GOP-led Senate panel agrees Russia infowar campaign helped Trump

Hackers. [Shutterstock]

In the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers presented evidence that Russia conducted information warfare against the U.S. in 2016 and demanded urgent action from Congress, the trump White House, and Silicon Valley to prevent the same thing from happening in 2020.

The group of Democratic and Republican senators delivered a sobering assessment of weaknesses that Russian operatives exploited in the 2016 campaign — all of which remain active vulnerabilities today, one year before our next presidential election.

“The Committee found that Russia’s targeting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was part of a broader, sophisticated and ongoing information warfare campaign,” the new Senate Intelligence Committee report reads. Russia's campaign was “a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood… an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States."

Huh. Wonder why Russia's favored candidate isn't helping.

From the Washington Post's Craig Timberg and Tony Romm:

The Senate Intelligence Committee, a Republican-led panel that has been investigating foreign electoral interference for more than two and a half years, said in blunt language that Russians worked to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton while bolstering Republican Donald Trump — and made clear that fresh rounds of interference are likely ahead of the 2020 vote.

“Russia is waging an information warfare campaign against the U.S. that didn’t start and didn’t end with the 2016 election," said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the committee’s chairman. “Their goal is broader: to sow societal discord and erode public confidence in the machinery of government. By flooding social media with false reports, conspiracy theories, and trolls, and by exploiting existing divisions, Russia is trying to breed distrust of our democratic institutions and our fellow Americans.”

Bipartisan Senate report calls for sweeping effort to prevent Russian interference in 2020 election