We also wrote that after the Cold War and up until 2016, Russian intelligence efforts focused on undermining US democracy and on collecting intelligence on candidate positions from their campaigns. I know from encounters with foreign intelligence services and governments around the world that both our friends and our adversaries take careful note of every word candidates say. Of course, our adversaries will look for an advantage, an indication of what the candidates are saying behind closed doors, and they understand that campaigns and political parties are softer targets than presidential administrations are later.
In 2012, Russia introduced a powerful new platform for broadcasting anti-American sentiment inside the United States. The Kremlin-funded television network Russia Today had been on the air during the 2008 election, but its name and its coverage were too “on the nose,” too obvious, and no one had watched it. In 2009, it rebranded itself as “RT” and positioned itself as an alternative to CNN and Fox News, similar to what Al Jazeera did at the time. It mostly ran straight news, not very different from what was offered by the mainstream media, just with a slightly funky flavor and an occasional story promoting Russian interests. Some pro-Russian policy stories were more subtle than others. Its series warning of the environmental dangers of fracking was a well-masked campaign, designed to protect Russian oil exports from increased US production of oil and natural gas. By contrast, RT’s series backing the Syrian regime was more obvious. By the time of the 2012 election it had cultivated viewership and raised its social media presence, with 450,000 subscribers on YouTube averaging one million views a day—more than any other network. By then it was well positioned to run a classic Soviet-era propaganda campaign on its massive American audience.
We didn’t take any steps to counter Russian propaganda in 2012, but we did watch their efforts closely, and after the election, the US IC published a report describing how RT had portrayed the US election as “undemocratic” and had urged the public to “take this government back.” From August to November 2012, RT ran stories on election fraud and voting machine vulnerabilities, alleging that the election results “cannot be trusted and do not reflect the popular will.” RT hosted, advertised, and broadcast third-party candidate debates, and then ran stories supporting the third-party political agendas. Supporting those candidates wasn’t inherently un-American at all, but RT’s pretense was that “the two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a sham.” In the final days before the election, RT ran a documentary on the Occupy Wall Street movement, linking the political resistance of the Occupy movement to its own frequent call to “take this government back.” After President Obama won reelection, RT began running a documentary called Cultures of Protest, about violent political resistance.
How Russia used RT during the 2012 election cycle wasn’t illegal, and in fact wasn’t all that different from how the CIA had employed Radio Free Europe in the 1950s and 1960s to broadcast information into Eastern Europe in an attempt to undermine the Communist regimes behind the Iron Curtain. I would be remiss if I glossed over well-documented US intelligence efforts to interfere with many foreign elections. In December 2016, Carnegie Mellon researcher Dov Levin published his research indicating the United States had intervened in eighty-one elections between 1946 and 2000, making us, by his count, the most prolific election interferer in the world during that period. I can’t verify or refute many of his claims, but we’ve declassified some of the examples he cites—for instance, the CIA’s work in Chile in the 1960s. Levin doesn’t include our non-election attempts at regime change, like the successful 1953 Iranian coup or the unsuccessful 1962 Bay of Pigs invasion. Nor does he count the case of two former CIA officers, under orders from the Nixon White House in 1972, breaking into a room in the Watergate Hotel to steal secrets from the Democratic National Committee and Nixon’s election opponent, thereby interfering in our own election. In the aftermath of Watergate, the Church Committee uncovered many other events that constituted intelligence abuses or overreach. In the aftermath of the Church Committee’s report, new laws and executive orders were put in place to prevent the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies from spying on US persons, infiltrating US political organizations, and assassinating foreign leaders.
Of course, the new laws didn’t stop US policy makers from—legally—using information operations, covert action, and even full-scale military conflict to bring about regime changes around the world, some of which I was involved in, such as the Iraq invasion in 2003. Looking back, I’ve always—at least since I’ve been in positions to know what was happening and why—viewed our attempts to influence developments in other countries as doing what our policy makers thought was best for the oppressed citizens of those nations, and then, secondarily, what was best for US interests. I believed we’ve been motivated by a commitment to spread liberal, democratic values throughout the world, and that, I think, has led me to see our efforts as ethical. In other words, simplistically, I always viewed us as the “good guys,” with at least noble intentions.
As someone whose fingerprints were on the faulty National Intelligence Estimate that led the United States to invade Iraq, I certainly knew we were fallible, and as someone who’d helped fight the forces of chaos unleashed after we’d removed Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi from power, I was well aware that the actions we took from initial good intentions could have horrific unintended consequences. Looking back now, I may have been more than a bit Pollyannaish—being overly generous in my assessment of our motives, intent, and ideals—but that’s how I thought about them then, and while I can reassess views I held earlier in life, I don’t get to remake my decisions after seeing how they turned out. I can only learn from my choices and keep moving forward. And here’s the hard truth: I can’t—and we as a nation can’t—let concerns about historical hypocrisy stop us from facing the facts in front of us now. That’s particularly true about confronting what happened in the 2016 election.
The US Intelligence Community first started noticing Russian activity around the election after Clinton announced her candidacy in April 2015. This was not a coincidence. For RT, 2015 was already a banner year. They’d gleefully covered the Black Lives Matter protests, incidents of police shootings, and the March 12 shooting of two police officers by a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri, as revenge for the police shooting of a young black man in Ferguson in 2014. They’d covered US income-inequality issues and encouraged minimum-wage workers to strike, and were set to cover the fast-food worker “walk off the job” rally across the nation on April 15. Those stories fit perfectly in RT’s wheelhouse. They were provocative and drew viewers with dramatic photos and clickbait headlines. They were about concrete issues that split the American public and deepened socioeconomic divisions. And they were mainstream enough to hide the fact that they served to support the Kremlin’s agenda.
They were also perfect for the moment, as RT was helping to frame issues for the presidential election in a way that, no matter which side of an issue a candidate came down on, some segment of the American electorate would feel anger and resentment. RT and Russian leaders—up to and including Vladimir Putin—had learned a lot from RT’s work in the 2012 presidential campaign.
Of course, Clinton’s candidacy was a given long before she made her formal announcement, but RT wasn’t waiting for that—or those of her rivals—to get up to speed before they prepared the political battlefield. On April 10—two days before Clinton announced—they ran an online story with the lead “Hillary Clinton, a former US secretary of state (and senator, and First Lady), will reportedly announce her 2016 presidential run Sunday via social media. Expect these recent Clinton scandals to surface again (and again) for the duration of her candidacy.” What followed was a primer on how to attack Hillary Clinton, with subheadlines for each section: “State Department emails,” “Benghazi attacks,” “Diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks,” “The Clinton Foundation dono
rs,” and “Support for Iraq war, Patriot Act, bank bailouts.” Each section laid out the relevant issue and how it made Clinton vulnerable. Each contained an embedded video clip of her that played to her disadvantage, and each linked to previous RT stories with greater detail.
The first section, on her State Department emails, succinctly made this case against her:
The latest Clinton controversy stems from her use of a private email account and server—which was found to be insecure for at least three months—to conduct official business as US secretary of state. Clinton has said she used her private email account—just as past secretaries of state have done—as a matter of convenience. Then just over a week ago, it was revealed that Clinton used both her Blackberry [sic] and an iPad to email State Department employees from her private account and server.
US Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who heads the House Select Committee on Benghazi, issued a subpoena for the private server that hosted Clinton’s emails as the congressional panel investigates the 2012 attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Late last month, he announced that Clinton had failed to respond to the subpoena and had wiped her server clean. In response, the Benghazi committee has formally asked Clinton to answer questions about the server during an in-person, transcribed interview before May 1.
Clinton has said that she deleted 30,000 of about 60,000 emails exchanged during her four years as secretary of state because they were “personal in nature,” but that she turned all of her work-related emails over to the State Department.
Within those seven sentences, RT perfectly framed the issue that would haunt Clinton more than any other over the next eighteen months, in precisely the way that the Republican candidates would use it against her—with the exception of one aspect I’ll get to in a moment that wasn’t yet public—and it linked to seven other related RT stories.
Despite RT’s labeling the emails as “the latest Clinton controversy,” the issue had in fact dogged her since she’d resigned as secretary of state in February 2013. Just a month later, a Romanian hacker with the moniker “Guccifer” published Clinton’s email address at the domain “clintonemail.com” and revealed that she’d used it almost exclusively for her duties as secretary of state. The “new” factor in 2016 was that the House Select Committee on Benghazi had discovered that the State Department didn’t have a record of all of Clinton’s official emails. The committee demanded access to what was missing. Answering public allegations of impropriety from committee members, Clinton tweeted that her attorneys had given all work-related emails from her private server to the State Department—minus, of course, any emails deemed “personal,” which her attorneys had deleted—and that she’d asked State to release the emails to Congress. The State Department determined that it needed to conduct a classification review before doing so and that it would take some time to complete—probably not until January 2016. Almost immediately, the Benghazi Committee subpoenaed all of her emails relating to their investigation, furious that she’d let her attorneys delete any emails without an outside review. They insinuated that she could have deleted incriminating emails regarding Benghazi along with those about her daughter’s wedding. The committee subpoena was followed quickly by a court order for the State Department to publish reviewed emails on a rolling basis—a new batch every thirty days. This order was unfortunate, both for Clinton and for the State Department, as it ensured it would continually provide fresh news for the media to discuss through the entire election cycle.
Personally, I was a bit baffled by the whole situation—first and foremost, that any committee was still investigating the Benghazi attack two and a half years after the event and after Matt Olsen and I had so painstakingly briefed them and rebriefed them on what had happened that night in Libya. I was deeply saddened by the loss of Chris Stevens and the three other Americans, but in the aftermath, we’d been as open as possible with intelligence assessments, and by 2015, the committee was generating all the controversies it was investigating. At the same time, I was surprised to learn that Hillary had a private server in her basement. People have asked me, “How could you not know?” Well, it’s not a question that comes up, and I can’t recall ever asking it of any other Cabinet secretaries. Hillary had used the server for Clinton Foundation work before she became secretary of state, so I can understand how she simply may have never thought twice about the matter. Based on my own life experience, it never would have occurred to me to put a server in my basement. Of course, for Russia and for Secretary Clinton’s political opponents, that was precisely the point.
The net effect of the seven “scandals” published by RT was that Clinton was portrayed as aloof, selfish, entitled, and corrupt; a member of an overly educated, liberal elite who couldn’t relate to and didn’t care about Middle Americans and their problems; someone who believed the law and the rules didn’t apply to her, who felt she was entitled to the presidency, and who would stop at nothing—whatever it took to get elected. Of course, it was the same narrative her political opponents had been using against her for twenty years or longer, but RT, the Russians, and Putin had sharpened it to a fine point and built the infrastructure to impale her with it.
RT partnered with Radio Sputnik to amplify its stories in another broadcast medium, on the web, and in social media, and backing up the overt stories was an army of secret Russian social media trolls who, years earlier, had established fake accounts with stolen pictures and fictional biographic data, each with a history of posting and accumulating “friends.” As RT went live with its traditional anti-American propaganda and newly created anti-Clinton campaign, the covert Russian trolls began reposting RT videos and stories—and similar articles from mainstream media—on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. On Twitter they’d learned to automate their work, using bots to retweet unflattering stories millions of times, flooding the system to make anti-Clinton stories “trend.” After the work the Russian troll army had done during the Russian annexation of Crimea, the military intrusions into eastern Ukraine, and the Ukrainian elections of 2014, this was a “battle-hardened” battalion that understood its mission space and was already running at its peak.
Meanwhile, Russia’s spy agencies also got involved, particularly in the cyber realm. They ran both spear-phishing and brute-force hacking operations, gaining access to the IT systems of think tanks, lobbying groups, both national parties, primary campaigns in both parties, and some state election networks and voter registration databases. By July 2015, they had penetrated the Democratic National Committee’s systems, and they maintained that access for nearly a year, playing off political vulnerabilities they discovered and feeding secrets to RT, Sputnik, and the trolls.
Then, just as Clinton’s campaign was getting some traction, her candidacy took a serious blow, from my office, of all places. The State Department inspector general had identified a sampling of forty emails sent or received through Clinton’s private server to further investigate. Recognizing it was not the ultimate authority to determine classification, the State Department IG’s office had given the emails to IC inspector general Chuck McCullough to review. I’m sure this was very close to the last thing in which Chuck wanted to get involved, but he had a professional obligation, and he led the review. On July 23, he reported that four of the forty emails were classified, and he referred the case to the FBI for investigation. Of course, little did we know that would be the start of an ordeal that would continue through Election Day and beyond. At the time, it was just Chuck following the facts and reporting a hard truth.
Secretary Clinton responded to media questions about classified emails passing through her home server the same way she’d responded to questions about why she’d used a personal email for government business, why she’d had her own server at her house in the first place, and why her attorneys had deleted thirty thousand emails deemed to be “personal” w
ithout someone from outside her circle reviewing them. She simply asserted there was no scandal and tried to move on. In this case, she insisted that she hadn’t sent or received any classified emails through her server, which may be what she thought at the time. Unfortunately, this only served to reinforce the narrative the Russians had established, and to her visible frustration, RT and Sputnik, along with the mainstream outlets, continued to lambast her. I remembered the note she’d sent to me four years earlier after the Diane Sawyer flap over “London,” the one reading “As a longtime observer—and sometimes victim—of the press ‘gotcha game,’ don’t let the First Amendment get you down! All the best, Hillary.” I’m sure she could have used a similar note just about then, but my official position prevented me from reciprocating with that kind of support to any political candidate.
In August she finally told a press conference that she’d ultimately been responsible for determining which emails to delete, and so she had made the decision. With cameras still rolling, she walked off, yelling over her shoulder to the assembled media, “Nobody talks to me about it other than you guys.” Russian trolls pushed the clip, writing that everyday people wanted to talk to Clinton about the emails, but she was sequestered in her ivory tower. In September, she posted on Facebook, “Yes, I should have used two email addresses, one for personal matters and one for my work at the State Department. Not doing so was a mistake. I’m sorry about it, and I take full responsibility.” When just a few weeks later on NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked her about a newly released email, she referred to the whole thing as “another conspiracy theory.”
Facts and Fears Page 41