To be sure, not every slight and slander against Clinton posted on the internet came from Russia, but Russia egged on anyone in its sphere of influence who would bash her, particularly the field of seventeen Republican candidates. To use a sports analogy, Putin’s attitude through the fall of 2015 was much like that of a University of Michigan football fan on a weekend the Wolverines don’t have a game—cheering for whoever was playing Ohio State. Up until December 2015, Putin and Russia simply pulled for whoever was bashing Hillary Clinton. RT and Sputnik ran articles covering the GOP debates and highlighted any GOP candidate who took a swipe at her, no matter who that was. At the same time, the troll army continued to promote all sorts of conspiracy theories, including some about Clinton’s health, which had been circulating since 2012, when, sick with the flu, she’d fainted, fallen, and suffered a concussion, which led to a blood clot near her brain and hospitalization. The trolls claimed that she had a brain tumor, repeated strokes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dysphasia, epilepsy, a traumatic brain injury, lupus, and/or HIV. I imagine that someone in St. Petersburg, where most of them were working, received a performance bonus for coming up with the story that Clinton was being slowly and repeatedly poisoned by Russian agents.
I don’t want to leave the impression that RT and Sputnik were focused only on bashing Clinton. They would have lost their television viewership and social media followers if they didn’t produce some other content, and while Putin had a personal vendetta against Clinton, Russia’s primary goal still was to breed distrust of the US government. RT’s coverage of Clinton’s eight-hour testimony before the House Benghazi Committee on October 28, 2015, is illustrative of how they accomplished both. In one typical RT clip, posted on YouTube under the headline “Hillary Clinton Grilled in Marathon Benghazi Hearing,” the anchor leads into the story, stating the hearing was part of “a probe by a select bipartisan committee into what was known by Clinton ahead of a terrorist attack on September 11, 2012, at the US embassy in Libya, an attack that led to the murders of US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.” Having alluded to the conspiracy theory that Clinton knew about the attack beforehand, the clip cuts to a reporter in the Capitol quoting committee chairman Trey Gowdy, who said the hearing with Clinton was necessary because previous investigations were “not thorough enough.” So, before getting to any actual video of the hearing itself, RT voiced the most damaging allegation against Clinton and quoted a congressional leader alleging that the seven previous congressional investigations as well as an FBI investigation were all conducted improperly—thus providing a fairly compelling reason for Americans to question the competence of their government.
The reporter continues, “Throughout the day, Republicans in the committee grilled Secretary Clinton on why more wasn’t done to provide the necessary security for Ambassador Stevens in Libya prior to the attack that resulted in his death. Now, the irony of this is, when looking at congressional votes, it was actually the Republican-controlled House that voted to cut funding to foreign embassies, leading up to the September 11, 2012 attack.” Again, it raises an allegation against Clinton, and another at congressional dysfunction.
Next, the piece reports that the hearing had a heavy focus on the Clinton emails, “the ones that have been recovered from the secretary’s private server, particularly those that show discrepancies.” The clip cuts to Tea Party Republican representative Jim Jordan questioning Clinton: “You’re looking at an email you sent to your family. Here’s what you said. At 11:00 that night—approximately one hour after you told the American people it was a video, you said to your family, ‘Two officers were killed today in Benghazi by an al-Qaida–like group.’ You tell the American people one thing; you tell your family an entirely different story.” RT didn’t run either Jordan’s question or Clinton’s answer, just the preceding allegation. The clip simply shows a US representative alleging that Clinton had lied and continued to lie. The reporter observes that was just “one example” of the “nitpicking” of emails, and that the burden was on Republicans to show this wasn’t just a “witch hunt” against the Democratic front-runner for president. Again, RT has it both ways, attacking Clinton personally and the institution of Congress generally.
Finally, the clip shows Secretary Clinton as a witness. For eight hours she had answered questions in a cool, calm, collected—some mainstream outlets even described it as “presidential”—manner, never breaking composure, which should have shut down any questions about her health and stamina, but, of course, didn’t. Showing any of that footage might have undercut Congress but helped Clinton. Instead, RT aired a thirty-second video clip of Clinton smiling awkwardly while Gowdy and Democratic representative Elijah Cummings, the ranking member, incomprehensibly yell at and over each other about the House rules for releasing transcripts of other hearings. The exchange all too vividly demonstrates why nothing gets done in Washington, and Clinton’s expression of discomfort leads the viewer to imagine her as president, still unable to get Democrats and Republicans to work together.
The clip aired on RT, and audio segments on Sputnik. Trolls could link to RT’s YouTube channel, targeting either liberals or conservatives with “This is why nothing gets done in Washington,” or “This is the truth about Hillary—she’s been lying to us this whole time,” depending on which demographic their social network and followers were composed of and how Russia wanted to manipulate them.
The US Intelligence Community knew at least as early as 2015 that the Russians had a collaboration of forces working around the clock—literally in shifts—to post and manipulate stories against the US government and Hillary Clinton. We told policy makers, but we didn’t have any mechanism to counter RT and Sputnik. We’d been successful in building platforms for being transparent with the American public about US intelligence work, but we didn’t have a viable, credible path to reveal to the electorate how Russian intelligence and propaganda were attempting to manipulate them. I was less concerned that they’d picked a particular candidate to attack than that they were so aggressively engaging with the American public and doing so with impunity.
By December, the Russian strategy of merely favoring whoever was bashing Clinton changed, as Moscow developed a clear favorite. Donald Trump had a long history of flirting with politics before the 2016 election, briefly running a campaign as the Reform Party candidate in 2000 and publicly discussing running in 1988, 2004, and 2012, but he was probably better known as a real estate developer and reality TV host when he entered the race in June 2015. His success as a businessman was somewhat mixed. He’d developed a series of structures around the world that bore his name, most notably Trump Tower in New York, and also hotels, casinos, and golf clubs, but his experience was in managing massive sums of money, not large numbers of people, and his businesses had filed for bankruptcy six times. Since the turn of the century, he’d largely shifted his focus to licensing his name for others’ projects, and in 2011, he got into a spat with Forbes when they valued his brand at $200 million, and he asserted that his name really was worth $3 billion. Whatever the case, the Trump brand stood for wealth and success.
Since 2004, he’d starred in The Apprentice, a reality TV series wherein contestants competed for a one-year contract to run a Trump business at an annual salary of $250,000. The show ran for eleven seasons, until Trump declared for the presidency, when he brought his reality TV skills into the political arena: how to make an entrance, how to make headlines, and how to play to his core audience. When his campaign officially kicked off, he didn’t just “come out of nowhere,” as many people seemed to believe. Prior to the 2012 race he had engaged pollsters about his chances and how to position himself, including Kellyanne Conway, who would help lead his 2016 campaign down the final stretch. In fact, he already was positioning himself with the base of voters that would carry him in 2016 when, in March and April 2011, he’d publicly promoted the “birther” theory that alleged that President Obama had been bo
rn in Kenya and therefore wasn’t eligible to be president of the United States. The conspiracy snowballed with an allegation that Obama was secretly Muslim, a rumor that somehow coexisted in the same space with the claim that Obama’s Christian pastor in Chicago was putting anti-American and antiwhite ideas into the president’s head.
All of these anti-Obama conspiracy theories contained transparently racist sentiments, and the right-wing websites complained incessantly about how great the United States “used to be,” before progressive ideas about valuing diversity in race, gender, sexual orientation, and religious expression took hold—narratives that resonated with people whose jobs had evaporated in the recession. They’d lost everything, they were angry, and the belief that the situation wasn’t their fault—which it largely wasn’t—was appealing. They blamed the “educated, liberal elite” and believed that if Washington had exploited them before, it would do so again.
In 2011, Donald Trump understood this anger as well as anyone in American politics, and he knew that no one incited this anger more than Barack Obama, not because he was black—or not just because he was black—but because he was seen by some opponents as a smug, overly educated liberal, one who had graduated from Harvard Law School and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Obama was cerebral, seemed to never make a gut call on any decision, and then lectured the public about the decisions he had made and why he’d made them, which they perceived as condescending. When in April 2011 President Obama was heard on tape talking about people who “cling to guns and religion,” rural America heard that as mocking them behind their backs.
This is precisely whom Mr. Trump was appealing to when he tested the election waters in 2011, pushing the birther conspiracy and demanding that President Obama produce his “long-form” birth certificate. He was proclaiming that he’d heard the complaints about Obama and was going to reveal that this arrogant, smug, liberal black man was not the legitimate president. It was a bluff, of course, but one unlikely to be called, because Hawaii had been saying for three years that it would not publish the proof he was demanding. Then, in the final week of April 2011—terrible timing for Trump, who became Obama’s primary target at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—Hawaii finally released Obama’s birth certificate. The president announced the death of Osama bin Laden the next day, and national surveys the following week indicated that believers in the birther conspiracy had dropped from one in four Americans to just one in eight.
Many people have argued that being so publicly embarrassed by President Obama somehow prompted Mr. Trump to run for president in 2016. I think it more likely that he had already decided he wanted to run, and the humiliation at the Correspondents’ Dinner helped convince him of what the pollsters were telling him in 2011—that he wasn’t yet positioned to run for the 2012 election. So over the next four years, he used his money and fame to legitimize himself as a Republican, first and foremost convincing the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, to publicly accept his endorsement, and then working in fund-raising circles to get invited to speak at conservative conferences and to connect with people in the power center of the Republican Party. Still, no one took him seriously as a presidential contender for 2016, because having never been on a ballot, much less won an election, he simply didn’t seem to have the political bona fides.
However, Mr. Trump’s persona on The Apprentice appealed to the disadvantaged rural demographic of Americans in ways no one seemed to understand. He was portrayed as a businessman who worked hard, appreciated others who worked hard, and created opportunities for people who applied themselves and listened to his direction and advice. He was harsh with those who didn’t meet his expectations, but he also presented an avenue for someone to earn respect and success. The winner of the show didn’t get a prize or a handout, but a job—a well-paying, hard-earned job—and the opportunity to become just as successful as the show’s host. That, essentially, was his pitch to what would become his core base of voters, when on June 16, 2015, he descended an escalator into the lobby of Trump Tower with his glamorous wife, Melania, and announced that he was running for president.
He didn’t use big words or soaring rhetoric, he didn’t use GOP-approved talking points, and he didn’t discuss the political issues of the day. Instead, he said,
Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time. When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time. When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically. The United States has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.
To Washington insiders and political elites, this speech was a disaster, but to the people who would become Mr. Trump’s core supporters it demonstrated that, finally, a politician had arrived who was unafraid to voice their concerns. They heard him say: I see you and I hear you. I know what you’re going through, and it’s not your fault. You just don’t have opportunities to put in a hard day’s work and get paid for it. You don’t have a chance to improve your place in the world, and in fact, you’ve had the things your parents and grandparents built taken away from you before you could pass those things along to your kids. It’s not your fault, and if you elect me, I’ll put the country back to the way it was. This sentiment was perfectly captured by his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
The next lines of his speech put the liberal elites into a tizzy. He said, I believe very purposefully, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He then made his first specific campaign promise: “I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.” While this was racist and xenophobic, that’s not what made it appealing to his base. What they liked was that he was flouting convention and had upset—outraged—the progressive politicians and the liberal media. In 2017, David Brooks wrote in the New York Times, “Trump is not good at much, but he is wickedly good at sticking his thumb in the eye of the educated elites.”
Through the summer and fall, he made ever more outrageous and disrespectful statements and issued personal, playground-level insults, and, to the disbelief of other Republican candidates, steadily rode the wave to the top of the polls. He continued to traffic in conspiracy theories, telling a rally in November, “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” This was demonstrably false and had been debunked years before, but it played to suspicions his base harbored. At a rally on December 7, five days after the San Bernardino shooting, Mr. Trump read aloud a statement his campaign had issued that morning: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” The statement continued, “Our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.” A few days later, Trump said that, as president, he would target and kill the family members of anyone who belonged to the Islamic State.
His base ate it up, and the Russians took notice. In the January 2017
IC assessment, we noted that “social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015.” Of course, this was something we could only pinpoint in retrospect. By then, not only did Mr. Trump have a solid lead in the polls, but he’d just begun to promulgate one of Russia’s favorite conspiracy theories. Promoting the fiction that American Muslims had cheered on 9/11 and that they were secretly supporting jihad in the United States perfectly aligned with Russian interests. First and foremost, it served to divide Americans—not just Muslims and Christians but also conservatives and liberals. It stirred up long-running conspiracy theories about Clinton, particularly the rumors that she was sympathetic to extremist organizations and that her chief of staff, Huma Abedin, was tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. And inciting anti-Muslim sentiment in December 2015 was very timely for Russia’s foreign policy. The Russians had just started their Syria operations in September, and by December they were bombing Islamic State fighters and Syrian civilians alike. Horrific images of Muslim civilians fleeing the Syrian city of Aleppo had less of an impact in the United States if the leading Republican candidate was dehumanizing even American Muslims.
Three days after candidate Trump released his December 7 anti-Islam statement, former DIA director and retired lieutenant general Mike Flynn appeared in Moscow at a gala for RT. He was seated beside Putin at dinner and was paid forty-five thousand dollars to speak. I knew Mike well, and it boggled my mind that he would so knowingly compromise himself. He had more time deployed to war zones than most of his peers—which is saying something—and he understood the psychology of the terrorist threat perhaps better than anyone else. As General Stan McChrystal’s top intelligence officer in Afghanistan in 2010, Mike had published “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan,” a paper that described shortcomings in serving forces in the war zone. Mike decried the fact that the US forces in Afghanistan lacked fluency with the microdetails of the political and sociological dynamics in each Afghan village—something under his control as the guy on the ground, not something the national intelligence enterprise could influence. It reminded me of the quote from the Pogo comic strip: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Nonetheless, in 2011 I brought Mike to the ODNI specifically to work on how the bigger Intelligence Community engages our partners. That September, I helped pin a third star on his uniform, promoting him from major general to lieutenant general. He served in ODNI for less than a year before USD(I) Mike Vickers and I agreed to recommend that Leon Panetta appoint him as DIA director.
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