Statement: We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election.
Speaker: hillary clinton
About the speaker: Hillary Clinton was the 2016 Democratic nominee for president. She served as U.S. Secretary of State during the first four years of the Obama administration. She is formerly a U.S. senator from New York, first elected in 2000. She was a candidate for president in 2008. She previously served as first lady when her husband, Bill Clinton, served two terms as president. She was born in Chicago in 1947, graduated from Wellesley College and earned a law degree at Yale Law School. She and her husband have one daughter.
Date: October 19, 2016
Location: national
Topics: elections;history;homeland security;foreign policy
Context: the third 2016 presidential debate
Fact-check justification: Clinton said, "We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election." We don’t know how many separate investigations into the attacks they were. But the Director of National Intelligence, which speaks for the country’s 17 federal intelligence agencies, released a joint statement saying the intelligence community at large is confident that Russia is behind recent hacks into political organizations’ emails. The statement sourced the attacks to the highest levels of the Russian government and said they are designed to interfere with the current election. We rate Clinton’s statement . https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/542ece9a-ae39-433c-8215-4a41906b75c9 The now former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made a comment when speaking before Congress May 8, 2017, that some readers interpreted as going against our findings in this article. Here’s why we disagree with that interpretation. We wrote this article Oct. 19, 2016, responding to an Oct. 7, 2016 , joint statement from Clapper’s former office, which oversees the entire intelligence community, and Homeland Security. Clapper’s May 2017 congressional testimony, on the other hand, was about the much more comprehensive January 2017 report produced by the CIA, FBI and NSA. The process of putting that report together didn’t start until months after we published this article, in December 2016, at which point the intelligence community decided to restrict the investigation to those three agencies. Here’s what Clapper said, according to Congressional Quarterly . ("ICA" refers to the January 2017 "intelligence community assessment.") "Additionally, I'll briefly address four related topics that have emerged since the ICA was produced. Because of both classification and some executive privilege strictures requested by the White House, there are limits to what I can discuss. And of course my direct official knowledge of any of this stopped on 20 January when my term of office was happily over. "As you know, the (ICA) was a coordinated product from three agencies; CIA, NSA, and the FBI not all 17 components of the intelligence community. Those three under the aegis of my former office. Following an extensive intelligence reporting about many Russian efforts to collect on and influence the outcome of the presidential election, President Obama asked us to do this in early December and have it completed before the end of his term." The January report presented its findings by saying "we assess," with "we" meaning "an assessment by all three agencies." The October statement, on the other hand, said "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident" in its assessment. As we noted in the article, the 17 separate agencies did not independently come to this conclusion, but as the head of the intelligence community, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence speaks on behalf of the group. We stand by our rating.