KNOWN KNOWNS:

The World's Marco Werman spoke with Mark Mazzetti, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with The New York Times.

Marco Werman: How do we know that Russia actually attempted to influence the election?

Mark Mazzetti: We base it on the near-universal assessment of American intelligence, law enforcement officials, foreign governments, etc., that Russia did in fact attempt to disrupt the 2016 campaign. I think that is not really in dispute at the moment, even though to a large extent the American intelligence community hasn't really shown its work to provide direct evidence of why. But after a year of reporting, I don't, and my colleagues don't, and our competitors don't, really hear anyone who credibly questions whether it happened.

And are you still using the word "alleged" to describe this?

No. We say it is a fact.

So what exactly did the Russians do, or, at least, what do we know they did?

What is pretty firmly established now is that Russians, or people working on behalf of the Russians, carried out a pretty extensive campaign of hacking Democrats, Democratic operatives, the DNC, advisers to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and spilling those emails out as a way to discredit her and her campaign. There was also a parallel effort by the Russians, or again people working on behalf of the Russians, to spread propaganda and fake news through Facebook, Twitter, etc., that would be particularly damaging to the Clinton campaign and would in effect help out the Trump campaign in 2016.

Tweet   @brothersjudd