US intel report finds Russians who gave info to WikiLeaks

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the CIA and others have concluded that the Russian government escalated its efforts from discrediting the US election process to assisting Donald Trump’s campaign. The intelligence assessment was presented to President Barack Obama on Thursday and will be briefed to Trump on Friday. Trump has rejected the broad intelligence community’s assessment that Russia staged cyber attacks during the election campaign to undermine Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Russia has rejected the hacking allegations. “By October, it had become clear that the Russians were trying to help the Trump campaign,” said one official familiar with the full report speaking on the condition of anonymity because the complete version is Top Secret. In some cases, one official said, the material followed what was called “a circuitous route” from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, to WikiLeaks in an apparent attempt to make the origins of the material harder to trace, a common practice used by all intelligence agencies, including US ones. These handoffs, the officials said, enabled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to say the Russian government or state agencies were not the source of the material published on his website.