As our teams briefed both candidates in separate sessions, I participated in the first formal meeting between the Obama administration and the transition teams, led by chief of staff Denis McDonough at the White House. I was struck by how sober, professional, courteous, and civil the conversation was. It was so different—both substantively and tonally—from what the campaigns were saying in public, particularly Mr. Trump.
In August, he tweeted out Russian conspiracy theories such as: “Many people are saying that the Iranians killed the scientist who helped the United States because of Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails.” He implied that if Clinton was elected, the only way to prevent her from taking everyone’s guns would be to shoot her: “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.” He repeated another absurd conspiracy theory about President Obama: “He is the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder of ISIS, OK? He’s the founder. He founded ISIS and I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.” After the Russians published fake medical records claiming Clinton suffered from dementia, he suggested she was hiding something and that they should both release their medical records, tweeting: “I have no problem in doing so! Hillary?” And as he fell further behind in the polls, he began repeating the phrase the Russians had already been pushing: “The election’s going to be rigged.”
In the midst of all this, a new source of turmoil erupted in the Trump campaign, as reports surfaced that campaign chairman Paul Manafort had connections to former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych—the corrupt pro-Russian official who had fled to Russia in 2014 as protesters overwhelmed Kiev. Manafort had received millions of dollars for supporting Yanukovych’s interests in Russia and in the United States. Even as the campaign was taking a downturn, Manafort’s presence exposed a real vulnerability for Trump. Then, on August 14, the New York Times published a ledger revealing just how much Manafort had received. So four days later, Mr. Trump hired Steve Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News, as his new campaign manager and pushed Manafort out. Breitbart was known for its virulent attacks on Clinton and for promoting conspiracy theories, and Bannon publicly promised to stop trying to bring Trump to heel in a traditional campaign. He would, instead, unleash him.
At the same time, RT began even more aggressively advancing conspiracy theories originating with the social media troll army. They posted a twenty-eight-minute video interview with Julian Assange titled “Do WikiLeaks Have the Email That’ll Put Clinton in Prison?” RT’s teaser for the video read “Afshin Rattansi goes underground with Julian Assange. We talk to the founder of WikiLeaks about how his recent DNC leaks have no connection to Russia. Plus what are Hillary Clinton’s connections to Islamic State, Saudi Arabia and Russia?” It released what would become its most popular Clinton video, with more than nine million views across all social media platforms: “How 100% of Clintons’ 2015 ‘Charity’ Went to Themselves.” This was particularly galling to Clinton’s campaign, as it pulled data from her 2015 tax filings, which showed the Clintons had contributed one million dollars to the Clinton Family Foundation—a legitimate vehicle for their personal charitable giving that was completely separate from the Clinton Foundation. In contrast, Mr. Trump continued to refuse to release any of his tax returns. The heated political rhetoric had become unlike anything I’d ever seen.
I’d like to be able to say the IC was shielded from all of this, but the Intelligence Community is a microcosm of American society, susceptible to the same doubts and anxieties as everyone else. As DNI, I continued to carve out time to meet with the workforce, and as the summer passed, I began to hear concerns about what would happen on Inauguration Day. Most were worried about Mr. Trump’s erratic statements and tweets; in addition to his barrage of political attacks on his opponent, he’d asserted that he’d bring back waterboarding, that he’d authorize killing family members of the Islamic State, and that he thought letting Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia build nuclear weapons might be a good idea. At the same time, there were many members of the IC who were legitimately angry that Secretary Clinton had so carelessly mishandled classified information, putting sources and methods in jeopardy, and they didn’t understand how she could become president after she’d done something that likely would have cost them their clearances and jobs. I tried to reassure people individually, but felt that perhaps the entire community needed to hear from me.
On September 7, in a speech to a joint conference of the IC’s two biggest industry associations, I first laid out my “litany of doom” on the vast array of threats we were facing around the world. I then noted the obvious: “With all this as a backdrop, I think it makes a lot of people nervous that with an election cycle that’s been ‘sportier’ than we’re used to, we’ll drop a new president with new national security leaders into this situation—in 135 days, but who’s counting?” That drew a small laugh. I went on, “I know a lot of people have been feeling uncertainty about what will happen with this presidential transition. There’s been a lot of ‘catastrophizing,’ if I can use that term, in the 24-hour news cycle, and of course, on social media. So, I’m here with a message. It’ll be okay.” I assured them that that would be the case because “our nation has a great legacy of orderly transition and power, going back to George Washington retiring in 1797, when he turned the presidency over to John Adams. I remember it well.” I then spoke about the actual political process, explaining how the IC was briefing the candidates, and reminded them that in times of national transition, the US Intelligence Community was “a pillar of stability.”
Apparently “It’ll be okay” was a message that the whole nation needed to hear. By that evening that short clip from my speech was airing on the cable news networks, and commentators were stealing my word to lament their own “catastrophizing.” The next morning, papers published my reassuring phrase, and Vital Speeches of the Day included the speech in their November issue, published a few days before the election. It felt good to—for once—be the calming voice in the room. I wanted to ask the New York Times if I was still “perfect for the North Koreans.”
Lost in that same news cycle was an interview Mr. Trump gave on RT. Asked about the possibility that Russia was behind the election interference, Trump responded, “Who knows? But I think that it’s pretty unlikely.”
My calm words on September 7 belied what I was saying and doing behind secure doors. As I believe this chapter shows, the Russians had been actively attacking our election process for a long time, and I—along with the Intelligence Community I was charged to lead—had merely been watching and following along. But as summer led into fall, I’d begun to meet with a small group of national security leaders that included the CIA director, secretary of state, secretary of defense, attorney general, FBI director, homeland security secretary, and a few key White House staff. Collectively, we could draw on the full scope of our national capabilities to understand what was happening, and we all agreed that Russia was behind an unprecedented, aggressive, multifaceted influence campaign, using cyber theft and cyber espionage, propaganda across the broadcast spectrum and all of the largest social media platforms, and an influx of Russian money at least for buying advertisements, perhaps even laundered and funneled into campaigns. The Russians had been probing state and local election IT systems in nearly half the states—that we knew about—and although we saw no evidence of manipulation or exfiltration, they’d accessed and viewed voter registration databases. Jeh Johnson had offered DHS assistance in securing state election systems, but for whatever reason, several states refused his help.
We didn’t see any hard evidence of political collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, but as I said at the time, my dashboard warning lights were all lit. We knew there had been meetings between the two, and by A
ugust, both the Russians and the Trump campaign were, in parallel, pushing conspiracy theories against Secretary Clinton with three identical themes: she was corrupt, she was physically and mentally unwell, and she had ties to Islamic extremism.
Finally, we all agreed this kind of effort could only be approved at the highest levels of the Russian government, and by September, we knew Putin was personally involved. While others thought a publicity blitz could just feed the fire rather than douse it, Jeh and I felt strongly that we should inform the electorate about the full extent of what was happening. In early September, we brought our concerns and our classified evidence to the White House for a policy decision. I don’t think any single piece of what the Russians were doing was a surprise to the president and NSC members outside our small group, but once all the evidence was put together, the scale and scope of the Russian interference in the election—including classified evidence I can’t discuss—were very disturbing. The Russians had been working for decades to undermine US democracy and the US government, but by August 2016, the president of Russia was directing intelligence and propaganda efforts specifically to get the Republican Party nominee elected and, in case that failed, to undermine the Democratic Party nominee’s ability to govern.
President Obama seemed convinced by the intelligence we presented but felt he should carefully consider his involvement with exposing the Russian interference. He was, after all, a politician who had endorsed the Democratic Party nominee, and he didn’t want to be seen as using the Office of the President to influence the outcome. He asked Denis to approach congressional leaders to elicit support for a bipartisan congressional statement acknowledging and condemning the interference, and he confronted Putin directly in person, telling him to stop the interference at risk of serious consequences.
Days later the Republicans, led by Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said they would not support a bipartisan statement that might hurt their nominee for president. I was disappointed but not surprised. It seemed they had decided by then that they didn’t care who their nominee was, how he got elected, or what effects having a foreign power influence our election would have on the nation, as long as they won. Jeh and I continued to argue the case for informing the nation. President Obama said he’d considered his options and felt that if he acted publicly, it could serve to amplify the Russians’ message and would give them more fodder to undermine Clinton’s authority as president later. I inferred that in the end, he trusted the electorate to see through the conspiracy theories and propaganda, and on Election Day, to do the right thing.
Jeh and I felt that, however unwilling President Obama was to “put his thumb on the scale of the election,” Russian president Putin wasn’t concerned with fair play, and we weren’t as confident the electorate would, on its own, realize what was happening. There were a lot of angry and frustrated people out there, and this was, after all, the same electorate that had been showing signs of political and social instability for years, the same electorate that had bought into Jade Helm conspiracies, and as the fall went on, the same electorate that seemed to believe crazy conspiracy theories originating from Russia.
On September 9, while campaigning in New York, Secretary Clinton was diagnosed with pneumonia. Not wanting to reveal that she was sick—which could give conspiracy theorists an opening to discuss her health again—she’d kept her condition private and pressed on with her schedule. Two days later, at a 9/11 commemoration ceremony, she collapsed and had to be helped into her car. Someone recorded cell-phone video as her Secret Service detail lifted her off her feet to help her into the car. The Russians—and every other troll on the internet—dissected the video as if it were as momentous as the Zapruder film of President Kennedy’s assassination, and refused to accept the campaign’s statement a few hours later that she was “severely dehydrated.” The Russians and Breitbart filled the gap with screaming headlines—Why has the Clinton campaign been silent for hours? When Clinton did reappear later that day, they claimed that she was actually in a coma, and the person appearing in public was a body double. They manipulated pictures to create differences between Clinton’s wardrobe precollapse and postcollapse.
Just as those rumors were racing around Facebook and Twitter, amplified by Russian bots, a second surreptitiously recorded tape appeared on the internet. On September 10—the day between her pneumonia diagnosis and collapse—someone recorded Secretary Clinton at a fund-raising event saying, to laughter and applause, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ . . . They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” Her comments played perfectly into the narrative that she was an elitist. Her response to the leaked tape only made the situation worse: “I regret saying ‘half.’ That was wrong.” RT bounced between the two stories, broadcasting and posting “Democrats and Republicans are now questioning what other health conditions Clinton may be hiding,” and then cutting to tweets of people reacting to #basketofdeplorables.
Considering that neither President Obama nor Congress was going to address the Russian interference directly, Jeh and I felt that, not only was saying something the right thing to do, but if we did not disclose the information we had, there’d be hell to pay later. We proposed to the small NSC group that we issue a joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the DNI, officially alerting the electorate to Russian activities. The group—and President Obama—assented, and Jeh and I had our staffs carefully push the boundaries of what we could say in an unclassified statement, ensuring that it addressed only the Russian activities and couldn’t be misconstrued as a government accusation against, or endorsement of, either campaign. We discussed whether we should name Putin as personally directing the effort, and decided not to be quite so specific. We settled on attributing the attacks to “Russia’s senior-most officials.”
The short statement, which was issued on October 7, led with the following paragraph:
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.
Initial media reports called our joint statement “stunning.” And then, within an hour of its being published, two other stories broke: WikiLeaks dumped a massive and controversial collection of emails belonging to Clinton campaign chief of staff John Podesta, and the Washington Post released a leaked video from 2005 of Donald Trump bragging about sexual assaults to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush. On tape, Trump says, “Yeah, that’s her, with the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” Bush interjects, “Whatever you want.” Trump clarifies, “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” With these scandals exploding, the nation didn’t have the attention span to consider our carefully worded press release. Our warning on Russian interference was so effectively buried that, in December, the national consensus held that the Intelligence Community and DHS had failed to provide any warning about the Russians before the election.
Just as Clinton’s response to the “basket of deplorables” tape made her situation worse, Trump’s response to the Access Hollywood tape exacerbated the scan
dal. Instead of admitting that bragging about sexual assaults was wrong, he dismissed his behavior as “locker-room banter,” saying he’d “heard much worse” from former president Bill Clinton on the golf course. The right-wing media and the Russians—retweeted by the most ardent Trump supporters—argued that Secretary Clinton was culpable for her silence after her husband’s indiscretions. By now I had begun to wonder if Mr. Trump had meant it literally when he’d said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
At the presidential debate two days later, Trump paced behind Clinton, glaring at her whenever she was speaking. On camera, he looked the part of a predator. Afterward, at rallies, he dismissed the growing number of women coming forward with allegations of sexual assault, specifically naming women he alleged weren’t attractive enough to assault. On October 14, he described standing behind Hillary Clinton at the presidential debate, remarking, “And when she walked in front of me, believe me, I wasn’t impressed.” Outside his base, his popularity was plummeting.
At the same time, the leaked Podesta emails were hurting the Clinton campaign. The Russians had gained access to Podesta’s account in March, when they’d faked a Google Alert that gave him a link to open and then prompted him to enter his login and password. Once they had his login information, they’d passively watched his email traffic until a very late stage of the general election campaign, when they assessed it was the optimal time to release his messages, again through WikiLeaks. The most damaging, on its face, was from Donna Brazile, who had replaced Debbie Wasserman Schultz as Democratic Party chair. In the email, Brazile appeared to leak a planned question to Podesta ahead of the CNN-hosted presidential debate; Secretary Clinton had later received a similar question at the debate. Russian trolls—with months of advance notice to figure out how to maximize the damage from the emails—posted about “coded language” in Podesta’s emails that proved their favorite conspiracy theories, including Clinton’s clandestine support for the Islamic State. They even used the opportunity to revive the bizarre claim that Clinton and Podesta were running a child-sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria. On October 10, Trump announced at a rally, “I love WikiLeaks!”
Facts and Fears Page 45