The Rest Is Classified - 136. How Russia Made Trump: Putin’s Troll Factory (Ep 5)

Episode Date: March 8, 2026

Russian trolls are trying to influence the 2016 US election, but did Putin's keyboard warriors really propel Donald Trump into the White House? In the penultimate episode in their series on how the Russians hacked the 2016 US presidential election, David and Gordon return to the sordid tale of Yevgeny Prigozhin: restaurateur and Russian troll farmer. ------------------- 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. Russian trolls are trying to influence the 2016 U.S. election. So did Putin's keyboard warriors really propel Donald Trump into the White House? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey.

And David, in our last few episodes, we've been looking at the Russian active measures, the influence campaign against the 2016 US presidential election, particularly, I guess, focusing on one aspect of it. The GRU, Russian military intelligence, this is hack of emails, and then their leak through the summer of 2016 onto the internet and the questions about how the US was going to respond. But that wasn't all that was going on, was it? was another plank, Gordon, in this active measure, another sciop that was focused on disinformation and in particular spreading disinformation on social media. It was led, Gordon,

by friend of the pod, Yevgeny Progoshin. Chef turned warlord, and we did a series on him last year in late 2025. And we made the comparison, Gordon, that Yevgeny Progoshin is really what would have become of Chef Gordon Ramsey, had Mr. Ramsey been brought up in sort of the twilight years of the Soviet Union and had been pulled into Vladimir Putin's orbit. And then gone to lead a mercenary group and lead a march against his own government with a bunch of mercenaries before being blown up an airplane. So the analogy doesn't entirely work. I think there are points at which that the chef analogy breaks down. But there are some relevant points to it, I think. But let's be honest, they're limited. And we should know.

just in case, and we did this at the time, in case any of Gordon Ramsey's people are listening to this, don't come after us legally because we've got a quote where Gordon Ramsey says that chefs are psychopaths, and we used that as the foundational sort of piece for the comparison between the two. But that's right. So, you have Getty progos and Gordon. Quite flimsy. He was Putin's caterer for a period. He ends up becoming a mercenary warlord running the Wagner a group and he bears a striking resemblance, we should say, a striking resemblance. Oh, I can't believe you're going to go. To rest his politics, co-host, Alistair Campbell.

You offended Gordon Ramsey and our co-host, Alistair Campbell, who, it's fair to say, did not react. Well, he reacted jokingly, but also slightly alarmingly to your comparison, which was based on two pictures where you thought they did look alike. But let's step away from the comparisons and get back to the story of who Fagady Progocin really was because I think to see how he fits into this story about 2016 it's worth even for those who might have listened to that previous series just recapping a little bit about why he

ends up playing a role he's this extraordinary figure who's on the criminal fringes in St. Petersburg in the 80s and then the 90s and opens up restaurants hence he's becomes known as a chef he's more of a restaurant But restaurants where the St. Petersburg elite starts to move, including Vladimir Putin. And that moves him by the end of the 90s into Putin's orbit as Putin comes to power in Moscow. And he starts catering to the guests of Vladimir Putin, including people like President Bush, Tony Blair. But what's interesting is he also starts to move into the edges of politics through the 2000s.

And the transition was really interesting. I remember finding this fascinating, look at his backstory, because he got really involved in social media, initially because he was battling his critics when it came to restaurants and the restaurant world. And he was basically going after. You know, it's the equivalent of a restaurant critic, hiring some trolls and private investigators

to take down Giles Corrin at the Times newspaper if he gives them a bad review, you know. It's not quite like that. But that was what kind of, Pregosian was doing, he built up a network around him, investigating journalists, paying off journalists, and then increasingly moving on to social media. And that got noticed by the Kremlin around 2012, because of course the Kremlin, I think it's fair to say, the old security kind of guard around Putin were not internet natives. They weren't so online. They weren't so online.

And you can see them going, what is this new world of social media and Twitter at the time and Facebook? And they have no idea about it. But they can see that Progogian has built this PR machine to bolster his own reputation. And it looks like the Kremlin, around 2012, says to him, we could use that. We could use your PR machine for the purposes of bolstering the Kremlin. And so that leads around 2013 to the creation of this thing called the Internet Research Agency. The IRA. The IRA, distinguished from the Irish Republican Army.

I've stolen my notes to not use that abbreviation so regularly in this episode. It'll get very confusing otherwise. But the IRA, the Internet Research Agency, we should say, is in St. Petersburg. Additionally, is a domestic social media influence organization. You know, trying to influence and do campaigns within Russia to bolster support for Putin. then by about 2014, it's going to start doing campaigns about Ukraine. But then, interestingly enough, at this point, 2014-15, it's going to start to set its eyes on America, isn't it?

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And the mechanism for that is going to be something that they call the Translator Project, which is going to focus specifically on the U.S. population and work across social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. This group will eventually have more than 80 employees assigned to it. So this is another feature of the way Prick-Ocean intervenes is this is pretty labor-intensive, I think, in many ways. This is kind of pre-A.I. So this is individual humans having to do a lot of this work. And interestingly, I mean, the month after the translator project has stood up back in 2014,

the team is beginning discussions on how to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election, which is still two and a half years away. So you get the sense. I go back to the first episode, Gordon, that we did in this series, which talked about the kind of early indications that appeared in diplomatic reporting, coming back to Washington about the Russians really launching a kind of broad-based active measure against the U.S. and against the U.S. presidential election. You know, you can see some of the glimmers of that in what Afghani Progossian and his team are setting up all the way back in 2014.

I guess you could say that one of the major advantages that Progosian has is that his team can create identities and just pose as Americans. So in a way, You know, if we talk about kind of old school active measures where you had to cede an idea, an argument, misinformation, whatever it is to a journalist, and get them to then promulgate that idea or injected into the bloodstream of whatever your target country is. In this case, what Progogian and his team can actually do is just they can be the source themselves posing as Americans and doing it digitally online and at scale. Yeah, and that is the key difference.

As the joke goes on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. No one knows you're a Russian on the internet. You can look like an American. And in the old days with those active measures, they would have to work through multiple proxies and steps and chains to kind of launder the fact they were Russians. So maybe if you were the Russians, you'd approach an agent of yours who was an Italian, who happened to be a communist,

who you could use to push out some of the information and push it forward. Here, these people in St. Petersburg, which gets called a troll factory, you know, internet trolls, can just create in a few moments online an American identity and look to all intents and purposes, at least in the online space, as an American. You know, it's one of those areas where the internet and modern technology transforms the potential of active measures. We should say a little bit about the people who are staffing this, these trolls, because I think that they are not Pop-Tart eating hackers like the GRU has. These are kind of professional staff that are being hired for what really feels, as we'll get into it, like terrible, terrible, terrible work to have. And yet they're paid pretty well. They are, you know, sort of young professionals, I guess you could say.

It's got an office setup, right? There's several departments in the troll den. And apparently early on, they printed the titles of the departments on A4 paper and taped them up on windowless offices. So there's a creative department, a rapid response department, a department each for commentators, bloggers, social media specialists. There's also another office in Moscow. Now, morale is low early on. And I think continuing, this will be a theme. Morale is low among the staff, a reporter who was able to.

infiltrate the Internet research agency and ask some of these employees questions. One of the employees said, you could go crazy. They had to write four posts on a large Russian blogging platform per day, along with comments on Internet forums, and to basically blast all these legitimate news stories with crazy comments. It's all really tedious. It's all labor intensive. And it's all happening in this kind of drab gray building in St. Petersburg. work. One of the other pieces of this that is interesting, as you look at the kind of architecture of the active measure, I think that the GRU and the SVR kind of didn't want anything to do with this work. And a lot of this, I'd be curious for your thoughts on this one, Gordon. A lot of this

feels like Progoshin has this good idea, and he just kind of starts doing it. And it's happening really truly in a very kind of siloed fashion. There's not a connection between what Progosion and the Internet Research Agency are doing and what the GRU is doing. Yeah. And I think at the time, or when some of this first started to come out, people thought there was some master plan in which every bit of the Russian state was coordinated and doing different elements of this in conjunction with each other.

And I think that's not the reality. I think the reality of the way the Kremlin works is there will be a view from the top that Putin wants this. The order will be given. We want to interfere with the election in this way. And then lots of people will go out and to some extent do it separately in their own silo and even compete to do things. And we saw that in the previous episodes when we saw how the SVR, the foreign intelligence agency and the GRU, the military intelligence agency, were both inside the DNC emails separately. And I think here you can see that the Internet Research Agency is also doing its own thing. I don't think there is a particularly coordinated campaign other than the sense that this comes

from the top that this is what the boss wants, the boss being Putin. And the GRU did have some social media kind of trolling that they had attempted during the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 when Russia had annexed Crimea. And it hadn't gone that well. And so I think in part, Progoshin and the Internet Research Agency, their work after Crimea and Ukraine in 2014 and in the run up to the U.S. election, it reminds me of, you know, I think one of the aspects of Progoshin's personality that really carried through in the series we did on him. He's always looking for an opportunity. He's entrepreneurial. He's very entrepreneurial. And he's looking for opportunities in some of the seams where the state agencies themselves are not effective or not working. And in this case, case, he may have taken up the kind of social media trolling piece of this, kind of seeing a gap, frankly, in what the intelligence agencies were up to in a way to demonstrate his value to Putin and the Kremlin. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Because I think the reality is,

as we'd said on the U.S. side, I don't think intelligence agencies, particularly this time, understood social media. I mean, I remember talking to people who work for intelligence agencies, who were supposed to be thinking about information warfare, what the Russians were up to. And they didn't have social media, you know, because they were spies or they worked in the intelligence community. So particularly around this time, I think it was all quite alien to a lot of people in intelligence agencies, whether it's the GRU or whether it's the CIA or NSA, how social media worked. So you need someone like Progoshin who can have people who can go out and understand social media, or natives to it, and also can go and learn about the US, because that's one of

the aspects about it. If you're going to craft messages that are going to. going to work on social media. You need to understand the audience you're trying to reach. And those pop-tart eating guys in the GRU don't understand that. But actually, what's interesting is the internet research agency people, precisely because they're not spies, they can, I mean, they go and travel to the United States, which is so interesting to do the research, to work out how to have an impact. So a team of four internet research agency employees apply for visas to go to the US. Only two visas are granted. I said two. Two. women working for Procogian travel for three weeks around the U.S.

So I bet they had a very lovely time. They went to Nevada, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Louisiana, Texas, and New York in order to learn more about the U.S., to take pictures that they could use in their social media reports, and then they file a briefing, an internal report up the chain of the Internet Research Agency after they return. And there's this great, great story on the heels of that trip, Gordon, where in this spring of 2015, one of the things the Internet Research Agency has tried to do is just figure out if they can actually arrange remotely via social media. Can they arrange an actual gathering of physical humans in the United States?

And so they put out a Facebook post announcing a hot dog giveaway in New York City. There's a webcam they've arranged to have there to record it. And the pitches basically show up here and get free hot dogs. and the webcam records a few New Yorkers actually showing up looking around, looking puzzled, looking at their phones. There's no hot dogs there, by the way. There's no hot dogs. There's no hot dogs.

And then everyone leaves. And you can just imagine this video of very confused-looking New Yorkers who thought they were going to have hot dogs. When it reverberates back in St. Petersburg, the Internet Research Agency, trolls are like ecstatic, you know, hugging each other and crying because they've been able to demonstrate that they could get like seven New Yorkers to show up with the promise of free hot dogs. And we should say, I think, again, very much a theme of the Internet Research Agency effort, they are scoring themselves on inputs, not outcomes. Okay?

That's going to be really important. Okay, we got a few people to show up thinking they were going to have a hot dog. That's a big wit. a lot of this stuff ends up getting packaged and sold up the chain in Moscow as great victories when in fact it's just it's sort of just activity. But it is wild. When you stand back and you think that getting people to turn up for a non-existent hot dog giveaway is a Russian active measure, you know, and that we're now putting that in the context

of intelligence operation. It just gives you some idea that this is not spying as we used to know it or think about it, is it? It's something different. But that's the point of it, isn't it? I mean, that's the point of what they're trying to do. They should have gotten one of those hot dog vending machines, like we had at Langley. They would have, they would have been able to just have that, have that sweet hot dogs roll out for those New Yorkers. Now, the staff who work in the American department, so the piece of the internet research agency, this kind of translator project that's looking at the States, again, just kind of a further portrait that these are

not the Pop-Tart eaters over at the GRU. They're pretty young. It's a great description of them as, you know, hipsters, kind of taking smoking breaks, wearing stylish haircuts, having beards, which are apparently, you know, part of his sort of hipster culture in Russia. The new employees, the employees that the Internet Research Agency break in, there's an internal document that they see. And it's very clear, though, that the goal of this.

effort, hot dogs and all, is to spread distrust toward the candidates, the American presidential candidates, and the political system in general. So the election really is a core focus area for Progoshin and his trolls right away. The head of the America Department is a 27-year-old named Jekun Aslinov, and again, we apologize, as we always do profusely, on the race is classified that we cannot. Our pronunciations leave much to be desired. He's He is an Azerbaijan-born guy who's apparently nicknamed J-Z, which I think is just wonderful. These great details come from a fantastic book called Russian roulette, written by Michael Isakov and David Korn, all about Russia's intervention in the election. They've got just some wonderful details here.

According to one former co-worker Oslinov, Jay-Z, was more popular as a colleague than as a boss. He was, quote, a great guy, but frankly speaking, generally incompetent as a manager. So we've got really the crack team here in St. Petersburg. Now, Jay-Z has a budget of approximately $1 million a year. Cue the Doctor Evil, $1 million. It's not that much. It's strikingly low. It doesn't seem like that much money.

But I guess the pay is pretty good. Yeah, I remember the pay was above average for people, which is why they wanted to work there. Exactly. Now, the trolls, which I also feel like this term is really, it's very derogatory. Perjorative. Bearded hipsters in St. Petersburg who are attempting to sabotage our presidential election. They are paid bonuses on audience engagement and reactions in the U.S. So I would argue that this creates massive incentives for bullshit.

It is all, it's like a self-licking ice cream cone, Gordon, is what this is. This is, again, a theme of the social media piece of the active measure. Lots of stuff going on, but as we'll see, I think, pretty minimal impact. Now, the Internet Research Agency by 2016 had bought computing infrastructure and servers in the U.S. they purchase space on the service and set up dedicated VPNs to be able to route traffic into the U.S. and make it look like it was coming from the U.S. And that tactic made it harder for social media companies in the States to actually uncover what was Russian disinformation operations on their platforms, even long after.

It'd become clear that this influence operation was underway. By the time we get into this kind of summer fall of 2016, so as the 11th, So as the election is going, the troll factory's audience online had grown into hundreds of thousands of direct followers. And I will note again, we'll use some large numbers in this section, but we are not trying to claim here. I think just we should probably say this right up front, that these numbers are not going to end up becoming particularly impressive when we talk about what actually happened. But the point is, is that there were a lot of Americans who were exposed in some way, shape, or form, to what the Internet Research Agency was up to. I would say that the managers gorted inside Progosion Shop,

Jay-Z and his friends, were operating, even after that little trip that their friends took to the U.S., they were operating with some pretty rough and bizarre assumptions about what was actually going on in the U.S. So, for example, they decided that infographics worked better with liberals than with conservatives. They also decided that liberals were more active at night while conservatives got up earlier in the morning.

I'm not sure if that's... Sweeping statements. Yeah, I'm not sure it's just sweeping statements. But yes, it doesn't seem like they've done that much research, but there you go. And the basic strategy was that they would create personas that impersonated activists or sometimes organizations and then boost those through paid ads to grow their following. And as many potential sort of or aspiring influencers will discover, it can be kind of hard. It can be long, tedious work to build an audience for your social media account.

Tell me about it, David. Have you seen my Instagram feed? As evidenced by Gordon Carrera's Instagram feed, which actually we should see. How many Instagram followers do you have, Gordon? Not that many. I only post when I'm told to post by I shouldn't say this, but by, by, by, colleagues at Goalhanger and Emma and others from our social media team. It's like, post this. You shouldn't say that. You shouldn't say that.

No, I shouldn't. It should sound much more organic. It's like an expression of my life and my by my real authentic self. Is that what it should be? Yeah. 703 followers, I'm being told. 703. I just looked it up. I'm like that. I should take some lessons from these internet research people. And some of them are probably bots. You're right. Thank you. Some of them are probably bots. They're mostly, Gordon has bought nearly all of his 7003 followers. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. If Progosion were still around, you could, you could hire him to kind of whip your social media profile. Let's get back from my social media feed to the Internet Research Agency's social media feeds. I mean, it is interesting, isn't it? Because they're creating these personas.

And, I mean, they're quite targeted in what they're trying to do, which I think is interesting. And they try lots of different things. You know, some of them work, some don't. But you can see that one of the interesting areas is they, they, for instance, target certain communities. So we talked about liberals and conservatives. But they target black voters specifically, don't they? And they are, they're essentially trying to send a message to them to say, don't bother voting. I mean, it's really interesting because they're not saying vote for this candidate or vote for that candidate. But it's like, don't bother voting.

It's not worth it. There's an element in which they're just trying to suppress the vote and make people disillusioned with politics. That was one of the tactics they used, wasn't it? It was. And I think, you know, it's worth looking at potentially a particular persona because the Internet Research Agency created someone named Crystal Johnson. They chose a picture of a young black woman who appears to be in early 20s. And by mid-2016, after some people,

hard work by the bearded hipsters at the Internet Research Agency. The account had about 7,000 followers. So roughly 10 times the number of followers has Gordon Carrera's Instagram account. And Crystal's bio said, quote, it is our responsibility to promote the positive things that happened in our communities. She's supposedly from Richmond, Virginia. In one of her more popular posts in June of 2016, she puts up a picture of the boxer Muhammad Ali and his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And she jokes that Muhammad Ali's star is the only one hanging on a wall, not for anyone to step on. Now, that post has more than 22,000 engagements.

But as I just said, not political and has no impact on the election. It is designed because the trolls understand this. They're trying to build an audience for Crystal Johnson, right? And it's designed to kind of attract people to her person. There's another example in late September of 2016, a Twitter account at Black to Live. It was one of the Internet Research Agency's most important fake black activist accounts. That had a follower count of 11,200, but kind of mediocre engagement figures, the account accumulated fewer than 190,000 social interactions at about a year, and only 16 of the accounts

more than 2,600 posts during the run-up mentioned Hillary Clinton, and most of those mentions were supportive. No, they didn't post it all in the weeks before the election about voter suppression. So you, again, you kind of have like, yeah, there's a lot of people who are kind of seeing this stuff, but some of it's not political. Most of what they're seeing is just not political at all. It's audience building rather than political. Yeah.

That's right. Now, the Internet Research Agency, Jay-Z, and his. and his crew in St. Petersburg were probably more successful with some of their conservative personas. And their most successful English language social media account was trying to mimic the Tennessee GOP, the grand old party, the Tennessee Republican Party. And by the end of September 2016, at 10 underscore GOP, had just under 36,000 followers. That's more than me. It's way more than you.

It's way more than the rest is classified. So shame on all of the tens of thousands of people who are listening to our podcast who haven't gone and checked us out on Instagram or Twitter or TikTok. Or subscribed on YouTube. Or subscribed on YouTube. Where is our bot army, Gordon? It should be there. We want a bot army. Aleister, Becky is typing into the chat.

Alistair Campbell, progosion lookalike, has a hundred. 195,000 followers. On Instagram is that? Is it on Instagram? I don't know how many of those are paid bots. How many inherited from people thought they were following progogion? And then they actually got Alistair Campbell. If you're listening to this, go to at Rest is Classified on Instagram and subscribe, please.

Because these numbers... This is the worst sell. This is the worst sell. This is a pity sell because when we compare our followers to this troll farm, it's terrible. Back to 2016 at Tennessee GOP. 36,000 followers. And they get a lot of engagement. Lots of engagement.

Now, the account generates 3.2 million shares in the year before the election. It's unknown exactly how many of those interactions are with actual Americans. But it's probably the majority. And I think it's worth kind of zooming to get on just a couple of the post because among that account's top 10 pre-election posts on Twitter, five attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the outcome and flagged like voter fraud. And one post, for example, publishes the day before the election, earned more than 10,000 engagements. And it said, wow, another proof of hashtag voter fraud. Machine refuses to allow vote for Trump retweet because media will never report this. That obviously

is bad. Shame on the Russians. Yeah. But again, it is. striking that there's just a bunch of, you know, because I tend to think that, you know, we tell these stories and you think about Russian disinformation, you sort of think about some kind of evil mastermind sitting in a room somewhere, puppeteering the election or kind of reprogramming American minds. And the reality is there is basically a kind of factory-like vibe at the internet research agency with all of our bearded hipster friends churning it out just churning it out right one worker said they needed 135 200 character tweets per shift uh the workers on the different floors apparently don't talk much to each other they only interact over smoke breaks and over lunch and coffee

um so it's they're kind of they're very isolated and in a in a February 2018 interview with the Washington Post. So a couple years after election, a former internet research agency employee said, I immediately felt like a character in the book 1984. The agency was a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling when you ended up there was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths into an industrial assembly line. And I think maybe it's worth taking a break here, Gordon. It's worth coming back and discussing whether or not you have Ganyi Progoshans' Troll Empire accomplished anything. We'll see you after the break.

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Tap the banner to order your groceries online at voila.ca. Enjoy in-store prices without leaving your home. You'll find the same regular prices online as in-store. Many promotions are available both in store and online, though some may vary. Welcome back. So Fagady Progosian's bearded hipster trolls have been busy. And they're busy right through the election, aren't they, David? Right until November and Election Day. But the question is, what impact did they really have?

There's always a figure which is cited by, I think Facebook after the election, says that the Internet Research Agency reached 126 million Americans. Now, that sounds extraordinary and led people to go, wow, that's, you know, nearly half of all Americans were reached by these posts. But it's not quite the same as saying it had an impact, is it? No. And I think the bottom line up front here is that these efforts didn't have much of an impact. And the first reason is that those numbers are the 126 of Americans. A lot of them are reached by really anodyne, benign posts made by these accounts that had nothing to do with politics to the election whatsoever.

So that's one piece. Another piece is only 8.4% of the Internet Research Agency's activity was the election related at all. And the pieces that were mostly stayed very much within echo chambers and did not cross over into networks of undecided voters. That's a really important point is a lot of this was conservatives or Democrats amplifying stuff that they already heard and believed and saw elsewhere. Which is unlikely to change someone's vote. It might increase the intensity of their view. And you could have some second order effects, but it's definitely different from actually persuading someone. It's very hard to measure what's reaching someone and what actually changes them.

They managed to do a few things in the real world, though, didn't they? Where they managed to kind of create events. We talked about this earlier with the hot dogs. And they managed to do that during the election campaign, which again is interesting, I think, but not necessarily impactful. There doesn't be evidence that in at least two cases, the internet. Research Agency was able to actually arrange in-person kind of rallies or events. And at one case, they paid a Republican political activist in Florida. And I don't think she knew who was paying them, but they paid her to dress up as Hillary Clinton. And this woman happily did. She had a blonde wig.

She had an orange prison uniform that she bought at Goodwill. Because you remember, of course, one of the kind of major MAGA chance during the election was to lock her up. Lock her up. And this woman, when she's confronted with the fact that it's actually the Russian who had paid her and set this thing up, she said, well, I would have done it for Trump anyway. There was a lot of excitement around this, and Russians didn't have any part of that. This wasn't a trick for me. So I think, again, it's this idea that if anyone else had reached out and said, go ahead and do this, she would have done it. And she was already voting. And everyone who's showing up at that rally, they're already voting for Trump, presumably. So that's another piece of it.

I think another slice is that we joked about this a little bit with the way that the internet research agency employees were getting to know the target. There wasn't a lot of regional or cultural specialization and it prevented, in other words, a lot of the trolls didn't know anything, much of anything, about the communities, the states that their personas were alleging to come from or out of. Despite the road trip. Despite sending two people on a road trip across the United States, somehow they weren't able to pass themselves off as natives of many of these states and communities.

So one internet research agency member says, he said, first you've got to be a redneck from Kentucky, then you need to be a white guy from Minnesota. That's actually me, Gordon. I'm a white guy from Minnesota. And then 15 minutes later, you're from New York posting in some slang. That's what this guy said. So it's like, yeah, you probably are going to struggle as a Russian in St. Petersburg, who's just on this assembly line to really kind of write.

copy for your accounts that's going to be credible and that other people are going to want to interact with, right? The other piece of this is that there were about a billion tweets related to the campaigns and that were posted in the 15 months leading up to the election. By everyone, you mean? By everybody, by everybody. Everything election. Yeah.

Everything election related. The Internet Research Agency generated less than 0.05% of all election-related posts, which what I read that, I'm kind of like, that's a small number. Then I thought it's actually not an insignificant number for one operation in St. Petersburg, Russia. But the point is that it was absolutely drowned out by the organic tweets created by Americans during the election. And to just kind of seal the point, the most engaged content was.

was designed not to polarize but to build communities around these personas so that more and more people would follow them. Now, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released about 2,300 of the Facebook ads that the trolls had placed over the two years preceding the election. And the top 10 most popular ads, which accounted for a quarter of all views, none of them had sharp or corrosive disinformation of them. So again, it's all kind of trying to drive people to these personas to build their profile. Now, the best known, the most widely covered Facebook ad, depicted Satan in an arm wrestling match with a white robe Jesus. And the caption says, Satan is saying, if I win, Clinton wins. And Jesus says, not if I can help it. The New York Times reported on and reproduced that ad after the election, which obviously is, you know, it's.

It's famous. It's iconic as one of the more. famous ones. The original ad was one of the internet research agencies the least successful. It displayed for one day. It cost them 64 rubles, which at that point was one dollar.

And it had 71 impressions, which is probably about the same number of impressions that you're getting on some of your Instagram post, Gordon. I was going to say, I'd be pretty happy with that. 14 Americans

clicked on it. In total. And yet that becomes the iconic one, which everyone points to, and it's on the New York Times and everywhere else. I think it's a really good example about how outsized the media reporting of it was compared to the potential actual impact of it, which isn't to say that it's meaningless. But it's just, I think that perspective is important. That's right. I mean, the median number of impressions for all of the pre-election political ads thrown out there by the Internet Research Agency, the median number of impressions was $199.

And Impressions is literally, I looked at it. I scrolled past it, right? I didn't actually read or engage with it. Yeah, it doesn't mean it did anything. Yeah. Exactly. But I do think what's interesting is the legacy of this operation will be enormous because particularly in the long term, the press coverage of it,

the questions around, you know, was there targeting through social media and Remember the whole Cambridge Analytica thing and the ability to manipulate people. It became a real thing and a real obsession. And that arguably overstates the impact of it and creates this sense that the Russians are there and almost all powerful and have the ability to manipulate American politics. When in this case, I think the actual evidence is much weaker. So it's an active measure which it doesn't necessarily have a huge impact on the election, on people's views, but it does have a much longer tail.

in terms of the kind of cultural, social, and political impact after the election, which maybe we'll get to, you know, when we get to the end of the series, in terms of what it means. So I think there's an interesting dichotomy there, isn't there? And I think it's worth summing up that this piece of the Russian sort of disorganized active measure, right, the siloed active measure, this was, I think, the least effective component of what the Russians did in 2016. But the hack and leak Yeah, it's much more significant. Is much more significant. And by October of 2016, the Trump campaign is beginning to signal

that another dump of information is coming. The hack and leak is really, unlike the social media piece, is going to be really integrated into the kind of the TikTok, the chronology of events in the run-up to the election. And of course, once again, Gordon, it's Roger Stone.

Trump sort of campaign advisor who is in the middle of the chaos because on Sunday, October 2nd at 12.52 a.m., I think in Trump world, you have to tweet in the middle of the night. It's important that important tweets go out. But I thought conservatives are up early, though. Stone's up. He got up at midnight. He got up at midnight. No, he's not, he didn't stay up late. He got up early, Gordon. Oh, he got up really early. He got up at 1245. But he's tweeting. That's the point. He's tweeting. And he tweets, Wednesday. at Hillary Clinton is done, hashtag WikiLeaks. So again, we have Roger Stone's got this weird foredology of what Julian Assange is up to. Then later that day, Stone appears on the show of Info Wars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Did Alex Jones, did he ever break into the UK market, Gordon? I think I'm aware of Alex Jones, but I don't think he was as big over here.

I think it's fair to say. Okay. And Stone says, you know, I'm assured the mother load is coming on Wednesday. says the release will be devastating. Also says that Assange was scared that the globalists and the Clintonites are trying to figure out how to kill him. And then he puts out more tweets on the 3rd of October saying that the payload is coming. The following day, Stone is contacted by a senior Trump campaign official who wants to know what on earth WikiLeaks is planning. And Stone writes back that Julian Assange is going to release a load every week going forward.

Donald Trump Jr. had intermittently been in private contact with WikiLeaks. And we should say for those listeners who want to go deeper into some of the campaign connections with WikiLeaks and the Russians and the kind of whole Trump-Russia nexus, what's fact and what's fiction, do go and check out our mini-series for club members on this. And you can join at the rest is classified.com. but Donald Trump Jr., who's on again, on and off again in private contact with WikiLeaks, he wants to know more about what Stone knows. Now, a couple weeks earlier on September 20th, WikiLeaks's Twitter account had actually sent Donald Trump Jr.

a private message asking him about a new election blog called PutinTrump.org. I wonder if that website is still up, that had been created by a political action committee that had been funded by an internet entrepreneur. And Donald Trump Jr. replies. He says, off the record, I don't know who that is, but I'll ask around. And then he emails Steve Bannon, campaign advisor, Jared Kushner, Killionk, Kalyant Conway, who's another advisor about his exchange with WikiLeaks. So on the 3rd of October, WikiLeaks reaches out to Donald Trump Jr. again with a private request. It says, hi, it'd be great if you guys could comment on or push this story. And then WikiLeaks attaches an article alleging, I think falsely, that Clinton had once suggested she wanted to, quote, just drone Assange.

And then Donald Trump Jr. says, already did that earlier today. It's amazing what she can get away with. And then a couple minutes later, Donald Trump Jr. is, you know, he's kind of trying to figure out what's going on with WikiLeaks. He messages WikiLeaks referring to the Stone tweet and says, what's behind this Wednesday leak, I keep reading about. And so basically what we have is that Trump campaign realizing that a new and potentially very damaging leak is coming that could be fodder that they could use against the Clinton campaign. So there, David, let's stop as this dramatic election campaign in 2016 reaches its final stages, looking incredibly tight Trump versus Clinton with the Russians lurking in the background. and we'll see in the final stages what the Russians get up to and how the US national security community responds. And a reminder, of course, you can listen to that episode right now

if you're a club member, join at the rest isclassified.com and you'll also get access to that bonus series. But otherwise, we'll 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, remember, 988, Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline.

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