Russia Tried To Damage Biden’s Presidential Campaign, Intelligence Report Says

A declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday reveals that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered various efforts to damage Joe Biden‘s presidential campaign during the 2020 election.

“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions,” the report said. The findings were compiled by several long-time officials in the intelligence community, including some top administration officials from the Donald Trump White House.

Russia intentionally spread damaging misinformation about then-candidate Biden and his son Hunter Biden, hoping to bolster then-President Trump’s chance at reelection.

The report confirmed that Putin and Moscow used Andriy Derkach, a Russian loyalist member of Ukraine’s Parliament, to allege that Biden and his son had a link to Ukrainian corruption schemes. The report cites a meeting between Dekach and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in 2019 when the Ukrainian official intentionally gave Giuliani false information.

A former colleague of Paul Manafort,  Konstantin Kilimnik, was a Russian influence agent who also tried to hurt Biden’s candidacy by feeding information to Manafort.

“Kilimnik was back at it again, along with others like Derkach,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), who leads the House Intelligence Committee said. “And they had other conduits for their laundered misinformation, including people like Rudy Giuliani.”

“They were disingenuous in downplaying Russia’s influence operations on behalf of the former president,” Schiff continued in an interview. “It was a disservice not to level with the public and to try to fudge the intelligence in the way they did.”