FBI and NSA Had Low Confidence That Russia Was Behind the DNC Hack

The FBI and the National Security Agency, in the heat of the 2016 election, dissented from an intelligence community assessment, which judged that Russia was behind the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee servers and the subsequent release of stolen emails. The FBI and NSA instead had “low confidence” in the attribution to Russia, according to a Sept. 12, 2016, Intelligence Community Assessment released to the public for the first time on July 18, 2025, as part of a batch of records declassified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “FBI and NSA, however, have low confidence in the attribution of the data leaks to Russia,” the assessment states. “They agree that the disclosures appear consistent with what we might expect from Russian influence activities but note that we lack sufficient technical details to correlate the information posted online to Russian state-sponsored actors.”...