American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now have "high confidence" that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee, The New York Times quoted federal officials as saying.

But intelligence officials have cautioned that they are uncertain whether the electronic break-in at the committee’s computer systems was intended as fairly routine cyberespionage — of the kind the United States also conducts around the world — or as part of an effort to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.

The emails were released by WikiLeaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, has made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency. 

It is unclear how the documents made their way to the group. But a large sampling was published before the WikiLeaks release by several news organizations and someone who called himself “Guccifer 2.0,” who investigators now believe was an agent of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence service.

The assessment by the intelligence community of Russian involvement in the D.N.C. hacking, which largely echoes the findings of private cybersecurity firms that have examined the electronic fingerprints left by the intruders, leaves President Obama and his national security aides with a difficult diplomatic and political decision: whether to publicly accuse the government of President Vladimir V. Putin of engineering the hacking.

US Secretary of State John Kerry raised the cyberattack with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday at a meeting of foreign ministers in Vientiane, Laos. 

Lavrov dismissed the idea that Russia was involved, telling reporters who asked about the charges: "I don’t want to use four-letter words."

Source: MENA