Russian President Vladimir Putin and his officials had sought to influence the 2020 US election by “denigrating”. Joe Biden with “misleading or unsubstantiated allegations” pushed through people close to Donald Trump. The US intelligence community said in a declassified report on Tuesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends an event in Moscow on March 15, 2021. (AP)
The intelligence report does not name any of these people, but Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney of former president Trump, may have been among them, according to news reports.
The intelligence report, which is the first about the November election, also says the Russian operation was supportive of then president Trump, but unlike in 2016, “we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to the election infrastructure”.
He had had contacts with Russian agents during the time he pursued the attempt to implicate then presidential candidate Joe Biden in an unproven corruption scandal involving his son Hunter Biden’s business connections with a Ukrainian company.
Iran also conducted a “multi-pronged covert influence campaign” intended to “undercut” then-president Trump, but it did not seek to directly promote his rivals, the report says.
The Russian influence operation was pervasive, in a throwback to the 2016 election meddling that was confirmed by special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation.
“We assess that President Putin and the Russian state authorised and conducted influence operations against the 2020 US presidential election aimed at denigrating President Biden and the Democratic Party, supporting former president Trump, undermining public confidence in the election process, and exacerbating sociopolitical division in the US,” says the report by the National Intelligence Council.
China is contrary to the Trump administration’s claims of China’s involvement in election meddling at the time.