The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference by David Shimer

Episode Date: September 19, 2020

Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference by David Shimer The definitive history of the covert struggle between Russia and America to influence elections, why the threat to American democracy is greater than ever in 2020, and what we can do about it. Russia's interference in 2016 marked only the latest chapter of a hidden and revelatory history. In Rigged, David Shimer tells the sweeping story of covert electoral interference past and present. He exposes decades of secret operations--by the KGB, the CIA, and Vladimir Putin's Russia--to shape electoral outcomes, melding deep historical research with groundbreaking interviews with more than 130 key players, from leading officials in both the Trump and Obama administrations, to CIA and NSA directors, to a former KGB general. What Americans should make of Russia's attack in 2016 is still hotly debated, even after the Mueller report and years of media coverage. Shimer shows that Putin's operation was, in fact, a continuation of an ongoing struggle, using familiar weapons radically enhanced by new technology. Throughout history and in 2016, both Russian and American operations achieved their greatest success by influencing the way voters think, rather than tampering with actual vote tallies. Casting aside partisanship and sensationalism, Rigged reveals new details about what Russia achieved in 2016, how the Obama administration responded, and why Putin has also been interfering covertly in elections across the globe in recent years, while American presidents have largely refrained from doing so. Shimer also makes disturbingly clear that this type of intrusion can be used to harm Democrats and Republicans alike. Russia's central aim is to undermine and disrupt our democracy, to the detriment of all Americans. Understanding 2016 as one battle in a much longer war is essential to understanding the critical threat currently posed to America's electoral sovereignty and how to defend against it. Illuminating how the lessons of the past can be used to protect our democracy in the future, Rigged is an essential book for readers of every political persuasion. ABOUT THE AUTHOR DAVID SHIMER is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and an Associate Fellow at Yale University. His reporting and analysis have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs. He is pursuing a doctorate in international relations at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and he received his undergraduate and master’s degrees in history from Yale University.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.

Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you tuning in. We have a super brilliant author on today with his hot new book. We're going to be talking to him. But in the meantime, you can see the video version of this. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification. You get all the notifications of all the different books that are out there. And also, you can see all the wonderful books of all the brilliant authors that have been on the Chris Voss show. You can go to amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash Chris Voss. You can see all the

wonderful books out there and buy them, order them up and all that good stuff. And you definitely want to get this latest book from this brilliant author that we have on today. He is the author of Rigged, America, Russia, and 100 years of covert electoral interference. His name is David Scheimer. He is an expert on the election security, U.S.-Russian relations, and covert action. He has been rated with the book A New York Times Editor's Choice, and his reporting and analysis have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs.

You may have heard of some of these publications. He's also appeared on CNN and MSNBC to discuss the threat of foreign election interference, and he's been interviewed by the New York Times, NPR, Politico, about American Russian foreign influence policy. This guy is brilliant. He knows everything, pretty much, or he's working on it. Scheimer is an associate fellow of Yale University, where he received his undergraduate and master's degrees in history and is pursuing a doctorate. See what I told you? He's working on everything in international relations at the University of Oxford, of all things, as a Marshall Scholar. Boy, I don't know.

You might be too smart to be on the show, David. Although, I don't know. We're getting there. I think you're overselling me, but that's nice of you to say. Well, I'm reading this bio. Holy crap, man. But definitely welcome to the show, David. Hey, give us your plugs on where people can buy the book and all that good stuff.

Yeah, the book's available. It was published by Penguin Random House, so it's plugs on where people can buy the book and all that good stuff. Yeah, the book's available. It was published by Penguin Random House, so it's available on their website and on Amazon and lots of local bookstores, which are well worth supporting. And sort of all the normal places that you would look to try to find a book, Rigged will, I hope, be there. If it's not, then there's some sort of issue. I've seen it everywhere, but maybe that's just the cookies picking me up and putting it there. But it's definitely a popular hot book because of what we're going on for the election. And then people can find you also at thewilsoncenter.org. You can look up David Scheimer at thewilsoncenter.org as well.

So give us an overview on why you wanted to write this book and why it's important. Sure. So I wrote this book because after Russia interfered in America's 2016 election, I was disturbed, frankly, that so many commentators, so many analysts treated Russia's operation as somehow unprecedented. And that to me is dangerous because if something's treated as unprecedented, that means there's no history behind it. That means there's no way to understand what about it is new and what's not. And it becomes very easy to create lies, myths, and misconceptions about a real national security threat, which is foreign interference in our elections. So I sought to basically abolish the myth that 2016 was unprecedented. I restored history in this book to the subject of covert operations to interfere in elections. I showed how the Soviet Union interfered in foreign elections

all over the world in the interwar period, how America went toe-to-toe with the KGB, interfering in elections covertly throughout the Cold War, how Putin's Russia is today interfering in elections all over the world. And only then do I examine 2016 based on the insider account of what really happened in our government during that period. And then I examine its aftermath in the Trump era in 2020. And to me, at least in doing so, by placing our current moment in its proper history, things look entirely differently. We can anticipate what Russia will do next in entirely new ways. And our moment becomes much more easy to understand and respond to than if we just act like everything is new and, you know, without any sort of precedent when, in fact, that just doesn't line up with the historical record. I love the concept of that because there are a lot of people running around with their head on fire.

I wake up every morning with my head on fire, terrorized. But there's an old, what's that old line? Those who don't learn from their history are doomed to repeat it. One of my favorite ways of putting that is the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. So this makes it very important in a book like yours so that we learn from our history so that we understand what the hell is going on and so that hopefully we can fix in the future your book has got two parts uh there's part one the hidden history and part two 2016 why don't we start at the beginning of your book and lay

the foundation of how we got here sure so what the hidden history sketches out and this is a story that really starts with vladimir lenin the first Soviet leader in 1919, that then spans to 2016. And that breaks down the three phases in our history of covert electoral interference. The first phase I break down was in between 1919 and 1947, when Vladimir Lenin and then Joseph Stalin interfered in elections around the world, most intensely in Eastern Europe, right after World War II, in Hungary, East Germany, and Poland, for example, with tools and tactics that in many ways foreshadowed exactly what Putin's doing today. The second phase of that history that I then detail took place between 1948 and 1991, the Cold War, when the KGB and the CIA

went, as I said, toe-to-toe in elections on a global basis. This started when the Soviet Union was interfering in elections in Eastern Europe, and Harry Truman, the U.S. president, made the decision to respond to Soviet election interference with American election interference. He authorized the CIA to engage in covert action formally for the first time with the express purpose of interfering in an election in Italy. So as I reveal in detail in the book, the starting point of the history of CIA covert action was, in fact, electoral interference. In this period, the KGB also interferes in U.S. elections, as I detail. I was able to go through KGB archives, interview a former KGB general to really get at the heart of what the KGB was doing in that period to try to actually destroy

Republican candidates, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, through, again, methods that are very similar to what we're seeing in our current moment. And then finally, I detail the third phase of that history since 1991, where America has moved away from the practice of covert electoral interference with rare exceptions. And I detail I was able to interview Bill Clinton Clinton and he acknowledged on the record that he authorized a CIA operation to interfere in the Serbian election in 2000 to defeat the tyrant Slobodan Milosevic or to work against him. But by and large, America has moved away from this practice. George W. Bush, as I also detail, considered but rejected a covert action program to interfere in an Iraqi election in 2005, stacked that up against Russia's trajectory

in its foreign policy, which is not only rediscovering, but doubling down on the practice of covert electoral interference, enhancing it through the internet to interfere in elections around the world. I was struck. I interviewed the president of Montenegro, whom Russian intelligence tried to assassinate, the former intelligence of Colombia, who said that he received reports his country was being interfered in from Ukraine to France to Germany to the United Kingdom. I found officials who said Russian interference is their daily life as Russia executes its strategy, which I can talk more about. the hidden history with then realizing and recognizing that Putin then trained directed his global campaign of electoral interference in this third phase of that history directly at the heart of American democracy which was our 2016 election because for any democracy elections their process of succession provide for progress order in a future and to really try to corrupt a

democracy is to corrupt its electoral processes. Amazing. And what's really cool is you did a lot of interviews for this. You interviewed KGB agents. How many different interviews did you do? So I ended up doing more than 130 interviews, actually, which were a lot of interviews. I interviewed eight former CIA directors. I interviewed the former KGB general. I interviewed 26 former senior advisors to President Obama, 11 former senior advisors to Donald Trump, folks like H.R. McMaster and Steve Bannon. I also interviewed foreign intelligence chiefs, foreign heads of state, journalists, technology experts, many CIA officers, NSA directors, former secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Susan Rice,

those sorts of folks. And in doing so, it allowed me to create or to meld two kinds of histories, archival history, source-based history in the print sense, but also oral history, recreating debates and discussions around these pressing national security threats to bring readers inside these rooms to understand why decision makers made the decisions they did, why it was so hard, for example, for President Obama to defend against Russia's operation back in 2016. And what we should be, must be, learning from these episodes, from this history, so we do not, as you said, fall into the same pitfalls or the same crutches as we have in the, in this century long

story. What's interesting in your book is you have this arc where you show this, this basically, I guess you call it a tennis match where I think the Russians start everything. And then we're just, we're just batting the ball back and forth in a fight with them. And of course, other different fingers that we put our pies in. I mean, the CIA trying to assassinate Castro. I don't know if that's in the book, but that was one of the ways we tried to interfere with a lot of different things. So did the Russians really start this, or was it us? And that's a side point, but I would say to clarify for listeners, the focus of the book is very specifically on covert electoral interference operations, which are covert operations targeting electoral processes involving the deployment of active measures. So I define that as a hidden foreign effort to manipulate a democratic vote of succession.

So something like a foreign assassination plot or a coup plot, while very important and historically essential to study, is not the focus of this book. It's operations to manipulate elections specifically. And in terms of who started this, just as a matter of the historical record, the Soviets began engaging in this practice before America did because America didn't found the CIA until after the Second World War. The Soviet Union had its own intelligence apparatus, had an international organization known as the Communist International, through which it was executing electoral operations between the First and Second World Wars. America then got in on the game, from Chile and Guyana to Japan and El Salvador, in predominantly seeking to support centrist candidates running against leftist challengers. So this was containment against communism applied

in the election sense, which made for some pretty extensive and fascinating operations, but also made for history that I think is also very applicable to our present day. Do you talk about the fallout in the book of those different elections? Like, for instance, how we put our finger on the scale of the El Salvadorian elections, and then you look at the fallout from that during the Reagan years with the slaughter of a lot of the citizens? Yeah, I mean, I think the example I get the most into as to the fallout and what it tells us about this history is in Chile, which is where the CIA engaged in covert action to interfere in Chile's 64 and 70 presidential elections to defeat the socialist Salvador Allende,

with the justification being that to defeat Allende was to protect Chilean democracy. And that was what officials told themselves in protect Chilean democracy. And that was what officials told themselves in Washington. But the problem with that was Allende won anyway in 1970, because these operations bring no guarantees. He then won the election and Richard Nixon, the US president, had a choice to make, which was, do I accept this outcome and hope that Allende preserves Chilean democracy? Or do I seek to take Allende out of power by other means? And he chose the latter path. He authorized and ordered the CIA to plot a coup, to foment a coup against Allende. Initially, it failed. Eventually,

the military succeeded in overthrowing Allende in 73. He then committed suicide, and Chilean democracy collapsed to a military dictatorship that ruled for over 15 years. And so as the result or in the aftermath of CIA covert action was actually the collapse of a democracy and the discovery of this operation in the mid 70s helped to bring about an inflection or turning point in CIA electoral interference so that America started moving away from this practice, but by no means abandoned it. You know, and that was Pinochet. Exactly. I mean, look how extraordinarily horrific and, I mean, genocide. This has been fascinating to me. Since I was a kid, I've always studied JFK, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Russia, of course. I grew up hiding under a desk to save myself from the nuclear bombs of Russia. And so, yeah, you have all these extraordinary things going on that you're just like, oh, my God.

And then you see the fallout of where we try and put our thumb on the scale, and we just end up screwing up everything many times. However, I do think it's important because this is a history that's very fact-based, that's very based on the full trove of evidence. And I would say that it's a mixed bag. I would say that in Chile, it was an awful outcome based on the analysis of what happened and its aftermath, as we're discussing. But in other cases, such as in Italy or in Serbia or in otherwise, I think that these were operational outcomes that resulted in the support of centrist politicians who remained in power and stewarded, maybe not in Serbia, but in Japan, for example, that stewarded their democracy or that helped to remove someone like Slobodan Milosevic, who was himself someone who had who would engage in ethnic cleansing. So so this is

a very complex story. And I think it's important to study. But for me, what's most important is that moving forward in the future, America should ban the practice of covert electoral interference. The CIA should not be engaging in this practice. And we should say so. And moreover, we should be working with our allied democracies to both punish countries that do engage in this exercise and to work with each other in defending against covert operations to interfere in our elections. That's the direction that I believe America should be headed, not responding to Russian interference with American interference, because I think that would be a 20th century mindset to a 21st century challenge. And I think it would be a mistake to fall back into those old habits.

The past is the past, but we should learn from it. And moving forward, what I think we should learn is that it's better to help shore up democracies and punish those who violate the sovereignty of democracies than to get in the mud ourselves. Yeah, there's definitely a question of ethics there and how we, whether we should be meddling in this or not. But then also, I mean, we have, I think right now we have China, Russia, and Iran, and probably God knows who else, probably South, North Korea, interested in meddling in our elections. So if we do step back from that and try and take the high road, if you will. Is that going to be good or help us in the long run, or what do you think?

Well, I believe that, and let's be clear, we do not yet know whether China or Iran is going to engage in covert action to manipulate the 2020 election. There has been, so far as I've seen, no evidence of such. We know Russia is doing so. We know that China is engaging in public messaging against the candidate, and we know, so far as I've seen, no evidence of such. We know Russia is doing so. We know that China is engaging in public messaging against the candidate, and we know that they've stolen files. We know Iran is targeting and seeking to steal files. But until we see, for example, China release those files through a third party to damage one candidate or another, we're not in the area of covert electoral interference. So that remains to be seen. But in terms of why I think

that that's important for us to do and why it would actually play to our advantages to move away from this practice, the Russian objective today is to tear down democracy, to corrupt, degrade, discredit, and disrupt democratic systems as an end in itself. That's why Vladimir Putin, as I detail in the book, is supporting authoritarian-minded, disruptive, and divisive candidates all over the world. So if the objective of Russia is to tear down democracy, our objective should be to build up democracy, to strengthen and renew democratic systems. But if we interfere covertly in elections, we're just further degrading the viability of the democratic model of succession we are playing into Russia's hands, when in fact what we should be doing is both engaging in domestic reforms in our own country to renew things like local media and education, to secure our infrastructure, to reduce polarization and bring back functionality

to our democracy, while also engaging in our foreign policy and an exercise of renewal in which we're working with our allies to detect these operations and to hold and to end to impose costs on those who execute them. To me, the best way to do that, or a vital prerequisite to that, is not to engage in the very practice that we're seeking to both defend against and ban. And so that's why I think it's important for America to move away or to no longer engage in covert electoral interference. But that is by no means a universal thought. Some people in my book, like John Brennan, agree with my conclusion. Others that I quote, such as Harry Reid, say that we in fact should, in some cases, interfere covertly in elections. So this debate is not settled, and I imagine that that question will emerge with time, as it did with Harry Truman,

when he had to decide whether to meet Soviet interference with American interference. Over all the different interviews you did, was there a consensus of between the two options? Of like one that was more popular? So I don't think there was. I think what there is a consensus over is that something more needs to be done. Because right now, Russia is engaging, as I said, in this global campaign to manipulate electoral processes. In 2016, as I detail, America was under siege in its elections, not only with regards to the theft and release of emails, to the propaganda across social media, but also Russian intelligence systemically penetrating our election infrastructure,

which according to folks like John Brennan, gave Russia the ability to alter the actual voter data and vote tallies of U.S. citizens directly in our systems. And so to come out of an election like that, where we were so systematically targeted in terms of manipulating both voters and votes, which are the two ways of interfering in elections, the response to that should be a national and urgent response to a national threat to our democracy. And it's been extraordinarily unfortunate that this threat has become so partisan in nature that so little effort has really been put in on a national level, including with the buy-in of citizens, to shore up our defenses because this threat persists. The KGB interfered in U.S.

elections throughout the Cold War. Russia started its operation in 2014 to interfere in the last election. They plan to continue it regardless of whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump had won, as I reveal in the book, and now they're interfering in the 2020 election. So this threat is going to keep happening, and it's on us to decide whether to really have a whole-of-nation approach to stopping it or whether we're going to let it be open season on our elections. And I hope that we choose the former path. I hope that we do. I mean, I think part of it is our population has to be smart and wise as part of the electorate, don't they?

That's exactly right. I think that. We're screwed. No, I mean, I think that you saw, for example, in countries where you've seen like Estonia or Finland or Sweden efforts to educate voters on disinformation. You should see in America an effort to make it so citizens have more education on what it means to be an educated voter in a digital democracy. In fairness to the American voters, our information environment has evolved so quickly. Thinking back to even just 20 years ago, no one was getting news from social media networks that didn't exist. No one was plugged into their iPhones that didn't exist. Whereas now, everything has changed so quickly. People are getting information that is not verified,

that is not fact-checked. They don't know what necessarily is real or not real. And it makes it very difficult to have a national conversation with a citizenry that exists in two different realities. And for a country like Russia, that is fertile ground for sabotage because something the KGB general I interviewed, Olaj Kalugin, emphasized during our interview in his home

was that Russia, its tradition is to identify weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and exploit them. They don't create the fissures. They just blow up the fissures. They pour gasoline on the fissures. And right now, we're so divided. We have so many different divisions that in that sense, we are the perfect target for Russian sabotage because it's so easy to exploit divisions that already exist because as a democracy, we're so divided. And that is a national security liability. It's not just a domestic policy liability. Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about the KGB agent. I think this is the one you mentioned in the pre-show that you had a pretty extensive, amazing interview with.

Yeah, it was a bit of a surprise. I didn't know whether I'd be able to find him. I tried sort of every avenue I could think of and ended up figuring out where he lived and had the opportunity to spend about half a day interviewing him in his home. And he was the youngest ever KGB general. He served in the KGB for almost the entirety of the Cold War. He was the acting station chief in Washington, D.C. for the KGB. He rose to become its chief of all counterintelligence. And we talked about operations he participated in to influence elections in the U.S. during the Cold War. But perhaps more interestingly, he told me about efforts that he participated in to sow racial and religious discord in America during the Cold War. Because what he described to me is that from the Soviet perspective, America's diversity is actually a vulnerability because the Soviet Union loves

to try to turn Americans against one another to the point where they would stage hate crimes, they would mail fake letters with racist or antisemitic content in order to both divide Americans from one another and to degrade America's image on the international stage. And so as one of many instances of why 2016 shouldn't surprise us, Russian social media trolls predominantly are most focused on targeting black Americans and trying to sow racial discord. I said that to this KGB general, Oleg Kalugin, and he said, well, of course, that's the oldest trick in the book.

That's just an old idea applied to a new technology. And in fact, that really holds true for effectively everything Russia did. And that matters not only for understanding the past, but also for preparing for the future, because it makes it so that we can anticipate what Russia will do, because these KGB ideas have flowed into Putin and his regime, which are flowing into our present moment. So all of this is a continuous story. And that is the story that I really try to bring to life through these interviews with folks like Kalugin and, and through this history that before this book hadn't existed.

You've answered something that I've always wondered about. Like I said, since I was a kid studying all of our different ways that we would put our finger on the scale to try and fight communism, you know, and, and sometimes it work. And I've always wondered that, you know, what should we do? How should we do it? You talk in the book about basically how we kind of start down the road of this tennis match of Cold War, information war with Putin, with I believe it's Bosnia-Herzegovina, with Selenia, that whole operation.

And that's when I believe Bill Clinton comes into play with Putin and Putin starts going, OK, so this is going to how we're going to play the game, I guess. Well, I think I think what you're referring to is the Milosevic operation. And I do get into in the seventh chapter of my book how Putin perceives the West, because that's very important. This isn't just about how we perceive Putin and about how we respond to him, because to respond to him first should be to try to understand how Russia interprets how America acts. And in that sense, what you're alluding to is essential, which is that from Putin's perspective, we're engaging

in interventionism all over the world. He thinks that the CIA's hand is behind every corner, and that whether it be in Serbia, or Iraq, or Libya, or Ukraine, from his perspective, America has engaged in efforts to topple regimes. And he cares about that not only because he'd use it as America being perhaps too aggressive on the international stage, but also as a threat to him personally. Because if we are supporting efforts such as in or executing them, such as in Libya, that ends in the brutal death of a dictator. If you're Vladimir Putin, who is a corrupt dictator, you then wonder, okay, will America try to topple me? And that's why there's a moment in 2011, when there were elections in Russia that were obviously manipulated domestically. And you saw Hillary Clinton and the Secretary of State speak out saying, well, there should be free elections in Russia. That's the right of affairs. And based on the interviews I did with the station chief of the CIA in Russia at the time, with the deputy director of CIA at the time, in that moment, Vladimir Putin thought that Hillary Clinton was trying to foment a revolution against him as these protests were being underwent,

and that that fed into his resentment of her, which helped inspire him to authorize the 2016 operation to defeat her, which was critically, by the way, authorized before it was underwent, it was ongoing in 2014, before Donald Trump had even announced that he was running for president. So I think it's a myth of our current moment that this issue started and will end with Donald Trump's political career. Again, as so many instances in this history that just doesn't check out. John Brennan and Jim Clapper told me that Russia intended to continue undermining Hillary Clinton had she won the election, which they thought she was going to. So this might be in some instances about Trump or Clinton, but it's been in the past about other leaders. It'll continue to be about other leaders.

What this is about, above all, is choosing our leaders for us, sabotaging our democracy, and seeking to undermine the viability of the democratic model in the eyes of the world. And that should offend and alarm all Americans, regardless of their party loyalties. Yeah, I always tell people, you're voting for the Constitution, the four-year caretaker of the Constitution in this fragile republic. That's who you're voting for. It's not about party. It's about you should vote for the Constitution first. And you're completely right. And we've seen we've seen its fallout. You know, we had a we had a Russian author who profiled who knows Ukraine and Russia

and Putin very well. And one of the great features to have as an authoritarian ruler like him is a good amount of paranoia, and that tends to keep you looking over your shoulder and checking your food. And if he can keep us on the defense by constantly throwing us off base, it makes it very hard for us to go at him, which is brilliant when it comes down to it. You've seen them screwing up stuff with Brexit. There's a lot of European countries that are in assault from Putin's different campaigns and what they're doing.

You've seen Hungary recently fall to, is it Hungary? Hungary recently fall with their democracy. Poland, they say, is under risk right now. Turkey is, of course, their democracy has gone out the window. And, yeah, when you're the leader, you know, what people claim to be the shining city on the hill and all that sort of stuff, the number one country in the world, yeah, you're going to take the arrows. And I think it's great you guys got into this.

You also talked to, you moved forward in the second part of the book, you talked about Obama and kind of what the operation went into there. And you talked to a lot of different people. What were some of the stuff that you got out of whom were senior in his administration, many of whom were essential to the deliberations about how to respond to Russia's operation. The most important lesson I gleaned from those interviews was that Russia was running in the summer and fall of 2016, two plays at the same time. Because in the history of covert election interference, there are two ways to manipulate elections, either by manipulating public opinion or by manipulating actual ballots.

And what Russia did was they were simultaneously manipulating public opinion by stealing and releasing Democratic Party emails and by spreading propaganda across social media, which was not fully understood at all at the time inside our government, but they were doing it nonetheless. But at the same time, as I mentioned earlier, Russian military intelligence was targeting, probing, penetrating our election infrastructure across the country, giving them the ability to affect those systems, manipulate those systems hypothetically. And the Obama administration was captivated by the notion that Russia intended to do this. And so in the summer and fall of 16, the predominant focus of the Obama team was responding to that threat by considering a critical infrastructure designation, by seeking a

statement from congressional leaders about election system security, by having DHS help to shore up those systems, by actually on election day itself, as I reveal in the book, running crisis teams, bracing in DHS and in the White House for a Russian cyber attack. And by having President Obama warn Putin, as one of his senior advisors put it to me,

basically said to the Russian leader, you fuck with us and we'll take you down. And that was in reference to, and excuse my direct use of that quote, and that was in response to, and excuse my direct use of that quote, but, and that was in response to the state systems, what they were seeing with Russia inside the systems. And so there was a calculation made inside the administration where the Russia experts who I interviewed for the book, his most senior Russia advisors, wanted him to retaliate against Russia in the summer to deter Russian aggression in real time. Whereas another bucket of officials felt that if you hit Russia, let's say in August, Russia would respond by escalating its operation toward manipulating our actual voting systems. So there was an idea, as one official put it to me, that there was a red line around those two tracks. And as long as Russia didn't escalate from manipulating voters to manipulating our actual infrastructure, retaliation could wait until after election day.

And so it did. President Obama didn't impose costs on Russia until December. But the problem with that in hindsight, in these interviews is that by election day, Russia experienced no cost for manipulating 10s of millions of Americans across social media and with those stolen emails. So moving forward, we need to figure out how to defend against both efforts to manipulate voters and efforts to manipulate voting systems. And until we defend against both of those threats, we're not really defending our elections because the tradition of foreign electoral interference is to do both of those things. You talked about Leon Panetta. You interviewed him, and he kind of inferred that the more cautious Obama became, the more he sent a signal to adversaries they could take advantage of him. He was kind of having that hard play where Americans were kind of sick of wars, Syria,

and everything else. Speak to that a little bit, if you would. Yeah, so three of President Obama's former CIA chiefs, David Petraeus, Leon Panetta, and Michael Morrell, all told me that they believe that decision-making President Obama made, whether in Syria or in Ukraine, where he showed caution in response to either the use of chemical weapons or to Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine and with Crimea, in terms of providing, for example, lethal arms to the Ukrainian government, emboldened Putin to push further, to push as far as he could without provoking pushback, because the mentality, they said, of a Russian leader like Vladimir Putin is to do as much as you can until you think you're really going to get punished for it. And so they attributed in part Putin's

decision to interfere in the 2016 election to President Obama's decision making abroad in other areas that that that suggested to Putin that he could do this without really paying an extraordinarily steep price for it. And he's definitely hit the motherlode with Donald. He hit the motherlode. What do you feel about what's going on right now? I mean, certainly Mitch McConnell not stepping forward back then, because Obama, I've always wondered why they went to Mitch McConnell,

and they tried to do some joint efforts, so it didn't look like they were putting their thumb on the scale, but in reality, they should have realized that there was, there was a lot of stuff going on with Russia and the GOP back then you had the, the gal, I forget the redheaded NRA gal was working the systems back then. You know, there's a lot of stuff that was going on and i'm sure mitch mcconnell was had to kind of known that russia was involved and that was the reason he didn't want to come with obama so i i don't know the answer to that i don't know what he was thinking but what i do know interestingly is as i reveal in the book and this has been somewhat reported on, Russia did steal compromising materials on Republican officials, and those materials were never released.

And the U.S. government knew that. They knew that the DNC and Podestinos were released, but that those Republican official materials were not. And that's in the 11th chapter of my book, where I detail sort of what Russia did and what Russia opted not to do. And so I think we should keep in mind that it's not as though it's only Democrats who can be targeted here. It's across our political spectrum, any American politician, because, again, Russia does not have any loyalty to any one political party. They've helped Republicans in the past, but they've also helped Democrats or at least tried to. Russia is just seeking to divide us, to degrade us, to undermine us, and I wish that all politicians in our country who believe in democracy, as I think they all purport to, should then say we therefore need to defend our democracy, because this isn't, at the end of the day, there are partisan issues out there,

this shouldn't be one of them. Yeah, I mean, the preservation of this constitution, we just had, we just had the birthday for the constitution. And it was interesting to see so many people that have voted against, there's been different legislation that, that they've talked about to ensure the elections, to secure security, give money to the states and all this stuff. And Mitch McConnell just shut it all down. They don't want it. What, how do you feel about all that what's going on i mean we're seeing some extraordinary things right now it almost seems like uh uh you know trump is dancing with putin uh again and quietly or uh unquietly you know saying giving him the wink and the nod like hey you can come over here and have all the fun you want buddy as long as i win um you know there's all giving him the wink and the nod, like, hey, you can come over here and have all the fun you want, buddy, as long as I win. You know, there's all sorts, we haven't, we haven't

shorted the election. There's the UPS, U.S. Postal Service thing that's going on. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. What do you think about all that? So I think we're in a very precarious position. We know that Russia is actively interfering. The FBI director just testified to this, very actively interfering in the 2020 election in favor of one candidate and to the detriment of another and also to sow discord. We also know that Russia's taking advantage, as always,

of weaknesses that already exist. You have the president saying mail-in ballots fraud, mail-in voting is fraudulent, and we've now seen that Russia is amplifying that messaging. We've seen the president say his opponent has, you know, mental issues or however he's phrased them. And I do worry that because of the coronavirus, because of the issues around the Postal Service, that will present a whole new set of vulnerabilities, that there's so much doubt among the American people that this election will even proceed fairly, that there will even be a legitimate vote count, which has never been the case in our history before. There's never been widespread concern that ballots would even be tallied.

So from Russia's perspective, whether it's by spreading disinformation about voter fraud, or whether it's by actually sabotaging or causing chaos at polling places, that could be an appealing proposition here, not only because of our pre-existing vulnerabilities, but also, as you said, because the current president has invited rather than sought to deter foreign interference in our elections, which means from the perspective of someone like Putin, you can push even farther, knowing there won't be that big pushback. So we'll see what happens next. There's no way to foresee exactly what is around the corner. But I am not optimistic or feeling very confident that America is in a position to defend itself in the

robust sort of way that I wish it were having it four years to prepare for the next iteration of this. And, and do you think social media companies are doing enough? I mean, you probably talk about this in the book where, you know, social media companies really failed, especially Facebook, Cambridge, Atlantic, et cetera, et cetera. Do you think they're doing enough this time around? They seem to be trying. I think the biggest difference between now and 2016 is that in 2016, I think everyone was caught off guard. I think the senior officials in the Obama team say in my book they did not see this coming.

They didn't think Russia was going to apply its global playbook to the United States. I think social media companies as well didn't even think that this could be part of the plan for Russia to infect or seek to infect its platforms to reach Americans in a covert way on an at scale basis. So I think since then, you have seen investment and planning on the part of some social media companies because they know this is now an issue. They recognize that this is something that needs to be addressed. But I also think that more work can be done as ever to address it more systematically. I think what I want to see is transparency always on the part of these companies as to when they identify and take down covert foreign networks.

I think you want to see the kind of public-private cooperation between the federal government and these companies, as you've been seeing recently, to identify and, again, take down these networks. And I wish Congress would step in and do anything regarding these companies and regulation around them because, again, four years later, the Congress has passed no bills around either social media regulation

or cybersecurity standards for our election systems. And I think that that is a real diss for our election systems. And I think that that is a real disservice to the American people, because I think that our government does have a role to play in seeking to make sure that our democracy is able to function in a way that meets the standards of what it means to be a sovereign democracy. You know, I've been reading some different things on Medium. I forget the author's name, but people follow me on social media, see me forwarding it. And he's been, he grew up in a country that fell to fascism and authoritarianism. And he talks about how

we're on that same path. And one of the problems, just like you mentioned, the 2000 election, we kind of underestimated it. You know, we kind we kind of have this confidence, like, you know, we're, you know, we're indestroyable, we're the greatest democracy ever, blah, blah, blah. But he talks about how a lot of countries think that. And that's the last thought that goes through their forehead, because they're not paying attention, because they're living in that, we're the greatest country ever. And what, this is how democracies fail, is they think they're impervious. They go along with this la-la-la land sort of mentality. They don't see it coming until it's already upon them because it's very insidious in how it syncs up. And one of the reasons they do, one of the ways they do that is to destroy confidence in the electorate's thinking towards voting and if it's fair, if it's good elections, et cetera, et cetera.

And we have something even more extraordinary that's probably Putin's just licking his chops over is the coronavirus. We'll, for the first time, not know on election night who the president is and it may be because of mail-in voting trump may appear to win biden may not you know that whole thing so what do you think about that whole i mean this this could really be the destruction of um how the population really views uh the electoral either person who wins there's gonna be a lot of damn screaming, even worse than Gore Bush, about whatever happened with the election. Listen, it's a dangerous situation. It's an unstable situation. very importantly, domestic, we are in a tricky spot here, because I do think there are a lot of scenarios in which the American people or a lot of wide swaths of the public don't buy into

the result of the election. And as you said, elections are at the heart of a democratic system. They provide for a future for those systems. They provide for the ability of those systems to have legitimacy, both in the eyes of their people in the world. And if elections are degraded, if voters no longer believe that their votes matter or that their leaders reflect their wishes, democracies can can really transform very quickly into corrupted versions of themselves. And Vladimir Putin recognizes that very well because he knows it from experience. And I think that moving forward, it really just falls on the American people to decide, do they care enough about living in a democracy to stay calm, to vote, to respect the result,

to demand that our leaders do the same, and to recognize that this is bigger than just who wins and who loses, but rather do we live in a functioning society in which it is the people that decide its leaders. And I do worry that in addition to all the threats you laid out, there is this sense of apathy. And I think over being overwhelmed among much of the country around whether this matters, there's so much happening that everything feels sort of numb. And that's dangerous in itself. Because that allows for leaders to do more, it allows for foreign countries

to do more in this sort of nefarious way, without really having the sort of public response, public outrage that holds leaders who would like to degrade democracies accountable. And without that, that's the loss of perhaps the greatest check we have, which is the investment of the public in the maintenance of our democracy. And I'm by no means saying that that's no longer there. I think in many ways it is. And I wouldn't be surprised if in the coming months you see real showing of that. But I also think that every citizen should remember that they're part of this democracy.

Democracy isn't necessarily the easy thing. In most cases, it's not. But for me, at least, it's the better thing. In most cases, it's not. But for me, at least, it's the better thing. It's what's worth preserving. And so every citizen has a role to play in voting and also in being engaged and finding fact-based information and preparing for the potential turbulence ahead and helping to maintain our system and even hopefully show that it can function even better than it has in the past in this new digital world we now live in. I hope so. I think I saw in this new digital world we now live in. I hope so. I think I saw in Virginia, the polls are starting to open. It's one of the states.

And they have super long lines, like people aren't even trusting the mail-in voting, they're going to go vote. And so I'm hoping we're going to see that. It's even interesting more that you're taking your life in your hands now, if you do go physically vote. Uh, but hopefully we've, you know, people wearing masks and mitigating that, uh, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, it's, it's just an extraordinary time. I mean, just the complication of coronavirus in and of itself on top of everything is just like, oh my God. And then like you speak to half this damn country doesn't vote. Yeah, no, I mean, and that's, and I hope, I mean, maybe I'm just too, too much of an idealist, but, but I do hope that you will see much greater turnout this cycle. Both because the stakes are so high, regardless of what side you're on. Also because of this affects everyone. The Corona virus reaches everyone in a real way, everyone's lives have been upended because of this pandemic. And this election will have

consequences over how the pandemic's addressed. So that alone, I think will motivate people to really try to make sure their voices are heard. I think that in history, as in Italy, in 1948, example, in a pivotal election, you saw more than 90% of eligible voters cast their ballots, knowing that this was such an essential contest. And moving forward in this cycle, I hope, not for any one side, I don't say this because I think it would benefit one or the other, I just think it's good for a system, for a democratic system to have high voter turnout. Because again, it's about being bought in, it's about caring about maintaining your democracy. And that apathy that eats away at democracies, if people just stay home, or they don't care, does no one any favors. So so I wish that people I hope that people do have trust in mail in voting. I think that mail in, because that is their right. And that is what,

how our country will decide its future. And I don't want to say I don't think it's true that American democracy, by the way, is, is on its death's door. I do think that history also provides reassurance, which is that other countries have experienced foreign efforts to manipulate their elections, domestic efforts to do so, but they've persisted. Those democracies have remained so more or less almost always because their citizens powered through that system said we care about this too much to let others take it away from us. And so long as we as voters are then willing to do the work, I don't think that this is by any means a done deal over the fall of our democracy, but I do think that this is a serious moment. And it requires a serious response, both in terms of defending our elections and also in terms of participating in our voting processes. There's the old thing when Ben Franklin walked out of the room and I believe it was a lady approached him and said, what do we have?

Do we have a monarchy or do we have a democracy? And he says, you have a republic as long as you can keep it. And that is where we're at this moment, guys. We are in the fight over this republic. And, you know, everyone should vote. Everyone should care. I think one of the other assaults that has gone on for voting is the attack of journalists, journalists' integrity, uh you know this fake

news that you know even in the the book with bob wooher rage uh i was just watching that uh they interviewed kushner and kushner explained that him and trump's uh game plan and you may have gotten this from bannon is total chaos they. They will just shovel chaos and news, well, you know, what they turn into news, into the public just to create noise and get people to tune out, and part of it hides whatever evil they're doing. And then they can go off and do whatever they want. But they've actually turned into an art form and you know i've heard a lot of uh i've heard a lot of journalists recently talking about how they never really were trained to to deal with uh people someone like trump a guy who has no shame who has no morals who has no you know normally journalists would call out

politicians and go hey what you did is wrong man and. And they'd be like, oh, yeah, so you're going to do my bad. They try and stay with the – the press would keep them on the narrow. This guy doesn't give a crap. And if anything, he keeps the press kind of on the fence or on the ropes with the amount of stuff that he's getting to. I think Mary Trump said it best. He spins so many different plates that the press can't even cover it all. It's just insane. Yeah, and I think the phenomenon you're talking about also has roots in other countries and other authoritarian countries, not other, in authoritarian countries. I do not believe

America is an authoritarian country, but as you said, it's always a possibility. And part of it is about promoting disengagement and apathy among voters by making it so that they're so overwhelmed by all of this news that they don't know what to care about and what not to care about. And that's what Russia sees too. Because Russia's objectives in interfering our elections, it's in part to help one candidate, in part it's to help another or to hurt another. But above all, it's to sow chaos. It's to sow discord, to undermine our discourse, to confuse voters, to spread propaganda designed to stoke fear and illegitimacy.

You even saw four years ago on election day, Russian trolls spreading propaganda or disinformation that our polling places were rigged and that violence was imminent. So you've seen that effort to tear down our system from within. And so I think that we should be under no illusions that Russia doesn't have a strategy. It does. It's to tear down our democracy, to turn it into a version of itself that more resembles Russia's political system than our own. And again, it falls on us to see through the haze, to see through the chaos, and to remember who we are as Americans, and that our political system is not something that will maintain itself, but rather is something that is maintained by both government level of being, but also by the level of being of just the citizenry in terms of being invested in it and in terms of overcoming challenges to it. And I think that that will remain an issue over the next 50 or so days and thereafter. And I do hope moving forward that whether it's 2021 or 2025, the next president does launch the sort of coordinated,

comprehensive policy response at home and abroad to rebuild our democracy, to reinvest in our democracy, to secure and defend our infrastructure, as well as to get at the polarization in our discourse, while also reviving our leadership abroad and seeking to defend this democratic model against those who seek to undermine it, because we're just not there right now. And it leaves us, as you said, in an even more precarious spot than we'd otherwise be in. And you've said some wonderful things here that are brilliant that I hope people listen to. Because like you say, it's each of our responsibilities to get this data, to learn, to educate ourselves. We can't just sit around, you know, I'll see people that have this couch potato quarterback sort of thing. Like, well, hey, the politician is doing more.

Hey, man, it's your job to go out there. Like, even this morning I saw somebody who's trying to – they were promoting some obscure – some astronaut news service that's trying to identify bias in the media. And they're like, you just don't know who to trust anymore. I'm like, come on, you don't know how to trust the WAPO, Washington Post? I mean, look what they did for Nixon. Look at all the different things that they uncovered in the New York Times, all the great papers, The Guardian, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, come on, man. Can't you at least pick? And I've had people say to me, they go, well, these guys seem really biased. They always seem to be calling out Trump for stuff. I'm like, that's because Trump does a lot of stuff, a lot of illegal stuff, a lot of unethical stuff, a lot of anti-constitutional stuff. It's really hard not to look at anything Trump does and be like, well, that's, you know, he's really being a good president. You know what I mean? It's really hard. So it's important for people to get educated, read your book, especially so they can understand history so they don't repeat alarming and everything is so new and unprecedented

because that might make for getting clicks, but it doesn't make for fact-based, holistic, educational information. And what I hope my book does in a riveting way, but also in a really forceful way, provides that compact history as well as compact analysis of 2016 and our current moment and where we should go from here so that you can identify what really is new and what isn't, what's really happening in terms of foreigners seeking to interfere in our elections, why it matters and what we can do about it in a way that escapes from this toxic partisanship that so often overtakes our discourse and instead really gets at the heart of this issue to our democracy.

And that's why I wrote the book. That's why I believe so deeply and work so hard in seeking to write the best book that I could. And that's why I've been trying to talk about these issues as much as I can, because I think it does really matter. And I think it's a real shame that this has been treated as such a political threat, because Russia knows that it's not. Russia knows that it's a threat to our democracy. And until we recognize it as such as well as a nation, we're going to be playing catch up. And

I hope that my book for readers will help to really bring that to the fore, show this history, what happened in 16, what we can do about it. And again, why this all really is important for our functioning as a society and making progress on all the issues that I think citizens can and do should care about. And I like what you brought up there, that it's not really about the sides. It's about the voting. It's about protecting our democracy, our constitution, and what we have. Being involved, being educated, reading. You know, I read multiple sources. I trust the WAPO and different sources that are the major ones. But I also get, I also, you know, compare a lot of data. And what you bring up is really true. I mean, Russia, you know, like I said earlier in the show, I grew up hiding under a desk

thinking Russia was going to drop nuclear bombs in my head. And I also believe that that steel desk is going to save my ass. But now Russia isn't sending bombs. bombs in my head and i also believe that that steel desk is going to save my ass uh but now russia isn't sending bombs they're literally letting us kill each other and destroy each other and gasoline on the fire they're just they're just ripping us they're trying to to aid and abet that process and the best way or one of the best ways to defend against it is to is to stop being in each other's throats. You're absolutely right. Yeah. Let's all get educated.

Let's all register to vote and give a damn. And at least that way when we get done as I hope when we get done, I mean, I think this is going to be one of those Supreme court things again. And three months after the election, we're still going to be fighting. My understanding is that regardless of anything on July 20 and January 20, someone has to be appointed. So that can be interesting. But, yeah, it's going to be some crazy days. And I do hope that voters will remember to stay calm and to recognize that our foreign adversaries, as well as some domestic political actors, want them to believe our democracies in turmoil, that things are collapsing and don't play into their hands. Absorb what's really happening.

Be alarmed if alarm is merited, but don't let others play you into distrusting an otherwise trustworthy process. Yeah. And distrusting, don't distrust it. Like, get involved. I mean, if you go vote, at least you know you got your things in. And you bring up a really good point, too. If either side you're on, the opposing side is not your enemy.

Russia is the enemy here. Russia and anybody else who wants to screw with us is the enemy. And I think we really need to identify that because, you know, I hear people from each side that go, that other side's the enemy and they're trying to destroy America and blah, blah blah blah blah and meanwhile putin's just sitting back going yeah no we're all americans and we're all part of the same country and um it's it's a sad state of affairs if folks view anyone who doesn't belong to their same political party as the enemy and i i hope that that's not the case. Or if it is, I hope it

doesn't remain the case because that will make it even more difficult to have a functioning society moving forward. I really look forward to the day when we can have a president that brings us back together, unites us. And, you know, we can fight about all the little politics things here and there, but as long as that constitution keeps sailing and democracy and our beliefs, and like I say, just like you, I hope that the next president or whoever wins in 2020, you know, ensures our elections. We need to solidify that because that's really how a lot of stuff fails. Check out David's book. It's been a wonderful discussion to have David on.

Rigged, America, Russia, and 100 Years of Covert Electoral Interference. Give us your plugs as we go out, David. That's where people can find you on the interwebs. Oh, I'm on Twitter at David A. Scheimer. I don't have a website, although I've been told I should have made one, but I haven't. But, yeah, I'm around. Please check it out. But more importantly, please check the book out just because I hope that it will help you to understand our current moment

and what we should be doing in this moment to preserve our system of governments. And share the wealth, too, man. Tell your friends about it. Share the book. Talk about how important is the vote. Have little group vote registrations sort of things with people and all that good stuff. You can check out the book on Amazon.com or any other booksellers out there. If you want to see all the books that have been on the show, including David's,

you can go to Amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash Chris Voss and order those babies up. You can see the video version of this. If you listen to the audio on iTunes and all the syndicates we have, you can go to YouTube.com, forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification to get all the notifications of all the great, brilliant authors we've had on. Thanks to David for being on the show with me today. And thanks to my audience for being here. We'll see you guys next time.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Thank you, David.