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The Gist
Garrett Graff: “Russia Sought Division More Than Victory”
00:30:34
Garrett Graff, host of the Long Shadow podcast, argues that Russia’s 2016 interference was about sowing distrust in U.S. democracy—weakening Clinton if she won, or destabilizing the system either way. He revisits the Access...
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- [00:00]
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Mike Pesca
When you text Mike to 33777? I mean, I don't. I know the output is you get an offer on your phone for 25% off Mike's substack, which is called Pesca Profundities one day a week and it's called the gist list the other days a week and it's going behind a paywall. Some of it is. So we're going to have to charge you, but I want to charge you less. But when I say I don't know what happens, it's like the classic system of tubes. And here I am on a podcast, which I don't really understand either. I get what the inputs and the outputs are and I understand that you get a text message with a link and this link will take you to Mike pesca.substack.com and 25% off is cool. But really, from podcast to text to substack, I don't understand any of the nuts and bolts. Are there bolts? Are there even bolts involved? I do understand texting Mike Mike to 33777 for 25% off the just list. It's Tuesday, September 16, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. As was clear would happen, the administration has used the assassination of Charlie Kirk to launch a crackdown on what they define as the far left. What is the far left? I think it's whatever they say it is. Stephen Miller, speaking in the Oval Office, talked about NGOs which fund rioters. You give true. And I say at the very least, let's take away their nonprofit status. J.D. vance defined the far less differently in different ways at different times while hosting the Charlie Kirk show yesterday. At one point he cited a mistake in the Nation magazine, which was the same mistake I talked about on the show yesterday. Misquoting Kirk to make a critique of Sheila Jackson Lee Joy Reid, Tanji Brown Jackson. Michelle Obama sounds as if it were a statement about the intelligence of all black women. My point was that journalists need to get it right, especially if they're going to define themselves in opposition to the untruthful Charlie Kirk Vance. His point about this instance of journalism that got it wrong was that the Nation magazine was a member of the Ford Foundation. Soros funded left and is therefore in line for a crackdown. Not good. Vance goes further and I'll play some of his remarks at length to see what he means when he says far left. Does he mean antifa? Does he mean anyone who receives Soros funding, which he would argue I guess includes an TIFA but a lot of other legitimate groups? Does he mean? I don't know. The Pod Save America guys. Let us now listen for some clues. I will be here with an analysis at the end of this clip.
- [03:45]
J.D. Vance
And while our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left. Are these people violent? I hope not. But are they guilty of encouraging violence? You damn well better believe it. We can thank God that most Democrats don't share these attitudes. And I do. While acknowledging that something has gone very wrong with a lunatic fringe. A minority, but a growing and powerful minority on the far left.
- [04:21]
Mike Pesca
So on the positive side, some acknowledgment that the right does it too. Okay. Also, you pick up that he doesn't mean most Democrats, right? Or most Democratic politicians. At least not today or that day. In that framing, who knows also what his boss thinks. Donald Trump is suing a lot of news media organizations and threatening others today. But Vance puts forward false notions that most lunatics are on the left. I'm not here to hit you with the scholarship that counts where political violence comes from. It's not mostly the left, but who cares? Let's say it was 60:40 left or 6535 or some ratio that isn't 99:1. Who cares? What's the 65 and what's the 35? How does it make sense to only go after the majority of harm doers and leave 40, 35% of potential or actual violent extremists out there being violently extreme? And by the way, we should also ask, maybe you're not the guy to do this. And maybe Cash Patel, who got into an embarrassing shouting match with Cory Booker today, isn't even try all your divide in this country. So the assessment is the assassination has devolved into politics, which I'm looking for a silver lining, maybe a saving grace. I had hoped for a moment of de escalation or retrenchment or reexamination or anything good to come of this. No way. This is politics, especially 2025 politics. That's not going to happen. But 2025 politics are almost entirely a waste of time. So lately I've been thinking that that's what could deliver us that this assassination and everyone yelling about it afterward and everyone making their arguments about the character and true nature of Charlie K. Wake of his head being blown off. I think maybe this doesn't get put in the category of actionable extremism. This gets put in the category of annoying politics. So we'll yell and we'll bluster, but we won't do anything real. And that maybe could mean that fewer people than I feared will actually suffer on the show today. The Oval Office, we haven't been there for a while. The whole crew's there and they're talking body slams and beautiful hammers. But first, we're joined again by Garrett Graf of the Long Shadow podcast. This season he takes on the Internet. Specifically, right where we're going to pick up the conversation is Russian interference in the 2016 election. Garrett Graff. Up next, hims cannot solve some of the more common bedroom problems. The I like to watch TV at a very high volume, whereas I look at the place of sleeping as a place to sleep. I don't want to tell you which one of us has those different stakes in the debate, but I think maybe you can tell. There's the blanket stealing, but when it comes to performance, that is where hims can help take control of ED with personalized treatments made with proven ingredients prescribed by licensed providers. 100% online. And you know, ED is more common than you think. I don't know how common you thought it was, but from what I understand, it's quite common, though getting less common because of hims, which allows you to connect online with a licensed provider to access personalized treatment options to get simple online access to personalized affordable care for ed, hair loss, weight loss and more. Visit hims.com the gist that's hims.com the gist for your free online visit hims.com the gist actual price will depend on product and subscription plan. Featured products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions and important safety information. I've been wearing a lot of True Work clothing because I like it. Because it looks good and feels good. But that's not even why True Work exists. 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Black goes with everything including clearing brush and taking a giant iron fence and dragging it into my I have a truck driving it and I'll tell you the whole story one day. This is a True Work ad. This is not how much money I got for my iron fence. But if you want to guess, you can upgrade your day with workwear built like it matters. Get 15% off your first order@True Work.com with the code the Gist. That's T R U E w e r k.com we're joined again by Garrett Graf, who hosts the long shadow podcast Russia's 2016 election interference efforts. We were saying last episode included offline protests and online trolling, boosting Trump and Sanders while attacking Clinton. It was perhaps ultimately aimed less at electing one candidate than its sowing division with an uncertain impact on voters. So my question to start us off with this part of the interview is to cite a recent Tulsi Gabbard report that contended that the beneficiary of the 2016 election interference effort by Russia might not have been Trump. And when Tulsi Gabbert put this forward, a lot of people objected. But I see, Garrett, in your reporting some indication that the real goal may well have been to weaken the presumed winner, everyone's presumed winner, Hillary Clinton, rather than to specifically secure Donald Trump a victory. Couldn't this have been what they were doing?
- [11:17]
Garrett Graff
Yeah, but I think that. I think that you are right about how they were approaching this. I think that. I think that most of what you're saying is a distinction without a difference, which is that they saw undermining Hillary Clinton and boosting Donald Trump as the surest way to undermine trust in the American electoral system and American democracy. That what, you know, what Putin actually cares about is not who is in control of the United States at any point. What he cares about is showing that America is a failing model of democracy and strength. And anything that makes America weaker makes Russia stronger. And so I think that, and by the way, this is not just a Russian approach to the 2016 election. Most people forget that Roger Stone actually first started to launch a Stop the steal movement in 2016 when he was assuming that Donald Trump would lose and that they were going to try to undermine the legitimacy of the electoral result in 2016, only to find out when Donald Trump won, that they now didn't need to stop the steal anymore. And that sort of whole playbook and the name went back on the shelf until 2020.
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Mike Pesca
Well, also, the Iranians tried to interfere. I guess their Internet trolls aren't as good as the Russians, but if anything, they tried to interfere on the side of Hillary Clinton.
- [13:14]
Garrett Graff
Yes, and you saw that more actually in 2020 where Iran. And I think that sort of part of that is this very dangerous territory that we have been in since 2016, where Russia's goals in the 2016 election succeeded beyond any possible wildest imagination of Yevgeny Prigozhin or Vladimir Putin. And that other countries have now seen that playing in the US Election is a good model for them that comes actually at relatively low geopolitical cost.
- [13:59]
Mike Pesca
Now, one thing that you asserted that I hadn't heard elsewhere, and it's not a fact, it's a framing, was that the release of the hacked Hillary Clinton emails which were out there, was the classic explanation, is that this was a distraction from the bombshell Trump Access Hollywood tape. This was a coordinated distraction, maybe with Roger Stone's involvement. But what you said is that the hacked Hillary Clinton emails were quickly forgotten because of the Access Hollywood tape. So you kind of reverse the who benefited and who was victimized framing of that. Were you trying to. Yeah, just tell me about if you realize you were saying something different than what almost everyone who's tried to put a sheen of intentionality on that has said.
- [14:55]
Garrett Graff
Yeah. And again, I don't. So there's a third thing that happened that same day I think was the point that we were trying to make, which was that it's that morning, that Friday morning where the US Government comes out and says in really its only pre election statement that Russia is trying to influence the election. And then that is what is forgotten very quickly and overlooked by the Hillary Clinton. Sorry. By the Access Hollywood tapes and that sort of. Most Americans, I think never heard that warning from the US Intelligence community that Russia was attacking the election.
- [15:47]
Mike Pesca
But the hack of the Hillary Clinton DNC emails would have been some evidence for that if we chose to or if we had the ability to engage. But we didn't because we were all looking at the Access Hollywood.
- [16:00]
Garrett Graff
Yes, is what you're saying.
- [16:01]
Mike Pesca
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So. And you're also saying, I mean what I'm getting here is it just worked out this way. You don't think that this was the design of anyone.
- [16:11]
Garrett Graff
No. Or at least I think that the. Yeah, I don't know that we will really know sort of what was cause, what was effect and what was the random overlap of world events.
- [16:29]
Mike Pesca
So you take us through the misinformation and disinformation. I want to talk about those two phrases of everything related to the COVID 19 and the virus and the, and the vaccines. And you also, of course, talk about, you have to talk about January 6th. You have one of the main narrators for your January 6th. There's a person who's associated and got into this through Eamon Bundy who is a past character in one of your shows. You could strip, you could strip some of these episodes and do a 911 standalone episode. You could do an Eamon Bundy standalone episode. You have all these episodes where all of four seasons of your series are talking about the same thing. But tell me about this woman. When did she come to regret her involvement being inside the Capitol? Why did she talk to you? So here are the questions. When did she regret it? Why'd she talk to you? And considering that she was pardoned by Trump, has she had any change of heart since she talked to you?
- [17:31]
Garrett Graff
Yeah. So this is a woman from Idaho named Pam Hemphill who is sort of known online as the MAGA Granny. And she was a live streamer is probably the best way to Describe her from, from Idaho. She'd gotten involved politically in some of the COVID and anti mask protests where she had been protesting alongside Ammon Bundy, who sort of heading back to your deep tracks, far right callbacks, of course, was the family behind two high profile government standoffs in the Obama years. One at the family ranch in Nevada, one in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, one that the ranch standoff ended safely for everyone. The Oregon one ended with a police shootout where one of the members of the standoff was killed on the side of a highway during a sort of high intensity traffic stop. And Bundy in Idaho becomes this big figure who is leading these Covid anti mask protests. Pam Hemphill gets engaged and then incredibly, her family. This is one of my favorite details of the entire season. Her family, as a Christmas present, gives her a plane ticket to Washington for January 6th. And she goes to Washington, is part of the early protests that morning, and then ends up part of the mob inside the Capitol where she sort of, pretty quickly, once she gets inside the Capitol, realizes that this is not a great thing that is happening, and gets herself out with the help of some Capitol police. But she ends up facing a criminal charge and serving, I think it was two months in jail, 60 days in jail, something like that, for her role in the riots at the Capitol. And she's one of the only people, she's a sort of fascinating character and I think has come to regret her actions on January 6, regret her alliance with the Maga movement and was one of actually only a tiny handful of people who turned down the presidential pardon in this past January when Trump was sworn into office. Because as she says, like she did it, like she did exactly the crime that she was convicted of and has now become, I think, a relatively outspoken voice for sort of January 6th regret.
- [20:52]
Mike Pesca
I wanted to ask you about misinformation and disinformation. This has become a huge hobby horse of mine. Disinformation is, could be anyone, state actor, broadcaster, lying to you and trying to put out information that they know is false to manipulate you in some way. But misinformation has many stripes. But you correct me if you have a different definition, but it means information that is false could be used very earnestly. Right. We tried our best. We said that you get the vaccine. It's a dead end to Covid. This is something that Foushee said, that's misinformation. Right. I don't think he was trying to hurt people. And maybe you could argue doing the best with the knowledge we had at the time and sometimes it's used very wantonly and can be dangerous. So first of all, I'll stop there. Would you agree with those definitions?
- [21:42]
Garrett Graff
Loosely. And there's a third category that is relevant to this discussion as well, which is mal information, which is true information sort of being used in a nefarious manner. And so that's where you get into, for instance, the hack and leak of the Podesta emails in 2016 or sort of similar instances, WikiLeaks or things like that.
- [22:09]
Mike Pesca
Right. So here is my concern problem. We look back, we listen to your series, and we see the nefarious effects of misinformation. But you know, you'll talk about certain types of misinformation and not the misinformation that's doing the best we can get got wrong. Not the misinformation that right now we think is right, but turns out to have been wrong. When you wrote about Watergate, there was a lot of that. And so if we as citizens or people who maybe want the government to intervene in the way that helps us the most, I think focusing on misinformation, there's a lot of downsides to that. There's the censorship downside, there's the who gets to define it, and there's the fact that the nature of information and our knowledge about information changes. So I don't see that much of a difference between a war on misinformation and a war on information. Do you see it differently?
- [23:10]
Garrett Graff
I don't. I mean, it's such a complex topic because I think that the challenge is, the challenge is who bears what responsibility in the system, which is we have as a society in the United States generally, for First Amendment reasons and otherwise decided that it is not the government's role to fight misinformation. Where I think we have seen a lot of the system break down is that I do believe the social media platforms have a role in fighting, fighting misinformation on their platforms as a matter of what in industry terms is called trust and safety. Where you see the teams there at those companies do try to tackle misinformation so that in the extreme example in Covid, we don't want to encourage people to directly drink bleach to kill the virus. And the challenge is there is an enormous amount of gray in between sort of point A and point Z. And I think we as a country and as a society and the social media companies very specifically have failed at delineating where exactly we should draw the line. In between those two points.
- [25:00]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, almost everyone would agree with you. But the thing is, they agree for maybe different reasons and different examples come to mind. So probably a lot of people are now thinking, oh God, X is a cesspool. It would have been better if we had got in there and stopped the disinformation and misinformation. But there's a certain category of person who's like, yeah, you're right, that is why the Hunter Biden laptop shouldn't have been censored. If you get it wrong, that's why the. And it wasn't censored. It was suppressed for a few days. Or I could point to some J. Bhattacharya quotes or tweets that were taken down that shouldn't have been because he was more or less right in these specific tweets. And then what happens is these are all private businesses. It's not exactly the government. Even though there is examples of, you know, government jawboning or trying to influence the private companies, it leads to a destabilization and a questioning of. Of truth. And so I come back to these are tools. These are powerful tools, but they're just expressions and maybe magnified expressions of who we are as people and what we think right now.
- [26:07]
Garrett Graff
Yeah, and I think that, you know, I have worked in this space through a lot of the pendulum swings from 2016 to 2024, and I think one of the challenges is that those lines are all constantly moving and that in 2016 we realized too late that the platforms had been under policed and that they actually had a pretty good system in place. This is part of the story that we tell in the podcast, that they actually had a pretty good system for the start of 2020 and were just completely overwhelmed over the course of that year by the flood of. The flood of misinformation and disinformation and lies and conspiracies that took place in Covid and Stop the Steal. And then in the years since, we have watched a very concerted effort by bad faith actors in Washington on the Republican side, including Jim Jordan specifically, who have really tried to punish and undermine people who were working in perfectly good faith through 2020 on those very challenging problems of misinformation and disinformation and malinformation and have effectively sort of silenced that entire field now and shut it down in the years since because it has become too reputationally costly in an era when the Republicans and the MAGA wing are ascendant politically in America.
- [28:08]
Mike Pesca
Okay, last question is another really Hard one to answer. But I really wanted to ask you this because you've written about 9 11, and this was in many ways a bipartisan time afterwards, we at least had a commission, right? We could. We can't even have bipartisan commission about COVID And it would be useful. You've written about Watergate in which Republicans were the ones who essentially pushed Nixon out. Now we're living in these unbelievably hyper partisan times. You just did this series on one of the tools and reasons for the hyper partisanship. But then again, you understand political science, hyper partisanship exists everywhere. It would exist without the tools driving us apart. What is the chicken and the egg? Is it. Do you think that it is these tools that make us so hyper partisan, or do you think that it is more the nature of our system that is hyper partisan and the tools become an expression of it? Everyone gets voice, and the voice really hates the other side more than the other?
- [29:11]
Garrett Graff
Yeah, I. I couldn't agree more actually, with you that I think this is a issue that we are watching America. We're watching these tools corrupt America, but they are also showing us who we really are. And that's really where we sort of finish this. This season is coming back to what Russia was able to do in 2016. These are all existing fissures in American society. And the Internet may reflect them more starkly, it may exacerbate them, it may make us more enraged than we were before, but the underlying foundation for our partisanship and polarization, that is who we are as America. And that these tools are changing our politics by order of magnitudes, but not necessarily directionally.
- [30:22]
Mike Pesca
Garrett Graff is a fine historian, writer, editor, journalist. He was last on the show to talk about his magisterial book on Watergate, is also a recent author of a book about China and America called World on the Brink. And we've been talking about his new podcast series which just concluded season four, Long Shadow. Thank you so much, Garrett.
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Garrett Graff
Thank you, sir. This was great.
- [30:55]
Mike Pesca
Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [30:59]
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Mike Pesca
That's not the itinerary we're following.
- [31:10]
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- [31:23]
Mike Pesca
Bon voyage.
- [31:25]
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- [32:23]
Mike Pesca
And now the spiel. It's been a while since I monitored and brought to you a full Oval Office session with the media and yesterday was a great one. Donald Trump was there to announce that troops would be going into Memphis, the one here in America, not the one in Egypt. He was surrounded by staffers from Pam Bondi who touted the D.C. experiment not just as a success but as over.
- [32:44]
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- [32:46]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, we're done here. And then there was Cash Patel, director of the FBI, noting that Donald Trump famously just wants to do good in the world and in no way wants to attach his name to any initiatives for, say, egotistical reasons.
- [33:01]
Donald Trump
Launching us early, launching us quietly, not.
- [33:03]
Mike Pesca
Looking for the credit.
- [33:04]
Donald Trump
Mr. President, we greatly appreciate your support.
- [33:06]
Mike Pesca
Trump's purpose was to rip apart the leaders of cities and Democratic states who don't want him bringing in the National Guard, and also to rip up a little bit of the Constitution, the Posse Comitatus act of 1870 federal law, certainly the sentiment behind keeping federal forces out of the business of local policing. Here he talked about the type of specific crime in Memphis that his forces will not countenance.
- [33:31]
Donald Trump
Last month, a vicious thug carjacked an elderly woman parked at the movie theater, dragged her out of the car and body slammed her into the pavement where she is still trying to recover. Probably won't be successful.
- [33:46]
Mike Pesca
I enjoyed the way he got bored with the prepared text as he does and rift oh, she's not going to Be good. Turns out that the actual reports from Memphis say she was hurt, but now she's doing fine. I wonder what effect on the healing process it is to hear the president speculate that you shan't recover. But speculate he did. Such as when it came to flag burning. He speculated that there could be a non first amendment rationale for banning flag burning. Like the fact that that burning flags angers people. Whereas you burn other things and no one cares.
- [34:19]
Donald Trump
And you know, you could burn other things if people just sit there, they fall asleep.
- [34:22]
Mike Pesca
You know why? Sleepy flame, low energy fire. But you know what doesn't make people fall asleep? Entrancing hardware.
- [34:31]
Donald Trump
And then they whip out a hammer. And it's a beautiful hammer. Really, it's nice. You know, this is not a hammer. Somebody happens up. These are serious hammers. Beautiful brand new hammers.
- [34:43]
Mike Pesca
If he had a hammer, he'd hammer in the morning. Who'd he hammer? Disrespectful expectorating protesters. Trump has a new initiative when it comes to federal forces being spat at.
- [34:54]
Donald Trump
And I say when they spit, you hit it.
- [34:56]
Mike Pesca
Must be a good policy. It rhymes. I'll try one. You know an act of Congress forbade us from violating posse comitatus. So if you favor law and order, you know this rule about troops inside the border. I got admit his is punch here. And that's it for today's show. The Gist is produced by Cory Wara. Ashley Khan is our production coordinator. Jeff Craig newly runs our social media aspirations. Kathleen Sykes is in charge of the gist list and she wants you to text Mike 233777 to get some money off subscriptions to the just list. That's Mike at 33777. No one has texted Mike more than the CEO of Peach Fish Productions, Michelle Pasco in Peru. G Peru. Do Peru. And thanks.
- [35:57]
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