Soon it felt like every day there was a new revelation about the scope of the Russian operation, secret contacts with the Trump campaign, and an ongoing federal investigation digging into all of it. Congressional hearings began. The New York Times and the Washington Post competed to break scoop after scoop. I know I give the press a lot of grief, especially the Times, but this really was journalism at its finest.
I wasn’t just a former candidate trying to figure out why she lost. I was also a former Secretary of State worried about our nation’s national security. I couldn’t resist following every twist and turn of the story as closely as possible. I read everything I could get my hands on. I called friends in Washington and Silicon Valley and consulted with national security experts and seasoned Russia hands. I learned more than I ever imagined about algorithms, “content farms,” and search engine optimization. The voluminous file of clippings on my desk grew thicker and thicker. To keep it all straight, I started making lists of everything we knew about the unfolding scandal. At times, I felt like CIA agent Carrie Mathison on the TV show Homeland, desperately trying to get her arms around a sinister conspiracy and appearing more than a little frantic in the process.
That’s not a good look for anyone, let alone a former Secretary of State. So instead, let me channel a TV show that I grew up watching as a kid in Park Ridge: Dragnet. “Just the facts, ma’am.”
We’ve learned a lot about what the Russians did, what the Trump campaign did, and how the U.S. government responded. Let’s go through it step-by-step.
What the Feds Did
First, we’ve learned that the federal investigation started much earlier than was publicly known.
In late 2015, European intelligence agencies picked up contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence operatives. Communications intercepts by U.S. and allied intelligence seem to have continued throughout 2016. We know now that by July 2016, the FBI’s elite National Security Division in Washington had started investigating whether the Trump campaign and the Russians were coordinating to influence the election. They have also been looking into Paul Manafort’s financial ties to pro-Putin oligarchs.
In the summer of 2016, according to the Washington Post, the FBI convinced a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there was probable cause to believe that Trump advisor Carter Page was acting as a Russian agent, and they received a warrant to monitor his communications. The FBI also began investigating a dossier prepared by a well-respected former British spy that contained explosive and salacious allegations about compromising information the Russians had on Trump. The Intelligence Community took the dossier seriously enough that it briefed both President Obama and President Elect Trump on its contents before the inauguration. By the spring of 2017, a federal grand jury was issuing subpoenas to business associates of Michael Flynn, who resigned as Trump’s national security advisor after lying about his Russian contacts.
We’ve also learned a lot about how various parts of the U.S. government reacted differently to the intelligence coming in over the course of 2016 about ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The CIA seems to have been most alarmed and was also convinced that the Russian goal was to help Trump and hurt me. As early as August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan called his counterpart in Moscow and warned him to stop interfering in the election. Brennan also individually briefed the “gang of eight” congressional leaders and shared his concerns. This explains why Harry Reid sought to galvanize public attention on the threat in his August letter.
We’ve learned that the FBI took a different approach. They launched an investigation in July 2016, but Director Comey didn’t inform congressional leaders, was slower than Brennan to come to the conclusion that Russia’s goal was electing Trump, and refused to join other intelligence agencies in issuing a joint statement on October 7 because he didn’t want to interfere close to an election—something that certainly didn’t stop him when it came to trumpeting news about the investigation into my emails. Sources within the FBI also convinced the New York Times to run a story saying they saw “no clear link to Russia,” countering Franklin Foer’s scoop in Slate about unusual computer traffic between Trump Tower and a Russian bank. This is one of the stories the Times’s ombudsman later criticized.
It wasn’t until after the election that the FBI finally came around and joined the rest of the Intelligence Community in putting out the January 2017 assessment that Russia had, in fact, been actively helping Trump. And in March 2017, Comey finally confirmed the existence of a federal investigation into possible coordination. Tyrone Gayle, one of my former communications aides, summed up how most of us felt hearing that news: “That sound you just heard was every ex-Clinton staffer banging their heads on the wall from California to D.C.” Part of the frustration was knowing that the FBI’s silence had helped Putin succeed and that more exposure could have given the American people the information they needed.
While Brennan and Reid had their hair on fire and Comey was dragging his feet, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was actively playing defense for Trump and the Russians. We know now that even after he was fully briefed by the CIA, McConnell rejected the intelligence and warned the Obama administration that if it made any attempt to inform the public, he would attack it for playing politics. I can’t think of a more shameful example of a national leader so blatantly putting partisanship over national security. McConnell knew better, but he did it anyway.
I know some former Obama administration officials have regrets about how this all unfolded. Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told the House Intelligence Committee in June 2017 that the administration didn’t take a more aggressive public stance because it was concerned about reinforcing Trump’s complaints that the election was “rigged” and being “perceived as taking sides in the election.” Former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, whom I’d come to trust and value when we worked together in President Obama’s first term, told the Washington Post that the Obama administration was focused on a traditional cyber threat, while “the Russians were playing this much bigger game” of multifaceted information warfare. “We weren’t able to put all of those pieces together in real time,” Ben said.
Mike McFaul, Obama’s former Ambassador to Russia, summed it up in a concise tweet:
FACT: Russia violated our sovereignty during the 2016 election.
FACT: Obama exposed that attack.
OPINION: We should have focused on it more.
I understand the predicament the Obama administration faced, with McConnell threatening them and everyone assuming I was going to win regardless. Richard Clarke, President George W. Bush’s top counterterrorism advisor on 9/11, has written about how hard it can be to heed warnings about threats that have never been seen before, and certainly it was hard to imagine the Russians would dare to conduct such a massive and unprecedented covert operation. And President Obama did privately warn Putin directly to back off.
I do wonder sometimes about what would have happened if President Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the fall of 2016 warning that our democracy was under attack. Maybe more Americans would have woken up to the threat in time. We’ll never know. But what we do know for sure is that McConnell and other Republican leaders did everything they could to leave Americans in the dark and vulnerable to attack.
What the Trump Team Did
Let’s look at what we’ve learned since the election about the actions of the Trump team.
We know now there were many contacts during the campaign and the transition between Trump associates and Russians—in person, on the phone, and via text and email. Many of these interactions were with Ambassador Kislyak, who was thought to help oversee Russian intelligence operations in the United States, but they included other Russian officials and agents as well.
For example, Roger Stone, the longtime Trump political advisor who claimed that he was in touch with Julian Assange, suggested in August 2016 that inform
ation about John Podesta was going to come out. In October, Stone hinted Assange and WikiLeaks were going to release material that would be damaging to my campaign, and later admitted to also exchanging direct messages over Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the front for Russian intelligence, after some of those messages were published by the website The Smoking Gun.
We also know now that in December 2016, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Kremlin-controlled bank that is under U.S. sanctions and tied closely to Russian intelligence. The Washington Post caused a sensation with its report that Russian officials were discussing a proposal by Kushner to use Russian diplomatic facilities in America to communicate secretly with Moscow.
The New York Times reported that Russian intelligence attempted to recruit Carter Page, the Trump foreign policy advisor, as a spy back in 2013 (according to the report, the FBI believed Page did not know that the man who approached him was a spy). And according to Yahoo News, U.S. officials received intelligence reports that Carter Page met with a top Putin aide involved with intelligence.
Some Trump advisors failed to disclose or lied about their contacts with the Russians, including on applications for security clearances, which could be a federal crime. Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to Congress about his contacts and later recused himself from the investigation. Michael Flynn lied about being in contact with Kislyak and then changed his story about whether they discussed dropping U.S. sanctions.
Reporting since the election has made clear that Trump and his top advisors have little or no interest in learning about the Russian covert operation against American democracy. Trump himself repeatedly called the whole thing a hoax—and at the same time, blamed Obama for not doing anything about it. As recently as July 2017, he continued to denigrate the Intelligence Community and claimed that countries other than Russia might be responsible for the DNC hack. Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates tweeted in response that Trump’s “inexplicable refusal to confirm Russian election interference insults career intel pros & hinders our ability to prevent in future.”
But there is one area where Trump’s team seems to have been intently interested: rolling back U.S. sanctions against Russia. That’s what Flynn was discussing with the Russian Ambassador. The Reuters news service reported that Senate investigators want to know whether Kushner discussed it in his meetings as well, including whether Russian banks would offer financial support to Trump associates and organizations in return. And as soon as the Trump team took control of the State Department, it started working on a plan to lift sanctions and return to Russia two compounds in Maryland and New York that the Obama administration had confiscated because they were bases for espionage. Career diplomats at State were so concerned that they alerted Congress. As of this writing, the Trump administration is exploring returning the compounds without any preconditions. All of this is significant because it makes it a lot easier to see how a quid pro quo with Russia might have worked.
We’ll surely continue to learn more. But based on what’s already in the public domain, we know that Trump and his team publicly cheered on the Russian operation and took maximum advantage of it. In so doing, they not only encouraged but actually helped along this attack on our democracy by a hostile foreign power.
What the Russians Did
That brings us to what we’ve learned since the election about what the Russians did. We know already about the hacking and release of stolen messages via WikiLeaks, but that’s just one part of a much larger effort. It turns out they also hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and fed damaging information to local bloggers and reporters in various congressional districts across the country, which required sophistication. And that’s just the beginning.
The official Intelligence Community report explained that the Russian propaganda strategy “blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users, or ‘trolls.’ ” Let’s try to break down what it all means.
The simplest part is traditional state-run media; in this case, Russian networks such as RT and Sputnik. They use their global reach to push Kremlin talking points over the airwaves and social media, including malicious headlines like “Clinton and ISIS Funded by Same Money.” Sputnik frequently used the same Twitter hashtag as Trump: #CrookedHillary. It’s hard to know exactly how wide of a reach RT has. A Daily Beast article reported on claims that it had exaggerated its stats. It’s probably more than you’d think (maybe hundreds of thousands) but not enough that it would have a big impact on an election by itself. But when RT propaganda gets picked up and repeated by American media outlets such as Fox News, Breitbart, and Alex Jones’s Infowars, and posted on Facebook, its reach expands dramatically. That happened frequently during the campaign. Trump and his team also helped amplify Russian stories, giving them an even bigger megaphone.
The Russians also generated propaganda in less traditional ways, including thousands of fake news sites and individual internet “trolls” who posted attacks on Facebook and Twitter. As the Intelligence Community reported, “Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton . . . some 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.” Some of the stories created by trolls were blatantly false, like the one about the pope endorsing Trump, but others were simply misleading attacks on me or puff pieces about Trump. Much of this content was then fed into the same amplification process, pushed along by RT and then picked up by American outlets such as Fox.
The Russians wanted to be sure that impressionable voters in key swing states actually saw their propaganda. So they set out to game the internet.
Much of what we see online is governed by a series of algorithms that determine what content appears in our Facebook and Twitter feeds, Google search results, and so on. One factor for these algorithms is popularity. If lots of users share the same post or click on the same link—and if key “influencers” with large personal networks do as well—then it’s more likely to pop up on your screen. To manipulate this process, the Russians “flooded the zone” with a vast network of fake Twitter and Facebook accounts, some carefully designed to appear like American swing voters. Some of these accounts were run by trolls (real live people), and others were automated, but the goal was the same: to artificially boost the volume and popularity of Russian and right-wing propaganda. The automated accounts are called “bots,” short for robots. The Russians were not the only ones using them, but they took it to a whole other level. Researchers at the University of Southern California have found that nearly 20 percent of all political tweets sent between September 16 and October 21, 2016, were generated by bots. Many of them probably were Russian. These tactics, according to Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, could “overwhelm” search engines so that the voters’ newsfeeds started showing headlines like “Hillary Clinton’s Sick” or “Hillary Clinton’s Stealing Money from the State Department.”
According to Facebook, another key tactic is the creation of fake affinity groups or community pages that could drive conversations online and draw in unwitting users. Imagine, for example, a fake Black Lives Matter group created to push malicious attacks linking Democrats to the KKK and slavery, with the goal of driving down African American turnout. The Russians did things like that. The similarity of their attacks to organic right-wing memes helped. For example, a prominent Trump supporter and evangelical bishop, Aubrey Shines, produced an online video attacking me because Democrats “gave this country slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws.” This charge was hugely amplified by the conservative media company Sinclair Broadcast Group, which distributed it to all of its 173 local television stations across the cou
ntry, along with other right-wing propaganda. Sinclair is now poised to grow to 223 stations. It would reach an estimated 72 percent of American households.
When I learned about these fake groups spreading across Facebook and poisoning our country’s political dialogue, I couldn’t help but think about the millions of my supporters who felt so bullied and harassed on the internet that they made sure their online communities, such as Pantsuit Nation, were private. They deserved better, and so did our country.
Put all this together, and you’ve got multifaceted information warfare. Senator Mark Warner summed it up well: “The Russians employed thousands of paid internet trolls and botnets to push out disinformation and fake news at a high volume, focusing this material onto your Twitter and Facebook feeds and flooding our social media with misinformation,” he said. “This fake news and disinformation was then hyped by the American media echo chamber and our own social media networks to reach and potentially influence millions of Americans.”
It gets worse. According to Time magazine, the Russians targeted propaganda to undecided voters and to “soft” Clinton supporters who might be persuaded to stay home or support a third-party candidate—including by purchasing ads on Facebook. It’s against the law to use foreign money to support a candidate, as well as for campaigns to coordinate with foreign entities, so a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission has called for a full investigation of this charge.
We know that swing voters were inundated. According to Senator Warner, “Women and African Americans were targeted in places like Wisconsin and Michigan.” One study found that in Michigan alone, nearly half of all political news on Twitter in the final days before the election was false or misleading propaganda. Senator Warner has rightly asked: “How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?”
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