Follow up to previous posting today – President-elect plans to restructure US intelligence agencies – via Washington Post – U.S. intercepts capture senior Russian officials celebrating Trump win – “Senior officials in the Russian government celebrated Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as a geopolitical win for Moscow, according to U.S. officials who said that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications in the aftermath of the election in which Russian officials congratulated themselves on the outcome. The ebullient reaction among high-ranking Russian officials — including some who U.S. officials believe had knowledge of the country’s cyber campaign to interfere in the U.S. election — contributed to the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow’s efforts were aimed at least in part at helping Trump win the White House. Other key pieces of information gathered by U.S. spy agencies include the identification of “actors” involved in delivering stolen Democratic emails to the WikiLeaks website, and disparities in the levels of effort Russian intelligence entities devoted to penetrating and exploiting sensitive information stored on Democratic and Republican campaign networks. Those and other data points are at the heart of an unprecedented intelligence report being circulated in Washington this week that details the evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and catalogues other cyber operations by Moscow against U.S. election systems over the past nine years…”

• Related via The Hill – “U.S. intelligence officials have identified the intermediaries Russia used to deliver stolen emails to WikiLeaks, CNN reports. The go-betweens used by the Russians were identified in a classified report presented to President Obama on Thursday, U.S. officials familiar with the report told CNN. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange denied in a Fox News interview earlier this week that Russia had provided the stolen Democratic documents that the group published last year. A senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News on Thursday that the U.S. had specifically identified Russian sources who gave WikiLeaks material from internal accounts of the Democratic Party.”
• Related via The Atlantic – Donald Trump’s Asymmetric War on the Establishment – The logic of policy by tweet: “…Trump’s Twitter activity has confounded not just the media and U.S. officials, but also foreign governments. Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, recently declared, in reference to Trump, that “An obsession with ‘Twitter foreign policy’ is undesirable.” Trump, Xinhua noted, appeared to believe that “issuing hard-line comments and taking up sensitive issues may perhaps add to his chips for negotiating with other countries…”
• Related – The Agency – The New York Times – “The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online…”
• Related – Former CIA director James Woolsey quits Trump transition team – “The resignation comes amid frustrations over the incoming administration’s national security plans and Trump’s public undermining of the intelligence community.”
• Related via Politico – Clapper: Trump rhetoric on intel agencies alarming U.S. allies