Dueling Narratives Emerge From Muddied Account of Russia's 2020 Interference

Their disagreement came as intelligence officials disputed reports that emerged last week about a briefing of the House Intelligence Committee. The officials now maintain that the House members either misheard or misinterpreted a key part of the briefing and that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not mean to say that it believes the Russians are currently intervening in the election explicitly to help Trump.

They do believe that Russia is intervening in the election and that Russian President Vladimir Putin prefers Trump, a deal-maker Moscow knows well. But at least for now, those two objectives may not be linked.

The differing interpretations only made it easier for the Trump administration and Democrats to put forward their own version of what the Russians are doing. As the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, defended Trump and intimated that the Russians favored the Democratic presidential front-runner, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden blamed the president and other Republicans for allowing Russia to continue to interfere in the election.

O’Brien, who took office at the end of last summer, insisted on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he had never seen any intelligence suggesting that the Russians were interfering on behalf of Trump.

“There’s no briefing that I’ve received, that the president has received, that says that President Putin is doing anything to try and influence the election in favor of President Trump,” O’Brien said, referring to the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. “We just haven’t seen that intelligence. If it’s out there, I haven’t seen it.”

He was referring to an assessment provided to the House Intelligence Committee on Feb. 13. That briefing outlined the breadth of Russian efforts to get involved in the November election — from hacking into voting systems to disinformation.

At the root of the confusion is what Shelby Pierson, a senior intelligence official responsible for overseeing the issues of election interference, said in that briefing.

Pierson, a longtime intelligence official, said there was no doubt the Russians were continuing to insert themselves in the election process. That would be consistent with past intelligence reports and the effort by the U.S. Cyber Command in 2018 to block Russian intelligence from manipulating social media before the midterm congressional elections.

But some intelligence officials said Pierson did not say that the current interference was explicitly on Trump’s behalf. Others in the briefing said that in response to lawmakers’ follow-up questions, officials made the connection between the Russian preference for Trump and Moscow’s efforts to interfere in the election.

The difference between actively backing Trump and preferring his reelection is a subtle nuance, officials said, but an important one: It is probably too early for the Russians to begin any significant move to bolster a specific candidate. In 2016, they at first sought to cause chaos and hurt Hillary Clinton, intelligence reports released later that year said, but only in the last few months before the election did they actively work to elect Trump.

If they go the same route now, it would not be inconsistent with backing Sanders for the Democratic nomination, in part because Sanders has voted against new sanctions on Russia and because he is considered a noninterventionist. And they may conclude, rightly or wrongly, that Trump could beat Sanders.

O’Brien seemed to have little doubt that the Russians preferred Sanders. “What I’ve heard from the FBI,” he said, “is that Russia would like Bernie Sanders to win the Democrat nomination. They’d probably like him to be president, understandably, because he wants to spend money on social programs and probably would have to take it out of the military.”

He did not give the source of that intelligence.

Sanders has denounced Russia and warned it not to interfere in the election.

Trump also leapt into the fray Sunday, accusing Rep. Adam B. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, of leaking information from the briefing.

He demanded on Twitter that someone tell “Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff to stop leaking Classified information or, even worse, made up information, to the Fake News Media.”

“Someday he will be caught, & that will be a very unpleasant experience!” Trump added.

When Trump made similar comments earlier Sunday, Schiff accused the president of deflection.

“Your false claims fool no one,” he said in a tweet. “You welcomed Russian help in 2016, tried to coerce Ukraine’s help in 2019, and won’t protect our elections in 2020. Now you fired your intel chief for briefing Congress about it. You’ve betrayed America. Again.”

Biden, who was in office as the Obama White House struggled over how to respond to Russian interference in 2016, saw some advantage in claiming he was the candidate Putin hated.

“The Russians don’t want me to be the nominee,” he said on “Face the Nation.” “They spent a lot of money on bots on Facebook, and they’ve been taken down, saying Biden is a bad guy. They don’t want Biden running. They’re not — no one’s helping me to try to get the nomination. They have good reason.”

Biden said he had not been informed of any specific intelligence. But intelligence officials said the reports they have generated have been consistent: Russian activity did not end with the 2016 election.

Biden suggested that Trump was still denying Russia’s involvement in 2016, even though U.S. intelligence officials have testified on the issue every year of his presidency.

“The president denies they’re involved,” Biden said. “They’ve been involved. I was deeply involved in the intelligence apparatus and how it functioned before we left the vice presidency. It was clear they were involved. The president continues to deny their involvement. It’s overwhelming. And the fact is that everybody knows.”

He accused the Republican leadership in the Senate of failing to act to secure electoral systems.

While Congress allocated several hundred million dollars for election security immediately after the 2016 election, gaping holes in the system remain, and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has repeatedly blocked additional legislation from coming to the floor for a vote.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .