By Brendan Cole
Senior Reporter
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
A report by the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about claims of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election went offline from part of the U.S. Senate website—only to be found elsewhere on the site and another government website, Newsweek has found.
The "purge" was first found on the Reddit group r/craftofintelligence, which featured a post headlined "All Five Volumes of the US Senate Intelligence Committees Investigation into the 2016 US Election have been purged."
The post was referring to the intelligence.senate.gov page, whose URL contained keywords referring to the bipartisan committee's release of its first volume into the Russia report. When clicked on, this resulted in a "no results found" message.
Read More on U.S.
Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment.
...
Why It Matters
Unavailable government webpage messages have appeared frequently since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. These have been attributed to changes across all forms of government in the transition from Joe Biden's administration to Trump's second term in office.
Many of the pages appear to have been taken down in response to Trump's war on "gender ideology" and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which the administration says are not meritocratic. Faith Williams, policy director at the nonprofit watchdog Project on Government Oversight, said in January that moves to remove pages were "extremely troubling" and a "major blow to government transparency."
What To Know
A Reddit user wrote on the r/craftofintelligence subreddit that a document from the bipartisan intelligence committee, which investigated claims of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election that Trump won, was no longer available on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence website.
A click on the link prompted the message that "the page you requested could not found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post."
Underneath the Reddit post, one user said that the Wayback Machine, a digital content archive, showed the reports were last available on May 13. Newsweek was unable to find any fresh versions of the page beyond that date on the web archiving service.
The archived link shows a press release from July 25, 2019, that states how the probe had spanned more than 15 open hearings, over 200 witness interviews, and nearly 400,000 documents.
The page provides a link to "Volume I: Russian Efforts Against Election Infrastructure." The committee's findings concluded the Russian government had engaged in an "extensive activity" to sabotage the election in favor of Trump.
Reddit users queried whether the files had been deleted, and if there were legal means to prevent such a move.
However, Newsweek found the page was now available under a different URL in another section of the website, where all five volumes of the findings of the intelligence committee concerning its probe into Russian election meddling were available.
The committee's first volume is also still available under the 116th Congress drop-down on GovInfo, which hosts U.S. government information.
The reports released between July 25, 2019, and August 18, 2020, documented the findings of the intelligence committee concerning the Russian attack efforts on the election.
They found that there was "no evidence that any votes were changed or that any voting machines were manipulated, nor was there any conclusion of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia."
There have been other cases of missing webpages. In the first days of the current Trump administration, the White House said that a "404 page not found" error page on its website that previously featured biographies of former U.S. presidents was due to administration changes to the website.
A webpage for the Office of Gun Violence Prevention that went offline at the same time was also put down to a tweaking of the website.
What People Are Saying
Reddit users on r/craftofintelligence noted how reports on the US Senate Intelligence Committees Investigation into the 2016 US Election "have been purged" with one posting, "aren't there laws against that happening?"
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on May 22: "The Trump White House is the most transparent in history."
President Donald Trump in January regarding material about diversity, equity and inclusion, per USA Today: "If they want to scrub the websites, that's alright with me."
Update, 6/4/24, 7:50 a.m. ET: This article and its headline were updated with additional information.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines