CIA: Putin personally led hacker attacks on US elections

Senate Intelligence Vice President Mark Warner (pictured left) said the report referred to an "astounding level" of contact between US President Donald Trump's team and Russian agents.

In turn, the head of the special committee, Republican Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, believes that the authors of the investigation have not been able to find evidence of collusion between Trump or his campaign headquarters with the Russian mission.

According to the report's main findings, the Russian government “led extensive activities against the US electoral infrastructure at the national and local levels” from 2014 to 2017. In addition, it states that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally led the attempts to hack computer networks and accounts associated with the US Democratic Party.

According to the authors of the report, after the elections, the Russian Federation was able to use for its own purposes the relative inexperience of the transitional Trump cabinet in matters of governance.

Paul Manafort, the ex-head of Trump's campaign headquarters, is named as one of the key figures in contacts between the American president's entourage and the Russian side. The authors of the report believe that he collaborated with representatives of the Russian Federation, for example, with businessman Oleg Deripaska and political strategist Konstantin Kilimnik, who is called in the report "an officer of Russian intelligence".

In addition, according to the authors of the investigation, Wikileaks, which released internal Democratic Party documents, played a key role in the Russian intervention campaign and likely knew it was helping Russian intelligence efforts.

Trump said that he had not read the report and had nothing to do with either the Russian Federation or Ukraine, "which is clearly confirmed in the report."

Earlier it was said that the American side intends to publish a classified report on the "Russian investigation". Intelligence Committee head Marco Rubio and Vice President Mark Warner thanked "the investigators of the Committee on Russia for their many years of painstaking and hard work on this important issue."

At the end of July, it became known that the Office of the Director of US National Intelligence had checked the last part of the report. This was done in order to prevent a possible leak of classified data.