In the american president ial election. It is as conclusive as it is damning, pointing the finger directly at Vladimir Putin and saying he ordered an Influence Campaign aimed at undermining public faith in the Us Democratic system. It states their understanding that the russian government developed a clear preference for President Elect trump over Hillary Clinton, and backed what private cyberspace companies have long concluded that a Russian Group known as fancy bear was behind the leaked emails of top democrats. The report emerged shortly after a meeting between trump and his top spies this afternoon. Donald trump called the meeting constructive and appeared to admit foreign spies could be behind some of the hacking. But he refused once more to believe the outcome of the election had in any way been affected. This is where it all started so publicly, the Democratic National convention injuly, a chance for a president ial candidate to shine in front of an adoring party conference. But hillary coronation was mired by scandal. The chair of the dnc had to resign on the eve of the Party Convention after a leak of internal e mails showed officials actively favouring clinton over Bernie Sanders. Wind forward six months, the leaks get worse and donald trump wins the november election, and barack obama takes to the stage to announce expulsions of Russian Diplomats after what america believed is a cyberattack from russia. This is a major headache for trump. It is not exactly in the interest of donald trump to acknowledge that he perhaps benefited from state sponsored hacking. Its made all the more awkward after those comments back injuly. Russia, if you are listening, i hope you are able to find the 30,000 e mails that are missing. The last 2a hours has shown the capricious nature of the debate, first a series of tweets saying he was a big fan of intelligence agencies. And then a follow up, asking why they had not investigated Democratic Committee computers. This Afternoon Trump was briefed by top spies, outlining the evidence they have for russias involvement in the hacking. He has now conceded the leaks might have come from foreign enemies but insists there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election. Perhaps hes right, we might never know for sure, but this is no longer about the part russia may be playing in americas domestic affairs, its about the relationship the president of the United States will have with the agencies tasked with keeping america safe. If trump no longer trusts his own spies, the kremlins work is done. Im joined now by thomas rid, professor of Security Studies at Kings College hes been looking through the cia assessment. It is unflinching. In the way it points the finger directly at russia and russian hackers, and at the russian government and at Vladimir Putin. It is important to keep this in a historical context, a lot us in the Threat Intelligence and Digital Forensic community have studied russian Hacking Campaigns for many years, two decades, and the one thing that is crucial, they make mistakes. Again and again, and when they make mistakes we can look at these mistakes and learn from them and link breaches and attacks to each other and to the perpetrator. You have read the report, and you dont think it has oversold this understanding of russian influence . The Us Intelligence committee have been tracking russian operations, not just in computers, network operations, but Russian Influence Operations for many decades. They have coverage through Human Sources as well as technical sources and we can tell from their very strong intelligence language in the report that their sources, including their Human Sources, seem to be very strong. This is a significant observation. Standing back, you could say that president obama ordered the report a month ago and it comes as donald trump is about to be inaugurated and it seems to favour Hillary Clinton by pointing the figure at Vladimir Putins support for trump, so why would you not be sceptical . Lets keep this in perspective, president obama was very reluctant during the campaign of course he campaigned for clinton, but he was reluctant to use the Intelligence Community and to point fingers at what was going on, because he, like many others, thought that clinton would win, anyway, so it wouldnt matter in the end, but clearly that did not happen. You have traced the way the servers were hacked. You were looking at e mails Tojohn Podesta and how the spam filter failed. And how the e mails were essentially leaked. What makes you Linkjohn Podesta at one end to Vladimir Putin at the other . In that particular case, the russian operators made the mistake and left part of the infrastructure that they used in order to breach thousands of targets, hundreds of thousands of targets and only one of them wasjohn podesta. Because they made that mistake with a link shortening account, and this is only one mistake of many, we can piece together a highly detailed full resolution picture of their targeting over many months and it looks exactly like the targets set of a military Intelligence Agency would look like. A military Intelligence Agency means Vladimir Putin himself . The operation was most likely started as a Bottom Up Initiative and then Vladimir Putin signed off on it at some point in the middle of last year which is also part of the intelligence estimate. Its easy to understand what russia wants to gain from this. How do you think donald trump himself has handled the leaks . We know from history, and this is a very long history, cold war history, the russian Intelligence Community have honed their skills in driving wedges into the political systems of their adversaries, to multiply divisions. First they wanted to divide clinton and Bernie Sanders which they succeeded in doing, and now it seems they are daring trump to deepen the division between his administration and his own Foreign Policy and intelligence establishment. So by tweeting out these unhinged statements, he is indeed doing exactly what the russians and probably Vladimir Putin want him to do. Thomas, Thanks Forjoining us. The former director of the cia James Woolseyjoins me now. He quit the Trump Transition Team this week as he explained he didnt want to fly under false colours as a Senior Security advisor to trump. Thank you very much forjoining us. Have you read the report before it was released . Do you agree broadly with what it says . I had not read it before it was released, i still have to read it, and it seems to me that it sounds like a soundly done report. It makes several points, that the russian effort is wide reaching, that is certainly true. The russians call it disinformation, otherwise known as lying, and they target institutions in the west, any institutions in countries they are concerned about or interested in, they have been doing this since the 1940s, maybe the 1930s. And they have done it of course until very recently without using cyber but using other devices, forged documents, doctored photographs, etc. Hundreds and hundreds of people, thousands of people work on this, according to defectors who have gone into this in some detail. That is apparently confirmed by the report. And i think it is good and sound for americans and the rest of us to understand that the russians operate this way and they have operated this way for many years and they are not going to change under Vladimir Putin. It also seems, the report seems to say, that whatever the russians did, it does not seem to have influenced the outcome of the election, that is notjust something trump is saying, that is something the report says. And something jim clapper has said, as well. They would have needed to do that, they would have needed to have got into the Voting Machine and the counting process, which we have got to upgrade in the United States. Can ijust come in, you have said this is good and sound, and we know donald trump has refused to believe that it had any effect on the election outcome, what do you read into that . No one else i know has charged that it has had an effect on the outcome. I dont believe the Intelligence Organisations or the fbi or anything ive read, suggests there was any effect. It is something which one needs to fix because if it is not fixed and the Voting Machines are not perfect, there could be an effect some day, but i dont know of any authoritative statement which says it affected the counting and the models, the counting of the ballots. What is your message to democrats tonight who hear this report which points the finger at Vladimir Putin leading a campaign of influence over the election and must be feeling outraged . Well, i would think that all americans, democrats and republicans, ought, if not to be outraged, to be somewhere between outraged and highly concerned, that the russians, by continuing to do what they have done for many a theoretical one, be out, of elections. Britains elections, our elections, other elections. We need to get in control of our own systems and counter what the russians are doing. Can i gently suggest that some might say that is rather naive, we understand there are reports of senior russian official celebrating a Trump Victory and we know that trump himself seems to be very friendly with russia and he has refused to point the finger at the state himself or stop what more evidence do we need that this is russian influence working on American Politics . If the russians had real elections and there was one between Vladimir Putin and gorbachev, there would be celebrations in the United States and britain, that gorbachev had won, even if we had not gotten involved in doing the kind of things that the russians do, with respect to interfering with voting and so forth. One of the things we are seeing here, americans come slowly as a nation, taking effective efforts at imposing and fighting something which were challenging. And we are still at the beginning stages of this. Churchill said the americans always do the right thing, but unfortunately only after they have exhausted all the other possibilities. You have to realise we are exhausting possibilities now, give us time, and i think we will organise things in such a way that we protect our ballot and help others protect theirs. Take us inside the mindset which you know so well of Senior Intelligence chiefs, the cia, who have heard their Commander In Chief reject the explanation that they have offered, what kind of relationship lies in store for donald trump and the cia now . They are big Boys And Girls and they take a lot of criticism, it is very popular in the United States politically, if anything comes up that remotely deals with intelligence, to find some reason to criticise the cia. Publicly . 0ften, often. I have seen that coming at me when i was director of central intelligence, demanding that i do impossible things, such as fire people who were already retired. Laughter we are not always at our best in the initial stages of something, it took three years to get into world war i and two and 2. 5 years to get into world war ii while britain held germany at bay, and sometimes we dont respond as quickly as we should. Thanks forjoining us. A gunman opened fire in the Baggage Claim Area at the Fort Lauderdale airport in florida, killing five people and wounding at least eight before being taken into custody. The attack sent panicked passengers running out of the terminal and onto the tarmac seeking safety. One man, believed to be the shooter, is now in custody. 0ur CorrespondentBarbara Plett ussher has been monitoring events. There was a lot of confusion around what was taken onto the plane, whether the shooter was a passenger, whether he had carried a gun, what more can you tell us . Police have not clarify the question, whether he came into the Baggage Claim Area from outside or whether he arrived as a passenger but the County Commissioner has said that he had been told that he came on a plane, that he had checked his gun in the luggage and that he picked it up on the Baggage Carousel and took it to the bathroom, where he loaded it and came out shooting. It is legal to check a gun, to put it into checked luggage, in the United States, under certain precautions and those precautions were taken. Have looked into and they have said, there was no evidence that he had any connection to canada and since then, reports that he flew in from anchorage, which is also the place where he was last known to have lived, anchorage, alaska. Come from a flight from canada. Has there been much reaction from politicalfigures in america this evening so far . You have statements of condolence from the president , and something similar from the President Elect, who takes the opportunity to comment on Public Events through his twitter account. He did that as well. One thing that people will be asking, how could this happen so easily in an airport, where you are supposed to have tight security. He seems to have brought his gun in with him but the fact is that it took place in an arrivals area, in domestic flights, in the United States, these areas are not terribly secure, people can walk in, picked up family members, drivers can pick people up at the baggage claim. It is possible there may be some discussion about whether these areas need to be further secured just like the areas where you go into departures for aeroplanes. Thank you very much. There is a certain irony that even when economists are attempting to take the blame, they end up using poor old Weather Forecaster michael fish as their whipping boy, and Headline Synonym for a forecast gone wrong. The Bank Of England admitted that economists were facing a forecasting crisis, after their dire predictions of a post brexit downturn proved unfounded in the first six months. The Bank Of Englands chief economist andy haldane said his team were now facing having to predict how the economy will perform, despite unknowable outcomes of the brexit negotiations. So can economists tell us anything more than paul the octopus, mr whippy the whippet, or indeed meg the mystic . Heres chris cook. Earlier on today a woman rang the bbc and said that she heard there was a hurricane on the way, if you are watching, dont worry, there isnt. Voiceover has economics had its own michael fish moment . That is what the chief economist at the Bank Of England said this week. Very similar to the sort of reports central banks, naming no names, issued precrisis, theres no hurricane coming, it might be very windy in the sub prime sector. The financial crisis was a huge shock to economists, in 2009, 49 countries had year on year falls, in economic activity, but as late as september 2008, no major forecasters foresaw that. We failed to appreciate the damage that a relatively sub prime bass Mortgage Market in the United States, loans to fairly poor people who cannot afford the houses they are trying to buy, would do to our Financial Sector because we did not realise just how interdependent the whole sector had become. There were views that the Financial Sector was able to manage risk much more effectively, than all this sort of computerisation and Self Reporting and it turned out not to be true. The financial crisis was not the only bad weather that the economists missed, e