The Jordan Harbinger Show - 419: David Shimer | 100 Years of Covert Election Interference

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

David Shimer (@davidashimer) is a historian, foreign policy analyst, and author of Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference. What We Discuss with David Shimer: Why the more polarized a democracy, the more vulnerable it is to foreign subversion. While we know that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and is working to interfere in the 2020 election, it's actually been attempting to subvert the integrity of our elections for the past century. Why every American, of every political persuasion, should be concerned about the interference of Russia -- or any other foreign power -- in our elections. What Russia really seeks to gain from undermining the democratic process not only in the United States, but around the world. Countermeasures the United States can use to defend itself against this kind of interference. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/419 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. In Ukraine's 2014 election, and Ukrainian officials discovered a virus that had been planted that would have displayed or announced an inaccurate result in the election. And so they got that virus taken down in the last minute. But ironically, Russian state media was ready to go

and ran that fake result anyway, even though Ukraine was able to detect it before the results were actually announced. They want the people of Ukraine to not believe in the outcome of their own election. They want people to believe that elections are legitimate, that no one will really know who won them, that they are not a viable form of governance or succession. And that stretches across all of these cases. That is what Russia is seeking to achieve to undermine the notion that democracy actually works and is all it's trumped up to be.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people. If you're new to the show, we have in-depth interviews with people at the top of their game. spies, psychologists, astronauts, and entrepreneurs, even the occasional four-star general or drug trafficker, each episode of the show turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. Today, we're talking with David Shimer. He's a fellow at the Wilson Center at Yale and author of Rigged.

This is an episode about election interference. We know from all the intelligence agencies, Harone and others, that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. It's not the same thing as collusion. So just pause if you think that this is political. Look, discovery of this divided the country and put huge numbers of people in denial that they and that we, as a country, as a nation, had been played. Today, we'll learn what happened and why, why we didn't retaliate, and why this is more important than ever right now, especially with an election around the corner.

Of note, this is bipartisan. Look, it doesn't matter if you're a Trump supporter, Republican, a hardcore Democrat. This is important. It's not about being on one team or another. It's about election security and ensuring the fairness of elections. And I know each side thinks the other side doesn't want to be fair, even if that's true. And I'm not saying that it is. But even if that's true, at the very least, we should want other countries that are hostile to the United States away from our election process.

I think we can all agree on that. If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and celebrities every single week, it's because of my network. and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. Now, here's David Shimer. A lot of people will not admit that, or not accept, I should say, that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. And I wanted to start here because a lot of folks are just like, oh, this is partisan crap.

There was no interference. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that people don't really understand what the difference is between interference and collusion, and I don't necessarily need to get into that. But I want to talk about why this is a bipartisan issue that everyone should care about, no matter which team you find yourself on or you think you're on, and why it's just not debatable that this was something that happened, and why we can't just bury it because our guy won or whatever. That's a three-part question, but I think you kind of see where I'm going with this, right? Absolutely. And I would say that the threat of covert electoral interference feel so partisan because it's been so confined to constrained to 2016. So from the perspective of the American people, covert electoral interference is a Russian operation to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton, which makes it feel so juiced up and so political. When in fact, what I reveal in my book rigged is that there's a vast history of covert operations to interfere in elections from Soviet and American operations during the Cold War to Russian operations around the world today to 2016 in its aftermath.

We're just a part of that story. The Soviet Union interfered in many U.S. elections. Russia interfered in this election. This threat is ongoing. But what Russia is after is not to help any one candidate. It's to choose our leaders for us. It's to sabotage our democracy and it's to undermine the viability of our democratic processes. And that should offend alarm and serve as a call to action for all Americans, regardless of their party loyalties. Yeah, I've done other. shows on how voting machines get hacked. I have Renee DeResta, who you probably know who she is coming on and talking about how social media has essentially been co-opted for election interference all over the world, not just from one side or the other or from one country or the other and not just for the

United States. But we all need to start from the same starting line, which is, hey, this happens and not say, well, the U.S. does it to other countries. Yes, and we'll get into that. We have to accept that too, but not use what aboutism and not deny that this is going on. because we don't want to deal with it or because, like I said before, because our guy won or didn't win or whatever it is. We really have to set that aside because otherwise, and I hate to use things like we're playing right into their hands, but we're playing right into their hands. Like the whole point is we're supposed to, these malicious actors want us to think that this is a bunch of crap and the other side is making this stuff up so that they can keep operating with impunity because as long as we're arguing about whether it happened, we can't really do anything about it, right? That's absolutely right. this is a threat to our democracy. It's designed to undermine our democracy, and that affects

everyone who lives in our democracy, because what Russia wants for us is for us to be a corrupted nation, for us to be dysfunctional, for us to be unable to lead abroad or to pass legislation at home. And again, that undermines the interests of all citizens, regardless of whether you identify as a Republican, independent, or Democrat. I mean, something that I really was struck by in my history is that I write about is I interviewed a former KGB general named Oleg Kulugan for about half a day. That's cool. And yeah, it was interesting. I sat in his living room and we talked through sort of his history of interfering in elections in the United States. And what he told me about were his operations to interfere in elections against Richard Nixon, a Republican, and then Ronald Reagan,

a Republican. It just so happens that today, this Russia thinks it's in its interest for now to help a Republican, but again, this isn't about whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. It's about who advances what Russia wants for America. And America should therefore come together to defend itself and its nation and its polity. Otherwise, we're playing into our adversary's hands and not our own. How was, just side note, how was Kalugan? Because he's like been on my list of, I should interview that guy, but it's like, oh, he's kind of not that easy to reach and, you know, where does he live? I don't even know. Probably lives in upstate New York. That's where all those guys seem to it for some reason. Yeah, it took me months to be able to sort of track him down. And by the time I

finally got him on the phone, he was like, well, when do you want to do this interview? How about next month? And I'm like, well, how about tomorrow? And then I race down to get to his house as quickly as I could because I wanted to make sure to incorporate his views into my book. And I mean, it was fascinating because he was able to bring to life. I've been reviewing KGB archives, but he really was able to bring to life the KGB perspective in terms of how they would manipulate the politics of democracies. For example, he said two things. that I found especially interesting, one was that he said from the perspective of a non-democratic regime, open democratic elections are just a right target. They're an irresistible opportunity

to manipulate the direction of either Western democracies or even the United States itself, because they're so penetrable. They're so manipulatable. That's why the first Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, all the way to the current Russian leader Vladimir Putin, had a tradition of interfering in elections. It's just so tempting. And the upside is so potentially great. The second thing he really emphasized to me was he talked to me about how America's diversity from the Soviet perspective is an enormous vulnerability. That whereas I think it's in the American tradition, as I believe that our diversity is a core strength of our nation, from their perspective, it's ripe for subversion. You can take divisions along race or religion or otherwise and pit Americans against each other, through propaganda, through staged hate crimes or otherwise, in order to both divide Americans from one another and to degrade America's image and eyes of the world. and he would execute operations to do so in the Cold War. And as we saw in 2016, Russia predominantly

sought to target black Americans and so racial discord in our own electorate. And when I told Kulugan that, he said, well, of course, that's just more of the same. Do you speak Russian or does he speak English well enough to sit there and conduct an interview? I mean, he defected a long time ago. So I've studied Russian, but we talked in English because his English trump my Russian. Yeah, that's how that usually works, eh? Yeah, exactly. Let's define covert electoral interference because I think a lot of folks don't really know what that means. They're not sure if it means hacking in and changing votes or if it just means running Facebook ads, right?

There's quite a breadth of techniques and tactics that people can use to interfere with elections in a covert way. And that's not just like supporting a candidate with a little bit of extra money. I guess maybe that's sort of level one or level zero is writing a check to a candidate. But that's not really what we're talking about, of course. Totally. So I would say I study in my book a very specific thing. which is operations that meet the qualities of being covert, electoral, and interference.

And to be covert, that means that the hand of the interfering actor is hidden. It means that when you see the effect of an operation, like stolen emails being released, it's not Russia's saying, I did this. They're working through a third party like WikiLeaks to hide their hand, which makes it covert. It needs to be electoral, which means you're targeting a vote that determines the leader of another country. And it needs to be interference, which means you're deploying so-called active measures. you're seeking to manipulate, not just to watch or to collect. So I define covert electoral interference as a hidden foreign effort to manipulate a Democratic vote of succession.

And what I found in many ways to my surprise over the course of my research is that these operations have underlined U.S. Russian relations for a century. They've affected democracies all over the world in extraordinary ways. It's not just money. It's seeking to either affect actual ballots, change vote tallies, or to spread massive amounts of propaganda in order to manipulate people, whether in the Cold War or today, this has been a tool of statecraft that has influenced the trajectories of nations. And we should recognize that and we should learn from that. I interviewed more than 130 people for this book, including many former CIA officers,

eight former CIA directors. And they emphasized to me as well, we should learn from our own history, from Soviet history, and then really study and get into the weeds at 2016, because then and only then can what happened to America make sense, in my opinion, that totally nonpartisan ways, it should be, and can we actually think about how to defend ourselves in a comprehensive real way that escapes the toxicity of our current moment? Who started doing this? Not like I'm looking for someone to blame. I'm just curious what's sort of the history or the first instance of electoral interference is, because democracy has been around for a while, but something tells me that Sparta and Athens weren't exactly like

interfering in each other's elections, but what do I know? Maybe they were. So I would say there were maybe exceptional circumstances that weren't systemic, where this issue would emerge prior to the 20th century, like in the 1888 U.S. election, there was a controversy over alleged British interference in that election, which caused an uproar. But when you really saw this become a global strategy was in 1990 when Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet leader founded an organization known as the Communist International. And the purpose of that organization was to unite the communist parties of the world and get them into power. And to do so, you had to win elections. So you saw the Soviet Union doing primitive forms of electoral interference, spreading money, propaganda to help these parties all over

the West and including in America. And then you really saw this go to the next level, perhaps, right after the Second World War, when Joseph Stalin's forces marched across Eastern Europe and executed extraordinary operations to interfere covertly in elections. You saw ballots altered, voter rolls purged millions of pieces of propaganda spread across these countries in order to manipulate voters' views. And after the communists won those elections, which were effectively rigged and stopped holding them, Harry Truman decided, who was the U.S. president, I'm going to respond to Soviet electoral interference with American electoral interference. And he authorized the CIA to engage in covert action formally for the first time with the express purpose of interfering in the Italian

election of 1948. So the starting point of CIA covert action was in fact electoral interference. And so in answer to your question, the starting point for the Soviet Union or the Soviets was 1990. And for America, it was Italy's 1948 election. Yeah, this is helpful because I think a lot of people just kind of assume that we've only been mucking around with elections or been mucked with as of the last decade or not even, right? This is like, well, it must be new because I'm only hearing about it now. And they don't think, well, this happened in the 70s and 80s with the Soviet Union interfering with. You said Ronald Reagan, was that, or was it Carter? They went after Nixon Reagan. Nixon. Okay. So even before that. And then the United States had been doing it. I want to talk about

the differences in how the U.S. and the Soviet Union slash Russia have done this in a little bit, because I think there's an important set of differences here and it will hopefully stop people from saying, well, what about the, you know, to stop the what aboutism, like, what about when the U.S. does it, because of course it's bullshit on both sides, but there's one side that's typically way beyond the pale, or maybe it isn't. I want your opinion on this. But it sounds like the Soviet Union got dozens of reps and decades of experience in election interference in the former Eastern bloc, so former Eastern Europe or a current Eastern Europe, I guess it hasn't moved, where they influenced elections, puppet governments were put in place until, or in the case

of Belarus, like, still going? I don't know. Is that something that we have history on? So Russia has been interfering in elections, is continuing to interfere in elections. This is an evolving story that neither started nor stopped in 2016. What the Soviet Union did matters because their methods were direct precursors to Russia's methods today. They sought to manipulate voters with physical forms of propaganda. Today, Putin is seeking to manipulate voters with digital forms of propaganda across social media or stolen emails. The Soviets sought to stuff ballot by. Putin's hackers are seeking to penetrate ballot boxes. Same idea. Again, just adjusted for the digital. And finally, back then, the Soviet Union sought to find and release damaging compromising

materials about public figures. What a day, Putin and his hackers are seeking to steal and release the private correspondence of political figures through their email inboxes. So these ideas, these methods are connected. The story is continuous. And we've seen Russia target in recent years, elections in Ukraine, in Montenegro, in the United Kingdom, in France, in Germany. So I interviewed, for example, the president of Montenegro whom Russian intelligence tried to assassinate. And he told me, we're under siege by Russia. Our elections are under siege. So again, this is a global strategy by Russia to support authoritarian-minded and divisive leaders who will degrade their democracies from within. And the sooner we get our heads around that,

shore up our defenses at home and work with other democracies abroad and seeking to respond to this threat, then the sooner will be able to defend our democratic way of life. That's interesting to hear. I think a lot of people don't realize how prevalent this is in other countries and why it would be happening. Like you said before, it's not just about supporting one person. It's about Russia wanting to put into place characters that will destroy their own democracies. Why is that? See, a lot of people will go, well, why, what do they care if Montenegro has a democracy? Who cares? They're small. It's not like they buy a bunch of stuff. They don't have an army massing against Russia. Who care? Why bother? I mean, Oliver Stone told me this. Why would they bother? They're worried

about other things at home. Why would they bother messing with our election or the election of a small country? That was what he told me. I didn't go down that rabbit hole with him because he's already made up his mind. But I'm curious about the reasoning, because of course, you've studied this. The shortcoming of that line of argument is that it treats domestic and foreign policy. is separate, when in fact they're very much linked in terms of this story. And so I would say there are three reasons as to why Putin is targeting democracies on a global basis in support of these authoritarian-minded and divisive figures. The first is that from his perspective as a Russian leader, if he is showing his people that democracies are flawed, they're penetrable, they're unenviable,

that therefore helps him maintain his own power as a corrupt autocrat because he's communicating to his people. See, they might say that democracy is this better, form of governance, but really it's a chaotic mess and you want no part of it. Targeting America specifically, it does two things from his perspective. It both divides us and undermines our societal cohesion, humiliates us to in the eyes of the world in terms of our ability to function as a democracy, which again is to his benefit. And it makes us more unable to lead abroad, which he also sees to his benefit, because from Putin's perspective, the world is zero sum. And if America is torn down, then Russia is by relative calculation building itself up.

So he's not trying to surpass us. He's trying to bring us down. And then finally, by targeting democracies all over the world, he's seeking to promote these figures who are exclusive in their nature, who are nationalist rather than internationalists, who will move away from the international institutions that underpin, or has historically underpinned American power in the world. And then in this new corrupted version of themselves,

will move toward Russia's orbit. Because right now, Russia's alliance network pales in comparison to Americas. And so from his zero-sum-again perspective, if he can divide, for example, European nations from one another, if he can promote as he tried to, movements like Brexit, it makes it so that he could bully isolated nation states rather than have to deal with a collective block of Western democracies that's harder to engage with and to have leverage over. So this strategy has many benefits for Vladimir Putin, which is why he's executing it vigorously and across at least the last decade. Can you define real quickly zero-sum game in terms of political context for a lot of people? There's a lot of people young and old that had not heard that term or I've heard it and go,

I really don't know what that means. Totally. So what the idea of zero-sum means is, well, let's talk about what positive some means. Positive some thinking is, and that's, I think, how America has historically since the Second World War before this administration exists in the world, which is, if I'm helping other countries improve. Like if I'm helping European nations come together rebuild through something like the Marshall Plan, a very well-known example, that benefits America too. And we can all win together. The total sum is positive. France is benefiting. We're benefiting. We're all moving up in the world. Whereas a zero sum calculus is if another nation is winning, you're losing because the sum is zero. So from Russia's perspective, if America is doing well, Russia by comparison is not. But if he

hurts America, then Russia, by comparison, is doing well. So the sum is still zero. So from his perspective, in targeting these different countries, he is seeking to surpass by bringing down these democracies. Because think about Vladimir Putin's assets. That's very important. He has a military that he can't really use other than in very select circumstances. His economy pales in comparison to either the EU or to Americas. And he diplomatically is much more isolated in terms of his alliance network than country like the United States. So therefore, rationally, he has no way to surpass where America has historically been. But he does have the capability to degrade America, to bring America down, and therefore bring him closer to surpassing the United States. So that's different than the Soviet Union,

which thought that its model would triumph, that it would overcome and surpass America, as for example Nikita Khrushchev told Richard Nixon, that's not Putin's way. Putin's way is divide and bring down. And that is what he is seeking to do to potentially great effect, because we've seen around the world and in our own country. I think we all feel this in the last few years. America is retreating. America's dysfunctional. America's unable to lead abroad because we can't even function and build ourselves to a better state at home. And so that plays into Russia's hands. It's not just the domestic policy challenge. It is exactly what someone like Vladimir Putin wants for democracies like ours. People throw that term around a lot and don't necessarily

realize that folks aren't necessarily going to have any idea what they're talking about. So positive sum is like there's a pie on the table and I bring another pie and now there's two pies on the table and we're both happy and zero sum is there's one pie on the table and if you take a piece of it, I cannot have that piece. So therefore I'm trying to get as much of the pie as I can to take it away from you, which is of course less efficient because now I'm doing things just to take the pie away from you even if I don't need more of the pie. Right. So that whole thing can be extremely destructive and we've seen how that works in countries that have thought that way over years, former Soviet Union being a classic example. Now, some of this interference and some of the

propaganda that we've talked about in other episodes of the show, one example that you brought up was that the United Nations actually read this letter from the Klu Klux Klan in the UN General Assembly. Can you take us through that? Because that to me was kind of mind-blowing that this actually happened and nobody found out about it until after the fact. Totally. So again, And thinking about the Soviet perspective, the Soviet mission in America, part of it was, how do we show the world that America is, as this general put it to me, quote, just a racist hopet of hate. So in 1960, before meeting of the UN General Assembly, various delegates from African and Asian countries received a letter signed by the KKK that was awfully racist in nature. And they read the letter, they were predictably outraged as you'd think they would be.

and on the floor of the UN General Assembly, the Nigerian delegate read the extent of the letter and said he wanted to add this to the public record. The U.S. was humiliated. The U.S. delegate at the session had to apologize before the U.N. General Assembly for America's own internal racism and division. So this was a humbling and a deeply embarrassing moment for the United States. And what you're alluding to and what I reveal in the book is that, in fact, the letter was not written by the KKK. It was written by the KGB by Soviet intelligence. It was a forgery of fake. And the idea of the Soviets was to create a scandal, which would involve the projection to the world of, quote, America's own, you know, racism. And it's being just a, quote, hotbed of hate.

And from the Soviet perspective, this operation was a huge success because it projected America's own flawed state, flawed nature to the world, and from the Soviet point of view, made it so that the American model would be less appealing to the rest of the world. So keeping in mind there, because this is very important, as I said earlier, our diversity can be played upon. And that is what the Soviet Union sought to do in 1960 when it staged this scandal and framed or pretended that the KKK had written a letter that it really did. And that's what Russia's been doing in recent years as it seeks to inflame real genuine divisions that already exist in our country. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, David Shimer. We'll be right back.

And now, back to David Shimer on the Jordan Harbinger Show. So Russia uses disinformation to create tribes and get citizens to fight with each other. I think that sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it? Exactly. And it not only sounds familiar, it gets at the Soviet and Russian tradition, which is that they don't create fissures, right? Like, that letter wouldn't have made any sense if there wasn't any systemic racism in the United States. Right. They identify our own flaws, our own shortcomings, and they pour gasoline on them. They blow them up. They take advantage of it. So whether it's today or whether it's then, the tradition here is to look at us to see where we're vulnerable and then to take advantage of that. And that is how you can both anticipate and understand these foreign

operations, these Russian operations to undermine our democracy and to degrade our democratic system. Let's talk a little bit about Ukraine, Spain, Mexico, Colombia. I kind of want to go through a checklist of places where this has happened. That's not the United States because I think it's also easier for people who might be thinking this is a bunch of crap or it has an emotional charge to it because I'm living through it right now. It might be interesting to see how this is happening around the globe, things that we don't really see in the news. We've all seen Ukraine in the news, but most people don't necessarily know that it's not just cyber warfare, but there was also fake news, character assassination, and maybe cyber warfare is what we focused on for Ukraine,

because when they hacked the voting system to change the results, it was so egregious. Actually, take us through that, because that was an example where I just went, wait, they did what? And then they doubled down on it after they got caught. I mean, it's just so ridiculous to even think about doing something like this. And yet they just gave zero fucks. Yeah, so in Ukraine's 2014 election, which has really been a testing ground for Russian interference generally, they did two things. They pursued the first track of these types of operations, which was trying to manipulate people. And so they spread propaganda, but disinformation. But they also sought to manipulate actual voting systems. A few days before the election, the election systems in the country were sabotaged and Ukrainian officials had to frantically repair them. And the day of the election, Ukrainian officials discovered a virus that had been. planted that would have displayed or announced an inaccurate result in the election. And so they got that virus taken down in the last minute. But ironically, Russian state media was ready to go

and ran that fake result anyway, even though Ukraine was able to detect it before the results were actually announced. And that is just one instance of Russia seeking again to maybe help one candidate and hurt another. But why would they want, for example, a fake result announced? Because they want the people of Ukraine to not believe in the outcome of their own election. They want people to believe that elections are illegitimate, that no one will really know who won them, that they are not a viable form of governance or succession. And that stretches across all of these cases. That is what Russia is seeking to achieve to undermine the notion that democracy actually works and is all it's trumped up to be. So I interviewed officials from Norway and Spain, who again told me this is our everyday life.

In the politics, it's our everyday life. In the UK, I interviewed the former head of one of Britain's spy service agencies who was serving at the time of Brexit, their equivalent to the NSA. And he said to me, you know, it was our failure in failing to anticipate that Russia might seek to actually affect the outcome of this referendum. I would say before July of 2016, when Russia in a very public way, through WikiLeaks, released the DNC emails, it was not widely understood that Russia was doing this in such a systemic global way. And since then, that picture has come more into view because the operation against the U.S. was unique in that it caused a global commotion, that this has been the focus of reporters,

journalists all over the world, especially in America. But before then, I would say democracies as they do now. Stand alone, I've stood alone. I mean, as I mentioned, the president of Montenegro, who I interviewed, literally, Russian intelligence tried to stage an election like Kudai, Atta, against him that would have culminated in his assassination. And he told me, big guy, 6, 6, he had a bunch of bodyguards when I interviewed. And he said, we are under siege here, and it's past time that Oss's democracies work together to

confront this threat. Think about our comparative advantage compared to Russia. We can work together. We can, as we've deterred land war through NATO, we can seek to deter digital war today. But as of now, there's been no effort to do so. Every democracy stands alone. And if you think America's bad, and we are, in fact, in a bad spot, Montenegro is in a worst spot. So it's on us to help our allies while also defending ourselves through both domestic

and foreign policy reforms. And the longer it takes us to do so, the more advantage and the more success Russia will have in seeking to divide, degrade, and direct foreign democracies. I know that they fund right-wing politicians in places like France. So you have Marine Le Pen and you have right-wing populist winning elections in Colombia largely because, like you said before, or if we can put in people, or if they can put in people that are going to destabilize or isolate that nation, that's great because divided we fall, right? So it must be insane talking with somebody who had the KG, or FSB plotting to literally murder them. And then they're like, hey, this is a problem? And everyone's like, yeah, but I mean, is it that big of a problem? And he's like, they literally

tried to kill me because I was going to win the election. Hello? In your example earlier that I just want to draw a little circle around. In Ukraine, they interfered with the voting result. And then Russian media, who had been provided with the fake result ahead of the results actually being done, still reported the fake result, which is like, how little do you have to care about democracy to say, like, hey, just tell them that 80% of the election went to the guy that we picked, and we're going to hack the election, and that's going to be the result. And then it's like, hey, our plan didn't work.

Just report it anyway, because we don't even care that it's going to be so. so obvious that we did this and that we hacked it and that we tried to falsify, just report the fake result anyway that you got days ago. And that means also that those media, maybe not the people speaking into the camera, but somebody at that television station, that news outlet just got a memo from somebody at the FSB and was like, sure thing, days before the election actually was done. So everybody along every step of the way knows that it's bullshit and is just like, whatever, they don't even care. Well, I think interestingly enough, and that brings up a really interesting point, which is from Russia's perspective, sometimes getting caught actually

is a good thing. Why? Because it makes Russia seem 10 feet tall. It makes it seem as though Russia can screw with countries as powerful as America and experience almost no consequences for doing so. And it broadcasts to the world that democracies are so unable to defend themselves. Think about it. If Russia had interfered in America's 2016 election and we had never learned of that, that would be bad in its own sense. And we have to take. that extremely seriously. But the discovery and outing of its operation added to the benefits in many ways of its operation, because it both divided Americans from one another, and it showed the international community that America is that easy to penetrate and manipulate, and Russia experienced so relatively

few costs for such an ambitious endeavor. So unlike for America, when it sought to exercise or execute these sorts of operations, detection is all negative. It's a huge drawback because it would undermine America's standing in the world and its soft power as a democracy, Russia is not playing that game. They are not purporting to say, I mean, that we are a viable, genuine democracy. So therefore, this only serves its objectives of corrupting, embarrassing, and discrediting democracies globally if on certain circumstances their operations are outed, as they have been in part in various countries from Ukraine to Montenegro to the United States. I worry a little bit about Mexico. I should say I worry more about Mexico than probably ever before,

because I know that Mexico's been under threat from international intelligence services. They're saying, look, our elections are being interfered with. Like I said, a right-wing populist won in Colombia. In Mexico, there's this kind of anti-establishment leader underdog that also won. Look, it might seem unimportant or trivial. Like, who cares? Who's leading Mexico? They're our neighbor.

They're a partner. But we'll work with whoever's in power because we're in the United States. We have lovers. But remember, we're trying to address a drug crisis, an influx of refugees, an influx of crime from a country that might be getting less and less stable or that refuses to cooperate with the United States. Not that Mexico has any inherent defect. I'm just saying anytime your neighbor has crime that's happening right in it that involves you as a United States. Like, they're supplying drugs. We're demanding them. I mean, we're equally complicit here.

But we need to work with the government of Mexico to stem that tide. What happens when they have election interference and somebody whose platform is, screw the USA, they're a bunch of dicks, is in power because of help from Russia, it's bad for Mexico, it's bad for Mexicans, it's bad for the United States, it's bad for the entire world order. I'm not saying that's happening right now, but it could definitely happen that somebody cooperates less with the United States because Russia doesn't want them to and they're pulling the purse strings, they're holding the purse strings and pulling the cords. It definitely could happen in the future, and you better believe that Putin's trying to make that happen. I mean, he can't destabilize Canada as well as he can destabilize Mexico,

and his chief rival is right there. It's like, if China were something that, the United States could control, we would be working that against Russia right now. Like, hey, your big, powerful neighbor China, you have disputed territory with them. Like, look at India and China. I think it's naive to say the United States isn't going, hey, that border clash you got there sure looks like trouble. Might want to get some arms upgrades from us, you know? Looks like China's really trying to step on your guys over there.

That's music to our ears, I assume, when things like that happen against global rivals. I don't want to get too far off the, I can't say off the reservation. I was emailed about this. I don't want to get too far off my point here, but it seems like we have to be wary of how the whole system works. We can't just say, well, it's not happening in the United States because we don't have an election this year, so we just don't have to worry about that right now. One, we got up our security, but two, anytime a democracy is being screwed with, especially when that democracy shares thousands of miles of border with the United States and has billions of dollars in trade,

you know, we should probably pay that for attention because otherwise we're just going to run head first into the wall. Totally. I mean, this is, we can. can't treat this threat as just a threat to America. It's global. I mean, an interesting story relating to Mexico in my research was that I interviewed the just departed president of Colombia, Juan Santos, and he told me that in the summer of 2018, when he was serving as Colombian's president, he personally provided the president of Mexico with a warning that he had received intelligence indicating that Russia intended to interfere in both of their country's upcoming elections. He said that they then investigated those warnings. They had foreign

intelligence services helped them do so, but they never received concrete evidence that Russia was interfering, at least in the Colombian election, but then result of those elections, following those warnings, was that you had a left-wing anti-establishment candidate triumph in one election, and you had a right-wing, populist win, similarly the other election. And that fits together. It's not immediately obvious how that fits together if you view things as the ideological sort of battles of the Cold War when it was only about helping communists, but for a country like Russia, today. Getting a left-wing populist or a right-wing populist into power, it doesn't matter so long as those leaders are divisive, so long as they're the types of leaders we were talking about,

and so long as they move away from these internationalist ideals that America is champion now or had champion for over seven decades. So Colombia and Mexico, just like America and the United Kingdom are dealing with intelligence related to Russian interference, and the sooner we can get to work again with getting to the hard work of confronting this threat with them and really making progress in doing so, it just would benefit all of these countries and their sovereignty and their ability to function as democracies. I mean, right now, if a Russian tank rolls into Estonia, America is obliged to go to war, which is, in my opinion, and that is a good commitment for our foreign policy through NATO. However, if Russia attacks the heart of Estonian democracy, which is its

elections, no one is obliged to do anything in terms of its allies. Estonia stands alone. And in that sense, Estonia, given its size, its economy, its military, is at a huge distance. advantage and seeking to deter and respond to Russian aggression. So again, just as we have with land conflict, we should be helping our allies defend against not only digital warfare generally, but election operations specifically, because this is something that Russia is doing with tremendous aggression and fervor and consistency, whereas America for now has been so at war with itself and pretending or acting as though 2016 is the only time this ever mattered. And other than that, this isn't an issue. And that is just to the advantage of the Russian state. And it is just making it

so that before our eyes, democracies are being degraded, both from forces within and also from outside. Why didn't we use countermeasures against Putin when we knew the interference in the election was happening initially? And also, what can we do? Is there anything we can even do in the moment? So that is a question that drove a huge amount of my research. I had the opportunity to spend time interviewing 26th, former advisors to President Obama, folks like John Brennan, Jim Clapper, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton obviously was out of government by 16. but the focus of my research was trying to figure out, in part, that issue. Why in the summer and fall of 2016 did the Obama administration not impose costs on Russia? And the answer to that question is only possible to grasp if you divide Russia's operation

along sort of two parallel lines. The first line was Russia's efforts to manipulate public opinion in the United States. And they were doing so by stealing and releasing emails, which the Obama team understood in real time, and by spreading massive amounts of propaganda across social. media, which the Obama administration had a more limited understanding of at the time. But at the same time, in that period, Russian intelligence was also systematically targeting, probing, and penetrating our election systems, our actual infrastructure. And there was a great fear in the United States in terms of in the White House that Russia intended to escalate its operation as voting unfolded, as it had done

in places like Ukraine, towards sabotaging our actual voting process. John Brennan told me that Russia had the ability to alter the vote tallies and voter data of U.S. citizens. And so there was a calculation made inside the White House that if Russia didn't cross a quote unquote red line from manipulating public opinion, that first lane to manipulating our actual voting systems, that second lane, we could wait to retaliate, avoid potentially provoking Russia until after the election. And this was in spite of the arguments of particularly the Russia experts in the administration who argued in July and August that they wanted to impose countermeasures on Russia, that they wanted to seek to deter Russia that summer. And that could have looked like exposing private information about Putin. It could have looked

like cyber penalties, diplomatic penalties, economic penalties that the Deputy Secretary of State described to me as amounting to economic warfare, which were debated considerably. But the end result of those debates was, will punish Russia after the election so long as they don't escalate toward manipulating our systems, while in the interim seeking to shore up those systems and also seek to warned Putin abroad as President Obama did to basically say, as one of his advisors put it to me, you fuck with us and we'll take you down, as he told Putin in early September at a summit in China in response to what America was seeing in terms of Russia's aggressive targeting of our actual election infrastructure.

This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, David Scheimer. We'll be right back back. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us going. To learn more about the discounts you've heard, the advertisers, so you can help support the show and check them out for yourself, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget, we've got worksheets for today's episode as well. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast.

And now for the conclusion of our episode with David Shimer. What types of countermeasures are there available? I know it's one of those is we can release damaging information about Vladimir Putin. Do you have any idea what that might be? Obviously, you don't know what it is or it will be less effective if you have. and I both know what it is. But do you have any kind of idea of what sort of areas is he vulnerable that intelligence agencies know about that we don't necessarily discuss all the time in public? I think it would be things around as well, private associations, personal corruption.

Gotcha. So like the fact that he's a billionaire many times over and Russians are still having to work later and their income is lower? I think that that would be designed to expose the hypocrisy and the corruption of the Putin regime was how it was described to me. Yeah, that makes sense. That's kind of what I've been hearing from my intel folks as well. Like they have so much evidence of his personal wealth being off the charts. I guess one day we'll probably find out, but who knows? I'm waiting for that document dump myself. Yeah, and the idea there, if they had hit Russia in August as the senior Russia advisors in the White House and the State Department wanted, was it would have signaled to Putin, you're vulnerable to. And if you keep pushing, keep interfering,

you'll pay an even steeper price because there's a idea among the Russia expert community specifically that Putin is the type of leader, and I agree with this, who pushes as far as he can until he meets pushback. You know, Vladimir Lennon had a favorite saying, push with your bayonet if you meet mush, then push, if you meet steel, then stop. And I think that from Putin's perspective, so far, rather than 16 or thereafter, he's really met a lot of mush in the United States. He attacked our elections in 16. He's now interfering in the 2020 election, and we have not imposed meaningful costs on him for doing so, which to me helps explain why he's continuing to push. So in 16, there was a debate over this, over whether to punish him in real time.

The decision was not to do so until after the election, which they did then do in December. But by that point, of course, Russian propaganda had already reached tens of millions of Americans across social media and the emails of the DNC and John Tedestad overtaken much of our information environment in the summer and then in October. of 2016, and he did not, Putin did not get punished for those forms of interference until Donald Trump had actually won the election. What might happen then in 2020? What are we likely to see here? I mean, this is very timely. I assume that's not an accident releasing the book right around now.

I worked myself to my limit in terms of trying to write this book as quickly as I could. I basically had, other than my research, about five and a half months to do it, which was a really exciting period. But the idea being, the reason I feel so passionately about this is we have to use this history. these lessons to prepare because we're not operating in a vacuum and we are just undermining ourselves if we pretend as though we are. It's dangerous and it's unnecessary. So what does history tell us, for instance, about what to expect next? Tells us a lot. It tells us that Russia will either seek or is seeking to manipulate American voters and could seek potentially during voting to actually

sabotage our voting process. Those are the two ways that Russia seeks to interfere in elections. We already know from the FBI director in the U.S. intelligence community that Russia is very actively interfering in this election. We've seen signs of how they're doing so in terms of manipulating voters that first track. Facebook and Twitter just took down a covert network of Russian accounts. Microsoft has revealed that Russian military intelligence is aggressively trying to steal the emails of prominent American political figures, which then presumably could be released. We also know that Russia's tendency, as I said, is to take advantage of our own vulnerabilities. So where are we voter? Right now we're vulnerable.

in terms of mail-in-voting, doubts that exist around its reliability. So it should serve as no surprise that it's been revealed that Russia's seeking and is likely to continue to seek to amplify doubts about mail-in voting. You've seen the president allege that his opponent has mental deficiencies. So it should be no surprise that we've seen reports that Russia's amplifying that messaging as well. So Russia, again, doesn't create the lines of attack. They just amp them up. So I do worry in terms of both Russian efforts to spread disinformation, but also to affect systems. that given all the doubt that exists around the stability of our voting process, how so many millions of Americans for the first time are so unsure because of the pandemic

that this election will even be legitimate and proceed fairly, that that presents fertile ground if Russia so wishes to escalate toward seeking to undermine the legitimacy of the literal election, whether by spreading, as they did partially last time around, disinformation about rig-polling places and violence, or by seeking to actually scramble voter databases, for instance, and caused chaos on Election Day as the Obama team so feared that Russia intended to do four years ago. What about China and Iran in terms of interfering with our elections? Are we worried about that as well,

or is it kind of a Russia specialty? So I think I have a different line of argument than some folks. I think some folks argue that China and Iran are the threat equivalent of Russia potentially. And I don't see it that way for a couple reasons. One, based on publicly available evidence for 2020 specifically, China might be have public messaging that supports one. candidate. But that's very different than the type of covert operation Russia ran, for instance, in 2016, which was an effort to manipulate actively the outcome of our election covertly by reaching more than 100 million Americans across social media, stealing and releasing emails and targeting our election systems. Now Russia's, as the FBI said, very actively doing, interfering in our

election again, I've seen no evidence indicating that Russia's China's following suit. And the reason that that makes sense is when we talk about this history, this is a Russian tradition, both globally and across time. So therefore, Russia has it in its lifeblood. How do you do this? How do you evolve these operations? What is the best way to really get at another democracy? And Iran and China don't have that history. However, I would say that Iran and China could seek to imitate Russia after the outing of its 2016 operation. That could happen. I wouldn't be shocked if China or Iran stolen, released emails imitating Russia, but I don't expect China and Russia to be the pioneer here because they haven't historically been the pioneer. Finally, I would say that Russia has, you need a global

basis to interfere in elections globally. Russia has a global strategy to do so, which is, as I said, to support candidates who divide democracies from within and from one another. Whereas China and Iran, they might target specific elections as we've started to see China do in places like Australia, but it wouldn't really make sense from a foreign policy perspective for Iran or North Korea to interfere in the elections of dozens of democracies, because, you know, because that doesn't align with the objectives of their states, whereas it does with the objectives of Putin's regime. So I would say that could Iran are trying to do something to try to mess with the 2020 election? Yes. Would that be in line with their histories in relation to America?

No. Do I think that they will be the ones breaking new ground here? I do not. Gotcha. Okay. Well, I guess that's good news. We can focus on one threat at a time in terms of election interference. I do want to turn the magnifying glass back around in the United States. We mentioned this briefly that U.S. influence in other elections. It actually started off as aid to countries who had governments fighting against communism domestically. How is what the United States does similar and, of course, also different from what we're experiencing from Russia? Because a lot of people are going to go, well, what about United States? We see what aboutism a lot.

I'm on Reddit, as you can tell from, you know, that's what aboutism central, right? Social media. And it's like, well, you do it. So, therefore, you can't complain. one Russia does it because the United States does it. But it's different, right? There are some commonalities, but it's not quite the same thing. Sure. So I would say in my research, key similarity in a key difference emerged, two key differences. The similarity is that across history, both the CIA and Soviet and now Russian intelligence have sought to interfere in

foreign elections covertly to help one candidate, to hurt another. That is something that America and Moscow have a history of doing. Anyone who says that the CIA has never done, done so is just completely ignoring a very robust history. But I would say the differences here are twofold. One is that the historical record plays out the transcripts, the memoranda justifying these operations, that the justification at the time from America's perspective was that they would support centrist candidates who were running against communist candidates, who once they won, would preserve their democracies. This was following those Eastern European elections, or in Poland, Hungary and East Germany, communists took power.

and stopped holding competitive elections. So there was a genuine rationale on a general level as to why the undemocratic means of covert electoral interference perhaps at democratic ends. This is something that CIA officials have written about and spoken about in my book. But I would say that we should be clear-eyed about the fact that that didn't always hold water. Not only with respect to the CIA's coup plotting in countries like Guatemala and Iran, which aren't a part of my analysis, but also because they don't involve elections, but also in Chile, where the CIA at first said, we're supporting centrists against Salvador Iende a socialist to help Chilean democracy, but they did not walk the walk.

Because after Salvador Iende actually won the 1970 election, despite CIA efforts to undermine his campaign, Richard Nixon then decided to proceed from covert electoral interference to Kuplai. And he decided to try to topple the Iende administration having Iynda actually already won the election. It didn't work at first. eventually the military did succeed in overthrowing Allende. He then committed suicide and a Chilean dictatorship. Military dictatorship was announced Chilean democracy died at this tail end of this story of American covert action in Chile. So this is a complex history. I think in some areas like in Italy or for example in America's more recent operation in Serbia, there was a genuine, we're supporting

Democratic forces, whereas in countries like Chile, America did not live by its values in terms of seeking to shore up democratic systems. But the first difference still does hold, however, in that the Soviet Union and Russia have always sought to support either communists or to hurt democratic systems to tear them down, whereas America does have a tradition, generally speaking, for its electoral operations specifically seeking to shore up or support centrist's candidates. That is a difference. And the second difference is that America's moved away from this practice in the post-Cold War period. We're no longer interfering covertly in elections all over the world, whereas Russia's not only rediscovered this weapon, but double down on it. And moving forward, I believe that

America should ban covert electoral interference. I think the CIA is no business doing this. I think it is not an alignment with America's interests or values for America to be engaging in covert electoral interference operations at a time when Russia is seeking to tear down democracy. And we should be seeking to renew democracies to build them back up. And if we're going to do that, we can't be in the mud degrading them ourselves by manipulating their elections. There are other ways to support democracies than interfering covertly in their elections, in my opinion, moving forward. Yeah, plus I think if people now want to elect like a hardcore leftist communist regime, they're not going to get help from a Soviet Union. They're going to go, oh, wow, this was actually

like the worst idea ever. And they're probably going to try and snap out of that at some point, especially when you elect authoritarian left wingers or right sort of wing people, you're going to find pretty quickly that things degrade. I mean, that's what happens in every country where these things happen. So U.S. support for democracies, not necessarily the same thing as election interference. A lot of times these elections are, we're fighting for fair and free elections that are observed and not using disinformation. Usually, I think a key difference that you mentioned in the book was usually we are fighting for widespread free information as opposed to clamping down on information and then supplying disinformation, which I think is a major difference. So I think that's another

difference. And I do think that's an important other distinction. I think there's a conflation of two things, which is people think that U.S. democracy promotion is the same thing as what Russia does with its covert action programs. And that's not so. Right. What America does through third party NGOs around helping countries hold stable elections that are legitimate elections where parties can campaign and compete on an equal playing field, that is its own issue, that is its own policy area. That is not the same thing as covertly targeting an election where you present foreign voices as domestic ones, mislead and manipulate and seek to determine the outcome of that election. Those are two different historical arcs. And I believe that democracy promotion is its own can of worms that has its own

benefits and drawbacks. But covert action to manipulate elections is what Russia is doing. That's what America had historically done. And I believe should move away from now completely. I know we didn't interfere with the elections in Iraq because like you said, the Cold War's over. You can't really interfere with a regime to encourage democracy by getting rid of the leader and then interfere on the resulting Democratic election, that would be kind of like a little bit too gross, even for people that do gross stuff all the time, right? Like, it's just too much. Yeah, no, as I detail that, you know, the Bush administration at the highest levels seriously weighed whether to interfere covertly with the CIA interacts January 2005 election. And for the reasons you said,

they decided not to do it. They thought that there was no longer a call to action through the Cold War and that if they were caught, it would undermine America rather than advance America's interests because it would show the world that America was basically manipulating a democracy that have purported to be seeking to establish. So that is a drawback for America that doesn't exist for Russia because again, Russia isn't seeking to shore up the viability of democracies. They're seeking to do the opposite. And a new vulnerability drawback for us has emerged more recently, which is that America is so vulnerable itself to these operations in a way it's never been. It was not during the Cold War. Soviet operations in the Cold War to manipulate our elections were very limited. But the

internet has leveled the playing field. All democracies are exposed. So for that reasons as well, if we're living, as David Petraeus put it to me in a glass house, we shouldn't be throwing stones. And I think that that holds as we seek to determine why for both our values around promoting free and fair elections and our interests in terms of protecting ourselves and our allies, we should be out of this game. I think the decision in Iraq shows how that played out in real time and how I hope it will play out moving forward. So in closing here, what can we do? Is there any good news here. It seems like the defense just, it has to be education. So I would say that history does provide reassurance in this subject because operations to interfere in elections have been happening

for quite a long time. And democracies who have been under siege in the past have remained democracies today. What matters is that those democracies need to care enough to defend themselves. And I think that for us, that means renewing ourselves at home and abroad. It means at home investing in things like education and local media that served to bring our electorate together rather than further apart around a fact-based reality. It means securing our infrastructure. It means working with social media companies regulating them as well. In order to try to get at that problem, expect more transparency and cooperation with those companies. It means minimizing the efficacy of operations to steal and release files. And then abroad, it means working with other democracies to

detect and deter these operations from occurring. And I believe strongly that if you do both of those things at once, if you build up your democracy at home, renew your democracy through basic investments, not even in just those areas, but also in education or health care that just get at the polarization and fissures that make us so vulnerable, while also leading abroad in seeking to prioritize this threat and push back against it, we're not going to get this threat to be completely solved because it's not solvable. Lenin saw what Putin sees, which is that elections are by nature penetrable. We can do a whole lot better of a job in seeking to establish an international norm against this sort of behavior, punish those who engage in it,

while also making ourselves more invulnerable to it by just as simply as investing in ourselves and putting in the effort to defend the democratic experiment because democracy is not the easy thing. But if we care enough to defend it, there's no reason why this needs to be a deadly blow to our system. Again, we just need to recognize the threat and do something about it. And unfortunately, up until now, we've just been at war with ourselves. And I think the sooner we should be turning the page from that, the better toward actually confronting this thread in a nationally minded whole of nation approach. David Chimer, thank you so much. It's really interesting. The book is called Rigged. We'll link to it in the show notes. Thank you so much for having me.

I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before we get into that, here's a sample of my interview with Chelsea Handler. This one was controversial. She's not for everyone, but I really had a great time, and we really hit a variety of topics from microdosing cannabis to her rise in one of the toughest career paths in entertainment. Here's a quick look inside. Do you have another one of those Coke zeros? That looks really good. Here, take this. Is it cold?

Yeah, it is. It's super cold. It's ice cold and somebody will maybe get me another one maybe. Kind of sorry? I don't mean to turn you into a server. But yeah. Thank you very much, everyone, for bringing that token. Isn't that nice?

I never have that. You probably have that all the time. It's so rare that I get to be like, excuse me, can you know? How did that feel? That felt so good. It good in a way where I'm like, God, don't get used to this, Lord. I know that you microdose weed. You're the only other person I met besides myself that does that?

You're in charge of your mood. So when you take something like that, it's a mood lifter. It's like an enhancer. You know, it makes, for me, it makes everything a little bit more sparkly. It makes everybody a little bit less annoying. And these are all things we want to all be able to engage with. Got a DUI when I was like 21, and I got in a lot of trouble because I had my sister's ID. And I forgot to change it out when I turned 21 because I'd been using it for so many years.

So that caused a whole ruckus of other events because my sister was really pissed at me. I had to go to DUI school, and in DUI class, you go for like what, 15 weeks and everybody gets up and tells their story, and I had such a fear of public speaking. You did? I did. Wow. Anyway, they forced you to do it in that class. And when I did it, I started telling my story, and all I did was tell what happened. And it was ridiculous.

Like, everything I do was always just in a very immature. You know, I called the coper racist. We were both white. I mean, everything that, you know, doesn't make sense. I did. The class was just, like, laughing. and I was on stage for like 14, 15 minutes until the guy was like, no, this is not stand up. Get off the stage.

Like, you're enjoying this a little bit too much. And that's when I was like, wait a second. I like this. For more with the one and only Chelsea Handler, check out episode 216 of the Jordan Harbinger show. Big thank you to David Shimer. The book is called Rigged, and links to that and everything else we mentioned here on the show will be in the show notes. If you buy the books from our guests, please use the links on the website.

That stuff all adds up. It helps support the show. Worksheets for this episode in the show notes. Transcripts for this episode in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same

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