Russian meddling did not affect election results.. Ex-US Homeland Security

U.S. officials told lawmakers on Wednesday that there is no question that Russia engaged in widespread interference in last year’s presidential election aimed at helping Donald Trump win the White House, but they said there is no evidence that Moscow was able to change the vote count.

Former Homeland Security agency Chief Jeh Johnson said at a House Intelligence Committee hearing that the extent of Russian hacking into computer files at the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington and attempts to infiltrate state election records went significantly beyond past Russian efforts to influence U.S. elections.

“In 2016, the Russian government, at the direction of Vladimir Putin himself, orchestrated cyberattacks on our nation for the purpose of influencing our election — plain and simple,” Johnson said, warning that the cyberattacks against U.S. elections would worsen in the years ahead.

Putin has rejected Russian government involvement in the U.S. cyberattacks. He has said that “patriotic” hackers, however, might have carried out the attacks on the U.S. election.

“I can imagine that some do it deliberately, staging a chain of attacks in such a way as to cast Russia as the origin of such an attack,” the Russian leader said last month.

At a separate hearing, a current Homeland Security official, Jeanette Manfra, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the agency has evidence that Russia targeted election-related systems in 21 of the 50 U.S. states.

Johnson said 36 states accepted help from the federal government in trying to blunt the Russian efforts, even as many states rejected federal oversight of their state-run election operations.