Did Russia Rig The Election? Kremlin Tried To Influence Results, Ex-NSA Official Says

A former high-ranking National Security Agency official stated Tuesday that Russia did not alter the final voting results in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, or even prefer President Donald Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton, but that it had attempted to greatly influence the country’s democratic process, TASS reported.

"I don't think they changed one single vote, they didn't do that. The American system is reasonably robust against that and I think that chances of succeeding in that are very slim," ex-NSA deputy director Chris Inglis said at the World Cyber Security Congress in London.

Weighing in on perhaps the most contentious issue around the country, Inglis, who served under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama between 2006 and 2014 before retiring and was also a top member of the Air Force and National Guard, said much evidence has implicated the Russians’ hacking efforts but electing Trump was not the primary goal.

"I don't think that Russian desire and intent was to physically change the results of the election to cause Donald Trump to win or Hillary Clinton to lose," Inglis said.

"I think that desire was essentially to cause the American political system to be somewhere introspective, to be concerned about the resilience, the robustness of their own electoral processes."

Inglis also used the word "chaos" to describe the country’s political system, which then allowed Russia to allegedly hack the Democratic National Committee and send a steady stream of "fake news" articles through social media.

While Russia has consistently denied any hacking of the election, Trump and his campaign’s alleged ties to Russian intelligence officers and its top ambassador to the U.S. have continuously dogged the new president during his first six weeks in office.

Last month, Trump asked for the resignation of now-former national security adviser Michael Flynn for speaking with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak about possibly lifting sanctions put in place by Obama prior to Trump taking the Oath of Office and then misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of the talks.

Most recently, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged dealings with Russia after it was revealed he had also met with Kislyak and did not say so during his confirmation hearing for the Justice Department’s top job.