It's been reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin might have finally admitted to what the intelligence community believes was Russian meddling of the 2016 presidential election. He apparently admitted this when he suggested that if Russians were involved with hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) then they were likely acting independently as patriots. Blasting News provides some of the contexts on the assertion that the Russian leadership was involved in the hacking of the DNC servers last year when thousands of emails were stolen and published through Wikileaks.
Russian hacks election for Trump outcome
The emails revealed that Hillary Clinton tried to sabotage Senator Bernie Sanders' campaign so that she could win the primary. And even though many have said that the hacking didn't make a difference on the outcome of the election, there is still the fact that Donald Trump won and with it, the idea that he was favored by Russian leadership -- who the intelligence community believe were involved -- to become president. Even more, the intelligence community has reason to believe that Trump campaign aides colluded with Kremlin officials and might have been involved with interference in the election.
Many intel community leaders have been paraded before congressional committee hearings over the early months of the Trump administration to provide more details of their ongoing investigation.
However, due to the important few who have been fired by the Trump White House -- in some cases for continuing the investigation -- those officials are now being asked questions about whether President Trump has tried to stop them from investigating him and his aides.
James Clapper chimes in
On January 17, only days before Donald Trump's inauguration, the then Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper stepped down from his role.
At the time, he acknowledged that people had reservations of President-elect Trump's incoming presidency when he said that everything would be okay.
Lately, Clapper has been one of the officials called into hearings to add some context to the investigations. Clapper was on Chris Cuomo's New Day program on Tuesday where he said that he had never seen Russians interfere in the U.S.
election as aggressively as they did last year.
Clapper said during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that he had not seen evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with Russian officials but in an article that accompanies the interview, it points out that he was not aware until March that the FBI had been investigating the matter when former FBI Director James Comey was questioned before the House Intelligence Committee.
So far, with Clapper being out of the DNI role, the only thing he can confirm is that Russia did interfere with the election and that there was proof enough of this for the intelligence community to draw that conclusion.
Here is a one-on-one interview with Clapper from the PBS Newshour on May 30.
