In a tweet Sunday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a member and former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, boiled down special counsel Robert Mueller’s new Russian election-meddling indictment to one basic lesson: “Key point in Special Counsel Mueller’s indictment: A dozen Russian military intelligence officials conducted the hacking of Democrats during the 2016 campaign.”
Other commentators, most with less knowledge than Feinstein, offered similar assessments. Regardless of what President Trump might say, they noted, the indictment showed very clearly that the Russians — Russian military intelligence, specifically — did it.
What few mentioned was that there had been a similar assessment — not speculation, or even a reported account in the press, but an official U.S. government assessment — that came to the same conclusion, based on some of the same evidence, just a few months ago. In many corners of the media and political conversation, though, that assessment was ridiculed and belittled when it was not ignored outright.
The assessment was the House Intelligence Committee’s “Report On Russian Active Measures,” sent to the Intelligence Community on March 22 and released publicly in heavily-censored form on April 27. It laid out much of the information contained in Count One of the Mueller indictment, the heart of Mueller’s case that 12 Russian military intelligence agents hacked Democratic Party computer systems and the Clinton campaign and then disseminated the stolen information.
“It’s pretty clear if you read the indictment, and you read our four findings and Chapter Two, even with redactions, you get most of the indictment,” House Intel chairman Rep. Devin Nunes told me in a phone conversation Sunday. “If you didn’t have the redactions, you’d get more than what’s in the indictment, except for the Russian names.”
Nunes referred to four of the House report’s 44 findings, the ones summarizing Chapter Two, headlined “Russia Attacks the United States.” The first of the findings Nunes mentioned was, “Russia conducted cyberattacks on U.S. political institutions in 2015-2016,” and the second was, “Russian-state actors and third-party intermediaries were responsible for the dissemination of documents and communications stolen from U.S. political organizations.”
The findings were fleshed out in Chapter Two — at least it appears they were fleshed out, although that is impossible to know for sure because of the Intelligence Community’s heavy redactions.
Chapter Two begins with this:
What followed were 38 wholly-blacked-out paragraphs discussing … well, it’s not entirely clear what they discussed. But given the context, it seems reasonable to surmise that they laid out the evidence for the committee’s assertion that Russians executed the campaign hacks.
There were a few clues here and there. For example, intelligence community censors left uncovered a small box on page 23 with a couple of definitions. One was of “spear phishing” and the other was “credential harvesting” — two practices that played prominently in Mueller’s account of the Russian hacks. The chapter’s unredacted paragraphs also discussed the role of WikiLeaks in publicizing the hacked material. Unlike Mueller, the committee named WikiLeaks. Also unlike Mueller, it named Roger Stone, criticizing “Trump associates [who] went beyond mere praise and established lines of communications with Wikileaks during the campaign.” Those contacts were “imprudent,” the committee said, because WikiLeaks is a “hostile non-state intelligence service” that targets the U.S. and seeks support from sources “such as the Russian military intelligence service (GRU).”
But those are just clues. To hear Nunes tell it, the 38 blacked-out paragraphs tell much of the story that is told in Mueller’s Count One. “Almost everything in the indictment, we knew about,” Nunes told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo Sunday morning. And more: Nunes said his report discussed Russian efforts targeting Republicans, which were not included in the Mueller indictment.
Nunes said the committee has known the basics of the Russian operation for a long time — since the spring and summer of 2017. Of course, the committee learned most of that by questioning and being provided documents by officials of the intelligence community. That suggests much, if not most, of the material in the Mueller indictment was known to the IC before Mueller even came on the job in May 2017. Why it took until July 2018 to indict the Russians is just another unknown about the Mueller probe.
All that said, there is no doubt the House Intel report and the Mueller indictment are two different documents with different purposes. As Nunes noted, the House report did not contain the names of the accused Russians. Beyond names, Mueller’s indictment contains technical information and information on funding, although it doesn’t include the underlying evidence. In other words, it’s an indictment, and Nunes’ is a congressional investigative report.
“I did not read the Mueller indictment looking for similarities with our report nor would I expect to find them given our different investigative tools and different constitutional purposes,” Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., told me in a text exchange Sunday. “Their indictment reflects lots of hard work and our committee worked hard on our report as well.”
Will the public ever see the full Nunes report? The chairman clearly feels the intelligence community grossly over-redacted the document. When I asked him how much of the report he believes should legitimately be redacted, he said about five or ten percent of what is currently redacted needs to remain secret. The rest should be public.
But the intelligence community blacked it out. Now, Nunes wants President Trump to bring it to light. “The president of the United States has got to declassify this,” Nunes told Bartiromo.
There’s no indication Trump will act; he has said he wants to stay out of such matters. But there’s no doubt the House Intel report, or as much as is possible without genuinely endangering U.S. intelligence efforts, should be made public — especially now, after the publication of Mueller’s indictment. Is there any good reason why it should remain secret?
