Former Director Clapper: Obama Directed Effort to Report on Russian Interference in 2016 Election

The Senate intelligence report was released today and while Chair Richard Burr said that the Intelligence Community Assessment that identified Russian election interference met the criteria, there was some other interesting information contained in the report regarding former President Obama and his Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper.

From the report: In a meeting of the NSC on December 6, 2016, President Obama instructed Director Clapper to have the Intelligence Community prepare a comprehensive report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Director Clapper told the Committee: “I don’t think we would have mounted the effort we did, probably, to be honest, in the absence of presidential direction, because that kind of cleared the way on sharing all the accesses.”

The President directed that the report include everything the IC knew about
Russian interference in the 2016 elections. In addition, the tasking included providing the IC’s understanding of the historical context of Russian interference in U.S. political processes, focusing on the 2008 and 2012 elections.

The presidential tasking also requested recommendations on how to prevent interference in the future and how to strengthen electoral
systems. Finally, the instruction was to have a version available to brief Congress, and also made classified version releasable to the public.

The President requested this product be completed by the end of his Administration, January 20, 2017. There was no document memorializing this presidential direction.

The same day, Director Clapper passed the President’s verbal direction to the National Intelligence Council (NIC), specifically the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Russia and Eurasia, Julia Gurganus, and the NIO for Cyber Issues, Vlnh Nguyen.