Officials from two European countries told Newsweek that Trumps comments about Russias hacking have alarmed several NATO partners because it suggests he either does not believe the information he receives in intelligence briefings, does not pay attention to it, does not understand it or is misleading the American public for unknown reasons. One British official said members of that government who are aware of the scope of Russias cyberattacks both in Western Europe and America found Trumps comments quite disturbing because they fear that, if elected, the Republican presidential nominee would continue to ignore information gathered by intelligence services in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy.
Trumps behavior, however, has at times concerned the Russians, leading them to revise their hacking and disinformation strategy. For example, when Trump launched into an inexplicable attack on the parents of a Muslim-American soldier who died in combat, the Kremlin assumed the Republican nominee was showing himself psychologically unfit to be president and would be forced by his party to withdraw from the race. As a result, Moscow put its hacking campaign temporarily on hold, ending the distribution of documents until Trump stabilized, both personally and in the polls, according to reports provided to Western intelligence.
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The Russian penetration in the United States is far more extensive than previously revealed publicly, although most of it has been targeted either at government departments or non-government organizations connected to the Democratic Party. Russian hackers penetrated the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department. The State Department cyberattack, which began in 2014 and lasted more than a year, was particularly severe, with Russian hackers gaining entry into its unclassified system, including emails. (Clinton left the State Department in 2013, which means that if she had used its unclassified email system rather than her private servera decision that has dogged her throughout the campaignany of her emails on the government system could have been obtained by Russian hackers).
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