The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that the intelligence community was correct in its finding that Russian President Vladimir Putin was trying to help Donald Trump when Moscow meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
The bipartisan report released Tuesday disagrees with the findings of the House Intelligence Committee Republicans, who found that the intelligence community was mistaken to conclude that Moscow wanted Trump to win.
"The Committee has spent the last 16 months reviewing the sources, tradecraft and analytic work underpinning the Intelligence Community Assessment and sees no reason to dispute the conclusions," a statement from Republican Senator Richard Burr, the panel's chairman, said.
The Senate panel found that the "intelligence community assessment (ICA)" is a "sound intelligence production."
"A body of reporting, to include different intelligence disciplines, open source reporting on Russian leadership policy preferences, and Russian media content, showed that Moscow sought to denigrate (former) Secretary (of State Hillary) Clinton," the unclassified summary of the report says.
The committee found that the slight differences in the findings of the CIA, FBI and the NSA were "reasonable, transparent and openly debated among the agencies and analysts."
Trump has strongly disagreed with the findings of the ICA, repeatedly touting Russian denials of meddling. "Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!" Trump tweeted last week.
VOA national security correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
