"Open to influence and manipulation": report by the US Senate shows Russian manipulation of the US election

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US President Trump, Russian President Putin (July 2018):

A nearly 1000-page report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee documents how Russia wanted to influence the US presidential election in 2016 in favor of Donald Trump. Accordingly, the current president's campaign team had numerous contacts with the Russian secret service. The report - the fifth and last of the committee on the subject - was preceded by years of investigation by the US Senate.

At the same time, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Marco Rubio, stressed that "absolutely no evidence was found that Trump or his campaign team had worked with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election".

However, the report also states that after the election, Russia "took advantage of the fact that members of the transition team were relatively inexperienced in government issues". Other countries - allies and opponents of the USA - also tried to exert influence during this time. In the absence of sufficient control over such interactions, the transition team was "open to influence and manipulation by foreign intelligence agencies, government officials and business people."

Paul Manafort - "from the point of view of counterintelligence a serious threat"

The report said that the temporarily chairman of Trump's campaign team, Paul Manafort, had close contacts with a Russian secret service agent. "Manafort's high-level access and willingness to share information with people with close ties to Russian intelligence services (...) posed a serious threat from a counterintelligence perspective."

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Former Trump confidante Paul Manafort during the 2016 election campaign

Courts in the US capital Washington and the state of Virginia had sentenced Manafort in March 2019 for tax evasion and bank fraud to a total of seven and a half years in prison. In view of the corona crisis, he has been allowed to serve the sentence under house arrest since spring.

WikiLeaks and the Hacker Attacks on Hillary Clinton

The report establishes a direct link between President Vladimir Putin and the hacking attacks on the email accounts of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The operators of the WikiLeaks platform, which published the leaked e-mails, were probably aware of supporting the Russian secret service in its goals.

Trump himself tried to get advance information about planned publications of the disclosure platform Wikileaks through his confidante Roger Stone. Stone shared his alleged knowledge "on several occasions directly with Trump and high-ranking employees of his campaign team," it said. However, it was not possible to clarify whether Stone actually knew anything about the publications.

Stone, however, had been sentenced to more than three years in prison. A jury considered it proven that he had been guilty of false testimony, obstructing investigations and influencing witnesses, among other things. Trump released Stone from prison in July.

High agreement with Mueller's findings

In 2019, special investigator Robert Mueller had already written a report on the involvement of the Trump election campaign team with Russia. Mueller had also come to the conclusion that there was massive influence, but none in the election campaign, but no coordinated conspiracy between Trump and Moscow. The findings of the Senate report largely agree with the findings of Mueller.

bah / AP / dpa / Reuters