The candidates are fighting for every vote in this very tight race.
Republican candidate Donald Trump has the lead across the country.
Clinton or Trump?
Hillary Clinton, 228. On this map, the states won by Clinton are blue
and those won by Trump are red.
And so, America has a new president.
And the planet has a new American President. Donald Trump.
My husband woke me up and said,
"You're not gonna believe it, but apparently Trump is winning."
And I thought, "God, now they're gonna blame us."
And I even posted that I think that Russians should go out on the streets
and carry the American flag.
Somebody against whom the whole establishment,
and all of the media, and all of the deep state, almost all of them, were,
won because the people liked him.
As a young person who still believes in the values that I was taught
by Americans, in an American school
to me, it was very optimistic to see that,
that it can actually really happen.
That is how democracy is supposed to work.
I think we know what we're up against. We do, don't we?
She's guilty of a very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run.
Hillary Clinton has some explaining to do.
I'm sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!
Bernie Sanders leading Hillary Clinton.
Bernie Sanders. I told him "The election's rigged."
"Here's another ballot!" Throw it away.
"Here's one I like. We'll keep that one."
You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call
the basket of deplorables.
Isn't this exciting? Don't you love it?
I love it! What's more fun than a Trump rally, right?
I made speeches to lots of groups.
But did you have to be paid 675 000 dollars?
That's what they offered.
This is the ultimate reality show.
It's the Presidency of the United States.
Hacked the hell out of us.
The DNC hack exposed by WikiLeaks...
Our country has no idea.
- I doubt it. - He'd rather believe Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin. He called you a brilliant leader.
Do you really want to be complimented by that former KGB officer?
When he calls me brilliant, I'll take the compliment, okay?
Every time Russia is brought up, they say, "Oh, Trump!"
What do I have to do with it?
I'm not going to make you relive the 2016 election. It was too chaotic.
Too crazy. Too much.
But I am interested in figuring out this Trump-Russia thing.
What was that all about? Vladimir Putin's plan to rule the world?
A Democrat witch hunt to take down Trump?
A Cold War spy game?
I've been trying for years to answer those questions,
and everytime someone asked me what this movie was about,
I'd say, "Well, how much time do you have?"
Fear. Money. Corruption.
I can't tell you the one thing that explains what Russia did to us
or that we did to ourselves.
All I can tell you is what happened.
That's hard enough when you're talking about the most chaotic election.
Maybe for now that's one thing I will say.
For some politicians, in Russia and America,
chaos isn't something to fear.
It's a way to get by. Sometimes, with a little help from your friends.
AGENTS OF CHAOS Part I
The country spent years telling itself stories to make sense of 2016.
It started in the final days of the Obama administration
with a report from the US intelligence community.
An American intelligence report finds that Russia used disinformation warfare
to try to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
One of the weapons in the Kremlin's arsenal
was its state-run news network, RT.
I read that report. Well, I laughed my guts out.
They mentioned my name there 27 times.
It would be laughable if it weren't that scary.
If the intelligence community of the most powerful country in the world
is that ignorant, the world Is In much trouble.
The FBI has an open Investigation...
What's next on the Russian investigation?
There were too many investigations to count.
The FBI, the Justice Department,
both houses of Congress.
Everyone wanted to know what Russia had done.
But if anyone was going to get the goods,
it would be the team put together by the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller.
After the announcement that Rod Rosenstein had appointed
Bob Mueller, a friend of mine sent me an email that said: "Bye, bye!"
He knew that I'd worked with Director Mueller twice before
and he assumed I'd just go off and work with him.
People like to think of the special counsel's office as a witch hunt,
but this is just not a partisan issue.
Our report has one key finding,
clear, unequivocal, efforts by the Russian government
to interfere with our election.
The issue that goes to the core of our democracy is:
are we doing everything we can to make sure that Americans will decide
who is running this country?
So the DNC knew of the hack on April 19th.
But it wasn't reported until...
I started working on the Russia story at the suggestion
of the legendary reporter and producer Lowell Bergman.
We formed a team of reporters and collaborators from the US and Russia
to take on different parts of the story.
Were you hired by a firm that had a more political interest?
But what exactly was the story?
We learned a lot of details about election interference.
The trolling, the hacking, and the alleged collusion.
What I couldn't figure out was,
how did these pieces fit together? Or even if they did.
The first piece of the puzzle led us down the cyber trail on the Internet,
where a motley band of Russian trolls had been busy making mischief
on social media.
TROLLS
The campaign was riddled with disinformation,
which travels like quicksilver on the internet.
So we sought out Camille Francois,
who was engaged by the US Senate to study the activities
of the infamous Russian troll factory
known as the Internet Research Agency, or IRA.
In 2016, people didn't know what a Russian troll was.
I was quite fascinated by this new means of controlling narratives.
My background is in human rights, and I was very concerned
with the way digital technology was actually creating new problems
in human rights.
What's really interesting with Russia, it exemplifies a new trend
in governments using the Internet to control and repress.
Members of the committee, thank you for having me here today.
We're here to discuss the growing issue of online imposters
and disinformation.
Targeting specific communities at the right time and with the right tactics
can have a catastrophic impact on society, or on an election.
And I have seen the types of impacts
that those disinformation campaigns can have.
The IRA uses what we call persona.
A persona is simply an account that's not who they say they are.
They're really doing three types of personas.
Fake people, like "Hi, my name is Jenna Abrams."
"I am an American conservative."
She doesn't exist. She's a fake person.
That's a fake persona.
Fake organizations. "Hi, we are BlackMattersUS."
"We are an organization dedicated to fighting racism in America."
This organization doesn't exist. It's a fake shop.
And finally, they're doing fake local media.
Like, a newspaper that's based in Baltimore that has a title
that sounds like it could be real. But it's not.
It's not a real newspaper. It doesn't have real journalists
and it has zero office in Baltimore.
They have this army of personas and together they're gonna do campaigns.
What does all this social media activity tell us
about what the IRA was doing in the United States?
What is the story? Initially, the IRA was not focused on
the 2016 election.
The first thing that you see is the IRA's seeking to control
the Russian domestic conversation.
The first target of the IRA really is the Russian people themselves.
The IRA starts in 2013, in St. Petersburg.
To tell the story of the troll factory,
we compiled hacked and leaked materials
and spoke to former employees and journalists who had gotten inside.
Can you hear me OK?
The whole organization was built from scratch.
But the factory itself started in 2013. It took off from there.
The troll farm itself is like a Disneyland
for investigative journalists.
There is always something going on there.
It's a very evil organization, but it was very fun to investigate.
When was the first time you heard of this thing
we've come to call the troll factory?
In the year 2013, I was the first journalist to report
about the troll farm.
I've seen a post on social media.
A woman told about a very strange job.
And I decided that I need to check.
So I went undercover. I bought a new SIM card.
I created a new social media profile.
And I came up with another name.
They rented this big building on Savushkina Street, 55.
I went to the interview and I was asked just two simple questions.
What's your attitude towards Kremlin?
And what's your attitude towards Russian opposition?
That's how it worked.
Videos shot inside the troll factory
I met another investigative journalist there.
We know each other since childhood
and it was very difficult to hide our laughs.
She said, "Hi, Andrei. Good to see you here."
"You also looking for a job?"
Yeah! I will write stuff on the internet about Kremlin
and praise Putin and stuff like this.
And she said, "Wow, I will do the same thing."
It shows how unprofessional they were on their first days
because they had two investigative journalists in the building
at the same time.
They had several levels.
Some doors has just a hashtag.
A special department creating hashtags, maybe.
They had two types of people, simple trolls and analytics.
The job of analytics is to create the agenda for the troll.
You have to use these words and these phrases
to promote our opinion.
A very short task, we call them technical assignments.
They were really interested in the comments sections of media websites.
Putin is good. Putin is the best president.
If someone had doubts that Putin is the best president...
And they had to send their bosses pages of forums
with examples of their posts.
I spent one day there.
I literally wrote the story in the evening
and the next morning it was online.
A very short story.
I thought they were amateurs.
And how people who were hired from the streets could establish
such a sophisticated disinformational campaign
against a strong Western democracy? Absurd.
It seemed absurd back then.
The trolls' skills just didn't match their ambition
to move fast and break things.
So the people in charge tried to scale up.
They boosted pay to attract better employees
and brought in outside consultants to train them.
Hello, my name is Oleg Matveichev
and this is Ears Wag the Donkey,
a channel for anyone who doesn't want to be a loser,
a channel for anyone who doesn't want to be a victim of manipulation.
I've always been a big fan of the internet.
I'm a pretty well-known blogger.
I always support the authorities and criticize the opposition.
One day, I went to St. Petersburg to give a lecture
for students on mass communication theory.
This young guy introduced himself.
He said, "I know you're this great blogger. You're famous."
"Would you be up for teaching my blogger friends"
"how they can get good at blogging too?"
We went to the outskirts of St. Petersburg.
And I saw a big hall there,
with about thirty to fifty people.
So I gave a lecture on how I work in the blogosphere.
From the questions I started getting after the lecture,
I realized that these people, these kids,
were very unprofessional in this area.
It turned out that they didn't even have their own accounts,
they were just commenting on stuff.
I told them, "Guys, what you're doing is crap."
In this gigantic sea of the internet,
with all these different resources,
your comments hardly get noticed.
If you want to create a system that would have an impact
on the internet, this has to be done completely differently.
First, everyone sitting here should create their own accounts.
Join them together in a network.
Then when someone posts something,
it'll instantly get distributed to a huge number of people.
It'll be way more effective.
The trolls were building a machine for influencing conversations on the web.
So what?
Every PR firm in the world was doing the same thing in 2013.
But the trolls wanted to do more than monetize social media.
They used their network to help the Russian government
in a war against another country.
What they really did, they did with Ukraine,
and Ukraine is the main victim.
Kyiv, Ukraine
Ukraine is fascinating because it is caught between the West and Russia,
both politically and physically.
There's the eastern part which is more Russian
and it's also the wealthier part.
Russia has enormous control there
because of oil and gas, which Ukraine needs.
And so there's this tug of war about Ukraine
whether it's gonna be a Russian sphere of influence or not.
Before the IRA did a major operation in the US,
Ukraine became frankly the lab
for all the latest and greatest from Russia's information operations.
November 2013
Viktor Yanukovych President of Ukraine
Yanukovych was the pro-Russian, pro-Putin president.
But he was going to sign legislation
that would put Ukraine further in the sphere of Western influence.
I believe that we should push on with our partnership
with the European Union. It's an imperative.
Originally, Yanukovych became president with the promise
of signing an EU association agreement.
There was a lot of political support because it was going to be good
for Ukrainian business.
It would have given them freedom of movement for their citizens.
It would have given them complete trade preferences.
It would have been a free, prosperous, increasingly European Ukraine.
Putin wakes up in October of 2013
and decides that he has to move very quickly to end that.
Ukraine is not our closest neighbor. It's our fraternal nation.
So he offers Yanukovych these big loans
and Yanukovych tells his citizens,
"We're gonna put this on the back burner."
This is Ukraine's moment to meet the aspirations of its people
or to disappoint them and risk descending into chaos and violence.
It was political for Putin.
He was afraid he was losing Ukraine to Europe
and the next step would be that his own citizens would want that too.
Putin needed to show Russians that Ukraine's turn toward Europe
was bad news, a perfect opportunity for the troll factory.
While the trolls tried to sway public opinion,
Putin invited Yanukovych to the Kremlin for a friendly chat.
Rumors are that Yanukovych was paid a bloody fortune under the table.
He lived this incredibly opulent life
that you couldn't possibly live on a government salary.
When he reneged on the European deal,
there was this huge popular uprising.
Boys, attach this one too.
We are ordinary Ukrainian people here to defend our rights.
No to Yanukovich, no to him being president for one more year!
He's got until 10 AM tomorrow to resign!
It started as peaceful protests in December of 2013.
Those protests turned violent in January of 2014.
Putin was encouraging Yanukovych throughout this period
to do what he himself would have done and has done in Russia,
which is to be very heavy-handed on the street against protestors,
locking up mass numbers of people.
- Ukraine! - Above all!
He thought that Yanukovych was a chump to allow it to go on
as long as he did.
Ukrainian security services, possibly with some outside help,
began to shoot at the protestors.
You've probably seen the films of the blood baths in January of 2014.
In Ukraine in 2013 and 2014, people mobilized for a very simple thing.
People, especially young people,
wanted to look forward to a future with predictability
and the rule of law and Europe in it.
That mattered to them enough to go out on the street and take risks.
And in the end, some of them paid with their lives.
That's the story of the revolution in Ukraine
which is thought of as the Maidan.
The whole world is watching.
There is a way out for Ukraine,
it is still possible to save Ukraine's European future.
The EU finally managed to broker a de-escalation agreement
that would constrain Yanukovych's authoritarian trends and power.
But he was going to stay in as President.
I have no doubt after our meeting
that President Yanukovych knows what he needs to do.
There was actually a plan for Vice President Biden
to speak to Yanukovych.
I was supposed to be in on that phone call, taking notes.
And they said, "We can't find President Yanukovych."
We all were like, "That's kind of strange."
We woke up the next morning to find out
that Yanukovych had actually fled to Russia.
And then, the Ukrainians had a vote to create an interim government.
The Russians were not happy about this.
On the next day I got a call from the Situation Room
saying you need to come in and see something.
And it was the first movement of Russian forces invading Crimea,
which was a strategic part of Ukraine for Russia.
Within 24 hours of Yanukovych having run away.
We fear that one wrong move, one stray bullet fired
by some psycho will lead to the start of something truly terrible.
And they managed to cut off Crimea from the mainland
within a couple days. The whole invasion was done within a week.
The invasion became a war for Eastern Ukraine
with pro-Russian separatists receiving support from Moscow.
And the troll factory had a key role to play.
They created fake news websites which they used to drive a wedge
into Ukraine and push the two halves of the country apart.
Targeting Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine,
they portrayed the protesters in the capital as a neo-Nazi movement
trying to seize power by coup d'état.
If you were an American, or a European,
following the war in Ukraine, and you were looking at Facebook,
if you were on the left, the Russians would be telling you
that Ukraine was a fascist or a Nazi regime.
With the lack of peace and stability
and the rise of neo-Nazi hardliners,
many Jews are considering fleeing the country.
If you were on the far Right, the Russians would be telling you
that this whole Ukrainian thing was a part
of the Jewish international conspiracy
and the Ukrainian state was just propped up by Jewish oligarchs.
Those two stories don't go very well together.
But people on the Left and people on the far Right are in their own bubbles.
So, they learned that you can do that.
And you can motivate and demotivate by telling contradictory falsehoods
that are targeted to different audiences.
And by doing that get the overall result that you want.
I worked for a website called WorldUkraine.com.ua.
It looked Ukrainian and said it was based in Kyiv, I think.
It was actually in St. Petersburg.
The media department on the 1st floor had a big Ukraine team.
There were so many sites.
Russian sites and fake Ukrainian ones.
They would rewrite the news there.
You had to find 20 articles about Ukraine
and replace terrorist with militia.
They wanted to make them look like the good guys.
It wasn't journalism. A teenager could do it.
They were preparing the informational background of these operations.
They created so many fake news and videos,
like to say that Ukrainian soldiers torture people who speaks Russian,
to cover what was really going on there.
Let me lay it all out for you.
The fake Ukrainians on the 3rd floor post on a blog:
"Kyiv kindergarteners are eating slop and starving."
On the 1st floor, the news sites write an article:
"Ukrainian blogger says Kyiv kids are starving."
The article then gets shared on social media.
If someone's curious and clicks through, everything looks confirmed.
I came up with a term for it. It ends up being a carousel of lies.
There were two departments. Ukraine 1 and Ukraine 2.
There is Coca Cola and Coca Cola Light.
Ukraine 2 was light propaganda.
Ukraine 1 was hard propaganda.
They were the ones who did all the stories about fascists.
We're the fighters of the Azov battalion fighting the Russian scum.
I would watch these videos about fascists in Ukraine and Nazis
and all this sort of insane stuff and be like,
"No one could believe that." And I was wrong.
I was insufficiently attuned to how those Russian operations
could be persuasive in the context of social media
if they were properly targeted.
People who worked on the troll farm, they changed history.
They really influenced the situation.
When the troll factory manufactured its campaign on the US election,
it used tools developed in Ukraine.
The motive developed there too.
Before Yanukovych fled, the Russians were furious
about the role played by the Americans on the ground in Kyiv.
We had a stream of Americans going out to Ukraine to mediate
between Yanukovych and the protestors.
The US ambassador on the ground called me. It was an open line.
I knew the Russians were listening.
I think we want to try to get somebody with an international personality
to come out here and help to midwife this thing.
That would be great I think to help glue this thing
and to have the UN help glue it. Fuck the EU.
And at that point I used this barnyard epithet,
never thinking that the Russians would put this out publicly.
In fact, they hadn't dumped a phone call on the street in 25 years.
A new political scandal is brewing in Ukraine.
Fuck the EU.
I did a great apologia tour. Called everybody.
It was pretty impressive tradecraft. The audio was extremely clear.
So, I don't think Klitsch should go into the government.
I don't think it's necessary, I don't think it's a good idea.
It sounds like they are playing a game of chess
with the opposition leaders as the pieces on that chess board.
Others are trying to make decisions for us.
I think Ukrainian politicians should decide this by themselves.
The hack and release of the Nuland phone call
was a new kind of cyber attack pointed at the US State Department
and, by extension, its former Secretary, Hillary Clinton.
Only a few years before, Clinton had wondered out loud
whether Russia's 2012 election would be rigged in favor of Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Putin, like all tyrants,
faces a very challenging kind of politics every day.
It's not that democracy is hard and tyranny is easy,
or the other way around.
They're both hard. They just have different kinds of challenges.
In 2011 and 2012 in Russia,
there were parliamentary elections in December
and then there were presidential elections in the spring.
The parliamentary elections brought Putin's party
a majority in the parliament
and the presidential elections brought Putin back to power.
But in fact, his party only won about 26% of the votes
and, in fact, Mr. Putin himself didn't win enough votes in the first round
to actually clear and be president after one round of voting.
So everything was faked. And everybody knew it.
And people did protest.
There were protests in 99 Russian cities.
There were hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously on the street
and the message was a very simple one, for free elections.
Freedom!
Russia will be free!
Putin, get out! You don't know your own people!
Putin is a thief!
That was a crucial moment, because it was the last moment where,
if you were Russian, you could maybe still believe
that voting might make a difference.
5 minutes before polls open
The time is now five minutes to 8 AM.
I can see the ballots from here.
What's the problem? What are you trying to start here?
- Can you look inside the ballot box? - For what?
Do you see all the ballots already in there?
No, I don't see anything.
You don't see anything? Everyone else can see them!
I believe the elections were completely rigged.
There's proof, eyewitness accounts.
They violated our constitutional rights.
There are plenty of Russians who care about democracy.
There are plenty of Russians who'd like to have their votes counted.
There are plenty of Russians who would like to have the rule of law,
who would like to have a free press.
Putin could have said, "Yes, let's have free elections."
But his reaction instead was a hundred and eighty degrees the opposite.
Please, don't disperse! Fight and don't disperse!
Russia will be free!
Journalists, disperse!
Putin's reaction was to say,
"All of these protesters are foreign agents."
"They all have been inspired by the American Secretary of State,"
"Hillary Clinton."
We do have serious concerns about the conduct of the elections.
The first thing the Secretary of State did was to characterize the elections
as unfair and dishonest.
Putin was furious because he believed that it couldn't possibly be the case
that the Russian people didn't like what he was offering.
It had to be inspired from the outside.
She set the tone for some of our political figures within the country.
She sent a signal.
They heard the signal and, with the support of the State Department,
set to work.
He blamed her publicly for the protests.
And also her foreign policy was very tough on Russia.
The Russian foreign policy elite understood that if she were elected
President of the United States, it would be possibly even tougher
and they didn't want that.
You know, it's better not to argue with women,
it's better not to engage in arguments with them.
When people cross the boundaries, boundaries of decency,
they don't look strong, they look weak.
But weakness is not the worst quality for a woman.
Look, Putin is a smart, calculating guy.
We're talking about a different league of street smarts or intelligence.
Even before 2016, Putin had a big fan in Donald Trump.
In Ukraine, Putin had done the unthinkable.
He had annexed the territory of another country,
something that hadn't been done in Europe since World War Two.
But for Trump, Putin's moves were a sign of strength.
Ukraine is not our backyard. It is his backyard.
Just look at the way he did Syria.
Look at what's going on with Iran, where Russia's backing Iran,
big league backing Iran.
It is absolutely insane what's happened to this country
over the last four or five years.
Small wonder that, in Russia,
Trump's announcement that he was running for President got rave reviews.
Telling horror stories about Russia
is one of the candidates' favorite pastimes. Trump has broken the mold.
He is one of the few who has so far resisted the temptation to use Putin
to scare Americans.
I was over in Moscow two years ago.
You can get along with those people, and you can get along with them well.
I would be willing to bet I would have a great relationship with Putin.
- It's based on leadership. - Based on what?
Trump's attitude towards Putin was part of a different kind of game.
From the beginning, the only consistent principle of Trump's campaign
was that you never knew what would come out of his mouth next.
No, it's so great. Twitter is so great
because when they lie on television I type out,
I'll do it myself, press,
and they go like twelve seconds later we have breaking news
from Donald Trump. Here's the story. It's the craziest thing.
Being an agent of chaos was part of Trump's brand.
The more chaos, the better.
And I said, "somebody should run against John McCain."
He's a war hero 'cause he was captured.
I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you.
He made disparaging comments about John McCain.
For virtually anybody else, that would have been a total career ender.
And yet, he seemed both to be able to absorb that,
bounce off it, and actually to some extent strengthen from it.
If I didn't have a big speaker system in terms of my mouth,
but the people that listened to it, and Twitter, @realDonaldTrump...
People ask, "Was the IRA pro-Trump?"
I think that's a tricky question. The IRA was anti-America.
In general, they were interested in any message that weakens
the democratic institutions of the US.
Create chaos was the primary goal.
Weakening Hillary's messages and position and identity
and amplifying Donald Trump's campaign
is a good means to create this chaos.
I think the target is trust.
Trust is a funny thing. So hard to earn.
So easy to lose.
If the US system depends on trust in democratic institutions,
who benefits if Americans lose that trust?
Is it Vladimir Putin? Oh my gosh, I can't believe it.
In Russia, Putin has built a political system that depends
on personal loyalty.
Putin can claim that the trolls didn't work for him.
But they do his bidding because they work for someone
he trusts to serve him. Literally.
He is Evgeny Prigozhin. A former hot dog salesman
who worked his way up the Kremlin food chain and earned the nickname
Putin's Chef.
It didn't surprise me that Prigozhin had been the source of funding
for the Internet Research Agency
given that he had been involved in some other Putin operations.
He was a go-to guy.
This is a very powerful Russian businessman,
allegedly very close to Vladimir Putin,
behind a troll factory operating out of St. Petersburg.
Prigozhin is well known in Russia for his friendship with Putin.
But his hidden web of business relationships is hard to penetrate.
He wouldn't speak to us and refuses most interviews.
When he does talk, he denies any wrongdoing.
To solve the mystery surrounding the man,
we sought out the former cop turned journalist
who's been tracking Prigozhin for years.
It's not entirely accurate to say that I started investigating Mr. Prigozhin.
I was working on different stories that were developing at the time.
And Yevgeny Prigozhin kept appearing in those stories.
It all started in 2012.
Not much was known about him at the time.
At 18 or 19, he was convicted of theft, robbery, armed robbery
and involving a minor in criminal activity.
From age 20 to 30 he was imprisoned in a Soviet open prison.
After many years in prison, he emerges in St. Petersburg.
He immediately tries to get involved in some food business,
primarily fast food.
He established a company with a very funny name,
BlinDonald's.
There is McDonald's, and then there are pancakes.
In Russian, pancake is blin, so he combined Donald's and blin.
Have you ever eaten at BlinDonald's?
I think when I was young. It was not delicious.
You should try it. It's very tasty.
He also had this famous restaurant called Russkiy Kitsch.
All the Russian stereotypes were gathered in one place.
It was just a museum of Russian stereotypes
and also he had some luxury restaurants.
A lot of those people who now rule Russia
worked in St. Petersburg in '90s
and most of them visited Prigozhin's restaurants.
Many Western leaders visited St. Petersburg.
There is one famous picture for example of Evgeny Prigozhin
and George Bush.
Honestly, no one knows how he's earned the president's trust.
But the trust is there.
In fact, for many years now
Mr. Prigozhin is the one serving the president his meal.
Have you ever met Yevgeny Prigozhin?
Yeah, I met him several times.
During dinners with Putin because he usually serves them.
What is he like, out of curiosity?
I don't know. He's the man who serves nice food.
You can ask him "What is this made of?"
and he says, "It's veal."
- Is the food good? - Yeah. The food is good.
He became a basic contractor for Kremlin catering.
Then he received contracts for school catering.
Students in several Moscow schools have been left without proper lunches.
Facts are facts. Here are first graders during lunch.
Grimacing from the smell, the children send the patties,
generously paid for from the city budget, straight into the trash.
Prigozhin kept failing up.
After delivering subpar school lunches,
he was mysteriously awarded bigger and bigger government contracts
for services including construction, sanitation, and utilities.
Investigators discovered his ties to hundreds of enterprises,
loosely connected to a holding company owned by Prigozhin
and his mother, called Concord.
Concord eventually got the lucrative catering contracts
for the Russian armed forces.
Concord is a very sophisticated big network of companies
under control of Yevgeny Prigozhin.
He receives lots of money from public procurement
and then he can invest this money wherever he wants.
He wants to establish a troll farm?
Okay. He wants to establish a private military company?
Okay. There's always money for that.
Did he receive instructions, requests, orders later on?
Definitely no direct orders from Mr. Putin.
Indirectly, possibly without Putin's knowledge?
Absolutely.
Prigozhin rose with Putin. Owes his position,
his wealth, his protection, to his relationship with Putin.
And those are the people who matter in Putin's Russia.
Someone who really needs to deliver,
because if you don't deliver,
all that wealth and all that power and all that protection goes away.
It makes perfect sense
in terms of mitigating vulnerability and keeping control of an operation.
Putin will use folks over whom he has influence.
You do a little bit of this for me, and we will do a little bit of that for you.
And particularly if they're not part of the formal intelligence apparat,
then he has deniability when things go wrong.
Putin has developed what I would call the franchise model.
That also gives you a thousand flowers blooming.
You can try lots of different things,
throw lots of spaghetti on the wall and see what's effective.
Some projects like the troll factory generate political support.
Others take a more physical approach to doing the Kremlin's dirty work.
We found out that Prigozhin apparently gave an order in 2014
to create this group knows as the Wagner private military company.
You won't find this name in any official documents,
but that's what they call themselves.
Videos shot by Wagner
At first it was a small, fairly compact group of people who participated
in the events in Crimea.
Over time, Wagner fighters directly engaged in the military actions
in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine.
Those were full-fledged assault units,
armed with heavy infantry weapons.
Here we are on the fourth day of our mission being fucked by mortar fire!
7.62 and 12.7 mm machine guns,
automatic grenade launchers, RPGs.
No other private military company has such weapons.
And our tanks are fast!
Say hello to your mom!
Denis opened this name Wagner to the whole world.
Nobody knew about Wagner before Denis wrote about that story.
And that's why he became Prigozhin's enemy number one.
They published my home address,
posted wishes for me to burn in hell, to be impaled.
I worked in Novaya Gazeta back then.
They brought funeral wreaths to the Novaya Gazeta for me
and the editor-in-chief.
They also delivered a severed ram's head.
And to my house they brought only a funeral bouquet, a modest one.
For the office, they brought a huge wreath,
but at home I only get four wilted carnations?
I said: "At least have the decency to send me some roses."
It's easy to see why Prigozhin was so angry.
Korotkov exposed how Prigozhin used disinformation from the troll factory
to soften the ground for military operations
carried out by his Wagner forces in Ukraine.
Prigozhin's organizations were involved in Ukraine in a number of ways.
On one hand, we've got the internet trolls.
On the other hand, the Wagner group with its tanks and artillery.
The troll factory is not a self-sufficient business.
For Mr. Prigozhin, everything is absolutely tied up into a single story.
Things are bad everywhere. Where is it better?
Who should we aspire to be like? Where are the things good?
In America? Democracy! Hello!
The St. Petersburg trolls say,
"What we're really doing here is geopolitical marketing."
"Russia's a brand, and we need to defend our brand."
So, the fact that the IRA is focused on the rest of the world,
and not just Russia, comes in quite quickly.
A different team handled memes.
They were officially called cartoon artists.
Some of the specialists were pretty funny.
And they were using pop culture references a lot
to build an audience and to gather followers.
There were definitely things they would steal and rebrand
and stuff that's original IRA creation.
Citizen of the world's "best" country
They were creating pictures with certain messages.
For example, Angela Merkel as Hitler.
Obama is a chmo.
Chmo is a word that's hard to translate into English.
Chmo - chump
It's not all overtly political. Some of it starts as wacky and fun.
A guy in a Spiderman costume,
running around the streets of St. Petersburg and harassing people,
saying rude things to people.
And in the end, it appears he's Barack Obama.
So it is you, stuffed Obama!
Some people who worked for the IRA were thinking,
"I signed up for a job in which I was basically doing digital content."
"And I woke up in some James Bond, espionage shit."
I first heard about it in November 2014.
There were rumors about a new English-speaking department.
I wasn't surprised it had something to do with the US election.
They start Project Translator,
which is the IRA department that's focused on the US,
trying to figure out what types of narratives work in the US.
The entire strategy is to influence by pretending to be Americans.
The program coordinators took trips to the US and to very specific cities.
Hello!
These are the best blogs and online publications
where you can post comments.
I'm still working on popular twitters and channels.
They're not Russian spies, but they do intelligence gathering missions
in order to better tailor their influence campaign.
Because the IRA starts with a focus
on controlling the Russian domestic conversation,
it's really good at Vkontakte.
It's kind of the Facebook of Russia.
They quickly realize that, if we're going to bring this to America,
we're not going to go very far with Vkontakte.
Regarding Facebook, we know that the IRA had pages, it had profiles.
We know a lot of what the IRA did on Twitter.
We know they liked YouTube.
We also know that the IRA came to love Instagram.
We know that they used Reddit. We know that they used Pinterest.
They really were constantly testing new platforms
and adjusting their strategies.
This is Jenna Abrams. On the face of it,
she is a woman in her mid 30's
and she claims she lives on Main Street, USA.
But of course, she's not a real person.
When Jenna tweets, it's actually a team of specialists in St. Petersburg
who are crafting this persona and thinking,
"What should Jenna be saying today?"
"Is it a racist tweet or is it like a Kim Kardashian joke?"
And they create this sort of mix of pop-culture references
and damaging political commentary.
She was mostly designed to speak to conservative audiences.
And she has quite a lot of followers online.
She has about 70 000 followers on her Twitter.
So, she is in the position to actually shape the political discourse
because of how well she has embedded herself within the fabric
of American political discussions.
That is also how she managed to get into actual mainstream media.
People would say, "Political activist, Jenna Abrams, said on the internet..."
Of course they had no idea there was no such person as Jenna Abrams
and this was not a real, conservative American activist
from Main Street, USA.
They used social media to talk to people directly in private messages.
They used social media to contact campaign officials
that they were having conversations with.
They also used social media to talk to activists.
We have this idea that all the content the troll put out was fake or wrong
or bad, but, you know, the trolls also amplified content
that they've stolen from elsewhere,
which is things that people actually believed in and resonated with.
Before the election, they were focused on specific issues.
And they realized that, if you wanted to make those issues divisive
and hurtful for America, you needed to have a hand in both sides of the issue.
They're designing conflict between polarized groups in America online,
but also offline. And so they conduct protests in the US.
When they organize a protest,
they reach out to one group,
and make sure that on the other side of the street there's another group
who's going to do the exact opposite position.
All these things are instrumental to white supremacy.
Online, when they talk about immigration for instance
they encourage messages that are inflammatory against immigration.
But they also encourage, in the same stroke,
pro-immigration messages and campaigns.
Then, they have an anti-immigration group do a demonstration,
and a pro-immigration group do a demonstration
on the very same street, on the same day
The anti-Muslim protesters were responding to an event.
called Stop Islamization of Texas.
It was organized by a Facebook group named Heart of Texas,
generated by Russia.
Posts on the Facebook event page threatened to, quote,
"blow this place up."
They're designing for violence.
They've done their research and so the content they curate
and how they behave online is unfortunately a reflection
of how polarized the actual online political conversation was at that time.
Of course they picked the most egregious parts of the content
and the most divisive ones, but they are not injecting in that bloodstream
anything that wasn't already there.
They're really holding a mirror to our face.
It's hard to look in the mirror.
It's even harder when you don't like what you see.
The trolls had spent years looking for the divisions In American society.
They knew that immigration and race were the sites of our deepest wounds.
Hands up! Don't Shoot!
Their fake personas exploited the very real social horror
of police violence against black Americans.
Don't touch me!
On the anniversary of the brutal murder of Eric Garner
by New York City Police,
the trolls tried to exploit Garner's memory
to call on Americans not to vote to reform the system,
but to tear it down.
If you take a group like BlackMattersUS,
it had a page on Facebook, but also a Twitter account.
It had a website. They were slowly gaining influence and traction.
And they became key assets used to manipulate American audiences.
When they target the black community in the US,
they craft messages saying, "Hey, we shouldn't vote."
There's nothing more undemocratic than convincing people not to vote.
But for the trolls, voter suppression was a pragmatic strategy
intended to hurt Clinton.
And it may have worked.
In Detroit, Michigan, a city dominated by black Democratic voters,
75 000 people who had turned out for Obama, stayed home in 2016.
Clinton lost that key swing state by only 10 000 votes.
Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest.
Do you think the trolls were effective?
You're asking me a question. "If there is life on Mars,"
"do you think they have babies after nine months of pregnancy or twelve?"
I don't know if there's life on Mars.
How could I possibly think of how they give birth.
I don't know what these kids thought or didn't think,
or why they worked there, because I don't know if they ever did.
NBC, an American TV channel, has finally found,
it took them long enough, the Russian troll factory.
The one created by Putin
and the one that ultimately elected Donald Trump for the Americans.
And NBC even managed to catch one of the trolls behind all that.
Russia One showed a piece of my NBC interview.
They cut out me talking about Ukraine.
Then they started showing photos and videos from my social media,
portraying me as a person who's out of his mind,
who gets tattoos, goes clubbing,
and might even be a drug addict.
They shifted the focus from what I said about trolls onto my tattoos.
In our studio is Margarita Simonyan.
I don't go to nightclubs and I've got no tattoos,
so I'm not interesting enough for NBC.
But everyone else finds us very interesting.
I don't know whether it was done or wasn't.
But apparently, even the people who think it was done,
see it as a hugely ineffective operation.
It's not a simple answer to just assess the impact on the result of the vote.
It's not something you can just compute.
We know the IRA was pleased with themselves,
but we also know they had all the incentives to celebrate this
as a victory.
We know from the senate report that when election night came through,
they uncorked the champagne, and toasted,
saying that they had "made America great".
How do we evaluate whether the IRA was a success or not?
You have to ask yourself, "Who is the audience of the IRA?"
They also had internal stakeholders.
The moral panic that unfolded around Russian trolling in America,
in itself, is a strategic win for the organization.
After the election, a source provided us with chats
from inside Pregozhin's organization
in which key executives discussed the best way to promote
the accomplishments of the trolls work in the US.
The reports boasted their numbers state by state.
The Heart of Texas Group, the largest internet resource
on the theme of secession. It had an audience of about 300 000 people.
Atlanta, African Americans make up 54% of its population.
Our Williams and Kalvin resource had 123 000 subscribers.
BlackMattersUS.com had more than 500 000 subscribers.
Company work influenced the opinions of citizens in swing states,
Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin,
with the result that Trump received 59 electoral votes.
Prigozhin likes his role in the world, like one of the devils of the world.
The more he looks like a devil in the world,
the higher his position is in the Kremlin.
The Kremlin has several towers. It's like a symbol of several groups
inside the Kremlin. So, Prigozhin is inside one group.
And for this group, it's a very good flag to show "we did it".
We've got a completely different understanding of what patriotism is,
what love for one's country and pride for it are.
Mr. Prigozhin certainly considers himself the biggest patriot of all.
In my opinion, what Mr. Prigozhin and his subordinates do
is a hell of a disgrace. It will take us a long time to wash it off.
I believe if the activities of the Wagner Group are ever investigated,
crimes against humanity are quite a serious thing.
But as for interfering in some election...
I've always found this hard to understand.
They say, "The US is outraged."
Journalists are outraged, everyone is outraged.
Guys, what are you outraged about?
Do you really think that 100 people, scribbling comments,
brought down democracy in the US?
If so, I am sorry. It that's true, I'm a little surprised.
I prefer to believe things aren't as dire yet.
Unless for the next election, he hires another 300 people,
and will get someone worse elected. Watch out.
In 2016, you still see that the IRA is a strategic blindspot
in America's understanding of what really happened with the election.
We want to think about it in terms of volume.
"How much did they troll?"
The thing that's more fascinating,
is to see them experiment with different techniques of trolling.
How does it look like to do this trolling on different platforms?
How does it look like to do this trolling hand-in-hand
with hacking information and more serious cyber operations?
There's no evidence to suggest that the IRA ever did the hacking,
or, frankly, was able to do so.
So it bears the question, who's doing the hacking
and how closely does the IRA coordinate with the hackers?
The troll operation was ambitious.
It lasted for years and had clear goals.
But during the campaign, the trolling operation was almost invisible
to those Americans who were tasked with protecting the country.
The national security experts inside the White House were focused
on a different kind of internet threat,
But instead of being written in memes, it was written in code.
Hack
The hacking of Democratic National Committee emails,
experts say, by the Russian government...
Somebody hacked into the DNC computers...
We have new details now on the email hack at the DNC.
The machinations of the Democratic party machine are all online.
Would you walk me through the hack into the DNC in 2016?
Sure. Imagine that you are Russian intelligence services
trying to get access to the DNC network.
The first thing you might try and do is get someone at the DNC to give you
their username and password,
so you can log into the network using those stolen credentials.
And then what you're going to do is reconnaissance.
What does this network look like?
What kind of security software is it running?
And, based on that, you will customize malware that you will install
on that system.
They had a particular malware product we knew as X-agent.
They could do screenshots of what you were doing.
They could do keystroking.
You're sitting there, typing on your computer,
and someone's literally seeing it.
It's coming up on their screen as if it's coming up on your screen.
You're going to begin moving through the network,
to other machines and servers, looking for information.
And then you will extract that from the network without being detected.
Maybe a network that you are trying to get into has a rule
on its firewall that says,
"Yeah, if it's an IP address from Russia, maybe not."
So then what you might try to do is connect to something here,
in the United States.
Then use that to connect to another server and maybe to another server,
and from there you're gonna move it back
to wherever you are conducting your operations from.
Most of the advanced actors out there use a combination
of off-the-shelf commercial tools that you can buy
from other criminal groups
and custom malware that they write themselves.
Sometimes these tools, if they're highly customized,
that's almost like a fingerprint for malicious actors
and it's very hard to fake that.
And in this case, when we assembled all of that information up
and you looked at the potential alternatives and other things,
the most likely result was that it was in fact the Russians.
Moscow, Russia
Using warrants and open source tools,
an FBI cyber unit identified the digital fingerprint of the Russian servers
and tracked the Russian operators in real time
on their networks and through social media.
Emails with fake links were sent by Aleksey Lukashev.
Nikolay Kosachek, call-sign cossack,
rented servers in Illinois and Arizona.
Artem Malyshev installed an updated version of X-agent.
Ivan Yermakov burrowed into the flimsy security systems
of the Democratic Party networks,
then built digital tunnels to exfiltrate troves of data.
They harvested hundreds of thousands of documents,
including fundraising records and opposition research.
But stealing secrets was nothing new.
Espionage is part of international relations.
It always has been and it always will be.
We conduct espionage as well, across the world.
We are looking for and collecting information and bringing that back.
And so, as a government,
you try to prevent as much espionage from happening,
but you don't really get your nose out of joint when it occurs
because that's part of the normal international relations process.
- He's coming back - Where? I can't see!
There he is!
For years, countries have silently spied on each other.
Sometimes things got violent, but that was mostly in the movies.
I'm an American diplomat!
When the internet came along,
spy agencies got into the hacking business,
but the old rules still applied.
Armed forces fought wars,
while intelligence services just stole secrets.
Those of us who are my age remember the KGB.
Or if they watch television, they remember the parodies of it.
In Maxwell Smart, it was called KAOS and in James Bond,
it was called Spectre.
It's important to talk about two real spy agencies in Russia today.
There's the GRU,
which is the intelligence service which works for the Russian military.
And then there's the SVR.
Typically, the SVR is focused more
on what we would consider traditional espionage.
- More like the CIA. - Correct.
The SVR is much more of a traditional foreign intelligence service.
It runs its own agents that serve abroad, undercover,
whether at embassies or as private citizens.
And it's an intelligence collection operation.
Its job is more to watch and collect. Not to act.
The GRU is military intelligence.
So it collects more on American defense capabilities,
on conflicts.
The GRU had been sent in early in Syria.
The GRU had been one of the lead agencies
in the intervention in Ukraine.
I was told that the GRU was a little sloppier
than some of the other Russian intelligence services.
Prior to 2014, if you discovered the Russians in a network,
they tended to vanish like ghosts.
They are very quiet, they are very stealthy.
They have excellent trade craft.
But starting in 2014, they actually became much more aggressive.
I think it was a broader shift in Russian strategic thinking
about how aggressive they wanted to be with the West,
and the United States in particular.
And the GRU is a reflection of that.
And it's the GRU that carries out more of the activities that actually generate
an effect in the physical world.
The GRU used the Ukraine invasion in 2014
as a cyber playground, including a power grid attack in December 2015.
Two days before Christmas, the lights went out in Western Ukraine.
In a display of Russian cyber power,
the GRU hacked into the control systems
of the Ukrainian power grid
and commanded distribution centers to shut down.
- Should we call the IT guys? - Maybe they did this.
Leaving more than 200 000 people without electricity.
The entire system was subjected to outside interference.
In total, 27 substations have shut down.
That's what you'd call a cyberattack.
The GRU obviously felt like they had a greater degree of freedom
operating in Ukraine than in other places.
Nothing was off limits for the GRU.
A year earlier, it had caused chaos by hacking
into the voting computer systems during the election
to replace President Yanukovych.
The Russians actually hacked into the main server and created an outcome
in which a minor nationalist candidate was portrayed as the winner.
And they actually broadcast it on their evening news.
This strange picture emerged on the main server
of the Central Election Commission of Ukraine a few minutes ago.
Dmytro Yarosh seems to occupy the 1st place in the election race.
Fortunately the Ukrainian state caught up with that
and they manually recounted and they got the right result out.
But imagine if that had worked.
Russia was telling the West over and over again,
"Ukraine is a bunch of fascists."
"We have to intervene to defend civilization against these Nazis."
And then you pick out a fascist,
and you claim that he's won the presidential election.
Even if that had only worked for a few days,
imagine how that would have affected our impression of Ukraine.
The cyber-attack that caught the eye of US authorities was an intrusion
into a nuclear reactor in Ukraine
owned by a Pennsylvania company, Westinghouse.
Marked by the fingers of the GRU, and the potential dangers posed
by a nuclear hack, the strike attracted the attention of federal prosecutor,
David Hickton.
Westinghouse is the designer of about 50% of the nuclear reactors
in the world.
So, our larger concern is how many Chernobyls do you want to have
because someone is stealing the technology
and building the nuclear reactor backwards?
Along with the FBI, he started watching the GRU's activities very closely.
We opened up a criminal case in December 2014,
which ultimately became Fancy Bear.
Sorry, I'm going to interrupt you for a second here.
From a straightforward point of view, who is Fancy Bear?
Fancy Bear is a Russian hacker group.
The dudes from that intelligence organization.
Cyber security experts will attach an adjective to the word bear
for any group associated with the Russian government.
And it's kitten for any group connected to Iran.
Fancy Bear was the name for hackers from the GRU.
Fancy Bear liked to show off. It didn't hide its tracks.
Not surprising for a spy group whose logo is a bat
with its wings across the world.
For the GRU, it's like, how much effort do you put into obscuring
what you're doing? How good is the disguise kit?
Is it just glasses with the funny nose?
Is it just a bandana across the face
or is it actually like the full Mission Impossible mask?
In the end I concluded they were sort of an in your face group,
because they had created their own website
in the name we had used for them. Fancybear.org.
Fancy wasn't the only Bear. There was also Cozy Bear.
Cozy was quiet. Snug as a bug in a rug.
It haunted networks like a ghost.
It belonged to the traditional spy group, the SVR.
SVR - Cozy Bear Headquarters Russia
In 2015, Cozy Bear hacked into the Pentagon email system.
Then Cozy sneaked into the Democratic National Committee
and quietly set about stealing information.
The FBI watched the data flow while they tried to contact the democrats.
That was kind of the first interactions we had with the DNC,
which is basically the same sort of outreach that we give
to private corporations and academic institutions.
Our cyber folks will call and say,
"Hey, we've seen some probing activity coming from a particular location."
"You should go onto your systems and look through your logs."
"If you are seeing any of these things, come back and let us know."
For six months, as spies roamed through the DNC files,
no one seemed too alarmed.
DNC tech support didn't return calls from the FBI,
and the FBI never bothered to contact senior officials.
Then, Fancy Bear, the group of Russian military hackers,
decided to find their own way into the DNC,
by sneaking in through another door.
The two groups may not have even known that they were attacking
the same network.
You will often find multiple Russian agencies targeting a similar target
to actively encourage bureaucratic competition.
Probably both of them had been given the DNC as a high priority.
In March of 2016, we learned that Fancy Bear,
which we had an active criminal investigation into,
had hacked the DNC.
And so then my next reaction to that is, "Well, who else?"
I fully expected that we would learn that they were hacking the RNC
and the Trump campaign too.
I later became surprised to learn that they were not.
And then it was the very next day. And it's John Podesta.
There's what looks like, a prompt from Google to change your password,
saying your account's being attacked.
We asked one of our cybersecurity people
"should we change, is this real?"
Later, he claimed that it was a typo but, email went back saying yes.
My assistant clicked on it, changed the password. The rest is history.
Shortly after the initial theft of documents from the DNC,
Fancy Bear tried to register a website, electionleaks.com.
They settled for DCLeaks, and waited.
A month later, Hillary Clinton sealed her victory in the Democratic primary.
We are on the brink of a historic, unprecedented moment.
The next day, DCLeaks went live
with its first dump of the Democrats' documents and emails.
I first thought, "Wow, now it's being weaponized,"
"and it might have an impact..."
But I discounted that because I thought,
"The only people who are going to read this are the people who read Politico."
The first dump was small and not widely publicized.
But when it came to emails, Hillary Clinton was particularly vulnerable.
Hillary Clinton is underfire. This morning's New York Times reports
that the former Secretary of State may have violated federal laws.
Clinton used personal email to conduct official business
during her time as the nation's top diplomat.
Hillary Clinton's email controversy growing by the day.
You could say her inbox is full.
There was a backdrop to the email story,
which was the investigation into her private use of emails
when she was Secretary of State.
But the hacks and leaking kind of brought the topic of emails
back to the campaign.
The Clinton campaign knew Russia was behind DCLeaks.
Their cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike had reached the same conclusion
as the US government.
But despite compelling evidence,
the government refused to blame the hack on Russia.
So the campaign took steps of its own.
What we knew in the summer of 2016,
was that the Russian government was hacking the DNC,
and now making efforts to hack the Clinton campaign
and campaign officials as well.
We were under attack by a hostile foreign power.
We tried, as best we could, in the days that followed those initial releases
of information, to raise the alarm,
to make the American press see just how dramatic this was.
And so we went public in a Washington Post piece in early June.
The GRU moved quickly to try to discredit the story.
Eight hours after the Washington Post article went online,
hackers were hard at work trying to hide the hand of Russia.
To distract onlookers, Fancy Bear had a special card up its sleeve,
a joker named Guccifer 2.0.
This is my personal project and I'm proud of it.
Personally I think I'm among the best hackers in the world.
Guccifer bragged about outsmarting the US intelligence community,
and even had a Twitter handle.
This persona Guccifer 2.0 says,
"The DNC intrusion was done by me, I'm a lone hacker in Romania."
I'm a hacker, manager, philosopher, woman lover.
- Where are you from? - From Romania.
This persona had appeared right out of seemingly nowhere.
When you're in this kind of environment, you're like, "Really?"
"That seems like an interesting coincidence."
I'm a man. I've never met a female hacker of the highest level.
Girls, don't get offended, I love you.
There probably was a Romanian platform involved in the operation,
but it was eventually attributed back to Russian origin.
Inside the National Security Council,
that conclusion came back pretty quickly that this was not
a lone Romanian hacker, that in fact this was a front for the GRU.
They based their creation on the original Guccifer,
a Romanian who had hacked US politicians like Colin Powell
and George W. Bush.
It created just enough deniability about the origins of the hack.
The claim that the Russian intelligence agencies were involved
in the procurement of these documents,
thus far there's been very little evidence presented.
Russian officials are calling Americans paranoid.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed the allegations
when he was asked about them today.
Well, I don't want to use four-letter words
The public was still at sea for some time in terms of Guccifer 2.0.
We had decided that we would not support the idea
that it was a lone hacker,
but that we were not going to try to aggressively debunk that.
Guccifer was a flimsy disguise, but it worked.
The identity of the hackers became a sideshow.
The story wasn't that Russia had hacked the Democrats,
but that the Democrats were falling apart.
On the eve of a democratic convention, a bombshell.
Wikileaks released thousands of internal DNC emails.
Just when Hillary Clinton was hoping to put the whole notion
of an email controversy behind her,
here comes an entirely different email controversy, and one that threatens
the unity the Democrats are hoping to show.
1700 new stolen emails.
Thousands of leaked emails show Democratic party officials
possibly plotting against Bernie Sanders in his race against Hillary.
In one, a top official wonders, "Can we get someone to ask his belief?"
"Does he believe in a God?" The response, an "Amen".
The idea that we've heard, of course, from the Sanders' campaign
is that the DNC had a finger on the scale to try to help Secretary Clinton,
and now you see these emails.
Does this not give credence to their argument?
Does this not validate their concerns?
It has been a tumultuous 24 hours here,
at the opening of the Democratic National Convention.
This is exactly the kind of tension that the party was hoping to avoid here.
Tonight, Sanders' supporters are furious.
Walk out! Walk out!
The Chair of the DNC, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz,
has announced her resignation.
She was booed off the stage. I've never seen anything like this.
Could we talk about the controversy around the emails that came out
and how it suggested that the DNC was clearly on the side of Hillary?
The Democratic party does not care about you.
The Democratic party does not care about America.
We are going to show the Democratic Party that if they will not have us
and they will not welcome us into their party,
then we will leave and they will lose to Trump. It will not be our fault.
I found the content of the emails pretty damning.
The Democratic party was putting its finger on the scale,
favoring Clinton over Bernie Sanders.
The emails were evidence that the system was corrupt
and even Sanders couldn't put a good face on it.
We have got to defeat Donald Trump!
And we have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine!
What's your reaction to these emails?
Outrage disappointed.
And it doesn't matter necessarily that it was the Russians.
It could have been the men from Mars.
But it didn't come from Mars. It came from Russia, and not with love.
That should have been an important part of the story.
You always want to know the source.
But the Russian hand was hidden by the volume of the data
and the chaos it caused.
That chaos and confusion was fed by a controversial figure I knew well.
I had already made one movie about him.
You were the one who released these twenty thousand emails,
Julian Assange. Where did you get them?
Can we address the question at hand, and that is, whether or not,
you can say definitively that Russia had no part in this hack?
I am a journalist. We don't reveal our sources.
I don't like leaked emails, but in this one case, God bless you,
WikiLeaks, for proving what we suspected.
Thank you, WikiLeaks! Told us that she doesn't even like Americans.
I find WikiLeaks very refreshing.
This is the Hillary Clinton I always knew existed.
I just never had proof of it.
Hillary cheats! Thank you, WikiLeaks!
There was a lot of support for WikiLeaks in the United States.
Sort of this freedom of information operation, which I never understood.
But some people thought that, so it had that credibility,
that sort of heroic credibility.
They were one step ahead of us by using a platform
that had that kind of aura of legitimacy.
Right now, we have a serious, serious allegation!
We wouldn't have this information right now,
the American people would not have this information if not for this.
I certainly do not condone cyber security and hacking,
but this all plays into the same thing. Look at what Hillary Clinton did.
She put an unsecured server in her home by jeopardizing...
But that's not WikiLeaks.
A lot of this was, in terms of the public's mind, confusing.
It's almost impossible for you to keep track of all these emails.
We didn't fully appreciate
just how insidious the releases of these emails were.
The words Hillary and email and revelation
were coming out day after day after day.
There's a Gallup poll that visualized what word was most associated
in people's minds.
For Clinton, email is this big, much bigger than anything else.
In people's minds, there are secret documents that are authentic and real
'cause they are real emails that show that somehow she's bad.
And I've never read them and I don't really know anything about them.
I just have a gut feeling that there is concrete evidence that she's bad.
She is framed by email the entire campaign.
That makes that particular vector of attack so powerful.
It was such an intelligent propaganda operation by the Russians
to hack the emails and dump them...
Email is bait.
The professional reporter comes to them as a trove of occult knowledge.
Another batch of stolen emails published today by WikiLeaks,
offering an even deeper look at the calibrations of the Clinton campaign.
It's a drip drip drip of distraction,
released on a daily schedule by Julian Assange.
Throughout this time, journalists make this effort to be objective
by being negative equally about both candidates.
For Trump, it's a focus on his issues,
because they draw people to them in the same way
that things that are on the verge of obscene draw people.
With respect to the Muslims, hey, Maria, there's something going on.
Go to Brussels. Go to Paris. It's like living in a hell hole right now.
It's political clickbait.
Clinton's policy agenda is so much more in line with the mainstream.
She's basically a centrist candidate. The focus to be negative on her,
was the implication of scandal.
The private server, followed by Benghazi.
Nothing about her substantive agenda.
That's a profound form of failure of these media
that the majority of Americans rely on.
As these materials were being leaked and washed through the press,
I went out to each of the major networks to make a presentation
about what we understood had happened.
Russian military intelligence were penetrating
various American campaign organs,
turning that information over to WikiLeaks,
who would do their bidding.
And then WikiLeaks put it out in the public for the express purpose
of trying to undermine Hillary Clinton's campaign for president.
Their initial reaction was, "Some of this is pretty far-fetched,"
"it doesn't seem like it could happen here in the United States. "
"By the way, you also have a political interest in pushing this narrative."
Robby Mook, the campaign manager, went out on television and said,
"We believe this is the Russians."
And the pushback from the press, when Robby did that, was pretty fierce.
That's a very, very strong charge that you're leveling here.
You're basically suggesting that Russians hacked into the DNC
and now are releasing these files through Wikileaks
to help elect Donald Trump.
Well this isn't my assertion.
There are a number of experts that are asserting this.
I think we need to get to the bottom of these facts.
Experts have said that it is the Russians that in fact went in
and took these emails and then, if they are the ones who took them,
we have to infer that they are the ones releasing them.
From Moscow today, an epic shocker.
Russian president, Vladimir Putin, denied that his government was behind
the hacking of the Democratic party's emails.
I know nothing about this. There are a lot of hackers today.
Besides, does it really matter who hacked it? Is that really what matters?
What really matters is the content that was shown to the public.
Putin was playing three dimensional chess.
He was right, the content did matter.
It also mattered that a foreign power was stealing and leaking data
from one campaign while leaving the other candidate alone.
Now regarding hackers...
They are free souls, like artists.
If an artist wakes up in a good mood, they'll paint all day.
The same goes for hackers.
They wake up one day and read that something's happening
on the international stage.
If they are feeling patriotic,
they will start contributing as they believe,
to the justified fight against those speaking ill of Russia.
Is that possible? In theory, yes.
At the government level, we never engage in this.
This is what is most important.
It was very clear that the purpose of this operation was to harm
the Clinton campaign, and it was coming from Russia.
At that point, it was still not clear at what level it had been ordered.
But my own take and my own advice at the time
was the Russian military doesn't operate rogue.
They take orders from the commander-in-chief.
They absolutely take orders from the commander-in-chief.
The way that oligarchies work is that they substitute
a spectacular foreign policy for the really absent domestic policy.
If you're Russia, you can't really have domestic policy.
Because a few men have all the money
and everything is blocked up by corruption.
How do you get people to think that the government is in some way
on their side? You have to generate a foreign policy with clear enemies.
Since Putin came back to power, foreign policy for Russia has been
all about creating these spectacular enemies.
The big enemy is the United States.
The United States is a great enemy to have for Russia because of prestige.
The Russians think of themselves as a superpower.
An average Russian might say,
"Well, yes, you know, my plumbing doesn't work"
"and no one ever clears the snow, but we're a superpower."
And having America as an enemy, proves that you're a superpower.
So Putin has tried to persuade his people
that there was a kind of great American/Russian conflict going on.
In recent years, US politics toward Russia can hardly be called friendly.
There are a lot of people in the governing body of the US
who are overly obsessed with the idea of their own exclusivity
and their superiority over the rest of the world.
The question that haunted the 2016 election
was why the White House refused to reveal what it knew
about Russia interference.
The United States is a really powerful country
and it's unlikely that we can be defeated abroad in a military conflict,
but in the last couple of years we have seen
that we are actually pretty vulnerable at home.
It's a privilege to serve in the government,
but it's also a responsibility, and you have to take responsibility.
The American citizens were counting on us and I think you can say
we didn't live up to the highest standards of protecting the country.
2016 was pretty awful.
We were dealing with the growing horror of Syria
and the helplessness of our attempts to get the Russians to help
end the conflict in Syria.
And trying to get the Russians to end the conflict in Ukraine.
The key to success in government is being able to distinguish between
the urgent and the important.
And I think we failed in 2016,
and we allowed ourselves to be distracted by the urgent.
It prevented us from really grasping what was important.
The real challenge in 2016 wasn't Syria,
important though that was.
I regret to say this, it wasn't Ukraine,
compared to the Russian interference in the election.
But it's not like one day you think
the Russians are interfering in our election,
and the next day you go to the president's desk and say
this is what we need to do.
Patterns that you've seen elsewhere and that you have experience with
are clearer at that level of government than they might be at higher levels.
I was working with Victoria Nuland.
We would kind of put our heads together on what was going on.
She pushed a lot.
She sometimes was impatient with our pace, which was fair.
What I felt at the time was our intelligence community was too slow
to validate what our experience told us was happening.
They ultimately did, but it would have been far more useful to the President
if they had been able to validate more quickly.
What we were seeing bore the hallmarks of Russian tradecraft
in Ukraine.
What we were asking for then was more US intelligence resources
so that we could give better information to leadership.
But it was too early for the intelligence community to validate
with the kind of certainty a President wants.
Those standards have to be impeccable,
with all strands of the US intelligence community in agreement
before you can say to the President, "We're confident."
If I'm going to talk to the President of the United States,
I wanted to make sure I was intimately familiar with every detail.
In the summer of 2016, I became exceptionally knowledgeable
of all the information that we had access to,
and all of the work that we had done.
No one in the US government had complete knowledge
of the Russian operation,
but CIA Director John Brennan probably knew more than most.
By mid-summer, Obama's national security team decided
it was time to send Russia a warning.
Brennan was tapped to reach out to one of his Russian counterparts,
an intelligence official named Alexander Bortnikov.
Bortnikov had direct and immediate access to Mr. Putin.
I think I was the first senior US official to confront them directly.
I must say Mr. Bortnikov is a very smooth and slick individual.
He said, "Oh, no, we would never do something like that, Mr. Director."
"We are ready to work with whomever is going to be elected."
He lies with the best of them.
Brennan calling Bortnikov on this was a pretty extraordinary signal
of how important this was viewed.
But there wasn't a lot of credible threats you could make.
Other than, "Relations between the United States and Russia"
"are going to be really, really bad."
Well, relations between the United States and Russia already are bad.
There was an increasing trend of Russian intelligence agents
to harass American diplomats,
including a physical assault outside the American embassy.
He was trying to walk into the embassy
and he was assaulted by a Russian security officer,
which was outrageous
She called the American a diplomat, but he's actually a CIA officer
with diplomatic cover.
Even still, the extraordinary assault became an international incident.
I said to Mr. Bortnikov, in no uncertain terms,
that some of the tactics that the FSB thugs were using
against US diplomats in Moscow was intolerable
and that there are limits to the espionage and intelligence profession.
Those limits are often flexible.
But between spies there is a rough equilibrium,
and when the tacit rules are broken, spies wonder why.
In 2016, Russia was breaking the rules of the game
and stability was giving way to a kind of chaos.
You have to think about this the way that they think about this.
This is not a legalistic process or a bureaucratic process.
This is not a diplomatic process.
This is making a play.
You make a play and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work.
And then sometimes it works better than you think.
We needed an effective threat.
You deter actions by raising the costs, and one of the most effective ways
to raise costs is to threaten reciprocal and more costly retaliation.
That's one of the reasons why I developed options
for steps that could be taken or things that could be signaled
that could make it a more effective threat.
One of the steps one sensibly might consider
would be to release embarrassing information about Russian officials.
Was it something that was under consideration?
Those options were explored.
We put together pretty aggressive options that we could use to counter
the Russians. Things like sanctions on individuals.
Could we identify Russian operatives in the US and kick them out?
Are there Justice Department options?
Actors that we could bring legal charges against?
The Justice Department was already investigating one crime
they could charge: the hacking of the DNC.
In Pittsburgh, David Hickton wanted to target Fancy Bear
for a federal indictment.
He'd gone after foreign actors like this before, years earlier,
his unit had named and charged Chinese government hackers
for stealing industrial secrets.
The hackers never saw the inside of a courtroom,
but the indictment itself did curb China's hacking for a time.
I really wanted to bring a case.
But the historical position of the Department of Justice
is you do not get involved in election litigation.
We weren't even allowed to appear with candidates
sixty days before they were elected.
So if a case was not brought two months before the November election,
it was not going to be brought until after the election.
But, in simple terms, the case was not going to be ready
unless we did something herculean to do it.
After I had written up that options paper,
Susan Rice, the National Security Advisor,
discussed it with some of the principals.
And their reaction was, "too risky, too edgy, too aggressive".
There were options in terms of what we could do even in the cybersphere.
Rattle the Russians' cyber cages.
Very uncertain as to what the Russians then might have decided to do
in response.
Would we have then engaged in some kind of escalatory war
with the Russians in the cyber realm?
There were things that they could have done
that could have been even more serious and potentially more impactful.
So we didn't want to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy
about what the Russians were trying to achieve
by escalating that could be cathartic on our part
but really would have, again, further undermined the election.
There was a reluctance to take steps that would undermine
the Syria negotiations, supposedly,
which were not going well anyway,
undermine the chance to rescue arms control,
or take actions that might not deter Russian interference
but actually escalate Russian interference.
And those arguments won the day.
It became pretty clear to me the election case was gonna be deferred.
I thought that if we had said, "Pittsburgh's gonna do the case,"
surged resources into Pittsburgh,
we would have been able to identify and indict the people.
But what would that have done? Would that have changed anything?
The Democratic nominee for President
was President Obama's Secretary of State.
It would look like the President was putting his hand on the scale
of the election, if he was more active
than precedent had dictated about this.
The better weight of wisdom would be to wait until after the election.
It's not for me to evaluate his decisions. He was the President.
Traditionally, war is a way of one sovereign state
making another sovereign state do what it wants.
War doesn't have to be carried out by way of traditional military force.
I can break your will, my nation can break your nation's will, in other ways.
I try to figure out what makes you tick.
I try to figure out your strengths, and above all, your weaknesses.
And then I appeal to those weaknesses to try to get you to do something
that's not really in your interest to do.
What Russia did in 2016 was understand and take advantage
of a new technical environment faster than anyone else.
They used an instrument that allowed them to get inside the will
of a country that they understood as their enemy. And they succeeded.
But they were also very lucky. They were lucky to have Mr. Trump.
He does things for them in public which they can't do themselves.
They can pretend to be Americans on the internet
but they can't pretend to be Americans in real life.
He's got the accent. He's a white guy.
He can wear a tie. He gives a good off the cuff speech.
He knows how to work an audience.
It's pretty clear that cooperation is taking place.
At what point did you become concerned or conclude
that the Russians had also reached out to the Trump campaign?
During the summer of 2016, we were seeing reports
of Russian officials claiming contacts with individuals in the Trump campaign.
And I was explicitly told that the White House cannot be involved
in tracking what Americans are doing.
It is illegal. It is not constitutional.
I was told by my leadership to stand down, and I took that seriously
and I stopped.
I also remember walking back to my office thinking,
feeling helpless.
They did make clear to me that the proper authorities were looking into it.
We started immediately identifying direct connections
between campaign people and Russians.
Paul Manafort was an obvious target. General Michael Flynn.
Carter Page. George Papadopoulos.
A lot of questions about their behavior, connections,
network of friends and associates.
The combination of those things brought to a head this idea
that we needed to now investigate potential collusion
between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
It was just like stepping off the rollercoaster into the rocket ship.
Is there somebody disturbing us up here?
Once inside the Trump rocket ship,
it was hard to miss the crazy way he seemed to be steering a course
guided by the Kremlin.
Those who suspected collusion,
played one particular clip from 2016 over and over.
What do I have to get involved with Putin for? I have never spoken to him.
I don't know anything about him other than he will respect me.
See, he starts by saying he doesn't know Putin.
Trump loves saying this, almost as much as he loves saying the opposite.
- Have you ever met Putin? - I've met him once.
As an example, I own the Miss Universe. I was in Russia recently.
And I spoke indirectly and directly with President Putin,
who could not have been nicer.
If it is Russia, which it's probably not, nobody knows who it is...
He's talking now about the hacking of the Democrats. And he's right.
The US government, at this point, hadn't publicly attributed
the hacks to Russia.
But this is where it gets really good. Now that he's denied
Russia hacked the Democrats, Trump spins like a top,
and openly asks Russia to hack Hillary Clinton herself.
Russia, if you're listening,
I hope you're able to find the 30 000 emails that are missing.
Trump said that this was just a joke.
But five hours later, Russian military intelligence,
aka Fancy Bear,
was looking for honey in Clinton's email accounts.
So was this just cartoon collusion?
Or a real back and forth hiding in plain sight?
It's the hottest thing out there, this hat.
That's the crazy beauty about the politics of chaos.
It's hard to tell a joke from a crime.
Getting help from the Russians? Just part of the game.
It doesn't matter how you play, or who you play with.
As long as you wind up on top,
who cares if the whole motherfucking system burns to the ground?
END OF PART I