimed at altering the final outcome.

Indeed, the effort fell short of the Kremlin-backed efforts to assist Trump in his 2016 contest against Hillary Clinton, the spy community wrote in its unclassified assessment of foreign threats to the 2020 U.S. federal elections. And the agencies found no attempts by foreign countries to change vote tallies or final results.

“We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden's candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.,” the assessment said.

"The primary effort," the document added, "revolved around a narrative-that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014-alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other US officials and Ukraine." It said Russia's intelligence services "relied on Ukraine-linked proxies and these proxies' networks-including their US contacts-to spread this narrative."

Unlike in 2016, however, “we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure,” added the document, issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Iran, meanwhile, waged a “covert influence campaign intended to undercut” Trump’s reelection bid without directly promoting his rivals in order to “undermine public confidence in the election process” and "sow division and exacerbate societal tensions” in the country.

“We assess that Supreme Leader Khamenei authorized the campaign and Iran's military and intelligence services implemented it using overt and covert messaging and cyber operations," the examination states.

The agencies assess with "high confidence" that China made no efforts to interfere in the election, although one intelligence official maintained in a minority opinion that Beijing "took at least some steps to undermine" Trump's chances, "primarily through social media and official public statements and media."

The findings largely support previous statements from Trump-era intelligence community officials who concluded that Moscow and others were attempting to interfere in U.S. elections.

Capitol Hill Democrats and the former administration last year jousted regularly over election security. Democrats initially argued that the administration wrongly placed China in the same league as the threat posed by Iran and Russia, a conclusion that seems to have borne out in the new report.

The two sides went back and forth for months before reaching an uneasy truce, though lawmakers worried the final examination — initially mandated in a 2018 executive order that called for the intelligence community to produce such a report, a requirement that Congress enshrined that requirement into law in 2019 — would be slanted, especially if it was published before Trump left office.

Other key takeaways: The examination found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process” in last year’s elections, including voter registration, vote tabulation or reported results.

A joint report issued by the Justice and Homeland Security departments similarly found “no evidence that any foreign government-affiliated actor” meddled in the voting process.

Together, the conclusions reject some of the most notorious baseless claims peddled by Trump and his allies, including that hackers aligned with foreign governments had rigged voting machines to put Biden in the Oval Office.

Other foreign nations, Lebanese Hezbollah, Cuba and Venezuela took some steps to attempt to influence the election, according to the report, though “they were smaller in scale than the influence efforts conducted by other actors this election cycle. Cybercriminals disrupted some election preparations; we judge their activities probably were driven by financial motivations.”

What comes next: Top congressional Democrats hailed the unclassified report’s release and urged election security to become a bipartisan issue post-Trump.

Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said the spy community has gotten better at detecting and defending against election interference.

“But the problem of foreign actors trying to influence the American electorate is not going away and, given the current partisan divides in this country, may find fertile ground in which to grow in the future,” he added.

House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) likewise said that “both parties must speak with one voice and disavow all interference in our elections. We must guard against and seek to deter all attempts at foreign interference, and ensure that American voters decide American elections.”

The intelligence community's report made clear that the Kremlin would maintain its influence operations.

“Moscow almost certainly views meddling in U.S. elections as an equitable response to perceived actions by Washington and an opportunity to both undermine U.S. global standing and influence U.S. decision-making,” the assessment said.