As in, do we have a certified email from Vladmir Putin asking Julian Asange to release the emails? No. But SEVERAL government agencies (which if you remember at the time was still controlled by Republicans) have concluded with high confidence that Russia was the guilty party.
"On July 22, 2016, a person or entity going by the moniker "
Guccifer 2.0" claimed on a
WordPress-hosted blog to have been acting alone in hacking the DNC.
[9][10] He also claimed to send significant amounts of stolen electronic DNC documents to
WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has not revealed the source for their
leaked emails.
[11] However,
cybersecurity experts and firms, including
CrowdStrike,
Fidelis Cybersecurity,
Mandiant,
SecureWorks,
ThreatConnect, and the editor for
Ars Technica, have rejected the claims of "Guccifer 2.0" and have determined, on the basis of substantial evidence, that the cyberattacks were committed by two Russian state-sponsored groups (Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear).
[12]
According to separate reports in the
New York Times and the
Washington Post,
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded with "high confidence"
[13] that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the DNC.
[13][14] While the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia was behind the cyberattack, intelligence officials told the
Washington Post that they had "not reached a conclusion about who passed the emails to WikiLeaks" and so did not know "whether Russian officials directed the leak."
[14] A number of experts and cybersecurity analysts believe that "Guccifer 2.0" is probably a Russian government disinformation cover story to distract attention away from the DNC breach by the two Russian intelligence agencies.
[2][3][4][5][15]
President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin had a discussion about
computer security issues, which took place as a side segment during the
then-ongoing G20 summit in China in September 2016. Obama said Russian hacking stopped after his warning to Putin.
[16]
In a joint statement on October 7, 2016, the
United States Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated that the US intelligence community is confident that the Russian government directed the breaches and the release of the obtained material in an attempt to "… interfere with the US election process."
["
So do they know for sure? No. Is it really really really likely. Yes.