137. How Russia Made Trump: MAGA Take The White House (Ep 6)

Summary

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Podcast Episode Summary

The Rest Is Classified – Ep 137: How Russia Made Trump: MAGA Take The White House (Ep 6)

Hosts: David McCloskey (former CIA analyst, spy novelist) & Gordon Corera (veteran security correspondent)
Date: March 11, 2026

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Overview

In the series finale, McCloskey and Corera dissect the climax of Russia’s interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election. They chronicle the intelligence community's scramble to finalize its assessment, WikiLeaks' timed Podesta email release, and the critical, chaotic October days when US cyber-attacks, explosive political scandals, and Russian influence operations converged. The episode concludes with a sharp analysis of the active measures’ true impact: on the vote, the US institutional trust, and the rise of the “deep state” narrative in American politics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) – The Painful Process

• Process: A task force of representatives from 17 US intelligence agencies painstakingly drafts a joint assessment to determine Russian interference, enduring grueling meetings often “excruciatingly boring.”
  • Quote, David McCloskey (02:32):
    “It's the only time during my CIA tenure where I actually saw an adult human fall asleep in a meeting… that person, of course, Gordon, was me.”
• Political Sensitivities: Debate occurs on naming Putin as the operation’s author. Eventually, the ICA uses “senior Kremlin officials” to avoid direct confrontation, reflecting the Obama administration’s cautious strategy.
  • Quote, David McCloskey (07:52):
    “They decide to scrap Putin’s name… they opt for the less specific wording of ‘senior Kremlin officials’.”
• FBI’s Reluctance: James Comey, FBI Director, requests the FBI’s name not be included, likely due to concurrent Trump campaign investigations.
  • Quote, David McCloskey (08:48):
    “The FBI director, James Comey, says he doesn’t want the FBI's name attached to the statement... It’s a little bit curious.”

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2. The Tumult of October 7, 2016

• Government Statement ([10:07]): The DNI and DHS issue a historic statement directly accusing Russia of election interference, stressing only “senior-most officials” could have authorized it.
  • Quote, David McCloskey (10:45):
    “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”
• Swept from the Headlines ([11:29]):
  Within minutes, the Access Hollywood tape drops, eclipsing the Russia news.
  • Quote, Gordon Corera (12:39):
    “All this stuff about hacking and Russian stuff just gets blown out the water, doesn’t it?”
• WikiLeaks Counter-Move ([13:23]):
  Roughly 30 minutes later, WikiLeaks releases 2,000 John Podesta emails, intensifying the Clinton e-mail saga in the media.
  • Quote, David McCloskey (13:23):
    “I've always wondered… if they sort of accelerated the dump in order to try to distract from the Access Hollywood story, or if this is just another of these random coincidences...”

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3. The Podesta Emails’ Drip-Drip Effect

• Content ([15:33–18:50]): The emails contain mundane notes, internal campaign squabbles, Wall Street speech extracts, and hints of favoritism, fueling narratives of Clinton’s “crookedness.”
  • Quote, Gordon Corera (18:49):
    “I think it played into the idea that Hillary Clinton was tight with Wall Street... and was not an advocate for working people.”
• Ongoing Impact: The steady leak of 64,000 emails in 34 tranches keeps negative stories alive in the press through Election Day.

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4. The Clinton Email Conflation & Media Ethics ([19:22]–[22:52])

• Blurring Issues: The hacked emails and Clinton’s private server investigation merge in the public’s mind, muddying perceptions and amplifying controversy.
  • Quote, David McCloskey (19:50):
    “They get conflated, right. And so… it amplifies the impact of the Russian active measure as a result.”
• Journalistic Dilemma: Reporters struggle with how to handle leaked data whose origins are intelligence operations.
  • Quote, Gordon Corera (21:13):
    “What are the ethics... if it is being released by… an intelligence agency trying to manipulate you?”

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5. Comey’s October Bombshell & The Final Days ([22:52]–[26:29])

• Comey’s Announcement: On October 31, Comey reopens the Clinton private server investigation, overshadowing other controversies and, arguably, shifting the election’s momentum.
  • Quote, Gordon Corera (23:36):
    “There are a lot of people who think that it’s this announcement... that may be the thing that swings the election more than anything else.”
• Political Asymmetry: Notably, Comey does not mention the ongoing Trump/Russia investigation before the vote.

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6. Election Night Shock & Immediate Russian Reaction ([25:11]–[27:55])

• Across the Atlantic: Both hosts recall the disbelief at Trump’s victory in their respective locations.
  • Quote, Gordon Corera (25:22):
    “You could just sense the shock of people because this was a Hillary crowd and they just were not expecting it.”
• Russian Response: US intelligence intercepts Russian officials congratulating themselves after the results.

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7. Obama’s Response & The Limits of Retaliation ([27:55]–[39:25])

• Aftermath: Obama’s options are limited. He issues a final warning via the “red phone” but mostly refrains from dramatic retaliation, hoping not to trigger escalation.
  • Quote, David McCloskey (30:04):
    “The only thing that the White House seems to have done is issue that intelligence community... statement on 7th October...”
• No Vote Manipulation: All evidence confirms Russians did not directly alter vote counts, although they probed state systems.
• Sanctions & Expulsions ([37:46]): Expulsions of Russian spies and further sanctions ensue, but measures are widely regarded as weak.
  • Quote, David McCloskey (39:25):
    “It comes down to what Trump is ultimately going to do about Russia and its interference in the 2016 election.”

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8. Did Putin Get What He Wanted? ([39:54]–[44:02])

• Assessment:
  US intelligence concludes:
  • Goals: Undermine faith in US democracy, damage Clinton, and boost Trump.
  • “High Confidence”: Putin had a preference for Trump and approved the campaign.
    • Quote, David McCloskey (41:10):
      “The intelligence community assesses that Putin ordered an influence campaign... We have high confidence in these judgments.”
• Improvisation, Not a Grand Plan:
  Putin’s strategy was opportunistic; his agencies were reactive, not perfectly coordinated.

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9. Did Russian Active Measures Swing the Election? ([44:02]–[53:06])

• No Direct Evidence:
  No proof Russia changed votes; the US intelligence community refuses to claim its influence was decisive.
• Hacked Content in the Media:
  Massive news coverage of WikiLeaks content far outstripped any direct impact of the Russians’ own misinformation campaigns.
  • Quote, David McCloskey (49:09):
    “…the hack and leak content… was massively covered in the press… hashtag Podesta emails was trending on Twitter… big stories on CBS and NPR.”
• Was It Decisive?:
  • The election’s razor-thin margin (78,000 swing votes across key states) means many factors could be cited.
  • Academic studies suggest social media trolling had negligible impact, but hack-and-leak operations shifted agenda and public focus.
    • Quote, David McCloskey (52:01):
      “The GRU hack and the WikiLeaks content... was one of the factors that contributed to the outcome of the election. But... how important or decisive it is, I think we just cannot know.”
• Baseball Analogy ([46:06]):
  A single pitch may seem decisive but is set up by the entire game before it—many elements contributed to Trump’s win.

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10. Long-term Impact: Institutions, Trust & the “Deep State” ([54:34]–[62:13])

• Erosion of Trust:
  The Russia story’s biggest impact is on public trust—in the intelligence community, the media, and information itself.
  • Quote, David McCloskey (54:34):
    “…it’s fueled and created a very conspiratorial, partisan view of the intelligence community, and… created the modern, like, deep state idea.”
• Media & Public Opinion:
  The inability to separate foreign leaks from domestic scandal has fueled “post-truth” perceptions and relentless polarization.
• Deep State Narrative:
  Trump sees the intelligence findings as an attempt to delegitimize his presidency, cementing the “deep state” concept in American politics.
  • Quote, Gordon Corera (36:34):
    “This is really, I think, where you start to see the talk of the deep state really taking root with Donald Trump...”
• Active Measures Win in the Long Run:
  Russia’s improvised tactics foster confusion and mistrust, successfully undermining democratic discourse.
  • Quote, Gordon Corera (59:45):
    “What better way to do that than to make it impossible to know what’s true?”

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11. Russian Interference Endures ([61:02]):

• 2024 Redux:
  Russia continues to adapt its active measures, using covert financial influence and fabricated videos, illustrating the ongoing, evolving threat.

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Memorable Quotes & Notable Moments

• “[On the ICA process] It is excruciating… someone fell asleep in the meeting. That person… was me.”
  – David McCloskey, 02:32
• “The final draft… FBI director, James Comey, says he doesn’t want the FBI’s name attached to the statement.”
  – David McCloskey, 08:48
• “3:30pm: Statement comes out accusing Russia. 4:00pm: Access Hollywood tape. 4:32pm: WikiLeaks Podesta dump. What a Friday.”
  – Timeline per hosts, [09:25]–[14:38]
• “It just blurs together in the minds of many Americans… amplifies the impact of the Russian active measure.”
  – David McCloskey, 19:49
• “The CIA couldn’t do its job without appearing to favor Hillary Clinton… That’s fueled the deep state idea.”
  – David McCloskey, 54:34
• “What better way to… sow chaos than to make it impossible to know what’s true?”
  – David McCloskey, 59:45

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Crucial Timestamps

• 02:32 – McCloskey’s anecdote about the ICA process
• 07:52 – Decision not to directly name Putin in the ICA
• 10:07 – Release of US government’s public statement accusing Russia
• 11:29–13:23 – The “October Surprises”: Access Hollywood and Podesta emails
• 18:49 – Email content’s alignment with anti-Clinton narratives
• 22:52 – Comey’s October 31 announcement
• 25:11 – Election Night personal recollections
• 30:04 – Obama’s post-election response
• 41:10 – Quoting the final Intelligence Community judgment on Russian aims
• 44:02 – Discussion of whether Russia “swung” the election
• 54:34 – Enduring impact on institutions, trust, and the deep state narrative
• 61:02 – Russian interference in 2024: new tactics

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Conclusion

This episode provides not just a detailed narrative of how Russian active measures and US intelligence processes shaped the 2016 election outcome, but also a broader reflection on their corrosive long-term effects—on institutional trust, journalistic norms, and confidence in democracy itself. With their signature blend of first-hand experience and clear-eyed journalism, McCloskey and Corera leave listeners with an unsettling recognition: the methods and consequences of covert influence are still very much with us, shaping our politics and our perceptions.

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For further detail, subscribe to the Declassified Club at therealclassified.com for bonus miniseries exploring the Trump campaign’s Russia connections post-election.

Transcript

[David McCloskey]

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the declassified [e-mail].

[Gordon Carrera]

Was Vladimir Putin behind the election of Donald Trump in 2016? And were Hillary Clinton's emails really as crooked as they seemed? Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

[David McCloskey]

And I'm David McCloskey.

[Gordon Carrera]

And welcome to this, the final episode in our series looking at Russia's active measure, its interference in the US election of 2016. We've looked at Hack and Leak, we've looked at Evgeny Prigozhin's troll farms. And we'd left the story as we entered the final stretch of the election campaign in October 2016 with potentially the news of another dump of information via WikiLeaks of hacked emails.

[David McCloskey]

Well, that's right. And meanwhile, as this, this tranche of new WikiLeaks data is about to come out, the intelligence picture, Gordon, that's being constructed by this intelligence community task force. We last talked about them back in the fourth episode of this series, right before we diverted to Yevgeny Prigozhin's Internet trolls. But the intelligence community in the US has had a task force running since the kind of late summer to try to build really a consensus view on exactly what is happening with respect to Russian interference and why. And I should say, Gordon, that what they're producing is what's called an intelligence community assessment. These used to be called National Intelligence Estimates. Now it's an intelligence community assessment, or ica. And remember, one of the planks of the Obama administration's approach had been to not get out in front of the intelligence. So they, they really want this document and they want it to be a view of the entirety of the U.S. intelligence community. Now, I should say I have participated in the drafting of such papers, and I would struggle to identify a more miserable process that I, that I was involved in in government. Because the reality of how these things are ultimately constructed is that you have Representatives of the 17 or so intelligence agencies who will sit in a room and go through individual line edits and argue about particular words. And it is excruciating. It takes hours and hours and hours of time. The people from individual teams that are told volun told to go and join these, this process view it as sort of like an absolute nightmare. And it's the only time during my CIA tenure where I actually saw an adult human fall asleep in a meeting and no one bothered to wake them. Up was working on, working on intelligence assessments like this one on Syria where somebody. There's a guy who just was slumped over in a chair for about two hours, just completely passed out because it was so unbelievably boring. And that person, of course, Gordon, was me.

[Gordon Carrera]

You're destroying everyone's image of the exciting life inside the US intelligence community. It's certainly not Jason Bourne if people are falling asleep at meetings, going through the drafting process for an intelligence community assessment. But I think the UK equivalent is the Joint Intelligence Committee, where they do JIC reports. And again, the kind of people really get into the language and are very precise, aren't they, about. About how strongly you're affirming a conclusion or coming to it. And, you know, different agencies also like to kind of leave their stamp on it and argue about it. So the risk is it gets watered down to something a bit anodyne. But I guess this one was a big one and a sensitive one. And we talked previously, hadn't we, that they'd had some insight into what Russia was doing from a couple of sources, maybe an agent inside the Kremlin. And they've got intercepts, no doubt. And all of this is going to give them a bit of a picture as to what the Russians might be up to. This episode is sponsored by hp. Most people are not counterespionage experts, but that won't stop them getting targeted by cybercriminals seeking to extract their secrets.

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[David McCloskey]

Well, and there is some new intelligence that has come in and it seems that it's actual intercepts that came out after WikiLeaks had dumped the DNC emails. And on these intercepts, officials inside the Kremlin are congratulating themselves on a job well done. At one Russian official apparently referred to the operation having been done, quote, at the direction of our leadership. You see this kind of connection between the WikiLeaks dump and the Russian active measure that is, that is demonstrated in the intelligence. Now, one sentence in particular is debated in these task force meetings, which is the sentence stating that Putin had authorized the operation. I'm assuming, based on how they understood the Russian government to operate, that they would have all believed that Vladimir Putin had personally authorized the operation, given that it's an authoritarian intelligence state and he sits at the head of it. It's a near to final draft intelligence assessment will assert that Putin had personally okayed the information warfare campaign. But there's concern about actually naming Putin as the kind of mastermind of this in an official intelligence assessment because some of those judgments, the high level judgments in these intelligence assessments are often declassified. And again, you come back to what we talked about in earlier episodes. The Obama administration not wanting to poke Putin for fear that he might do something more extreme against the actual election infrastructure. So they decide the scrap Putin's name from the intelligence community assessment and ultimately from the sort of public statement that will be made about the findings inside that intelligence assessment. And they opt for the less specific wording of, quote, senior Kremlin officials, which you kind of don't know how that could meet anyone other than Putin, but it doesn't say his name. The final draft is produced. It's got all the logos of all the intelligence agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. FBI, NSA, CIA, others. Right. They all agree on this finding. But in the final principles meeting, the FBI director, James Comey, says he doesn't want the FBI's name attached to the statement. Something I find quite curious, actually. And I'm not quite sure if this connects to some of the investigations the FBI has ongoing at this point in time into members of the Trump campaign or what it really reflects on Comey's part. But it's a little bit curious.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, it is a bit curious. Maybe Comey's designed not to appear political. I mean it's always a little odd, isn't it, with the FBI because it's obviously got its law enforcement functions and it's got its counterintelligence functions and sometimes it feels those two different responsibilities situation a little bit uneasily together. And I guess maybe that's an example of some of the tension. A bit hard to know.

[David McCloskey]

So it's the 7th of October 2016. This is going to be a very, very big day.

[Gordon Carrera]

I can remember it.

[David McCloskey]

And the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is finishing the declassification of a statement based on the findings in this intelligence community assessment. They plan to release it within a few hours on Friday 7th October 2016. Now the US government in modern times has never accused a foreign nation of intervening in the American political process, even though as we mentioned in the first episode of the series, it had happened before. A public statement like this I think is without precedent.

[Gordon Carrera]

It's a big deal.

[David McCloskey]

And yet this is barely going to make the dues. So October 7th, Friday 2016, it's 3:30 in the afternoon. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security issue a joint statement declaring that the intelligence community was quote, confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations. And then it says that the release of all that stolen material by DC Leaks, which is the GRU front account, WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 was quote, consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process. And then it states in kind of a, I think indirect way that quote, only Russia's senior most officials could have authorized these activities. It also makes a statement about individual states seeing some scanning and probing of their election related systems. I think it's pretty clear essentially the statement says that the IC suspects, the intelligence community suspects that Moscow is targeting America's electoral infrastructure. The Clinton campaign is ecstatic about the statement. The Trump team, eh, kind of meh, not so much of a reaction.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, so I remember this coming out. For those of us following kind of national security cybersecurity, it was a big deal. Although Friday, late in the afternoon, it's a slightly strange time to drop a story like that anyway. Kind of always makes you wonder why, why then. But then the crucial thing is within minutes and by chance it is going to be completely blown out of the water as a story by something Else which emerges literally minutes later. And this is the bit I think is one of those weird, extraordinary kind of coincidences because no one could have planned it. As you said, at 3:30 in the afternoon, that statement comes out at 4:00pm news comes out of what's called the Access Hollywood tape. And we should remind people who've maybe blanked this out of their minds what it was. But it was a, a recording of Donald Trump talking to the Access Hollywood host Billy Bush. And they're gonna talk about some pretty unpleasant things, aren't there? I mean, this is one of the famous quotes of Donald Trump. Are you gonna do it? You gonna describe what he said?

[David McCloskey]

No, I mean, just to say, I think, you know, Trump essentially brags about kissing and groping and propositioning women without any kind of remorse or consequence. I mean, it goes absolutely viral because it's so repugnant.

[Gordon Carrera]

And I mean, this was astonishing. I mean, that tape. And I think a lot of people, when that tape emerged, thought this was game over for Donald Trump. I mean, that was generally the view of a lot of people watching the campaign. I think, you know, his campaign was already. People weren't sure he's going to win, but this would finish him off. So you can see why at that moment when that tape comes out, all this stuff about hacking and Russian stuff just gets blown out the water, doesn't it?

[David McCloskey]

Although in yet another strange, and I think we could argue about whether this is a coincidence or not, I'm. I'm actually not sure. At 4:32pm, so a half hour after the Access Hollywood tape comes out, WikiLeaks tweets release the Podesta emails. And at that Moment in time, WikiLeaks is posting about 2,000 of John Podesta's emails. Now, John Podesta, remember, is the chair of the Clinton campaign. And WikiLeaks has leaked, they've leaked DNC content. Up to this point, they haven't really leaked the personal emails of John Podesta. And they are putting out about 2,000 of John Podesta's emails from his personal Gmail account and reporting WikiLeaks says that they have more than 50,000 of his emails in their possession. And so I've always, I wondered, you know, Gordon, as I was researching the story, if WikiLeaks did this in response, if they were already had it ready and they sort of accelerated the dump in order to try to distract from the Access Hollywood story, or if this is just another of these random coincidences that seems to strike on on that day in October.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, well, I'm not sure either, but we should say, I mean, it's obviously Access Hollywood tape coming out was a coincidence. The fact that that story dropped at that moment was not planned because whoever was planning to Release it at 4pm did not know that the statement was coming out for the intelligence community at 3:30. So you already got this kind of conflation of different things. But the things people are going to remember are the Access Hollywood tape and to some extent the, the Clinton emails, because that looks like the October Surprise, which is this phrase always used for something which happens in the last minutes of an election campaign to try and shift it. And yeah, I mean, maybe it was a deliberate drop there to distract from both the intelligence community statement and Access Hollywood. Maybe it was coming, maybe it was coming anywhere around then. That's what you'd have thought. But it's amazing how much happens in that one period of basically an hour or so on a Friday afternoon.

[David McCloskey]

We should talk a little bit about the Podesta emails because a lot of it is actually really boring. So it's messages that, you know, I'm headed, headed home, honey, for the night. There's a risotto recipe in there. There were also, but there were, there were excerpts of Clinton's, Hillary Clinton's speeches to Wall street firms that, for example, that she had made after she had left government as Obama's secretary of state and she'd refused to release. There were exchanges, unsurprisingly, that exposed infighting among campaign aids and there were some kind of cringy comments about Hillary. And in one that got a lot of traction, there was a former Clinton campaign advisor saying that, you know, Clinton's instincts can be terrible, right. So kind of bashing the candidate. And whether it was planned or not, the hope on the part of WikiLeaks and course the Trump campaign would be that it would draw some fire away from the Access Hollywood tape. Although we should say, I don't think it's really effective in doing that. I mean, the Access Hollywood tape consumes all of the, all of the oxygen, right? That is the big story.

[Gordon Carrera]

But the Clinton stuff continues to drip out, doesn't it? And I think that's the effect of it is rather than dominating the news cycle that day, the Clinton, the pedestrian emails, I suppose I should say they drip out and people are looking through them and finding stuff and they are going to play out through the kind of closing weeks of the campaign.

[David McCloskey]

We should also note, Gordon, before we move off of that wild day of October 7, 2016. It's Vladimir Putin's 64th birthday. So it's, it's a, it's a big day for Volodya. Happy birthday. So you're right, the drip and the kind of. I think I would argue that just the constant drumbeat of the email stuff, it's going to be integrated into the final weeks of the campaign and injected into the bloodstream of the election. Because, for example, during the second presidential debate, Hillary Clinton is asked directly about the Podesta emails. Right. So a debate question is generated from the kind of stew of a Russian active measure. And you know, Clinton's trying to just to focus on the Russian attacks and Trump deflects it. WikiLeaks will end up sending Donald Trump Jr. A message thanking him and Trump for talking up their site. And they send a link to the Podesta emails that Don Jr later passes on to campaign associates. So the leaks to the kind of drip, drip, drip, they come out in 34 tranches, just about one every day up until the election. There's a total of 64,000 emails that are released. And each tranche has some kind of enticing pieces of information to keep the story going and to make sure that journalists, you know, pick it up, that news outlets pick it up. So for, for one example, there's an email where Clinton aides are tapping clients of their consulting firms for contributions to the Clinton Global Initiative, seemingly in exchange for access to former President Clinton. So there's one client, Coca Cola, that receives a face to face meeting with the former president at his home back in 2009 after contributing millions to his nonprofit foundation. Right. So there's stuff that comes out like this.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah. And it was interesting because I think it played into the idea that Hillary Clinton was tight with Wall street and with big business and was not an advocate for working people, which was a kind of Trump's message was, I'm for the ordinary people. And you know, she's part of the kind of globalist elite. And I think there were elements of that which worked also, you know, some of the protester emails slamming Bernie Sanders, calling him a doofus, things like that, which again, may have had an impact. So I think it is interesting, but I think it is fair to say it's there pretty constantly, you know, in that period, at some level.

[David McCloskey]

I mean, Gordon, what I think is happening here is that the email stuff just blurs together in the minds of, of many Americans. Right, because the WikiLeaks dump the Podesta emails are a very separate issue from the private email server that Hillary had been using that the Department of Justice had been investigating and that had generated so much of the controversy about Hillary Clinton and emails.

[Gordon Carrera]

They get conflated a little bit.

[David McCloskey]

They get conflated, right. And so I think in the, in a lot of the, the public mind, the stuff that's being released is the stuff that she was covering up. Those two things converge, I think, for many Americans. And it, it amplifies, I think, the, the impact of the Russian active measure as a result. Now, I mean, again, it's, this is all kind of straight out of the active measures playbook, wouldn't you say, Gordon? I mean, it's, yeah, exploit these kind of weaknesses and existing controversy muddy the waters. They're using journalists to amplify the message really throughout the fall. I think it is interesting, like it was known that the GRU was behind the DNC hacks. And yet, because a lot of the connection between the GRU and WikiLeaks is still pretty murky. Exactly how and when the GRU got all this stuff to WikiLeaks and what WikiLeaks knew about what they had and how, where had it come from? So I think that piece of the story was sort of unexplored and impossible to explore back during the election cycle. And so the source for all of this stuff is not cited as the Russian GRU. The source is cited as WikiLeaks. And journalists are much more inclined, I think, obviously to work or to cite stuff that WikiLeaks is putting out that they would have been if the source had been Russian intelligence.

[Gordon Carrera]

After this, there's a lot of thinking in journalistic circles which is what are the, what are the ethics, what are the kind of practicalities of dealing with leaked information? Because there's one way of looking at it which is to go, well, the source of something doesn't matter if the information is true and is newsworthy and interesting. And there's another view, which is to say, but what if it is being released by someone with an agenda and in this case an intelligence agency trying to manipulate you. And I think it took time for journalists to kind of find their way around this and to understand how to deal with leaked information. I think it was all quite new. As I said, we'd had a little bit before with some of the Sony emails, kind of 2014, 2015, but this was kind of new, I think, in the journalism world. And then it became a long running issue like how do you deal with something which may be disinformation, may be true, may be pushed by another state, but be true. When you get to the next campaign, you get to kind of Hunter Biden's laptop. There's a whole other story there which some people don't cover because they think it's being pushed out by the Russians. But then what if it is true and they've ignored it because it. So it becomes quite a contentious issue, I think, within journalism of how you deal with true information, but which has originated in a leak and when that leak has come from an actor with an agenda. But that's often true with leaked information. I mean, you think about the Panama Papers or something like that, but what if it's a foreign intelligence agency trying to disrupt your election? That is different. But yeah, it was definitely complicated at the time and perhaps not thought through enough at that time.

[David McCloskey]

And then Gordon, on the 31st of October 2016, so eight days before the election, we get another massive blending of this whole Hillary Clinton and email issue, because on 31 October, FBI Director James Comey announces the discovery of additional Clinton server emails that he says need to be reviewed. And this is an absolute bombshell. And I think even though it is unrelated to the Russian hacked material, the drumbeat of all of the leaks over the course of October had really set the stage for this to be a even more massive story than perhaps it would have been without the active measure in play.

[Gordon Carrera]

I mean, I think there are a lot of people who actually think that it's this announcement of the James Comey investigation, of renewing basically reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails eight days before the election. That that may be the thing that swings the election more than anything else. And we can come back to that. But, you know, James Comey's decision to do that and to be public about it is something I think he will be very, very heavily criticized for. And it, it's going to go back. We can explore this a bit more at other points, but it's, it's one of the big decisions, I think, for him to publicly announce that they're reinvestigating Hillary Clinton's emails eight days before. But you're right, one of the key points is that there just becomes this morass of stories around Hillary Clinton leaked emails. Just that sense that there's something murky or as some might put it, crooked around Hillary. And that is part of the problem which is going to be hanging over her like a cloud in those final days of the campaign.

[David McCloskey]

And it's interesting, isn't it? Because Comey at that point hasn't said anything about an investigation called Crossfire Hurricane, which is a look at Trump campaign associates and their linkages to Russia. And we go into much more detail on this at our miniseries for club members. But that's not public before the election.

[Gordon Carrera]

And it's the problem that you've got him publicly announcing a new investigation to Hillary Clinton, but not revealing that they're investigating the Donald Trump campaign. That, I agree, is, you know, in hindsight, is a very big call, and that's putting it mildly.

[David McCloskey]

So November 8, 2016, it's election day. Gordon, what do you remember, by the way, what was the vibe in the UK when you got the news that Donald Trump had been elected?

[Gordon Carrera]

Well, I can tell you exactly where I was because I was in the US Embassy in London. It was the old embassy in Grosvenor Square. And they always, well, they used to. I think they still do, but on a big party for election night. And it was really interesting because the vibe is always quite kind of fun and there's drinks and there was an Elvis impersonator. I think I've got a picture of me with an Elvis impersonator from that night. But you can imagine that the U.S. embassy, both the staff and most of the crowd at that time are definitely in the Hillary Clinton camp. That was definitely the mood. No one was expecting a Donald Trump victory. And I just remember when the first results started to come in and there were the initial exit polls and details, I think, from Florida, which suggested it was going to be much closer than people thought. I mean, the mood just changed in an instant because they had these big TV screens up in the auditorium. And you could just sense the shock of people because this was a Hillary crowd and they just were not expecting it. And people just started to leave at time that when they realized it wasn't going that way, I mean, the party basically ended. What about you?

[David McCloskey]

I was at home and I'd been watching with family and friends that basically everyone had either left or gone to bed under the presumption that it was going to be a Clinton victory. Because you remember that that evening it like went from, I mean, almost certain that it was going to be Clinton to she's done right in a matter of a matter of hours as the results came in. I remember going and actually amazing, waking my wife up to tell her that it completely swung the opposite direction from when she'd gone to bed. I mean, it was just, it was absolutely astounding. But so Trump wins. He gives a kind of weirdly gracious speech complimenting Hillary Clinton and the campaign. And in the days that follow, the US Intelligence community is going to intercept communications among senior Russian officials in which they are congratulating themselves on Trump's victory. But we're not done because, Gordon, I don't know how it works in the uk, but in the US we have our elections in November and the new president is not inaugurated until January. And so Barack Obama is president for a few more months. And I think hanging over his head is a really big question, which is, you know, how or should you even retaliate against this active measure.

[Anita Anand]

To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.

[William Duranpole]

To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.

[Anita Anand]

Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world, yet he started life life as a rural boy in a muddy provincial village.

[William Duranpole]

A rebel son who hated his father, survived a 6,000mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions from Empire.

[Anita Anand]

The Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.

[William Duranpole]

And I'm William Duranpole.

[Anita Anand]

In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitta to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.

[William Duranpole]

We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power.

[Anita Anand]

We'll explore the greatest famine in human history, a catastrophe where Mao himself predicted that half of China may well have to die.

[William Duranpole]

And we'll discuss descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution, a time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.

[Anita Anand]

And we'll play a clip from the series at the end of this episode for you to listen to.

[Gordon Carrera]

So, David, we are in the aftermath of that real shock and an election result in November 2016 when Donald Trump wins. President Obama has, as we've heard, been trying to avoid being seen to influence the election in any way and probably been like many people assuming that Hillary Clinton was going to win. He's still in office. I mean, he's got a problem now, some people might say a problem partly of his own making for not calling out earlier. But now what do you do? I mean, the election is done. Donald Trump is elected.

[David McCloskey]

More statements, Gordon, more, more wagging of the stern statement, wagging of the finger at Moscow. I mean, up to this point, the only thing that the White House seems to have done is issue that intelligence community sort of the DNI DHS statement on 7th October 2016 calling out the Russians for interfering in the election. That is essentially all that, all that has happened there is a final warning that's conveyed to the Kremlin on 31 October through a secure channel that's actually originally designed to prevent miscommunication between Washington and Moscow leading to a nuclear exchange. And it's known it's the red phone. It initially began as a teletype connection between the Pentagon and the Kremlin, but then became a fax machine. Now I think it's finally encrypted, encrypted email. I actually don't think it's a phone at all. And the, the late October message very carefully alludes to war. It notes that international law, including the law for armed conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace and that meddling in the election would represent serious interference in the fundamentals of US society. Russia confirms that it got the message, but offers no immediate reply. Now, I don't know how much of this is just, you know, sort of wish casting, but Obama officials have since said that they think that those warnings a week before the election persuaded Putin to abandon any idea of actually carrying out a cyber offensive on election day. What, what say you to that?

[Gordon Carrera]

Well, I think it is worth saying that we talked previously about the fact the Russians had got into some of the things like voter databases in states and some of that electoral infrastructure, and it is true that they didn't do anything. There's no sign of them really interfering with the actual voting process or the tallying or the registration on the day. So it is possible the warning did have an impact on that, or it could be that the Russians didn't feel they needed to or didn't want to do that anyway. I mean, it's hard to know, I

[David McCloskey]

guess, and I think probably impossible to know, but I think it is worth saying and I think just know as we're kind of getting close to the close of this series, that the, the Senate investigation back into 2016, the Mueller report, all of the journalistic work that's been done on this, there has, there hasn't been anyone who has been able to say that the Russians manipulated vote counts or directly interfered in the actual electoral process. So that's important is that, that, that did not happen. And during 2016, that was a, that was a massive fear. So, so you could, whether it, whether that didn't happen because it was Never part of the Russian plan to begin with or never on the table or because the Russians, it was made clear to the Russians by the Obama administration that there would be massive consequences for doing that. Impossible to say.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, and I think that's right. I think there was a view which was if Hillary Clinton had won, it might have been more in Russia's interest to suggest that the voting counts had been interfered with and to start spreading information, at least maybe not to have interfered with it, actually the actual tallying, but to spread that. But they don't need to do that in the end. So, again, there's different scenarios and possibilities here, but so much of it does seem to have been defined by the fact that everyone thought, probably the Russians as well, and probably a lot of people in the Trump campaign, that Hillary Clinton was going to win. And I think that factor, that people were just convinced that Trump wouldn't win, I think does help understand what otherwise seem quite odd actions by a lot of the key players in this, don't you think?

[David McCloskey]

Absolutely. I mean, think about it from Obama's standpoint. He doesn't weigh in really on Russian interference publicly because he doesn't want to. He assumes Hillary will be elected. He doesn't want to taint the upcoming Clinton presidency. Obama also doesn't punish the Russians before the election because he assumes that once Hillary is elected, she'll be able to finish the job or be able to respond, you know, at the beginning of her administration in a more forceful way.

[Gordon Carrera]

And James Comey we were talking about, why does James Comey talk about the Hillary investigation, not the Trump investigation? Because he assumes, I think he said this since, that Hillary is going to win and he doesn't want to be accused of having suppressed information about her ahead of the vote. So he talks openly about the fact there's an investigation into her when normally as an FBI director, you wouldn't reveal that there was that kind of investigation. So, again, it's the assumption that Hillary is going to win and Trump's going to lose, which drives behaviors which actually end up helping the Russians.

[David McCloskey]

But of course, Hillary did not win. And we now have a new president elect, Donald Trump, who's praised Putin and WikiLeaks throughout the campaign, encouraged them at one moment in late July to intervene on his behalf, and has publicly said during the, during the campaign, I think, in one of the debates that nobody knows whether Russia intervened in the election. This kind of tough position that Barack Obama and his administration are in, it continues after the election because, you know, what do you do. I mean, there was an idea of, do you appoint Bureau Obama? Do you appoint a formal investigation? Obama nixes that. He's worried that's going to be too political. He launches another intelligence community review in December that'll be published before the transition will be published in early January. And the CIA, other agencies, uncover some information that influences their view that Trump was Putin's preferred candidate. And details of this begin to leak out, I think, to the Washington Post almost immediately. And this is important because although the public had known for months that Russia had intervened, nobody knew that CIA believed that it was actually a formal intelligence assessment that the intervention had occurred, the Russian intervention had occurred on behalf of. Of Trump, which makes anybody getting involved in this in the weeks and months after the elections even more politically toxic.

[Gordon Carrera]

I mean, that is the problem, because then immediately Donald Trump sees this as being an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of his win in the election. And therefore, this is really, I think, where you start to see the talk of the deep state really taking root with Donald Trump, because he comes to view this as a concerted attempt to smear and undermine his legitimacy by using accusations that he'd only been elected by the Russians. Now, we're going to deal with that and that question about the relationship in the bonus miniseries. But it is important, these leaks and reports and these intelligence community assessments, which are starting to come out in December and January, in actually defining the whole of the Trump presidency, the first and the second Trump presidency, in terms of how it sees the deep state, how it sees Russia, all of these big questions. I think a lot of them revolve around what's happening in these few weeks. And in the meantime, I mean, the US Intelligence community is going to come to this assessment, but what are they going to do to the Russians? I mean, it's pretty weak, isn't it? If you think someone's interfered in an election, I mean, what do they do? They expel a few GRU and FSB officials from the U.S. yeah, I mean,

[David McCloskey]

I guess the final. The final tally is there are sanctions, additional sanctions placed on the GRU, the FSB, and three Russian intelligence officials. Four companies involved in cyber operations. The US expels 35 Russian, I guess they believe are Russian intelligence officers. Of course, a lot of them are under. All of them are under diplomatic cover. There are Russian diplomatic compounds in New York and Maryland that get shuttered. And the Russians are told they have 24 hours to vacate those properties and 72 to get the expelled officials out of the U.S. so, again, it's something, but it's, it is pretty, it is pretty weak. Now, what is left unsaid here by the administration at the kind of public unveiling of these punishments is that it seems very likely that the President authorized the CIA, the nsa, and US Cyber Command to deploy malware and implants in critical Russian networks. It could be telecoms, it could be electricity. And that's a long term game. That's not something you do overnight, to be honest.

[Gordon Carrera]

I, they should be doing that anyway. I kind of go, why would they, why are they not, why were they not doing that anyway? You know, that, that feels to me not either a punishment or a deterrence, to be honest, especially if it's secret. So, yeah, I have to say it does, looking back, look slightly bizarre. But I guess they're about to be out of office. I mean, there's a limit to what they can do. Their time is up.

[David McCloskey]

Yeah. It comes down to what Trump is ultimately going to do about Russia and its interference in the 2016 election.

[Gordon Carrera]

And that, as they say, is a very different story. Well, we're not going to deal with today Trump and how he deals with Russia after the election. I think we may come to that another time. But I guess we're left still with some pretty big questions, aren't we, David, which is what were the Russians trying to do with this active measure and how much did it succeed?

[David McCloskey]

Yeah, that's right. I think there's three, there's three big questions to look at. The first one is did Putin get what he wanted? The second one is what impact, if any, did the active measure have on the outcome of the election? And the third, I think is what impact did it have on US Institutions and the kind of broader society? And I think it's worth thinking about those three things separately. So let's start with the first one. Did Putin get what he wanted? Well, I think it is worth going back to the intelligence community assessment that comes out In January of 2017 after the election, which, and by the way, the findings from this are publicly available and have been declassified so people can read them. But, and I think we should probably provide a link to the findings in the, in the show notes. But essentially the, the major finding is, is that the intelligence community assesses that Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at the US Presidential election, that its goals were to undermine public faith in the US Democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess that Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President Elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments. And so I think you could say in one word, yes, Putin. Putin got. Got what he wanted. The fact that we're doing these episodes is a suggestion, an indication that Putin got what he wanted.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah. I think if you run through an undermined faith in the democratic process because people view it as subject to interference. Denigrated Hillary Clinton. Yep. Made it harder for her to be elected. Yes. Although whether it swung the election, we'll come back to. But, yes, I think you can argue that it was an active measure, which in that sense, if that was its objective, it worked. Even though, as I think we were suggesting all the way through, it perhaps was improvised. It wasn't necessarily all coordinated as one great master plan. There were bits of improvisation with some of the interactions with different officials, including in the Trump campaign. But I almost wonder if it succeeded more than they expected it to, because I don't think they expected Donald Trump to win. I think they just thought, let's just mess with this a bit. It and weaken, particularly, I think, weaken Hillary Clinton and undermine when she won her legitimacy by being able to kind of call into question what had happened. So I do think it succeeded perhaps in a way they didn't expect.

[David McCloskey]

There was not some kind of perfectly well thought out and strategized evil master plan. I think this whole thing was very. Was improvised in a lot of ways. I mean, I think Putin obviously decided and told his intelligence agencies early on that he wanted them to interfere in the election and to sow chaos, that the U.S. the active measure was approved at the highest level. But as we've seen, none of his intelligence agencies really coordinated with one another. I think they were. The Russians were responding as much to events in real time as. As maybe anybody else. And, and this was very, very improvised. So, yes, Putin got what he wanted, but it wasn't a kind of well thought out evil master plan. I think the second question, though, Gordon, this is maybe the big one. What impact did the active measure have on the outcome of the election? Now, first off, just to remind everyone, no evidence of direct tampering with election infrastructure. FBI forensic work that's been done in the years since has showed the Russians probed pretty much every state voting system, but there was no breakdown at the polling booths. There was no manipulation of vote counts. The CIA and the broader intelligence community, interestingly, I mean, and I think rightly so, haven't taken a position on this question, on the broader question of what impact the active measure had on the election. The intelligence Community has not taken a stand on this.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

Now, it is worth reminding everyone how close this election was. Trump lost the popular vote. He won three important states, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, by, respectively. He won Michigan by 10,704 votes. He won Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes. And he won Wisconsin by 22,748 votes. That is a roughly 78,000 votes swing. And Hillary wins the election.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

So it's, it's very close.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yes. The fact that it's incredibly close could lead you to go, well, the Russians swung the election. But you could also say, when it's that close, lots of things can swing an election. I mean, you mentioned Wisconsin. There's, I mean, the fact is Hillary Clinton didn't bother campaigning in Wisconsin. I think she didn't, she didn't go there. There are a number of states where she didn't vote. So you could argue that decision. The decisions of the, you know, Hillary Clinton campaign of where to go and try and get out the vote were the things that cost her the election because it was that close. So when you've got a really close election, you can come up with lots of things which potentially could have swung it. I think you can definitely make the case that James Comey's decision to publicly announce he was reinvestigating her emails could have swung the election when it's that close. So I think you can make the case that the GRU hack and leak or the social media had an impact and was one of the things which you could say made a difference. But it is always really hard. And I think if you look at the academic work as well, to understand why people make a decision to vote a particular way and what might have changed it and what made an impact. Did seeing one particular ad make them change their mind and vote a different way? Did a news report about Hillary Clinton's emails or John Podesta's emails make the difference? I think it's really, really hard to measure that. That is the problem.

[David McCloskey]

That is the problem. And I do think that the, the analogy, the overall analogy that comes to mind for me is if you look at a sporting match, right, I think of baseball because I've been a bar and I know you, you won't think

[Gordon Carrera]

of baseball, no understanding of baseball, but go ahead.

[David McCloskey]

You could have a baseball game that is decided on the very last pitch, right? Whether that's a striker, it's a home runner, it's whatever it is, like, very last pitch. And there is a tendency in, in the way that you analyze these games and think about them to put a tremendous amount of weight on that thing that happened at the very end of the game. And, and yet the result of the game comes down to the lineup of either team, decisions that are made about who plays where and when. At bats that happened much earlier in the game in high leverage situations. There's been nine innings of play up to that point that you got to the very last pitch or at bat. And to say that the game was won or lost because solely because of that at bat is just not right. Because it's the sum total of a whole bunch of other decisions and outcomes that happened beforehand. That's one of them. It gets a lot of coverage, but it's maybe not the most important. Now, I do think it's interesting though, because we've talked in this series about basically two planks to the active measure. There's the social media trolling that Evgeny Prigozhin and the Internet Research Agency led, and then there's the hacket leak which was conducted by the, the gruo. And I think it's interesting if you try to split those two apart to kind of look at, well, what, what impact you write. It's, it's one factor among many, but kind of was it a big, really big factor or was it potentially a, a smaller factor in, in the outcome? And there's a book called Cyber War How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, what We don't, can't and Dudo, written by an academic named Kathleen Hall Jamison, who did a, an interesting analysis of really both of these planks. But she starts with the social media trolling and she uses data scholarly work for the advertising industry to look at how exposure to messages affects decisions to buy things or to vote. And what she did was she looked at the total number of Americans exposed to the troll content and then kind of walked that down to the potential number of votes affected at the state level. And in the back of the envelope calculation that she did, even with those really large exposure numbers that we talked about in the last episode on what Yida Prigozhin was up to, really minor impact on the vote. And even the really minor impact that she calculates on the vote is probably an overstatement of of its impact. So the sort of the troll content,

[Gordon Carrera]

the social media almost the Facebook, the

[David McCloskey]

social media content probably had almost no impact. But when you look at the hack and leak content.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, I agree.

[David McCloskey]

More by the gru. It's, it is more interesting because it's massively covered in the press. It's searched by ordinary Americans in the campaign and election cycle. And you know, there's an argument that, that some have made that say, well, you know, all of this content that the Russians injected into the American bloodstream through their WikiLeaks, like it was just kind of jumped upon by the right wing, kind of more pro Trump propaganda bandwagon, right? That all of this stuff was really only being consumed inside, inside Trump world. And that's, that's really not, not true. I mean, as an example, from the 7th of October through the 20th of October, I mean, so really, as we're getting into the kind of final days of the election, There were over 8,000 headlines that had the term WikiLeaks covered across over 300 outlets. There was an average of a piece and a half of content per outlet per day. Hashtag Podesta emails was trending on Twitter throughout October. And the stories were, were big. I mean, they were on the CBS Nightly News, they were on NPR Morning Edition. I mean, these are, these are massive. Particularly 10 years ago. I mean, at that point, NPR's Morning Edition was reaching like 15 million listeners. So there's a lot of what, what Kathleen Hall Jamison in her book says, it's, there's a lot of agenda setting and kind of framing that the hacked content is able to do in the American media. And I think what it, what is interesting is like if you look at the FiveThirtyEight, which is a kind of polling, polling, aggregate polls, right. And do political and sports forecasting and in their analysis they looked and they said the percentage of Americans who found Hillary Clinton to be honest or trustworthy, it stayed at around 30% in polling throughout October and into November. Right. Which initially in the face of it would say, oh, stuff didn't really have much of an impact. But the race in late October, which is the period where that Podesta content in particular was regularly framing the news cycle and where you could see real spikes in interest by actual people in that content on Google Trends, in that period, the race is getting a lot tighter. And Clinton's lead over Trump, it peaks at 7 percentage points in polls on 17 October. Again, that's according to the 538 forecast. By late October, it's down to 5.7 percentage points. Other polls that are conducted in that same period have the margin at like 2 to 5 points. So there's a massive decline even before. And I think this is the important piece though is even Before Comey's statement, there's, well, essentially a compression in the race is occurring. Now, I agree with you, but what causes that?

[Gordon Carrera]

I think I find it very, very. The correlation rather than causation to that. And the WikiLeaks dumps.

[David McCloskey]

It's the GRU hack and the WikiLeaks content, unlike the social media disinformation, controlling, I think, was one of the factors that contributed to the outcome of the election. But, but how important or decisive it is, I think we just cannot know.

[Gordon Carrera]

No, I agree.

[David McCloskey]

In the end, the election is decided or comes down to a swing of 78,000 votes. And, you know, it reminds me of the Iran episodes we did where we talk about how do you actually predict these kind of revolutionary environments? And a lot of it gets down to these, you know, what's going on in the heads of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals. It's not actually a knowable thing. And I agree with you, what you said earlier, which is there are a lot more important factors than the GRU hack and WikiLeaks, which were the, the, you know, the character of the candidates, their stances, the charisma the candidates had and their strategies. So not, for example, Hillary not campaigning in Wisconsin is arguably a more important piece of this overall story than the GRU hack ever was.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, and I agree with you that it's unknowable. I think actually the one bit I always found slightly more convincing was the idea, I think I raised it in a previous episode was that the release of the DNC emails on the eve of the convention in which the DNC was biased against Bernie, I think may have turned off some of those Bernie supporters from supporting Hillary and suppress some of the support that might have come with her there. You can see, you can make a case for that. But I agree with you. Ultimately, it's just very difficult to disentangle. But I think it's true that it was a factor in a close election. So the third question that you raised was what impact, if any, did it have on US institutions and the broader society? Now this, I think, is the most interesting one, isn't it? Because it's. This is where the legacy of it is incredible. I mean, active measures were about discrediting, dividing, sowing, disunity. Boy, does the 2016 election do that. And does the question of whether the Russians swung the election or not do that? It's a second order effect, in a way. It's not that their posts on Facebook supporting or opposing Black Lives Matter or whatever. Other issue actually divides society. It's the question of, did the Russians interfere in the US Election? Does that delegitimize Donald Trump's election? What does it mean for that? All of that is enormous.

[David McCloskey]

I think it's interesting to look at the impact that this whole story had on the intelligence community in particular, because the intelligence community throughout the story was, were forced to make analytic calls on the active measure itself, and because the active measure was political in nature and it involved collaboration, even in a indirect way, with the US Political system. And people in made the analytic calls that the agency and other members of the intelligence community had to make inherently political, or at least increased the possibility that they would be politicized or viewed as political in nature. And I think, you know, Senator Mitch McConnell's reaction to the briefing from John Brennan is a great example of that, where it's, it's being filtered through this intensely political lens. And it became impossible as a result to assess what was happening without being perceived as weighing in in favor of one candidate over the other. And, and because the CIA and the intelligence community more broadly are set up to collect on and to analyze the actions of foreign adversaries, and in this case, because a foreign adversary had a clear preference for one of the candidates, Trump, it meant that, in effect, the CIA couldn't do its job without appearing to favor Hillary Clinton. And what that has done, and there has also been a wave of either misguided or totally disingenuous disinformation that has persisted since, that has attempted to kind of create a picture that the CIA actually did weigh in in favor of Hillary Clinton to, to diminish Trump. But what all this has done is it's the active measure, in a lot of ways has, has fueled and created a very conspiratorial, partisan view of the intelligence community, and in a lot of ways has kind of created the modern, like, deep state idea. It's eroded trust in the U.S. intelligence system. And weirdly, this is one of the weird effects of it. Gordon, is like, for when I worked at the CIA, I would say that we were, we were sort of bashed more by the left, right? You look at the call on Iraq, wmd, enhanced interrogation, slash torture, like, the criticism of the agency, and a lot of the criticism of what the agency had been in the past really came from the American left. And what's so bizarre and topsy turvy about the world we're in now after this act of measure is that it's kind of flipped and the CIA is Much more is critiqued much more by the kind of Trump. Right. As being the deep state, as being advocates of Hillary Clinton. Right. So it's actually made it a lot harder to understand what actually happened, because a significant section of the electorate just doesn't believe the actual analysis that the intelligence community is doing.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, that's right. Because it's politicized intelligence in a completely new way, I think, for the U.S. system. And at any time anyone wants to explore it, it immediately goes to that question of, are you questioning the legitimacy of the election? Are you? What's your agenda? You almost cannot get into this subject. I hope we've got into it without trying to be too partisan. But the risk is it immediately opens everything up to partisanship rather than an assessment of what the Russians might have been doing and trying to do and how successful they were and what their methods were. So I think it's made it. It's one of the factors behind that polarization of American politics. But it's also changed the relationship with the intelligence community and with trust. I think it's also seeded that idea that you don't know who you can trust on social media. You don't know who's trying to manipulate you. You don't know what secret agendas are being pushed, whether it's in social media, whether it's in news stories, whether it's in the latest hack, whether this is a false flag. There's this whole, whole world of mistrust about information, and not just intelligence, but information and news, which I think is fed by 2016. There's deeper roots to it as well. People can go back to Iraq and WMD and people feeling like they were fed false information then. But I think 2016, in the questions of whether there was manipulation, just opens up the idea that there is not a neutral news or information space, but it's subject to interference by hostile states and actors who we don't always know about, or people claiming those are actors in order to discredit their opponents. All of that just muddies the water and creates some of the. I think, some of the problems we've got these days.

[David McCloskey]

Fundamentally, if the goal. And we talked about, you know, there are a number of different goals that the Russians layer onto this as time goes on. But if fundamentally the goal is to sow chaos inside your adversary, what better way to do that than to make it impossible to know what's true?

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

You know, and to feed that. And I think that that is maybe the. One of the most lasting impacts of this is that it has contributed to a general assault on truth and our ability as citizens to understand what's true and what's not truly. And I think that is. That is perhaps the most profound impact of. Of this Russian active measure from 2016.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, that's right. Peter Pomerantsev wrote that great book about having worked in Russian media in the 1990s called Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. And it was about a kind of world out of which Prigozhin came, which in which you could just make stuff up and get away with it because everyone had a kind of fragmented and unsteady view of truth. And you feel like that Russian worldview of the 1990s has increasingly been exported into the US and into the west more broadly, including the UK and part of that is the result of Russian active measures, and part of it is a kind of weird confluence of circumstances which occurred in that 2016 election. So it is a. Whether or not it swung the election. That's almost. There are bigger things, which it certainly did. This Russian active measure, it is extraordinary, I think, to look at it, and its legacy isn't.

[David McCloskey]

Is. And I think, you know, there's an interesting postscript all this, Gordon. And I think maybe we close with this. Russia in 2024 intervened again in the presidential election. The Russians conducted at least two separate information campaigns, mostly spreading a lot of fabricated videos online. And there was a covert effort organized by the state television network, RT and Russian intelligence to funnel at least $10 billion to prominent American political influencers. And influencers, of course, have said since that they had no idea the source of the bunny was Russia.

[Gordon Carrera]

Exactly. And I think the reality is Russian active measures continue, and as that story reveals is they've just changed their methods. You know, they'll keep changing their methods and do different things. They won't do the same thing as last time. Let's not even get onto Alistair Campbell's favorite topic, which is what the Russians might have done or not done in the Brexit referendum. That's like a whole other story.

[David McCloskey]

But that the last. The last two minutes of our series, you bring up Brexit.

[Gordon Carrera]

Brexit, it's time to pick up Brexit. But no, I think, you know, that is the point that they've messed with our minds. And I think that is a slightly depressing way to end this series, which has given us a view of a Russian active measure, but a reminder that there's more.

[David McCloskey]

We're running our own active measure, Gordon.

[Gordon Carrera]

Our own active measures are the Truth rather than lies. The truth where we're going to dive deep into the Trump campaign's relationship with Russia through 2016 and telling that story in fascinating detail, which is a real counterpart to the story we've been following on this podcast. So do sign up to the Declassified club@the restisclassified.com to listen to that. But otherwise, David, we will hopefully see you next time.

[David McCloskey]

We'll see you next time.

[William Duranpole]

Hello, it's William Drimple again from Empire. Here is a clip from our recent six part series on Matthew.

[Empire Series Narrator]

The great leaf forward was supposed to be, on its face, a kind of highly rationalized bureaucratic system of working out what China could produce and then, you know, working upwards so that you would produce, you know, enough food for everyone to, to eat and crops that could then be exported to increase China's GDP and everything would be great. But basically because all the figures are being fiddled by officials who are too terrified to give the real information in case they get arrested or, you know, kind of fired from their, their jobs, they pass on statistics upwards saying, yes, it's all going great and we're kind of producing huge amounts of grain and products and up, you know, in the cities and then, you know, beyond that to Beijing. The guys at the top are saying, oh, well, this is great. Well, in that case we can export lots to the Soviet Union Union. So you have the kind of obscenity of out in the countryside, there isn't enough food for people to eat while the grain is being seized and exported from the country to bring in money for the state. This is very much a rural phenomenon. And that's significant because of course, shortly before this, the system which still exists today was started up in China of a sort of Soviet style internal passport system. It's called the hukou, or household registration scheme. And it basically means that you can't just simply wander around wherever you want in China. You have to sort of have internal permission. So people in the cities were no longer really kind of interacting that much with the countryside. They were kind of almost separated off. And while people in the cities, you know, found there was a certain amount of deprivation, the devastation was really out in the countryside where essentially it turned into mass starvation. About 1959, 1960, 61, it became clear in the countryside there simply wasn't enough food to go around. But when the news came, came through to the top leadership, including Mao, he basically chose to ignore it. He didn't exactly deny it, but he basically said, well, you know, we need to keep going. And he said something like, if things are not going so well, then let's just not say anything about it and keep going. And that led to one of the great confrontations of that period, which is the conference, Communist Party top level conference held at Lushan.

[William Duranpole]

We hope you enjoyed that clip. To listen to the full series, search Empire World History, wherever you get your podcasts.