In a secure meeting room under the Capitol last week, legislators held in their hands a classified letter written by colleagues in the Senate summing up a secret, new CIA assessment of Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election.
Sitting before the House Intelligence Committee was a senior FBI counterintelligence official. The question the Republicans and Democrats in attendance wanted answered was whether the bureau concurred with the conclusions the CIA had just shared with senators that Russia "quite clearly" intended to help Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton and clinch the White House.
For the Democrats in the room, the FBI's response was frustrating. During a similar Senate Intelligence Committee briefing held the previous week, the CIA's statements, as reflected in the letter, were "direct and bald and unqualified" about Russia's intentions to help Trump, according to one of the officials who attended the House briefing.
The FBI official's remarks to the legislators were, in comparison, "fuzzy" and "ambiguous," suggesting to those in the room that the bureau and the agency weren't on the same page, the official said.
The divergent messages from the CIA and the FBI put a spotlight on the difficulty faced by intelligence and law enforcement officials as they try to draw conclusions about the Kremlin's motives for hacking Democratic Party emails during the 2016 race. Officials are frequently looking at information that is fragmentary. They also face issues assessing the intentions of a country expert at conducting sophisticated "influence" operations that made it hard - if not impossible - to conclusively detect the Kremlin's elusive fingerprints.
