The Rest Is Classified - 134. How Russia Made Trump: Was The Vote Rigged? (Ep 4)

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Foreign spies are messing with the 2016 election. Private emails are being leaked. But what will Donald Trump say about it? In their latest episode on the Russian active measures campaign to hijack the 2016 US presidential election, David and Gordon go deep into the story of how the Obama campaign reacted to a series of leaked emails, and why the Republicans chose not to get involved. ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ ⁠⁠https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified⁠⁠ Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee ------------------- Email: [e-mail] Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the Declassified Club at the rest is classified.com. Foreign spies are messing with the 2016 U.S. election. Private emails are being leaked. But what will Donald Trump say about it? Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClasky. And David, last time we looked at how an old source. school Russian active measures operation had been updated for the modern internet world as a bunch of pop-tart eating GRU operatives. I think they were eating pop-tarts, pop-tops and borsh, hacked and stole emails from the Democratic Party and the Democratic candidate in 2016 Hillary Clinton and then leaked them onto the internet through various different channels and methods. It took everyone by surprise, And this time we're going to dig into how the campaign and crucially, I think, David, how the national security world in Washington reacts to this momentous development. Although I think it's fair to say at the time, it wasn't really recognized perhaps just how momentous it was.

Exactly. And that's right, Gordon. We are going to be looking in depth in this episode at how the intelligence community in particular in the U.S. responds. and the campaign, the Clinton campaign, they don't much appreciate what's going on over the course of the summer of 2016. Having their emails leaked. The Clinton campaign, I think right off the bat, given the work that CrowdStrike had done as a cyber security firm to examine the DNC's servers, to examine the Clinton campaigns, there was an understanding right off the bat in kind of June July that they're under attack essentially by the Russians. And Hillary Clinton herself is convinced, I think rightly, that this is Vladimir Putin's payback against her. And she actually makes a joke next time she says, are going to put polonium in MIT, which is a very dark reference to the 2006 assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, something you know a few things about, Gordon. That's right.

Covered it at the time. The former FSB officer was poisoned and killed in London with a radioactive. cup of tea. I think something we'll probably look at on the podcast later this year, according to our current plans. But yes, it's a pretty dark joke. But the fact she's joking about it in that way suggests that it felt like it was maybe annoying to them rather than something truly cataclysmic or incredibly serious. That's what I get from that kind of tone and the general reaction at the time. This episode is sponsored by HP. Most people are not counter-espionage experts, but that won't stop them getting targeted by cyber criminals

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You don't need an alias or a secret hideout to stay safe. Just WolfPro Security working tirelessly to protect your hard work. It's security that's built in, not bolted on. Find out more about how HP can protect your business at HP.com forward slash classic. Podcast listeners benefit from a 10% discount on all business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC-10, Terms and Conditions Supply. During the convention even, so this is the last week of July in 2016, Clinton's team is making the case to reporters that the Russians have covertly attacked the election

and are beginning to make this case that this is a Russian active measure, not just against, you know, the Democrats, not just against Hillary Clinton, but against the entire process of free and fair election in the U.S. And Clinton campaign aides note that intelligence community officials were telling reporters on background, but not yet for sort of public attribution that Russian intelligence had pulled off the DNC hack because this has been reported in the Washington Post, but we don't yet have the intelligence community, the CIA director, the D&C. and I, the director of national intelligence, anybody, saying outright and publicly that this is the

Russians in that June, July, 2016 period. Now, the campaign, of course, the Clinton campaign, is immediately keen to make the connection between the hack and Trump's ties to Russia. Now, we should say, Gordon, this episode and the couple that are going to follow, this is a six-part investigation. And so Russian election interference in 2016, we're paired. this with a mini-series for our club members on the Trump-Russia connection. What's fact, what's fiction, what's hype, what's politics, what's not. What is relevant for this part of the story, though, is that the Clinton campaign is really keen to make the connection between Russian interference and Trump's ties to Russia. And at this point, at the summer, the most

glaring one that the Clinton campaign is sort of seeking to make is, number one, the official Republican platform shift on Ukraine, which has occurred prior to the Republican convention. And the fact that at this point, a guy named Paul Manafort is Trump's campaign chairman, and Manafort is a longtime Republican political consultant and operative who had worked for, at this point, I think, four prior Republican presidential campaigns, but who in recent years, had become a really gun-for-hire mercenary lobbyist, and on sort of his client list were what I would describe as fairly pro-Russian Ukrainians

that he had been lobbying for in Washington. He's made a bunch of money. We go into much more detail on Manafort in that series. But you can already start to see how this active measure, Gordon, is seeping into the political bloodstream in the states, because as soon as the Russians conduct this hack and leak, we've got the Clinton campaign seeking to make it part of this Trump Russia story, which would potentially be quite damaging to Donald Trump's candidacy. But really at this point, I think the reaction in the U.S., it's kind of muted. And that tack by the Clinton campaign doesn't seem to carry much water right out of the gates in June and July.

The Clinton campaign are trying to make this out to be a national security issue. not just a leak, but the framing for this is politics. It's the middle of an election campaign. So the lens through which all of this is going to be seen is politics. And it's interesting that when you look at how the reaction to this, it's all seen through the lens of, well, one campaign is accusing the other of being close to the Russians or working with the Russians, or other things. It's all just politics. It's all just back and forth about the political debate rather than actually being about national security. Well, the other thing that the Russians doing in this period as they've of course gotten the word out via WikiLeaks.

But in, I think, kind of tried and true active measure tradition, you want to widen the surface area of the leaks. You want to get the word out there to as many different sort of outlets and journalists as possible. And throughout the summer, the GRU Unit 26165 team starts making offers to journalists and media outlets, Gawker, which is now but run out of business, rightly. So the smoking gun is primarily digital first kind of digital native media outlets they start reaching out to. In August, the GRU provides several emails with exclusive material to one investigative

reporter from the AP. There were other sort of outlets contacted in the U.S., Politico, Der Spiegel in Germany, Sky News in the UK. Gordon, were you furnished with material by the are you? I was not. I do have recollections. Maybe it's because of all those horrible things you'd written about the Russians by that point. They decided you weren't going to be a friendly face. I have vague recollections of trying to reach out to them actually at various like the kind of Goosephor and DC leaks

and things like that over Twitter DMs, but not receiving any leaks nor getting into touch with them, which I'd like to think is that they knew I wouldn't be taken in by a Russian active measure. They knew They could sense I was too sober and serious a journalist to fall for their dirty Russian tricks, you know, or else I just missed it amidst all the emails. We've heard it here, though, first. I think we're breaking the story that Gordon Carrera attempted to slide into the GRU's DMs during the 2016 election. But it got no response to try and expose their activities, not to fall prey to misinformation.

Thank you. But they are trying. I guess that's the point. They try to push the stuff out. That's the point. And the GRU officers that are banning the front account eventually interact with more than 1,200 users and exchange around 15,000 individual private direct messages with them. So I think you should be slightly offended, Gorda, that you were not on that extremely long list of people to interact with. Not invited.

As this is happening and as the leaked material is bleeding out in terms, to the sort of American body politic, President Obama is becoming intensely concerned. And he is becoming intensely concerned, rightly, that the Russians are messing with the presidential race. But he doesn't want to get ahead of the intelligence community. And this is going to be a major theme of the response, is that President Obama understands right off the bat how potentially divisive it would be to even wade into this mess. again, I think is a sign of how effective the active measure already has become, is that it's kind of made it almost impossible for even the president to weigh in on what's going on. So he wants the intelligence community. He wants the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and the DNI

and all, you know, 17 of the intelligence agencies that we have here in our intelligence community to weigh in on what's actually going on. This response, of course, is going to take some time. it's kind of kicking a bit of the, I guess, initiative into the intelligence community as opposed to the White House. And that's going to make the Clinton campaign really frustrated. Yeah. We're kind of coming down to the final stretch. President Obama is the campaign's best asset. And we could debate it.

But I think, you know, for a lot of really kind of sound reasons, he doesn't feel ready yet to tell the nation what's actually happening. And so the Clinton campaign is kind of out on a limb here, trying to get the work. out about what the Russians are doing. I mean, I can see why it took some time for them to kind of get their heads around this. But I do think it is a problem. And I felt this at the time, which is intelligence community was not looking for this kind of active measure. It also, you have people who did cybersecurity who were worried about hacking, but they weren't really thinking about leaking all the information environment. And the intelligence community didn't think it was its job

to look at U.S. social media, for instance, where some of this stuff is being pushed out. and other places. So there was this sense that I didn't think anyone quite knew whose job it was to look at this stuff or to get their arms around it or to connect the different bits of this Russian operation. So I definitely get this sense that they are, I think, flat-footed by this active measure in a way that in hindsight looks a bit of a miss. It does. I think flat-footed is absolutely the right word. And it's in fact the word that came up in a number of conversations I had with FBI and CIA formers who were involved in the assessment and in, I think, unraveling a lot of what the Russians were up to in 2016, there was a sense that the warning signs

had been missed. And there's a separate debate, which we're not having, I think at least not yet in this series on whether this is an intelligence failure or, you know, how you sort of define it. But there's a, I think a sense that there wasn't preparation for this and that they were, there was a very reactive posture inside the White House and the intelligence community, as opposed to kind of a plan. Yeah, certainly in that June-July period. Yeah, I agree. Then the hits kind of just keep on coming because there is in late July on the 27th,

then candidate Trump, I think, makes one of the most remarkable statements of the entire campaign because as he's responding to the swirl of news that the Russians have hacked the Democrats, and Trump says, nobody knows who it is. But if it had been the Russians, he kind of then delivers this message about the deleted Hillary Clinton emails, right? So the emails that are related to her private server. And Trump says, I'll tell you this, Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you'll probably be rewarded mightily by our press, which is pretty wild. And I'm not sure if there is there a precedent for a candidate from a major U.S. political party.

soliciting foreign assistance publicly from, I would argue, a quite adversarial power in support of his political campaign, because that is, you know, we'll have a conversation about what that happens here. But just to take that in context, it's a pretty remarkable statement, isn't it? It is. We've now almost got used to these kind of statements by Donald Trump. But I think at the time, this was just kind of wild, I mean, head-scratchingly wild, to effectively invite Russian hackers to go after Hillary Clinton's emails. Now, I think it is worth saying that the context for this is the Clinton email server and the view that there were missing emails which Hillary Clinton had deleted from her private email server,

which was being investigated. And that is the kind of campaign political story that Donald Trump wants to focus on. And it is an important part of our story. And so what he's doing is pivoting the WikiLeaks hacking. story to kind of, I think, in the Trump language, to make almost a joke, although you could also take it as much more of a joke as an invitation, to say, well, the emails we're really interested in are these ones that were on her server. You know, if the Russians can go get those, those would be great. I mean, that's what he thinks he's doing. But it does sound more than a

little bit like an invitation to hack. It does. And it's also coming in the context of, there had been speculation for months about whether there was any behind-the-scenes connection between people, on the Trump campaign and Russians or sort of Russian affiliated intermediaries, which again is a topic that we go into immense detail on in the miniseries we're doing for our declassified club members. But in any case, here's a very clear message from Trump basically to, you know, to the Kremlin, which is I want you to hack my political rivals. And interestingly, what do they do? Hours later, they brush the pop tarts off of their Russian slacks.

and decide, let's launch a spearfishing campaign. And they do. The GRU launches a bunch of spearfishing attacks against 15 private email accounts used by Clinton's personal office and 76 addresses associated with the campaign. So essentially, they do exactly what Trump told them to do, which is, why don't you go have a look at Hillary's e-bails? And the GRU attempts to do just that. It's a classic example where if this had been a secret message from Trump saying,

to someone, can you see if the Russians can go after it? It would have felt like a massive thing. But it's the fact he says this stuff publicly, which almost makes people struggle to know how to kind of interpret it. It's not exactly a covert instructional request. It's a very obvious thing to do, but it's wild. It also coincides with a massive step forward in the intelligence picture. Because inside Russia House, the CIA is shop responsible for Russia-focused operations,

back at Langley, they have been delivered a bombshell, which is there is intelligence collected from sources probably inside the Kremlin that both sources reveal that Putin himself had authorized a covert operation aimed at destabilizing the American presidential election. So at long last, the CIA has really, I think, specific information. on Putin's plans and intentions, right? So this is the good stuff. This is the gold mine. And it's coming from two separate streams of intelligence. So it's not single-sourced, which makes both of those streams at once seem much more credible. And it is interesting that later on, the possible identity of one of those sources is revealed in the media. And I'm sure the CIA wouldn't want

to comment on any of its sources. I understand that. But this is widely reported that a Russian called Oleg Smolenkov, who is a key aid in the Kremlin, may have been the source for this. And it's interesting because he is then extracted from Russia in 2017 after Trump comes to power. And he kind of leaves, I think, through Montenegro in 2017. And it kind of comes out publicly a couple of years after that. But the suggestion is he might have been the key source who provided the confidence from within the Kremlin itself. because he's a he's a Kremlin aide about what the instructions were at the highest level. So that's that's one theory at least as to where this comes from, a very well-placed,

high-placed human source. Yeah. And it leads then CIA director John Brennan to call for a meeting at the White House, a very, very small meeting with just a handful of Obama's advisors, you know, the national security advisor Susan Rice, maybe her deputy, Brennan himself, Obama. I mean, it's like, it's a very small meeting and it's much smaller than the normal kind of national security morning meetings that Obama would hold. Interestingly, none of that information that we just talked about has ever put into the PDB, the president's daily brief, which I'm sure happens on Russia and China stuff occasionally, but it's exceptional because there are, there's a category of kind of red stripe is what we called it, restricted handling kind of sort of. sources where if you put that into a piece of analysis, it would make that article redstripe

and it would make it extremely sensitive. And that could sometimes go to a smaller distribution list of customers who are normally getting the PDB. But in this case, it's coming from such sensitive sources. And I think because it's not being written up in a piece of analysis and kind of blend it in, he feels that it shouldn't actually go in something that's going to be distributed to the full kind of list of customers who get the PDB. Interesting.

Now, the reaction from Obama to this briefing is to say basically to tell Brennan to stand up a task force inside the intelligence community to figure out the full nature and scope of the Russian operation. And so Brennan, in collaboration with FBI director James Comey and Admiral Mike Rogers, who's the head of the NSA, they basically put together a, a group of people, 15 or so people at Langley, maybe a dozen or so others who are working from the NSA and the FBI. Maybe that sounds kind of big, but in terms of an intelligence community task force, it's actually really quite small. And they are charged with collecting more intelligence on this

and building a fuller picture of what's actually happening and why. Now, I find this fun, which is that on the 4th of August 2016, John Brennan has a regularly scheduled phone call with the chief of the FSB, Russia's Federal Security Service, kind of internal intelligence agency, Alexander Bortnikov, who's a really unpleasant guy, by the way. And the main subject is the war in Syria, because Russia has intervened in Syria the year before. There's American troops in Syria as well.

So there's like a need to kind of de-conflict what's going on in Syria so that we don't end up in a shooting war with the Russians in Syria. And Brennan uses this phone call with Bortnikov to bring up, in broad terms, of course, Russia's interference in the election. And Brennan basically says, we know you're doing this. It is interesting, I think. People might be surprised that there are these contacts between intelligence chiefs, between Western intelligence chiefs and the Russians. But they do happen. And actually, they still happen.

I mean, I think the heads of the CIA and MI6 do have contacts with their Russian counterpart. You know, every few months, I think, you know, there'll be a call. Often with the Svr, the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service, Naryshkin, where they will pass messages. I think recent messages which have been passed have been about Russia's Sabbath. campaign in Europe, where they were putting things like incendiary devices on planes, cargo planes. And it was a chance for Western intelligence chiefs to say, we know you're doing this. This is serious. This is dangerous and escalatory. You need to stop. So, I mean, that still happens

even now with the post-2020 and the invasion of Ukraine, these contacts. But back then, yeah, you can see that this was one of the channels the US could use to basically say lay off to the Russians. We know what you're up to. And of course, what do the Russians do? in all of these calls, when they get accused of something, they go, they come clean. They come clean, right, Gordon? They admit it. No. They say, what us? Interfine? Us? Sabotage? Never. Never. Never. Never. Porknikov vehemently denies the charge, unsurprisingly. But he says he'll inform Putin of the message, which I think, you know, that's the point.

And Brennan interestingly says that Americans will be absolutely enraged to find out that Moscow is trying to subvert the election. And he says that the Russian op will backfire. I would argue that neither of those things come to pass. But that is included in the initial warning from John Brennan. Now, at the same time, the Obama administration is. starting up interagency policy meetings, which are very close hold. They don't have what we call plus ones or backbenchers. So if you think about the conference rooms these meetings happen in, there's usually there's a central table. And then there's a ring of chairs on the wall around the

table. Those are for the plus ones. So you think like the CIA director goes to a meeting. The plus one might be the chief of Russia house for a meeting like this. No plus ones, right? Keeping it really, really small. And these meetings are chaired by Obama's national security advisor, Susan Rice. And as that process begins, there's really no doubt on the big picture, which is that the GRU is responsible for hacking the DNC and releasing the material. But the intelligence at this point is kind of murky on a really big question, which is what is Moscow's primary aim? what are they attempting to do? And I think this is a really fascinating point because there's kind of three options here

that are all distinct but not mutually exclusive. And the first one, which I think is probably the most obvious one, is that the Russians are trying to sow discord and chaos to kind of cast doubt over the entire process of the U.S. election. And ideally would prompt a series of political crises in the U.S. that would be destabilizing. Yeah. Keep the U.S. off balance. Yeah. Right. That is kind of the goal of an active measure, and that's one. The second one is Putin, as we've discussed, despises Hillary Clinton. And U.S. officials make me think that the Russian operation is designed at least to weaken Clinton during the election, but not necessarily prevent her from winning.

Because again, though kind of base case in Moscow at this point in July, August, has got to be that Hillary Clinton is the frontrunner and the likely next president. But it would be great from Putin's standpoint if she's weakened at the outset of her presidency, right? Less able to challenge him. So weakening Clinton is another possibility for the Russian aims. And there's a third possible reason. And this part is what gets makes this thing really politically nasty, which is are the Russians trying to help Trump? Does Putin think that he can influence a national election in the U.S. and potentially affect the results, right? And at this point, this task force in the intelligence community, the analysts, the targeters, the case officers working on it, they did not consider this point fully substantiated. by the intelligence they possessed. There's going to be an evolution of this, but this is in August of 2016. There's a sense that they can't quite make that case strongly. But you do have to think, seen from Putin's eyes, you know, given Trump's business dealings

with Russians over the years and the positive remarks about Putin and the solicitation of Russian intervention publicly on the 27th of July asking for, you know, the Russians to help hack Hillary's emails. You kind of think, and my opinion, is that as we get into the summer of 2016, Putin's aims are all three of the things that I've just listed out. Yeah, I would say, because all three, as you said, they're not mutually exclusive. But I'd also say the order you gave them in is probably the order of descending importance or likelihood for them. So you can see, you know, the first most obvious one is so chaos. And the second one is maybe you can either defeat or weaken Hillary Clinton.

The third one and the least likely, and maybe your third order priority is maybe see if you can help Trump. But actually, that's the kind of least likely to help him win because people don't think he's going to win at this stage. And therefore the least important. So it's all three, but maybe in descending order of importance. But I think if you accept that the first one is arguably the most important and it's a classic active measure, discredit we can divide, then if you look at something else that Russians are doing, it very much fits in with that, doesn't it? which is hacking into the actual electoral systems, because they're going to hack into the voting machines or the voting systems, not necessarily change anything, but hack into them, which goes

back to that first idea, isn't it? Which is you can potentially just mess with the election, mess with America's sense that this is a legitimate election. And it feels like that fits into that being the first priority. Well, and to that point, by the summer of 2016, Russian-linked hackers are already probing the computers of state election systems all over the U.S. And I think many of these fears don't come to pass, but seen from the Obama administration standpoint in the summer of 2016, you kind of have to think that that's actually the bigger potential problem. I agree.

And they start to see from the summer of 2016, Russian hackers probing these state voter registration databases. And it's worth reminding people that elections in the U.S., including federal election, are state elections, aren't they? You know, each state administers the election and has its own voter registration and database systems. So it's not one national one. So these states are starting to see hackers probing into their systems. In some cases, getting in. I mean, they're pinging the Illinois database five times per second at one point, 24 hours a day, and, you know, Arizona as well. And they're getting into the systems. And this is important

Because if you are the US government, what you're worried about is that they're getting into the systems and preparing to do something on election day. Perhaps if you wipe a voter registration database the day before an election because you're in it already. And then people turn up to vote and they expect their name to be on the database and it's not because it's been voted. Then you have chaos. That is the real worry, I think, the ability to actually stop the voting happening on election. campaign rather than the hack and leak at this point. And you can see why it's the bigger worry, but I guess as we'll get to, it perhaps is the dog that doesn't bark, the hacking of the electoral system itself. It does end up becoming the dog that doesn't bark. But I mean, even, you know,

as one example among many, you know, there were reports from Arizona where the username and password of a county election official had been stolen. And then the state is essentially, you know, the Russians are able to get into the system. And the state, is forced to shut down its voter registration system for a week while it cleans it up. Now, again, there's no evidence that the Russians end up doing anything with that access in 2016. But seen from the summer of 16, that's a very, very real fear. And I think the concern of the administration, and I think rightly so, is that the Russian hack and leak campaign, which is part of the active measure, is actually unlikely to make a difference in the

the outcome of the of the election, right? Because again, there's an underlying assumption, I think, on the part of almost everybody involved in the story, including the Kremlin and the White House, that Hillary Clinton is very likely to be the next president. And so what difference will the heck, you know, and leak effort make? What could make a massive difference is messing with the actual administration of the election, right? And at the time, that's, seen as the more serious threat. And as a result, what ends up kind of confronting Obama, I think, are a number of dilemmas, right? Because it's kind of this question of like, how do you inform the public about the Russian attack without triggering really kind of almost

a panic about the election system? Yeah. How do you proactively deal with the Russian aggression without coming across as partisan and bolstering Trump's claim that the election is a sham? and is rigged, right? And how do you prevent? I think this one's really important. How do you prevent Putin from kind of more destructive cyber aggression without prompting him to do more? I think the spin cycle that the Obama team gets into. And I think this is a mistake. I'll just, I'll give you my take on this. I think a lot of the sort of Russia house hands that have dealt with the Russians for a very long time, they'll say, look, the only way to get the Russians to stop is by you got to kind of smack them.

You got to smack them. Otherwise, they'll just keep pushing and poking and looking for weak spots. They'll keep pushing with the bayonet until they feel steel, basically. That's the staying, isn't it? Until they feel resistance to their pushing, they'll just keep pushing harder and harder. I couldn't agree more. And that seems to be the problem here, is that the Obama team are overly cautious about how hard they smack back or even suggest that they might smack back. They're overthinking it, which I think is always one of the criticisms, I think, of the Obama national security team, is that they were very intellectual and overthinking all the kind of possibilities and the way this might play out in the election campaign.

And that feels like what they're doing, because they don't go for the, you know, tough sanctions or diplomatic moves, do they? No. Also, I appreciated your flex there, Gordon, with a Lenin quote that you didn't, that you sneakily. Lenin or Stalin? I can't remember it's Stalin or Lenin. I think it was Lenin. I think it was Lenin, the quote about, you know, if you hit mush, push until you hit steel, right? And I think that's right.

I mean, I think it's absolutely right. And in this case, I think the Obama administration with the response that, as we'll see, they cook up, doesn't put up any steel to prevent that Russian bayonet from going on. And Becky is saying it is Lenin. It is Lenin. It's Lenin. That's right. We love a good Lenin quote on the rest is classified. So the NSC, the National Security Council, charged with coming up with a policy response,

they do work up some options. And some of those are quite aggressive. They look at a cyber attack to go to shut down the leaking websites, release information on Putin's family, you know, that would be sort of active measure-ish in response, target the intelligence service, do a kind of denial of service attack on Russian media. But the administration nixes the most aggressive ideas because they don't. want to force Putin to act. This is the logic. They don't want to force Putin to act. I would argue he's already acting. But there ends up being a disconnect between, I think, the urgency felt by a lot of the sort of staff level people working on this and the caution that the president and other senior

advisors had on what to do about the Russians. They could do that classic thing of, we're very angry. We're going to write a very firm statement. A very firm, a very firm letter. statement will be made about what's happening. And that's kind of what ends up happening, right? Because after they go through all the potential, you know, cyber attacks or our own version of active measures or much harder sanctions, keep in mind, this is happening before the full-on invasion of Ukraine in 2022. So there's still, you know, a lot of potential options left on the sanctions menu.

They decide not to. And Obama and his senior advisors come up with a very different plan. One piece of this is getting the Department of Homeland Security. to basically double down on making sure that the state voting systems will be protected and that the integrity of the election itself will be protected. To do that, because again, to your point, Gordon, elections in the U.S. are conducted at the state level. What the administration needs is they need buy-in from congressional Republicans because they want this to be a bipartisan effort that when, for example, the federal government,

the Department of Homeland Security goes to a red state, a Republican state, and tries to convince them, essentially, that they need to prevent or protect their systems from Russian intrusion. That's going to be a lot easier if you have congressional Republicans that sign up and say, this is really important that you do this, right? So the administration reaches out to then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and try to convince them that a kind of bipartisan public message about a Russian threat to the election is important, it's serious, and local officials should collaborate with the feds to protect the electoral infrastructure. How do you think that goes, Gordon? What's your prediction for how that effort's

going to go? In the middle of an election campaign, of a heated election campaign, you're going to ask for bipartisan support to do something which looks like it plays into the message of one campaign, the Hillary Clinton campaign, that the Russians are interfering against the other campaign, I don't think it's going to go well. It's not going to go well, right? And the initial response is kind of, we're not interested in signing up for this. We'll see how it's going to get much more political and partisan, if you can possibly imagine that.

And really, what Obama decides to do is, we'll make these statements, we'll try to get bipartisan support for the statements. The threat of action, I think this is the Obama perspective, the third. of action could be more effective than actually doing something. And I think that is almost certainly incorrect, but it is the response that the Obama campaign takes. It's extremely cautious. And at this point, in mid-August of 2016, Hillary Clinton is up by about four percentage points in the kind of national level pew polls. So, Gordon, there's not much to worry about with that hack and leak is there. No. Maybe that's a good place to take a break, David.

with the summer coming to a close of 2016 and this tumultuous campaign about to reach a climax. And, of course, the Russians aren't done yet, are they? We'll see you after the break. Welcome back. It's the summer of 2016, a tumultuous summer in American and British politics, actually. But in the American election campaign, the Russians are still messing, aren't they, David? The Russians haven't stopped, Gordon? They have not stopped. And what is amazing is, of course, that the leaks are not done. By late summer, the kind of public reaction, public viewer over the initial round of leaks had died down. So what does the GRU do? They go and find, and we talked about this in earlier episodes, they'd hacked the D-Triple-C. It's essentially the organization that helps get congressional candidates. Congressional Democrats elected. And the GRU posts a big cash of D-Tri-C records in late August.

and includes a bunch of really sensitive things about, you know, campaign strategies, field plans, finance documents, voter data, turnout models, a bunch of stuff. But what's interesting is I don't think it has that much impact. I think by this stage in the campaign, there's other things going on. People have got a bit tired of these leaks. I do often think with leaks and with hacked data off different, there's quite a steep, diminishing curve of return from the data. And you start to see that here, I think.

The big impact is in the run-up to the Democrat convention. leading to the kind of resignation of the chair. Less here, though, I think, isn't it? But that doesn't stop the overall political debate about Russia and the leaks picking up pace as the campaign continues. Yeah, and I think the reality with the D-Triple-C stuff is there just isn't, there aren't the nuggets in there that could be used to kind of twist or embarrass the Clinton campaign or somewhat at the national level.

You know, it's very local in many ways. And so it just doesn't have as much of a splash. Now, around the same time in mid-August, the Trump campaign, Gordon, begins to receive its first intelligence briefings. And Trump and Michael Flynn, who is a retired three-star general who had led the Defense Intelligence Agency, his tenure had ended quite badly with him essentially being shoved out. Flynn is one of the most senior national security official who has signed up for the Trump campaign. He's going to become Trump's first national security advisor, though he will not remain in that post for more than a few weeks. Once the administration takes office, we go into a lot more depth, by the way, on the curious case of Michael Flynn in our mini-series for club members. But they get these briefings, Gordon, and the reaction is kind of, eh, we don't buy it.

You know, it's not a particularly politicized response to the briefings, but it is just kind of, lack of interest, really. Lack of interest almost. Exactly, exactly. On the 8th of August, a Trump advisor, Roger Stone, who's among a campaign of very colorful figures, maybe among the most colorful. I believe he has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, if I'm not mistaken. Is that right?

Documentary, Get Me Roger Stone, which is very entertaining about him. Yeah, he's a character. He gives a speech to a Florida. Republican group in which he claims that the Clinton emails come out and would show, as he describes it, stone cold proof of the criminality of Bill Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, so including the daughter. And when an attendee at this gathering asks him, you know, what is Julian Assange of WikiLeaks? What is he going to do? Does he have an October surprise up his sleeve? Stone replies, well, it could be any number of things. I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next

tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation, but there's no telling what the surprise may be. Now, this is another one of these interesting, kind of weird things that I think is not quite fully developed even at the Mueller report, which is what is the true nature of the connection between Roger Stowe, who's on the campaign at this point as an advisor. And WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. Yeah. But there's plenty of statements throughout the late summer and fall that show that Roger Stone is in contact with or kind of new of, even in general terms, new of Julian Assange's plans for future dumps. And bring this up here in this episode on the active measure because the point is, is that by late summer, it's become

blindingly obvious to the Obama administration that the Trump team is not going to go along with any linkage between the leaks and the Russians, that there is going to be, and this is one of the most fundamental, I think, points to raise in this series, which is there is a connection, I think, very early on in Donald Trump's mind of any connection between the leaks and the Russians is seen as contaminating the credibility of his own campaign. Yeah, he sees it as a politically minded fabrication by people to undermine legitimacy. He, if you like, sees the claim of a Russian active measure campaign as an active measure campaign by a deep state to kind of discredit him in a sense. That's what he'll come to believe. I think that that view will be

solidified later, but that's certainly already the view is this is politics that's going on. They want nothing to do with it. And it's interesting as well, isn't it? Because it's not just the Trump campaign, but we talked before the break about Congress. And I find it interesting as well that the senior Republicans in Congress also don't want to kind of engage with this, do they? And maybe that's not so surprising because you're in the middle of a campaign, but it is interesting and significant, I think. I think we talked before the break about how the administration's approach had essentially been statements and trying to make sure that, you know, Congress was on board as part of that effort. And so what they do is they send John Brennan, among others, to basically brief the senior kind of intel committee heads and ranking members in Congress, in the Senate and the House. And the reaction is basically this.

The Democrats want to see the raw intel on which the assessments are based. And the Republicans think the CIA, to your point, Gordon, is playing politics. And many Republicans are just outright hostile toward the assessment, right? And Mitch McConnell, who's the Senate, I think the Senate Majority Leader at that point, says, you're trying to screw the Republican candidate. That's his take. And John Brennan, the head of the CIA, who we should say, is a strict Irish Catholic from New Jersey with what I would describe as kind of stiff moral

rectitude and maybe a mild anger management problem goes nuts. And the meeting with McConnell devolves into an actual shouting match where the two guys are yelling at each other. And McConnell basically says, you know, this is all BS. You're just trying to help Hillary Clinton, right? So the administration is going after a bipartisan condemnation of the Russians. But the essential political problem is that if you do that, it's seen as undercutting Trump. And that logic in an election year is just there's no, there's no way to get out of that. Gordia not is there. Any damage to Trump's campaign, and I think this is part of Mitch McConnell's response,

is that any damage to Trump's campaign is also going to trickle down ballot to other Republican candidates who are running for the Senate, running in the House. It's going to threaten McConnell's position as majority leader. So he has political reasons, I think, to not buy into the intelligence briefing that he's receiving from John Brennan. Trump is, of course, not going to acknowledge the Russian hacking, as is apparent from the Roger Stone comments above. There's no intent on the part of the Trump team to kind of turn the temperature down and issue some statement of bipartisan unity about what the Russians are up to. and Obama himself brings Republican congressional leaders to the White House in early September under the guise of a briefing on his upcoming trip to Asia.

Again, we have Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan there. And in reality, it was a briefing to discuss the intelligence about the Russians interfering in the election and trying again to convince congressional leaders to draft a response. And, you know, again, there's just kind of disinterest in doing that. The administration, though, they keep trying. There's a classified briefing for congressional leaders on the Hill on the 8th of September in the skiffs, the kind of top secret briefing rooms that are below the east wing of the Capitol. The Democrats are saying, look, this has been going on for months. We need a statement like ASAP on what the Russians are doing.

It's been two months since the intelligence community had reached the conclusion that the Russians were threatening the election. And pretty much everyone has known since June that the Russians were behind. the DNC hack and the Clinton campaign hack. And up to this point, the White House really hasn't said boo about it. And what ends up happening is, I mean, essentially congressional democratic leaders, they issue a statement, but throughout September, the White House doesn't. And it's interesting, the DNI, the director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper, expresses extreme frustration with President Obama. And he says, I wondered what President Obama was thinking, and if he regretted his reticence to put his thumb on the scale of the election, meanwhile, Clapper writes, Putin was effectively standing on the other end of that scale. Wow. So there, I think, with the White House in this really, what feels like a state of paralysis, let's end. And when we come back, we'll look at another aspect of this Russian active measure campaign, an effort to spread disinformation over

social media that it's going to find its way in front of hundreds of millions of Americans. But of course, if you want to hear that right away, join the Declassified Club. Restisclassified.com where you can join, you can hear the whole series. And of course, the bonus series as well, David. That's right. We get our bonus mini series and exclusive mini series for club members on the Trump-Russia connection, what's fact, what's fiction, what's politics, what's not, getting into kind of the weeds of how we can make sense of the connections between Trump and Russia.

Do go and join at the rest is classified.com. And we will see you next time. See you next time. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything. Like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988 Canada's suicide crisis hubline. It's good to know just in case.

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