U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sought to reassure President-elect Donald Trump that a leaked document on the latter’s alleged links with Russia was not a product of the intelligence community but the distrust between the two may not be overcome soon.
“James Clapper called me yesterday to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally circulated. Made up, phony facts. Too bad!,” Mr. Trump said on twitter on Thursday morning, a day after he slammed the intelligence agencies and news outlets for spreading “fake news.”
Meanwhile, a BBC report said a joint investigation by several U.S. agencies is looking into possible cash payments by the Kremlin to Mr. Trump’s election campaign. According to the report, the investigation was launched in April 2016, when intercepted conversations provided by the intelligence agency of a Baltic state indicated this possibility. Approved by a competent court, the investigation is now into transactions between three associates of Mr. Trump and two Russian banks. The agencies that conduct this investigation will come under Mr. Trump who will be sworn in as President on January 20.
A former British spy working for a Washington firm hired by a Democratic operative prepared the document on Mr. Trump that talks of his alleged sexual escapades in Moscow which were filmed by Russian spies. The document was offered to several media outlets and political operatives in the final months of the campaign but nobody published it. The BBC’s Paul Wood wrote on Wednesday that he had confirmation from multiple sources on the existence of these tapes with the Russians, but decided against writing the story without seeing them.
Mr. Clapper said in the statement that in his conversation with Mr. Trump, he “emphasised that this document is not a U.S. intelligence community product” and that he did not believe that its leak came from his officials. “The intelligence community has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions,” he said, adding, “however, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.”
“I expressed my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press, and we both agreed that they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security,” Mr. Clapper said of his conversation with Mr. Trump. According to the intelligence chief, the document “was widely circulated in recent months among the media, members of Congress and Congressional staff.”
Mr. Clapper said the privately generated report was not relied upon by the agencies to conclude that Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin tried to help Mr. Trump’s victory in November but there are overlapping conclusions. The private documents and the official intelligence are in agreement that Russian state supported hackers were behind the breach of the Democratic Party’s computer networks.
The private document, now released in entirety by BuzzFeed, makes several conclusions based on information it claims to have extracted from serving and retired Russian spies and associates of Mr. Trump. It says there was a “regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin” to Mr. Trump’s campaign and there were monetary transactions between Paul Manafort, former chief of Trump campaign and Russian intermediaries. The document also names two other associates of Mr. Trump - Carter Page and Michael Cohen, who allegedly held secret meetings with Russian agents in Moscow and Prague respectively during the campaign. While the travel details of Mr. Page and Mr. Trump tally with their locations mentioned in the report, in the case of Mr. Cohen it is way off the mark. Mr. Cohen has not travelled to Prague at all, he responded.
Other than some verifiable factual inaccuracies, the private report also leaves some crucial conclusions unexplained. It said the Russian spies had made a dossier on Hillary Clinton, by snooping on her conversations during her visits to the country but refused to provide this to the Trump campaign, while allegedly helping them throughout the campaign. It also says Mr. Trump was offered various real estate deals ahead of the 2018 World soccer cup but he did not take up these for “unknown” reasons.
