Former Director of US National Intelligence James Clapper has defended the assessment by the intelligence community that Russian President Vladimir Putin directly interfered in last year’s presidential election to help Donald Trump.

Axar.az reports citing to PressTV "While it's been over four months since the issuance of the assessment, as [FBI and NSA] Directors [James] Comey and [Michael] Rogers testified ... the conclusions and confidence levels reached at the time still stand," Clapper told senators during a hearing on Monday.

Clapper summarized the intelligence assessment, completed by the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, by saying that the Russian leader directed an “influence campaign” to erode the "faith and confidence" of American voters and "demean” then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

The former intelligence chief also said that Putin "sought to advantage Mr. Trump."

In the run-up to the Nov. 8 vote, WikiLeaks kept releasing batches of emails from Clinton's campaign as well as the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Clapper said the Russians collected information on both Republicans and Democrats but only chose to release damning information about the DNC.

"The Russians used cyber operations against both political parties, including hacking into servers used by the Democratic National Committee and releasing stolen data to WikiLeaks and other media outlets," he said.