--- title: CIA Identifies Russians Who Gave DNC Emails to WikiLeaks description: Officials say the report concludes that Russia escalated its efforts from discrediting the election to assisting Donald Trump's campaign. canonical: https://time.com/4625301/cia-russia-wikileaks-dnc-hacking/ author: TIME article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-01-06T03:08:09.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-23T02:34:57.366Z article:section: Politics og:title: CIA Identifies Russians Who Gave DNC Emails to WikiLeaks og:description: Officials say the report concludes Russia tried to help Donald Trump's campaign. og:url: https://time.com/4625301/cia-russia-wikileaks-dnc-hacking/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc7553de31ac7453c/6988b48d524fc047e6dfaa2f/gettyimages-631029002.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3000 og:image:height: 1688 og:image:alt: Senate Armed Services Hearing on Cyber Threats at US Capitol og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: CIA Identifies Russians Who Gave DNC Emails to WikiLeaks twitter:description: Officials say the report concludes Russia tried to help Donald Trump's campaign. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc7553de31ac7453c/6988b48d524fc047e6dfaa2f/gettyimages-631029002.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # U.S. Intelligence Report Identifies Russians Who Gave DNC Emails to Wikileaks > Sponsored content. 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It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, three times a week. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. by [Reuters](https://time.com/author/reuters/) ## Reuters Jan 6, 2017 3:08 AM UTC  James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, testifies at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Jan.5, 2017. James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, testifies at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Jan.5, 2017. Samuel Corum—Anadolu Agency/Getty Images by [Reuters](https://time.com/author/reuters/) ## Reuters Jan 6, 2017 3:08 AM UTC (WASHINGTON) — The CIA has identified Russian officials who fed material hacked from the Democratic National Committee and party leaders to Wikileaks at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin through third parties, according to a new U.S. intelligence report, senior U.S. officials said on Thursday. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Central Intelligence Agency and others have concluded that the Russian government escalated its efforts from discrediting the U.S. election process to assisting President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign. The intelligence assessment was presented to President Barack Obama on Thursday and will be briefed to Trump on Friday. Trump has rejected the broad intelligence community’s assessment that Russia staged cyber attacks during the election campaign to undermine Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Russia has rejected the hacking allegations. “By October, it had become clear that the Russians were trying to help the Trump campaign,” said one official familiar with the full report speaking on the condition of anonymity because the complete version is Top Secret. In some cases, one official said, the material followed what was called “a circuitous route” from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, to Wikileaks in an apparent attempt to make the origins of the material harder to trace, a common practice used by all intelligence agencies, including U.S. ones. These handoffs, the officials said, enabled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to say the Russian government or state agencies were not the source of the material published on his website. In an interview with Fox News this week, Assange said he did not receive emails stolen from the DNC and Clinton aide John Podesta from “a state party.” Assange did not rule out the possibility that he got the material from a third party. Details of the report emerged as the top U.S. intelligence official, James Clapper, said on Thursday he was “even more resolute” in his belief that Russia staged cyber attacks on Democrats during the 2016 election campaign. Not all 17 intelligence agencies participated in preparing the assessment. An unclassified version of the report is expected to be released on Friday morning, two officials said. The report contains some of what the officials called “minor footnotes” about open questions and other uncertainties, in part because some of the evidence supporting the conclusion is inferential. One such example, the officials said, was that intercepted messages and conversations among senior Russian officials in Putin’s inner circle indicated they were aware of the hacking campaign and celebrated Trump’s election as a victorious end to the campaign. The officials declined to discuss the nature of the communications, including whether they were domestic, international, or both. “People who knew what this was about were celebrating a victory over the United States,” said one official. Another example of inferential evidence, the officials said, was that as time passed and the early leaks attracted media attention that undermined or eclipsed Clinton’s campaign, the Russians increasingly focused their hacking “almost exclusively” on Democratic rather than Republican targets. There was also strong resemblance — including the use of the same computer malware — the Russians have used against targets in Europe and the marriage of traditional espionage tactics used by Soviet and Russian intelligence such as bribery, blackmail and internet vulnerabilities, which they said Putin has devoted increasing resources and attention to exploiting. For example, one official said, the Democratic databases and email servers the Russians hacked also contained personal information that Wikileaks has not published. Such information could be used to search for financial, medical, browsing history and other records that can be used to target individuals for recruiting efforts by Russian spies. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4625301/cia-russia-wikileaks-dnc-hacking/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4625301/cia-russia-wikileaks-dnc-hacking/"},"headline":"U.S. Intelligence Report Identifies Russians Who Gave DNC Emails to Wikileaks","datePublished":"2017-01-06T03:08:09.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-23T02:34:57.366Z","description":"Top U.S. intelligence official, James Clapper, said he was \"even more resolute\" that Russia staged cyber attacks during the election campaign","url":"https://time.com/4625301/cia-russia-wikileaks-dnc-hacking/","keywords":["intelligence","russia","Hacking","onetime"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc7553de31ac7453c/6988b48d524fc047e6dfaa2f/gettyimages-631029002.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Reuters","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/reuters/"}],"articleSection":"Politics","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc7553de31ac7453c/6988b48d524fc047e6dfaa2f/gettyimages-631029002.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Senate Armed Services Hearing on Cyber Threats at US Capitol","caption":"Senate Armed Services Hearing on Cyber Threats at US Capitol","creditText":"Samuel Corum—Anadolu Agency/Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/politics/","name":"Politics"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/intelligence/","name":"intelligence"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4625301/cia-russia-wikileaks-dnc-hacking/","name":"U.S. Intelligence Report Identifies Russians Who Gave DNC Emails to Wikileaks"}}]}] ```