The Daily - Monday, Feb. 19, 2018

Episode Date: February 19, 2018

The Justice Department charged 13 Russians with illegally trying to disrupt the American political process, in a sophisticated plot to deepen the country’s divisions and turn Americans against one another. President Trump’s reaction to those charges suggests that plot is still working. Guest: Matt Apuzzo, a New York Times reporter based in Washington. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the special counsel's charges against 13 Russians reveal a sophisticated plot to turn Americans against one another and deepen the country's divisions. The president's reaction to those charges shows that that plot is still working. It's Monday, February 19th.

Good afternoon. A grand jury in the District of Columbia today returned an indictment presented by the special counsel's office. The indictment charges 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies for committing federal crimes while seeking to interfere in the United States political system, including the 2016 presidential election. The defendants allegedly conducted what they called information warfare against the United States with the stated goal of spreading distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.

Matt, we're both looking at an ad that was posted on Facebook, and it's literally a picture of Satan and Jesus arm wrestling. And they're staring each other down ferociously. And Satan is saying, if I win, Clinton wins. And Jesus is saying, not if I can help it. is saying, not if I can help it. And this ad then encourages, who's ever looking at it, to quote, press like, to help Jesus win. So what are we looking at? We were looking at this really bizarre, kind of like Marvel universe twisted cartoon. I mean, come on, if you have to choose, are you going to root for Satan or are you going to root for Jesus in the arm wrestling match, right?

Matt Apuzzo covers national security for The Times. And what we're also looking at is a piece of Russian propaganda purchased by Russian operatives to try to tip the 2016 election. for sure, because Bob Mueller, the special counsel here in Washington, dropped a lengthy and detailed indictment that spells out many of the ways that Russia tried to tip the balance and tip the outcome of last year's election. It was a remarkable document. And this bizarre ad is just one piece of a very, very large, long-running counterintelligence operation. Internet Research Agency was a structured organization headed by a management group and arranged into departments including graphics, search engine optimization,

information technology, and finance departments. In 2014, the company established a translator project focused on the United States. This began all the way back in 2014, which of course is before Trump is even running for office. And the origins appear to be pretty anti-Hillary, but also with an eye towards just making a mess of democracy. And what was happening in Russia or to Russia in this 2014 period that helps us understand why this operation begins then? Sure. So 2014. We begin with the breaking news. The United States believes that Russian troops have entered Ukraine. Russia is becoming more and more isolated from the West. Groups of pro-Russia troops surrounding Ukrainian bases, ordering their forces off of them so they can occupy them.

Obviously there was the incursion into Crimea. The international warning to Russia to end its invasion is being ignored. Which was a major diplomatic rift with the Obama administration. This morning, I signed an executive order that authorizes sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. And 2014 is also the time when it's becoming clear that Hillary Clinton has a really good chance to become the next president. As for President Putin, I know we are dealing with a tough guy with a thin skin. Now, Vladimir Putin had a pre-existing beef with Hillary Clinton.

It's a war of words between Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton. Clinton recently compared the Russian president's actions in Ukraine to those of Hitler. Well, now Putin is hitting back and bringing gender into the fight. It's better not to argue with women, Putin said, calling Mrs. Clinton weak and adding, oddly, maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman. When she was secretary of state, there was a lot of tension there. He saw her as a problem. And so he set out in 2014, it appears, to do

something about that. In July of 2016, more than 80 employees were assigned to the Translator Project. Two of the defendants allegedly traveled to the United States in 2014 to collect intelligence for their American influence operations. So the first thing that happened, and this was a big surprise, was that Russia actually sent teams of people into the United States. They traveled around the country and they were trying to gather intelligence. And when I say intelligence, I mean kind of just the stuff that political reporters or political junkies know, you know, like breathing, right? Where are the purple states? What are the hot button issues in every state? What can we pull on over here?

stealing the identities of Americans and American institutions and creating online personas and using those to create kind of this online echo chamber to both echo and amplify the message that they thought would do the most damage both to the system and to Hillary Clinton. They also purchased political advertisements on social media networks. The Russians also recruited and paid real Americans to engage in political activities, promote political campaigns, and stage political rallies. The defendants and their co-conspirators pretended to be grassroots activists. They gave the address in the indictment in St. Petersburg. He said this was the hub of the effort to influence the election. So they had people in an office, they worked shifts, you know, they had a day shift and a night shift. They were keeping track of what

messages that they were pushing out on social media were getting traction. They had teams that were in charge of graphics and metrics. And so you saw things like they created a Twitter account for the Tennessee Republican Party. And it had over 100,000 followers. And you would think like, oh, I'm following the Tennessee Republican Party. Like, no, you're following Russian trolls. What struck me is how Russians were grabbing at the most emotionally charged issues in American politics, religion, race, immigration, and they were tearing at those issues to make the anger worse. There was evidence in the indictment that the Russians actually recruited Americans at rallies to get them to build a cage for a rally and pose as Hillary Clinton and stand in the cage to be like, look, Hillary Clinton's in jail. Yeah, that's right. Lock her up. The Russians didn't invent lock her up, but they did obviously what they could to amplify the shouting that was happening in the United States in 2016

and really worsen the risk. I think we feel like our views, our anger are our own. And that's a big part of the political process in the United States is we get fired up by what we get fired up about. And this document said, yeah, but also you're getting fired up by people who don't really care at all about what you're getting fired up about. They just want to get you fired up and angry. Right. It feels like they kind of used us, used Americans. They tapped into our pre-existing notions and biases, and they didn't run with them. They kind of made Americans run with them.

Politics are getting nastier. And did the Russians push us towards that? Or did they just sort of get on that train and recognize that it was heading in that direction? I don't know. But they certainly recognized a trend and took advantage of it. So this thing is churning along, producing these ads and pushing stuff out into the social media echo chamber about how terrible Hillary Clinton is. And then in 2016, the indictment says the strategy changes, right? I mean, because suddenly now Donald Trump is in the picture. Besides the battleground states, which are obvious,

Donald Trump and the RNC are now targeting blue states like New Mexico. Donald Trump maintaining that big lead he has had. The reality is he's got momentum on his side. He is getting the Republican base, you know, back together again. As Trump mounted a legitimate campaign, the Russians, like everybody else, started to take him seriously. And their strategy moved from just saying, hey, instead of just being anti-Hillary, we can actually be more pro-Trump. They began to stake out really pro-Trump views. And they're pushing ads like the Jesus Arm Wrestling ad. And their social media is more pro-Trump than just anti-Hillary. And so they're actively working. Here's an instance of a foreign government actively working to help elect the president of the United States.

And who better arguably to help the Russians' deep intentions in the United States than Donald Trump, who is representing so many grievances from a significant percentage of Americans. Right. He was speaking to a population that felt that it had not been heard. And he was speaking out on issues that were the hot button issues, the very hot button issues that the Russians had identified as ways to exploit rifts in the United States. And so it wasn't just about sowing discontent. I mean, they had a clear favorite, and the favorite one. Well, what's interesting about this indictment is that this investigation has become so much about the president and his campaigns tied to Russia, and it's become more recently

about his efforts to end the investigation, and these questions of whether his behavior since the investigation has started constitute obstruction of justice. But what was released on Friday, it feels like a return to what this investigation was originally about, to kind of the purest form of this investigation, which was just simply Russian meddling. Right. I mean, let's go back to before there even was a special counsel, before Bob Mueller was even on the scene. Jim Comey was the FBI director. It's early 2017. He goes to Capitol Hill and he confirms it. I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission,

is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. And that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts. And now, look, we've spent the past year focused largely on was anybody in the Trump campaign involved? Because that's a huge question. Was anybody around the president of the United States involved in a counterintelligence effort to get him elected? But Mueller obviously has the broader mandate. He's got that first question. How did Russia try to influence the election? And this indictment

is really the first effort to publicly answer that. So what do you make of that? What does it tell you about this investigation and what Mueller is up to that we are now back to the origins, to the simple Russian meddling question. Yeah, I think it just shows that this is proceeding on several tracks, right? So you have the Russian meddling track, you have the collusion track, and then you have the obstruction track, which is the problems that Donald Trump has made for himself, which is, did he violate any laws by trying to shut down or slow or hinder the investigation that Mueller's in the middle of? So, I mean, it's a multi-track thing. It feels notable that all these tracks are running at once in thinking about how President Trump has responded to this indictment, because here we have the revelation in these charges of what feels like very serious anti-American behavior

by a foreign power attempting to undermine our election. And yet, the response we've gotten from President Trump over the weekend has seemed much more connected to the investigation also being about him. investigation also being about him. President Trump going on a 24-hour Twitter storm following the indictments of 13 Russians for meddling in the U.S. election. You're right. I mean, you might have expected after an indictment like this for the president to come out and say, enough is enough. This indictment is evidence that Vladimir Putin is meddling in our politics. He's meddling in the sort of sanctity of our elections. But instead... It's quite something watching really a tweet storm from the president started last night,

again this morning. Because of the world we've lived in over the last year, where all things Russia loom over Donald Trump, you know, his response is... Russia started their anti-U.S. campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for president. The results of the election were not impacted. The what can be done to stop it from happening again? The debate is, did Mueller's prosecutors come up with any evidence that I did anything wrong? No, they didn't. See, this is fine. I'm exonerated. Case closed. President also added this for more context. He said, I never said Russia did not meddle in the election. I said it may be Russia or China or another country or group, or it may be a 400-pound genius sitting on his bed and playing with his computer. The Russian hoax was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. It never did. Wow. What does it tell us that we're at this moment in this investigation where a serious attack by a foreign power has been unmasked and described in all its elaborateness? And that results in more infighting within the U.S. rather than any kind of focus on a response and any kind of unification. a response in any kind of unification. It feels like, as we started talking about at the beginning of this conversation, Russia knew exactly what it was tapping into when it decided to try to deepen

the divisions inside the United States. And now that we have revealed just how broad the plot is, we are finding that even that unmasking and revealing is another step in advancing Russia's original effort to divide Americans against each other. Yeah, that's absolutely right. It just shows that this was brilliant, right? I mean, our colleagues who wrote a phenomenal story about the hacking effort called it the perfect weapon. Trump also reprimanded his national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, for saying the evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 elections was, quote, incontrovertible. General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians, the president said. It is this weird moment where you read that indictment and you're like, wow, Russia really likes to have everybody in the United States screaming at each other. Right. And here we are beginning of 2018 and we're all just screaming at each other.

Thank you, Matt. Anytime. anytime. This indictment serves as a reminder that people are not always who they appear to be on the Internet. The indictment alleges that the Russian conspirators want to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy. We must not allow them to succeed.

The Department of Justice will continue to work cooperatively with other law enforcement and intelligence agencies and with the Congress to defend our nation against similar current and future efforts. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. My message for the people in office is you're either with us or against us. We are losing our lives while the adults are playing around. On Sunday, students at the Florida high school where 17 people were killed last week said they would organize

nationwide marches set for March 24th to demand gun control. This is about us begging for our lives. This isn't about the GOP. This isn't about the Democrats. This is about us creating a badge of shame for any politicians who are accepting money from the NRA and using us as collateral. On Saturday night, in one of his many tweets over the weekend, President Trump suggested that the Russia investigation had distracted the FBI and contributed to its failure to look into reports about the shooter. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, he wrote. In response, several students at Stoneman Douglas High, where the shooting occurred, tweeted back at him.

My friends were brutally murdered, and you have the nerve to make this about Russia, wrote one of them. I cannot believe this. and you have the nerve to make this about Russia, wrote one of them. I cannot believe this. On Sunday afternoon, the White House said that the president would hold a listening session later this week with high school students and teachers, but did not say whether it would include students from Stoneman Douglas. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.