Russia wants to defeat the US presidential election and help Donald Trump win - this accusation is not new. It was already circulating in 2016 and is now getting loud again before the next vote in November. The reason for this is alleged intelligence knowledge.
Washington (dpa) - According to media reports, US intelligence agencies assume that Russia wants to intervene again in the election campaign to help President Donald Trump to be re-elected.
Senior officials in the House of Representatives explained this in a confidential meeting, the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN reported on Thursday evening (local time). A spokesman for the Secret Service Committee only confirmed that last week's hearing was indeed about "the integrity" of the November presidential election.
According to the US secret services, Russia had already interfered in the election campaign in 2016 in favor of the Republican candidate Trump. Trump denies this. Republicans interpreted the intelligence agencies' findings in such a way that Russia primarily wanted to create chaos and uncertainty, but did not support a specific candidate. The suspicion of a cooperation between Trump's campaign and Moscow led to a long investigation by Russia special investigator Robert Mueller after the election.
According to media reports, the intelligence agency's new findings now indicate that Russia wants to interfere in both the Democratic primary and the actual presidential election this year - for example, through hacking attacks, instrumentalizing social media and manipulating the election process. However, it initially remained unclear which documents were presented to MPs for this. Some of the Republican parliamentarians are said to have questioned the credibility of the intelligence agency's findings, it was said.
Trump reportedly wanted to prevent Parliament's confidential disclosure so as not to give the Democrats ammunition against him. Should this be the case, the chairman of the Secret Service Committee, Democrat Adam Schiff, said the president has sabotaged efforts to prevent any foreign interference in the election. "He's doing exactly what we warned about," Schiff wrote on Twitter. He was apparently alluding to the impeachment proceedings against Trump, in which the Democrats had accused him of compelling Ukraine to help him vote.
One of the applicants for the Democratic presidential candidacy, Senator Elizabeth Warren, accused Trump of undermining "the integrity of our democracy." "Russia is back in our elections to get Trump elected," she wrote, looking at the reports on Twitter.
During the investigation by special investigator Robert Mueller, it was examined whether there were secret collusions between the Trump camp and Russia in the 2016 presidential election campaign - and whether Trump has hindered the judiciary. Mueller found no evidence for the first point in his final report presented in March 2019, leaving the second open. At the same time, he emphasized that he was not relieving Trump of the allegation of legal disability. Trump has always rejected the allegations and spoke of a "witch hunt".
The Russia investigation is separate from the investigation by the Democrats in the US House of Representatives into the Ukraine affair, which was the basis for the impeachment proceedings against Trump, which were ultimately stopped by the Republicans in the Senate.
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