What Happened

by Clinton, Hillary Rodham

  Interestingly, the Russians made a particular effort to target voters who had supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries, including by planting fake news on pro-Sanders message boards and Facebook groups and amplifying attacks by so-called Bernie Bros. Russian trolls posted stories about how I was a murderer, money launderer, and secretly had Parkinson’s disease. I don’t know why anyone would believe such things, even if you read it on Facebook—although it’s often hard to tell on there what’s a legitimate news article and what’s not—but maybe if you’re angry enough, you’ll accept anything that reinforces your point of view. As the former head of the NSA, retired General Keith Alexander, explained to Congress, the Russian goal was clear: “What they were trying to do is drive a wedge within the Democratic Party between the Clinton group and the Sanders group and then within our nation between Republicans and Democrats.” Perhaps this is one reason why third-party candidates received more than five million more votes in 2016 than they had in 2012. That was an aim of both the Russians and the Republicans, and it worked.

  According to CNN, Time, and McClatchy, the Justice Department and Congress are examining whether the Trump campaign data analytics operation—led by Kushner—coordinated with the Russians to pull all this off. Congressman Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has said he wants to know whether they “coordinated in any way in terms of targeting or in terms of timing or in terms of any other measure.” If they did, that also would be illegal.

  Think this is bad? There’s more. We knew during the campaign that Russian hackers had breached election systems in two states. Now we know that this effort was far more extensive than previously thought. In June 2017, officials from the Department of Homeland Security testified before Congress that election systems in as many as twenty-one states were targeted. Bloomberg News reported that the number could be as high as thirty-nine. According to a leaked NSA report, the accounts of more than a hundred local election officials across the country were also penetrated. In addition, hackers gained access to the software used by poll workers on Election Day. The goal of these intrusions seems to have been accessing voter registration information. Hackers attempted to delete or alter records of particular voters. They could also have used the data to better target their propaganda efforts. According to Time, investigators want to find out if any stolen voter information ended up with the Trump campaign.

  I know that the slow unfolding of this news has inured many people to how shocking all this is. It feels a little like the frog in the pot that doesn’t realize it’s boiling because it happens so gradually. But step back and think about it: the Russians hacked our election systems. They got inside. They tried to delete or alter voter information. This should send a shiver down the spine of every American.

  And why stop there? According to the Washington Post, the Russians used old-fashioned forgery to influence the election as well. The Post says Moscow surreptitiously got a fake document to the FBI that described a fabricated discussion between the chair of the Democratic National Committee and an aide to financier and liberal donor George Soros about how Attorney General Lynch had promised to go easy on me in the email investigation. It was a bizarre fantasy straight out of the fever swamp. Jim Comey may well have known the document was a forgery, but the Post says he was concerned that if it became public, it would still cause an outcry. Its existence, however fraudulent, provided him with a new justification to disregard long-standing protocol and hold his infamous July press conference disparaging me. I don’t know what Comey was thinking, but the idea that the Russians could have manipulated him into such a damaging misstep is mind-boggling.

  Finally, to add one more bit of cloak-and-dagger mystery to this whole story, a lot of Russian officials seem to have had unfortunate accidents since the election. On Election Day itself, an officer in the New York consulate was found dead. The first explanation was that he fell off a roof. Then the Russians said he had a heart attack. On December 26, a former KGB agent thought to have helped compile the salacious Trump dossier was found dead in his car in Moscow. On February 20, the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations died suddenly, also from a heart attack. Russian authorities have also arrested a cybersecurity expert and two intelligence officials who worked on cyber operations and accused them of spying for the United States. All I can say is that working for Putin must be a stressful job.

  If all this sounds unbelievable, I know how you feel. It’s like something out of one of the spy novels my husband stays up all night reading. Even knowing what the Russians did in Ukraine, I was still shocked that they would wage large-scale covert warfare against the United States. But the evidence is overwhelming, and the Intelligence Community assessment is definitive.

  What’s more, we know now that the Russians have mounted similar operations in other Western democracies. After the U.S. election, Facebook found and removed tens of thousands of fake accounts in France and the United Kingdom. In Germany, members of Parliament have been hacked. Denmark and Norway say the Russians breached key ministries. The Netherlands turned off election computers and decided to count every vote by hand. And most notably, in France, Emmanuel Macron’s campaign was hit by a massive cyberattack just before the presidential election that sparked immediately comparisons with the operation against me. But because the French had watched what happened in America, they were better prepared. Macron’s team responded to Russian phishing attacks with false passwords, and they seeded fake documents in with their other files, all in an attempt to confuse and slow down the hackers. When a trove of stolen Macron emails did appear online, the French media refused to provide the kind of sensationalized coverage we saw here, in part because of a law in France that guards against that happening close to an election. French voters also seem to have learned from our mistakes, and they soundly rejected Le Pen, the right-wing pro-Moscow candidate. I take some comfort knowing that our misfortune helped protect France and other democracies. That’s something, at least.

  The War on Truth

  As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, one reason the Russian misinformation campaign was successful was that our country’s natural defenses had been worn down over several years by powerful interests that sought to make it harder for Americans to distinguish between truth and lies. If you feel like it’s gotten tougher to separate out fringe voices from credible journalists, especially online, or you find yourself arguing more and more with people over what should be knowable facts, you’re not going crazy. There has been a concerted effort to discredit mainstream sources of information, create an echo chamber to amplify fringe conspiracy theories, and undermine Americans’ grasp of objective truth. The McClatchy news service says federal investigators are looking into whether there were direct links between the Russian propaganda war and right-wing organizations such as Breitbart and InfoWars. But even if no direct ties ever come to light, we need to understand how the right-wing war on truth opened the door to the Russian attack.

  After the election, a former conservative talk radio host in Wisconsin named Charlie Sykes came forward to explain how this worked. For years, he said, right-wing media and politicians conditioned their supporters to distrust anything they heard from the mainstream media, while pushing paranoid conspiracy theories from people such as Alex Jones and Trump himself—the chief promoter of the racist “birther” lie. “The price turned out to be far higher than I imagined,” Sykes said. “The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize” the mainstream media and “essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information.” This was useful for Trump when he became a candidate, because it helped him both deflect negative stories from mainstream sources and find a receptive audience for false attacks against me. It did the same for the Russians. And Trump has kept at it in the White House. “All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself,” Sykes said. He quoted Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster and Putin opponent who sa
id, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

  Rupert Murdoch and the late Roger Ailes probably did more than anyone else to make all this possible. For years, Fox News has been the most powerful and prominent platform for the right-wing war on truth. Ailes, a former advisor to Richard Nixon, built Fox by demonizing and delegitimizing mainstream media that tried to adhere to traditional standards of objectivity and accuracy. Fox gave a giant megaphone to voices claiming climate change was fake science, the falling unemployment rate was phony math, and you couldn’t trust Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Ailes and Fox were so successful in polarizing the audience that by 2016, most liberals and conservatives got their news from distinctly different sources and no longer shared a common set of facts.

  During the Obama years, the Breitbart News Network, backed by Robert and Rebekah Mercer and led by their advisor Steve Bannon, who is now Trump’s top strategist, emerged to give Fox a run for its money. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Breitbart embraces “ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right.” To give you a flavor, here are a few memorable Breitbart headlines:

  BIRTH CONTROL MAKES WOMEN UNATTRACTIVE AND CRAZY

  * * *

  THERE’S NO HIRING BIAS AGAINST WOMEN IN TECH, THEY JUST SUCK AT INTERVIEWS

  * * *

  GLOBAL TEMPERATURES PLUNGE. ICY SILENCE FROM CLIMATE ALARMISTS

  * * *

  NAACP JOINS SOROS ARMY PLOTTING DC DISRUPTIONS, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, MASS ARRESTS

  * * *

  HOIST IT HIGH AND PROUD: THE CONFEDERATE FLAG PROCLAIMS A GLORIOUS HERITAGE

  * * *

  FACT CHECK: WERE OBAMA AND HILLARY FOUNDERS OF ISIS? YOU BET

  This would be funny if it wasn’t so scary. This kind of garbage “conditioned” Americans, to use Charlie Sykes’s word, to accept the Russian propaganda that flooded our country in 2016.

  Robert Mercer is a key figure to understand. A computer scientist, Mercer made billions of dollars by applying complex algorithms and data analysis to the financial markets. The hedge fund he helps run, Renaissance Technologies, is wildly successful. By all accounts, Mercer is an extreme antigovernment right-winger. A profile in the New Yorker quoted one former Renaissance colleague as saying Mercer is “happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the President’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it to all fall down.” The New Yorker also reported that another former high-level Renaissance Technologies employee said Mercer hates Bill and me and once accused us of being part of a secret CIA drug-running scheme and of murdering our opponents. If you think these accusations sound batty, you’re right. And this man is now one of the most powerful people in America.

  Breitbart is only one of the organizations Mercer and his family control. Another is Cambridge Analytica, which has gained notoriety for using Facebook data to target voters for clients such as Trump. It’s hard to separate reality from hype when it comes to Cambridge Analytica’s track record, but it seems like a mistake to underestimate Mercer. As the New Yorker put it, “Having revolutionized the use of data on Wall Street,” he “was eager to accomplish the same feat in the political realm.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with using big data and microtargeting—every campaign does it, including mine. The problem would come if the data were obtained or used improperly. After reports were published raising questions about whether Cambridge Analytica played a role in Brexit, British authorities are now investigating the company’s alleged role with Leave.eu and whether Cambridge’s techniques violated British and European privacy laws (which Cambridge denies).

  Mercer is not alone. The Koch brothers, who run the second-largest privately held company in America, with extensive oil and gas holdings, have also invested huge sums of money, which has eroded the public’s grasp on reality and advanced their ideological agenda. For example, they’ve spent tens of millions of dollars to fund a network of think tanks, foundations, and advocacy organizations to promote the false science of climate change denial and their agenda. We can expect more of that as the Kochs prepare to spend whatever it takes to consolidate their hold on state governments and expand their power in Washington.

  And let’s not forget Donald Trump himself. It took a little while for Mercer, the Kochs, and Fox News to realize that Trump could help take their war on truth to the next level, but their eventual support for his candidacy was invaluable. In many ways, Trump is the embodiment of everything they had been working toward, and the perfect Trojan horse for Putin. The journalist Masha Gessen, who covers Putin extensively, has observed: “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”

  What Now?

  In a Senate hearing in June 2017, Senator Angus King of Maine asked Jim Comey, “Was the Russian activity in the 2016 election a one-off proposition? Or is this part of a long-term strategy? Will they be back?”

  “They’ll be back,” Comey replied emphatically. “It’s not a Republican thing or Democratic thing. It really is an American thing.”

  He returned to the point a few minutes later. “We’re talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion, lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal. And people need to recognize it,” Comey said. “It’s not about Republicans or Democrats. They’re coming after America.”

  Comey is absolutely right about this. The January 2017 Intelligence Community report called the Russian influence campaign a “new normal,” and predicted Moscow would continue attacking the United States and our allies. Given the success Putin has had, we should expect interference in future elections and even more aggressive cyber and propaganda efforts. Sure enough, since the election, there are new reports that Russia has launched cyberattacks against the U.S. military, including targeting the social media accounts of thousands of American soldiers; that hackers have penetrated companies that run American nuclear power plants; and that Russia is expanding its spy networks inside the United States.

  We should also expect the right-wing war on truth to continue. As Trump faces growing political and legal challenges, he and his allies will likely intensify their efforts to delegitimize the mainstream press, the judiciary, and anyone else who threatens his preferred version of reality.

  Can anything be done to meet these twin threats and protect our democracy? The answer is yes, if we take this seriously. In 1940, a time of much greater danger for our country, the writer John Buchan wrote, “We have been shaken out of our smugness and warned of a great peril, and in that warning lies our salvation. The dictators have done us a marvelous service to remind us of the true values of life.” Americans today need to be similarly alert and determined.

  Here are four steps that would help.

  First, we need to get to the bottom of what really happened in 2016. Investigators and the press should keep digging. Based on how things are going, it’s possible that, as often happens in Washington scandals, the alleged cover-up will become the most serious legal and political problem facing Trump. But no matter what happens, the American people will still need to know the truth about what the Russians did. Therefore, I believe the Special Counsel investigation should be complemented by an independent commission with subpoena power, like the one that investigated 9/11. It should provide a full public accounting of the attack against our country and make recommendations to improve security going forward. It’s hard to understand how Republicans, so eager to set up a special committee to go after me over Benghazi, could block such a step.

  Second, we need to get serious about cyber warfare. Government and the private sector need to work together more closely to improve our defenses. It will require significant investments to protect our networks and national infrastructure, and Corporate America needs to see this as an urgent imperative, because government can’t do it
alone. At the same time, our military and intelligence agencies should accelerate development of our own offensive cyber and information warfare capabilities, so that we are prepared to respond to aggression in kind, if need be.

  Right now we do not have an effective deterrent to prevent cyber and information warfare the way we do with conventional and nuclear conflicts. Russia, China, and others believe they can operate in a so-called gray zone between peace and war, stealing our secrets, disrupting our elections, manipulating our politics, and harassing our citizens and businesses without facing serious repercussions. To change that calculus, I believe the United States should declare a new doctrine that states that a cyberattack on our vital national infrastructure will be treated as an act of war and met with a proportionate response.

  Third, we need to get tough with Putin. He responds only to strength, so that’s what we must demonstrate. It was gratifying to see Emmanuel Macron, the new French President, condemn Russian interference and propaganda while standing next to Putin at a press conference in Paris. If the French can do it, surely our own leaders can. Congress recently passed legislation over Trump’s objections to ratchet up sanctions on Russia, and he reluctantly signed it. We should keep doing everything we can to isolate Putin. As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in May, “I’m appalled by what the Russians did, and we ought to find a way, ultimately, to punish it.” The Obama administration proved with crippling sanctions against Iran that this kind of pressure can force our adversaries to change course. Russia is a much bigger and more powerful nation, but we have a lot of tools at our disposal, and even Putin is vulnerable to pressure. We also should strengthen NATO; help our allies reduce their dependence on Russian energy supplies, a key source of leverage for Putin; and arm the Ukrainian government so it can resist Moscow’s aggression.