James R. Clapper Quotes

We, America, elected Trump. Putin didn't do it, nor the trolls in St. Petersburg with their zillions of busy bots. They may well have plucked certain strings in the national psyche - played us like a dimestore ukulele - but we were keen to be plucked.

I don't know one person who has changed their vote from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump because Vladimir Putin wanted them to do that.

I think that when you saw Donald Trump absolutely calling Hillary Clinton crooked, the "lock her up, lock her up," all of that was developed. I think that was developed strategically with people from the Kremlin, with Vladimir Putin.

There may be evidence the Russians are trying to tamper with elections. The Russians are trying to infiltrate everything we do, and they've succeeded. They've infiltrated Hollywood, they've infiltrated our universities, probably try to infiltrate elections by who knows what. But the idea that there is evidence that Putin was actively trying to elect Trump, there isn't a morsel of evidence for that, yet it shows up. The truth of the matter is that Putin doesn't care who runs the United States. It doesn't matter to him.

The Intelligence Community Assessment concluded first that President Putin directed and influenced a campaign to erode the faith and confidence of the American people in our presidential election process. Second, that he did so to demean Secretary Clinton, and third, that he sought to advantage Mr. Trump.

I think that Russian meddling in the election is an important issue.

I think that Putin's strategy has been throwing a lot of money, fairly haphazardly, at a lot of projects aimed at disrupting Western relations and undermining trust in democracies. They may have gotten farther in the States than anywhere else.

He [ Vladimir Putin] would rather have a puppet as president of the United States.

It is preposterous to believe that the Russians had any effect on the outcome of voting in America. It's absurd. There is no evidence.

Who's driving this business that the Russians hacked the election? It's the Democrat Party. It's Hillary Clinton. It's Obama. It's all those people who just can't accept that they lost.

The Russians sought to interfere with the election process - that the cyber hacking that took place by the Russians was part of that campaign, and that they had a clear preference in terms of outcomes.

Foreign meddling elections is bad whether it's done by the Russians here or by us or anyplace else.

The Russians have to be celebrating with a minimal expenditure of resources and what they have accomplished. Of course, what's unfolded now, here, the leader of the lead of the investigation about potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign has been removed. So the Russians have to consider this as another victory on the scoreboard for them.

We have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election, and, believe me, they're not doing it to get me elected. They're doing it to try to influence the election for Donald Trump. Now, maybe because he has praised Putin, maybe because he says he agrees with a lot of what Putin wants to do, maybe because he wants to do business in Moscow, I don't know the reasons.

The Russians wanted Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton. Their entire intervention in the American president election - from the news bots, to allies like Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn to the meeting with Don Jr. - was about hoping to elect a president who would ease the sanctions that pinch the oligarchy that enables Vladimir Putin.

I do not believe that Russians changed the outcome of the election. I want to be clear about that. But I do think that it is very - some of the things we saw are very reminiscent of the active measures that Russian intelligence and before that Soviet intelligence agencies used to try to undermine the government or individual politicians in foreign countries.

We know from the company we hired, Kraus Stripe , that there was Russian involvement in this to destabilize not just our institution, the Democratic Party, but our democracy itself.

We do have evidence the [Donald] Trump campaign was working to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue.

I know Donald's [Trump] very praiseworthy of Vladimir Putin, but Putin is playing a really tough, long game here. And one of the things he's done is to let loose cyber attackers to hack into government files, to hack into personal files, hack into the Democratic National Committee. And we recently have learned that, you know, that this is one of their preferred methods of trying to wreak havoc and collect information.

[Donald] Trump at a press conference personally asked the Russians to get involved in the search [of missed Hillary Clinton's emails].

I think that what is true is that the Russians intended to meddle, and they meddled. And it could be another country in the future.

I don't know who did the hacking [through president election 2016]. The article is based on a lie that the R.N.C. was hacked. So the entire premise of the article is false. The sources are unnamed. And the report was inconclusive.The point is, though, we need to find out more facts about this situation. Then we can make intelligent decisions later, and you and I can have more intelligent conversation about what to do about it.

The Russians could not have had any impact whatsoever on voting in America, either how they were cast or how they were counted.

We do know from our intelligence community that Russia had a design to discredit the U.S. elections, and took sides in favor of Mr. Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. We do now that they engaged individuals and entities to do cyber-attacks to get as much information as they possibly could, and of course, also used WikiLeaks to accumulate information, and released it in a strategic way that could affect our election, and certainly the credibility of our election.

I have had no contacts or collusions with the Russians. And my exchange with Guccifer 2, based on the content and the timing, most certainly does not constitute collusion.