E. OM . H ICE UR YO R VO S. W U YO R NE U YO
W W W. L A L O Y O L A N . C O M
EST. 1921
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Los Angeles LOYOLAN The
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The action against Planned Parenthood shows Ryan does not understand its importance.
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| ISSUE 15
Report reveals Russian media influence
Intelligence reports were revealed to the public about Russian election involvement. Sami Leung
Asst. News Editor @LALoyolan
A report coordinated among the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) concluded that the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, ordered a covert campaign to influence the American election in Donald Trump’s favor. A declassified intelligence report detailing the investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election has been released to the public as of Jan. 6. A report on a collection of unverified memos pertaining to Donald Trump and Russian operatives’ close contact was subsequently released on Jan. 10. According to the New York Times, the Russian teams hacked emails, created an internet ‘troll’ persona to leak the emails, and spread stories harmful to Hillary Clinton through an international propaganda outlet known as Russia Today (RT) starting in March 2016. “RT’s coverage of Secretary Hillary Clinton throughout the U.S. presidential campaign was consistently negative and focused on her leaked emails and accused her of corruption,
poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism,” the report stated. The campaign also sought to undermine Americans’ faith in democracy and the election process. “A number of Republicans [continue] not to be too concerned about it as if it’s not something we should take seriously,” LMU political science professor Liza Taylor said. “Normally, that would be something Republicans would care about, but I think because it’s working in the favor of their current president-elect, there’s less concern about something that should be completely bipartisan — the fact that any sort of foreign power would be meddling in our election process.” The report notes that the influence of the campaign “represented a significant escalation in directness, level of activity and scope of effort compared to previous operations aimed at U.S. elections.” President-elect Donald Trump was briefed on the evidence in a meeting with the directors of the NSA, CIA and the FBI, during which he described the meeting as “constructive” and stated that the U.S. needed to aggressively combat the cyberattacks. However, he has also denied that Russian cyberattacks had any effect on the election, according to the L.A. Times. He later added in an interview with the New York Times that the report and focus on Russian influence
was a “political witch hunt” by his political opponents. Although the report did stress its “intellectually rigorous” analysis of information drawn from human and technological sources, it failed to mention exactly how the agencies had collected their data or came to their conclusions, thus leaving it open to attack by allies of Donald Trump.
The report also asserted that the emails taken by Russian intelligence from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were then relayed to Wikileaks’ Editor-inChief Julien Assange for publishing. Assange adamantly denies that his sources for information were from a member of any government or state parties. He went on See Report | Page 4
via Flickr Creative Commons
A report was released on Jan. 10 saying Donald Trump was in contact with Russian operatives.