Despite President-elect Trump’s false claims that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, reported the Russian hacking had no influence on the election, the contents of the actual declassified intelligent report suggest otherwise. In fact, Clapper claimed only that there was no definitive way to estimate the impact of the Russian hacking’s influence on the election. The report confirmed that Vladimir Putin constructed an influence campaign to target the 2016 U.S. election. Within their attempts to influence American democracy, Russian intelligence agencies hacked computers at the DNC and leaked hacked information to WikiLeaks in an effort to boost Trump’s chance of getting elected. In short, the report specifically states that it does not assess whether or not the election was influenced by this hacking, so for Trump and his colleagues to not only say otherwise but to tweet outright lies about what the Director of National Intelligence said, is either a testament to his dishonesty or to his ignorance of having not actually read the report. In a tweet posted on January 7, 2017, Trump tried to use the lack of tampered voting machines as evidence to dismiss any possible impact the hacking could have had on the election. However, tampering with voting machines is not the only way to impact or influence an election. If anything, the hacking succeeded in presenting a more negative view of Trump’s opponent, thereby influencing the American public’s perspectives to side with and eventually vote for Trump.