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TEHRAN, December 23 -The top US intelligence official has accused Russia, China and Iran of running election meddling campaign during American mid-term polls last November in an official report to the White House but insisted that no election systems were compromised.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -The top US intelligence official has accused Russia, China and Iran of running election meddling campaign during American mid-term polls last November in an official report to the White House but insisted that no election systems were compromised.
“Russia and other foreign countries, including China and Iran, conducted influence activities and messaging campaigns targeted at the United States to promote their strategic interests” during the 2018 midterm elections, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats wrote in a report to the White House unveiled late Friday.
US President Donald Trump had ordered Coats’s office – under executive order 13848 -- to conduct a review within 45 days of the November 6, 2018 election amid political pressures calling on him to respond more forcefully to alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential campaign.
Trump declared in September that such interference constituted a national emergency, and said there would be sanctions imposed against individuals and governments found to have meddled in the midterm polls. Coats’s letter, however, contained no recommendation for such sanctions.
According to the report by the spy chief, the US intelligence community did not find evidence that the election infrastructure had been breached in a way “that would have prevented voting, changed vote counts or disrupted the ability to tally votes.”
Additionally, the US Justice and Homeland Security departments have 45 days under the executive order to review the findings by DNI and respond with recommendations.
This is while mainstream media reports in the US portrayed Coats’s letter as confirmation of Russian election meddling, even though US intelligence agencies did not assess any impact of what they claimed as influence activities and messaging campaigns of foreign nations targeting US midterm elections, in which the ruling Republican Party lost its control of the Senate.
Following Trump’s surprise defeat over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in 2016, he faced accusations by the Democrats that he had “colluded” with Russia to win the presidency. However, after two years of FBI and special counsel investigations into the case, actual Russian interference is yet to be proven.
Source: presstv
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