The NPR Politics Podcast - Grand Jury Indicts Russians Linked To Interference In 2016 Election

Episode Date: February 16, 2018

A federal grand jury has indicted 13 Russians and three Russian entities in connection with the attack on the 2016 presidential election. This episode, host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson and national security editor Phil Ewing. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Josh Ranger from Neenah, Wisconsin, where I'm out on the ice of Lake Winnebago. And even though it's five below zero, I'm surrounded by thousands of ice fishermen taking part in our annual sturgeon spearing season. This podcast was recorded at 4.35 p.m. on Friday, the 16th of February. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org, the NPR One app, and your local public radio station. Now find somewhere warm and enjoy the show.

Hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has announced the indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations for violating criminal laws to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein addressed the charges this afternoon. 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. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Phil Ewing, national security editor for NPR.

And we said we were not going to have another podcast unless there was some sort of significant news development. This might qualify. There has been a significant news development. This might qualify. There has been a significant news development. And really significant and stunning. When this came and we started reading through it with our yellow highlighters or whatever color highlighters we had, it was like, wow. We knew a lot of this stuff, but here it is in black and white and now with yellow highlighter all over it. Before we get into the specifics here, what stands out to both of you

in reading it? After months and months and months of talking on Capitol Hill and inside the Justice Department about what exactly the Russians did, this grand jury and this special counsel team with the help of the FBI have actually gotten to the bottom of and named 13 people, 13 individual Russians, in a blockbuster indictment, alleging that they attempted and conspired to interfere with the American political system. And to a large extent, they spelled out detailed ways in which that happened, that actually happened. They paid real Americans. They purchased space on U.S. computer servers. They put out Facebook ads. On one occasion, they actually found an American to build a cage and paid that person. And they found another American to dress up like Hillary Clinton in

a prison jumpsuit and stand inside the cage at a rally. Unbelievable. Today was the day that this stopped being, quote unquote, a witch hunt or, quote unquote, a hoax. The Justice Department, the FBI, the special counsel's office have, as Carrie said, put together a case with granular levels of detail about what took place and told a story about the origins of this attack that take it actually years into the past farther than we believed it went. The story begins, according to the indictment, in 2014. There's some geopolitical implications that make that significant, which we can talk about a little bit later on. But it also

just shows the level of evidence, not only that the intelligence community has about what took place, but which it was willing to put on the record in public view with sufficient quality that if the Russian persons ever came within the power of the United States, they could actually go on trial for this. Now, we should say at the top here, we don't expect that to happen. This is not an indictment where the feds are going to go knock on somebody's door in St. Petersburg, Russia, and get these Russians on an airplane to the United States. The point of this is to show the public, this is how much we know about what you did. And to show the Russians, these persons we've identified,

they can't work in covert operations anymore. This practice that you've employed, we know how it works, we know what you're doing. And that imposes a cost on them because they can't use these individuals and they can't use this work anymore in the way they have before. Exactly. These were 13 people. At least two of them actually traveled to the United States

in furtherance of this conspiracy, the court papers say. And they were quite sophisticated. They consulted with unnamed American people about how to get more bang for their buck, trying to target purple states. The indictment says that they were interested in spreading dirt about Hillary Clinton, but not just Hillary Clinton. Also Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. And the indictment says they were interested in pumping up both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Now, importantly, the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein talked about how the people on the other end of this activity, the Americans mentioned mostly in these court papers, were unwitting accomplices. Yeah, that word unwitting.

The defendants posed as politically and socially active Americans advocating for and against particular candidates. They established social media pages and groups to communicate with unwitting Americans. 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. According to the indictment, the Americans did not know that they were communicating with Russians.

That's significant because the question that has underpinned this story for so long is what did people in the Trump campaign know about all the things that were taking place in 2016? And we should also note that there are more, there's a great deal more evidence beyond just this indictment of contacts, electronic or personal, between Trump aides and Russians in 2016, before and after Election Day. So although this indictment doesn't describe any collusion or conspiracy between Trump aides and these Russian influence operations officer, that question still remains unresolved. And maybe we'll get there and maybe we won't in the near term. But that's something that does remain an unbalanced aspect of this equation. and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.

That's right. And not only that, there's a great moment in the indictment where these Russian influence operatives are described as talking with what's described as a grassroots political activist in Texas, who tells them, in my words, not the words of the document, you need to focus your efforts on purple states, states that might be Democratic this year or might be Republican. And this was an important piece of information for these guys, because remember, these are Russian nationals. They might be intelligence officers, they might be contractors or operatives, but they're not Americans. They don't know the political system in the way that we certainly know it from people who cover it, or even as normal Americans do. And so something even as obvious as that was useful information to them. And it also speaks to another aspect of the story,

which goes beyond this indictment today. There were many planks to the active measures campaign in 2016. They included all the online mishegas on Facebook and Twitter, the rallies that were organized, the women in the cage that Kerry talked about. But there were also cyber attacks that targeted state election systems, that probed state officials, their computer networks, the networks of their vendors. Why did that happen? One reason was simple fact finding. These Russians are sitting back in their own country, in their own context, behind their own firewalls, trying to figure out what this stuff is, what these American government officials or contractors know. And part of this was them ingesting that information.

And part of it was using the tools they had to create as much chaos as they could inside the United States. If, as Phil says, these people started out being kind of naive about the American political system, in fact, the indictment describes what they learned along the way. By 2016, they were spending more than a million U.S. dollars a month on these efforts. Okay, that's a lot of money,

but it's not that much money when you want to sow discord across the United States. They came to, according to the court papers, try to find divisive American social issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement and attacks against Muslims and others, and try to target and pour some of their resources into some of those things. And listen, if the ultimate goal was to sow discord among the American public,

they've succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Hugely successful. There's one other thing on this just real quick that I want to say very briefly. These techniques and these phenomena are very old. They're as old as the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. There's a great history of the KGB called the Sword and the Shield, which I recommend to all ofapon, the people at the leadership level in Moscow or St. Petersburg basically didn't understand how the United States worked. the newspapers about how J. Edgar Hoover was working with the Ku Klux Klan about its leadership, things that we Americans would find ridiculous. That was obviously not happening, but that's how they understood or misunderstood the workings of the United States. And to watch in this indictment, these Russians trying to kind of learn as they went, definitely matches with the pattern that the Soviet Union and now Russia have gotten into with these kinds of intelligence operations. And just another part of this indictment talking about how there were these

people called specialists who worked in social media and they were given instructions to do things like use hashtags Trump 2016, Trump train, MAGA, I won't protect Hillary, hashtag Hillary for prison. There's another point where it says specialists were instructed to post content that focused on politics in the USA and to, quote, use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest. Except Sanders and Trump, we support them. And then there were specialists who got in trouble because they weren't posting enough negative stuff about Hillary Clinton on social media. Even Russian spies get micromanaged by their bosses. There's stuff about expense reports. There's an IT department.

Like this is this is an organization. This is this is like it could be the office, except it's Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election. Which is another thing that really rings true about a lot of this, because the FBI a couple of years ago arrested and expelled a couple of intelligence officers in New York City who were Russian SVR officers. And they released transcripts of recordings they made about these guys talking. And a lot of it was exactly like the office. One Russian intelligence officer saying to another, you know, when I took this job, I

thought I would be like James Bond. Now all I do is sit in an office all day. It's really boring. You know, we started the week covering the worldwide threat hearing with senior leaders in the intelligence community who all agreed that the Russians had attempted to interfere in the election and that those efforts were going to accelerate in advance of the 2018 midterms. This indictment underscores how successful that attempt was in some ways, and how these folks, this institution that's been built up in Russia, is not going away, right? And so there was this strange moment, strange to me, because here you have the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, Rod Rosenstein, who's kind of a by-the-book Boy Scout guy, using his press conference at the Justice Department today to warn Americans that things

on the internet are not always what they seem. Newsflash. 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. And one other thing that Rosenstein said that I want to ask you about, Kerry, he was talking about what this indictment says and what it doesn't say, though he, yes. So let's hear it. And then I want to hear what you think. Now, there is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the

outcome of the 2016 election. It sounds basic enough, but he's a lawyer, right? He is a lawyer and a good one and one at the Justice Department for more than 27 years. Listen, allies of President Trump and the White House have been pointing to that statement to say, listen, you got the bad guys. They're in Russia. The end. Not so fast. The words in this indictment mean something. The Justice Department and Special Counsel Robert Mueller don't always like to show everything they have. We have a bit of an ankle. We do not have a thigh. We may not even have a knee into what they are doing and what they want to tell us. This investigation is ongoing. Robert Mueller has dropped bombshell surprises in the past, including today. And it's not clear

to me at all that the investigation as to whether any American co-conspirators is ongoing. And let's just get to the White House reaction. It came in various forms. And I guess I'll start with President Trump's personal lawyer who says, very happy for the country, Bob, meaning Robert Mueller, who he's known for a while, and his team did a great job. Oh, it's all over. that stands out in that sentence. President Trump turned to Twitter, as he often does, and in his tweet about this, he used a two-word phrase that he uses a lot. Let me just read the tweet. 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 Trump campaign did nothing wrong. No collusion! Exclamation point.

Is that what it said? No. Well, as we've discussed here, elsewhere, and every NPR platform that exists, collusion is not a federal crime. Conspiracy is. And guess what? It was charged today again.

So we'll see. We'll see where this goes. And let's also take our step back in time beyond this indictment from Friday and look at the other things that were part of this active measures campaign. The Russian government began a huge series of cyber attacks in 2015, according to the former FBI director, James Comey, that targeted thousands of people in political organizations. And what did they do with the material they stole? They leaked it out through WikiLeaks and DCLeaks and other means, so that so much of the 2016 presidential campaign was dominated by people being embarrassed

by personal information that they never expected would see the light of day, whether it was the Democratic National Committee, whether it was people like Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State, American military commanders, and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. All of a sudden, we were reading his emails, and that changed the course of the campaign. It would be arguably foolish to pretend like it didn't happen. Did that change people's votes? Maybe it did, maybe it didn't, but it was a huge part of the story, and we all lived through it. Let me just jump in here to say that there are two voices which are notable on this question. One of them is James Clapper, the former director

of national intelligence, who said on NPR this week that he personally believes it would be hard to conclude that no voter's opinion was changed as a result of all this propaganda. And, you know, just before running into this podcast, John Brennan, the former CIA director, tweeted the same. In other words, that the saturation of some of this propaganda was so great across Twitter, across Facebook, across television screens around the country in the run up to the election, that it's hard to imagine that individual voters didn't base at least some of their decision on what they heard and saw. This indictment also says that the efforts to sow discord in the American political system did not stop with the election of President Trump. In fact, it continued after, and this indictment doesn't go all the way through the last year and a half, but it talks about how

almost immediately after the election, these Russians organized, allegedly organized rallies that were both pro-Trump and anti-Trump rallies, trying to just And the insight that these foreign powers, including Russia, have taken away recently is if they can push it at the right time, they can get it to oscillate in even greater wobbles between extremes. That's why this indictment describes the Russian operatives being instructed to support what they believed were the most extreme candidates in Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They may have had no expectation on their own that that would result with the election of one or the other, but that's their goal, to sow as much chaos and to make our swings back and forth as extreme as possible. Phil, you mentioned this started in 2014. What was happening in 2014? Very briefly, 2014 was the unrest that took place in Ukraine. There was a pro-European, pro-Western movement

there that took place. And in the perception of the Russian government, Russian President Vladimir Putin and others, it was basically a puppet operation by the United States. The State Department was involved. State Department officials were in Ukraine helping with the outcome there that they wanted. And that made Putin very, very, very angry. OK, Kerry, before we get out of here, there was also a major development on the rest of your beat, which is as relates to the FBI. The FBI today announced, admitted that they failed to act on a tip that they got in January about Nicholas Cruz. That is the 19-year-old who police say has confessed to killing 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida this week. And they just didn't act on it properly,

I guess. Tell me what's up. An unusual Friday afternoon statement from the FBI. The FBI says on January 5th of this year, somebody close to Nicholas Cruz, the accused Parkland shooter, called an FBI tip line to report a lot of concern about him. The caller gave the FBI tip line some information about the fact that Cruz owned a gun, that he desired to kill people, that he was engaged in erratic behavior, had posted a lot of disturbing stuff on social media, and finally actually raised the possibility that Cruz would conduct a school shooting. Now, the FBI says the information provided in that call should have been passed along to the FBI field office in Miami for follow-up. It was not passed along. There was no follow-up. And the FBI director, Chris Wray, the new FBI director, said he's determined protocols in place were not followed and that they're going to do an investigation and get to the bottom of what happened. I need to add here that this has become enormously controversial in Florida and beyond. The Florida governor, Rick Scott,

has called on the new FBI director, only six months on the job, Chris Wray, to resign over this. Whoa. And Chris Wray's putative boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has also kind of chastised the FBI and announced that he wants to do an investigation of how the FBI missed these tips and how they can move and act better to prevent future attacks amidst warning about potential violent crimes. Yeah, I mean, the message for two days was, if you see something, say something. People did say something. People did say something. And unfortunately, it's not the first time we've seen a lapse from federal law enforcement. Of course, a former FBI director, Jim Comey, had to come out after the shooting at AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and say a bureaucratic error allowed Dylan Roof, the shooter there, to purchase that gun, which killed nine parishioners who were praying at a prayer service in the church.

And he should not have been allowed to get that gun. No, it was an administrative snafu that was deadly. All right. Well, that is a wrap for tonight. We will be back in your feed next Thursday, unless more news breaks out before then. I like I don't even know if I should say it. Keep up with our coverage on NPR.org, NPR Politics on Facebook and, of course, on your local public radio station. You can also always catch one of us on Up First every weekday morning. And if you're in or around Cleveland, come see us live.

We're doing a show at the Ohio Theater at Playhouse Square on February 23rd. That's next Friday. And we'd love for you to join us there. You can learn more and get tickets at NPR Presents dot org. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Phil Ewing, National Security Editor. Thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. You've probably heard about this Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. Every day there's a new headline about it. Well, Embedded is back with two episodes that lay the whole thing out, start to finish, so the news makes sense.

Listen on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts.