The Russian connectionNew questions in Russia probe
“It has become clear that the Russian intention was to attempt to enter into a collaborative or cooperative relationship with the Trump campaign in order to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign to their mutual benefit,” a former CIA official says. “To that end, the Russian government employed hacking activity to collect information and then embarked on an ambitious intelligence operation to leak that information to Trump’s advantage and to Clinton’s detriment. The question that remains, and is most important to answer, is did the Trump campaign willfully accept this assistance from the Russian government and enter into a conspiracy to benefit the campaign?” the former official said. “I would say it’s the most consequential Russian intelligence operation in my lifetime in terms of the attempted scope of their intention to penetrate our domestic politics and influence an American election. I can’t recall a precedent where they were that ambitious and that aggressive in pursuing that kind of goal. It’s hard to imagine that they would have done so with a completely unwilling partner.”
President Trump’s repeated insistence that no one in his campaign was aware of or involved in Russian interference in the 2016 election is now in doubt after the president’s eldest son published emails that not only confirmed a June 2016 meeting between top campaign officials and Kremlin-connected Russians, but also hinted at an offer of access to information potentially harmful to Hillary Clinton.
Though the president and his son have characterized the meeting as a polite sit-down to chat about opposition research, many intelligence, Russia, and legal analysts say the gathering appears to have been designed to gauge the willingness of the campaign to accept covert help. Such an approach is typical of Russian intelligence operations, experts say.
Three senior campaign advisers present at the meeting — Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and now a White House aide — are scheduled to testify next week before Congress [on Monday Kushner testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors].
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is the director of the Belfer Center’s Intelligence and Defense Project at Harvard Kennedy School. Before coming to Harvard, he served as director of intelligence and counterintelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy and was a distinguished intelligence officer in the CIA for two decades.
In an interview with Christina Pazzanese of the Harvard Gazette, Mowatt-Larssen discussed the Trump Tower meeting against the backdrop of the ongoing probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Gazette:In a recent piece in the Washington Post, you said the Trump Tower meeting had all the hallmarks of a carefully orchestrated Russian intelligence operation. From your vantage point as a former intelligence officer, when you consider what is currently known about Russian meddling in the election, what do you see?
Mowatt-Larssen:It has become clear that the Russian intention was to attempt to enter into a collaborative or cooperative relationship with the Trump campaign in order to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign to their mutual benefit. To that end, the Russian government employed hacking activity to collect information and then embarked on an ambitious intelligence operation to leak that information to Trump’s advantage and to Clinton’s detriment. The question that remains, and is most important to answer, is did the Trump campaign willfully accept this assistance from the Russian government and enter into a conspiracy to benefit the campaign?
