Senate Intelligence Report Warns of Repeated Russian Interference in US Elections

New report on Russian interference in Trump election 0:53

(CNN) - A report from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee detailing how President Donald Trump and his campaign encouraged Russia's election interference in 2016 raises the stakes for the current campaign at a time when Trump is openly amplifying Russian disinformation.

The recently released findings and recommendations add to warnings from US intelligence officials that Russia continues to target the 2020 election, specifically Trump's opponent, Joe Biden.

Russian intelligence agents were closer to Trump's campaign efforts than was known in 2016, according to the report. The commission also documented continued misinformation by people linked to Russia long after the 2016 elections, such alarming findings that the bipartisan Senate commission called for several changes to protect national security in 2020.

"Campaigns must recognize that campaign officials are an attractive target for foreign intelligence services," the commission said.

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"The threat continues," Republican Senator Richard Burr, who chaired much of the commission's investigation, said in a statement Tuesday. "My hope is that this report and the work of the Commission will provide the American people with more information about the threats facing our nation and the steps needed to stop them," he explained.

For Democrats, the report prompted a new round of calls for national security reform and diligence in US elections.

The bipartisan Intelligence Commission's findings on Russia "should be an alarm to the nation," wrote five Democratic senators - Martin Heinrich, Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, Kamala Harris and Michael Bennet - in commentary to the report's release Tuesday. "Russia is again actively interfering in the 2020 US elections to help Donald Trump, and some of the president's associates are scaling up those efforts," they said.

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Wyden also said that information redacted in the report that has not yet been released to the public is "directly relevant to Russia's interference in the 2020 elections."

But the Trump campaign and some Republicans responded to the report with retrospective criticism, insisting that "there was no collusion," rather than questioning how US politics may still be vulnerable to foreign misinformation and interference in 2020.

Previously, the Mueller investigation painstakingly recreated the actions of campaign officials, WikiLeaks posts, and efforts by Russians to spread hacked documents and disinformation that could help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016. Justice Department prosecutors have also alleged that a propaganda effort on social media by Russia continued in the 2018 elections.

Russia's disinformation efforts continue in the current election cycle, the Senate commission now notes.

"The Commission observed numerous actors in the Russian government from late 2016 to at least January 2020 consistently spreading overlapping false narratives that sought to discredit investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 US elections and spreading false information about the events of 2016" says the report.

Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and those around him were part of this ongoing effort, as were convicted Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his longtime associate Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence operative who has continued to tweet disinformation. and propaganda until this year, according to the report.

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Trump regularly makes false statements in speeches and on Twitter, and attacks the Russia investigation as well as the FBI. As a recent example, the president spread misleading information about Biden after US Intelligence flagged it as Russian propaganda.

"They are working toward the same goals again this year, and Trump is refusing to refuse their help," Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Biden's campaign, said Tuesday.

The Trump campaign downplayed the accusation, saying it was Democrats who came forward with foreign information in 2016 when commissioning an investigation into Trump and Russia.

While the Biden campaign said it will not accept information from foreign sources in 2020, the Trump campaign has declined to say whether it has accepted information from foreign sources.

Some Trump allies, including his attorney Rudy Giuliani, have openly worked with foreign actors to spread anti-Biden conspiracies. Giuliani even met with a Ukrainian lawmaker who was recently singled out by US Intelligence as part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

What's Next?

The 15-member Intelligence Commission used the report Tuesday to call for legislative, police and cultural changes in the nation's approach to national security, especially in relation to election interference.

The commission wrote long and harsh warnings about how campaigns, political leaders, and other influential Americans should be on guard against foreign malpractice.

The report explained how "hostile actors" were able to exploit Americans and American institutions in 2016. "Freedom of speech at the root of our democratic society became an opportunity for Russian influence to be hidden in plain sight," he wrote the Commission.

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The commission urged changes to both the laws and the executive branch's approach to foreign interference. Among several recommendations, the commission said that legal loopholes that regulate foreign lobbying work should be filled, that campaigns should receive better intelligence reporting and training and do a better investigation of their personnel, and that the FBI should have more procedures. strong in responding to election-related attacks. Political groups and others, from business leaders to non-governmental organizations, must realize that they "are likely to be targeted" by foreign intelligence services, the commission added.

“The Russian government treats the oligarchs, organized crime and associated companies as tools of the state, rather than private and independent entities. The Kremlin uses these entities to pursue the Kremlin's priorities, including money laundering, sanction evasion, and influence operations. This is a fundamentally different model than the United States, ”the commission wrote. "The US government needs the tools and authorities in place to determine whether a non-governmental entity is operating on behalf of the Russian state and to mitigate the counterintelligence threat."

CNN's Jeremy Herb, Marshall Cohen and Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.

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