Agents of Chaos (2020): Season 1, Episode 1 - Part One - full transcript

The candidates are fighting
for every vote in this very tight race.

Republican candidate Donald Trump
has the lead across the country.

Clinton or Trump?

Hillary Clinton, 228. On this map,
the states won by Clinton are blue

and those won by Trump are red.

And so, America has a new president.

And the planet has a new American
President. Donald Trump.

My husband woke me up and said,

"You're not gonna believe it,
but apparently Trump is winning."

And I thought, "God,
now they're gonna blame us."

And I even posted that I think that
Russians should go out on the streets



and carry the American flag.

Somebody against whom
the whole establishment,

and all of the media, and all of the
deep state, almost all of them, were,

won because
the people liked him.

As a young person who still believes
in the values that I was taught

by Americans, in an American school

to me, it was very optimistic
to see that,

that it can actually really happen.

That is how democracy
is supposed to work.

I think we know what we're up against.
We do, don't we?

She's guilty of a very serious crime.
She should not be allowed to run.

Hillary Clinton has some
explaining to do.

I'm sick and tired of hearing
about your damn emails!

Bernie Sanders leading
Hillary Clinton.



Bernie Sanders. I told him
"The election's rigged."

"Here's another ballot!"
Throw it away.

"Here's one I like.
We'll keep that one."

You could put half of Trump's
supporters into what I call

the basket of deplorables.

Isn't this exciting?
Don't you love it?

I love it! What's more fun
than a Trump rally, right?

I made speeches to lots of groups.

But did you have to be paid
675 000 dollars?

That's what they offered.

This is the ultimate reality show.

It's the Presidency
of the United States.

Hacked the hell out of us.

The DNC hack exposed
by WikiLeaks...

Our country has no idea.

- I doubt it.
- He'd rather believe Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin. He called you
a brilliant leader.

Do you really want to be complimented
by that former KGB officer?

When he calls me brilliant,
I'll take the compliment, okay?

Every time Russia is brought up,
they say, "Oh, Trump!"

What do I have to do with it?

I'm not going to make you relive
the 2016 election. It was too chaotic.

Too crazy. Too much.

But I am interested in figuring out
this Trump-Russia thing.

What was that all about? Vladimir
Putin's plan to rule the world?

A Democrat witch hunt
to take down Trump?

A Cold War spy game?

I've been trying for years
to answer those questions,

and everytime someone asked me
what this movie was about,

I'd say, "Well, how much time
do you have?"

Fear. Money. Corruption.

I can't tell you the one thing that
explains what Russia did to us

or that we did to ourselves.

All I can tell you is what happened.

That's hard enough when you're talking
about the most chaotic election.

Maybe for now
that's one thing I will say.

For some politicians,
in Russia and America,

chaos isn't something to fear.

It's a way to get by. Sometimes,
with a little help from your friends.

AGENTS OF CHAOS
Part I

The country spent years telling itself
stories to make sense of 2016.

It started in the final days
of the Obama administration

with a report from
the US intelligence community.

An American intelligence report finds
that Russia used disinformation warfare

to try to interfere with
the 2016 presidential election.

One of the weapons
in the Kremlin's arsenal

was its state-run news network, RT.

I read that report.
Well, I laughed my guts out.

They mentioned my name there
27 times.

It would be laughable
if it weren't that scary.

If the intelligence community of the
most powerful country in the world

is that ignorant,
the world Is In much trouble.

The FBI has an open Investigation...

What's next on the Russian
investigation?

There were too many investigations
to count.

The FBI, the Justice Department,

both houses of Congress.

Everyone wanted to know
what Russia had done.

But if anyone was going
to get the goods,

it would be the team put together
by the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller.

After the announcement that
Rod Rosenstein had appointed

Bob Mueller, a friend of mine sent me
an email that said: "Bye, bye!"

He knew that I'd worked
with Director Mueller twice before

and he assumed I'd just go off
and work with him.

People like to think of the special
counsel's office as a witch hunt,

but this is just not a partisan issue.

Our report has one key finding,

clear, unequivocal, efforts
by the Russian government

to interfere with our election.

The issue that goes to the core
of our democracy is:

are we doing everything we can to
make sure that Americans will decide

who is running this country?

So the DNC knew of the hack
on April 19th.

But it wasn't reported until...

I started working on the Russia story
at the suggestion

of the legendary reporter
and producer Lowell Bergman.

We formed a team of reporters and
collaborators from the US and Russia

to take on different parts of the story.

Were you hired by a firm that had
a more political interest?

But what exactly was the story?

We learned a lot of details
about election interference.

The trolling, the hacking,
and the alleged collusion.

What I couldn't figure out was,

how did these pieces fit together?
Or even if they did.

The first piece of the puzzle led us
down the cyber trail on the Internet,

where a motley band of Russian trolls
had been busy making mischief

on social media.

TROLLS

The campaign was riddled
with disinformation,

which travels like quicksilver
on the internet.

So we sought out Camille Francois,

who was engaged by the US Senate
to study the activities

of the infamous Russian troll factory

known as the Internet Research
Agency, or IRA.

In 2016, people didn't know what
a Russian troll was.

I was quite fascinated by this
new means of controlling narratives.

My background is in human rights,
and I was very concerned

with the way digital technology
was actually creating new problems

in human rights.

What's really interesting with Russia,
it exemplifies a new trend

in governments using the Internet
to control and repress.

Members of the committee, thank you
for having me here today.

We're here to discuss
the growing issue of online imposters

and disinformation.

Targeting specific communities at the
right time and with the right tactics

can have a catastrophic impact
on society, or on an election.

And I have seen the types of impacts

that those disinformation
campaigns can have.

The IRA uses what we call persona.

A persona is simply an account
that's not who they say they are.

They're really doing three types
of personas.

Fake people, like "Hi, my name
is Jenna Abrams."

"I am an American conservative."

She doesn't exist.
She's a fake person.

That's a fake persona.

Fake organizations.
"Hi, we are BlackMattersUS."

"We are an organization dedicated
to fighting racism in America."

This organization doesn't exist.
It's a fake shop.

And finally, they're doing
fake local media.

Like, a newspaper that's based
in Baltimore that has a title

that sounds like it could be real.
But it's not.

It's not a real newspaper.
It doesn't have real journalists

and it has zero office in Baltimore.

They have this army of personas and
together they're gonna do campaigns.

What does all this social media
activity tell us

about what the IRA was doing
in the United States?

What is the story? Initially,
the IRA was not focused on

the 2016 election.

The first thing that you see
is the IRA's seeking to control

the Russian domestic conversation.

The first target of the IRA really
is the Russian people themselves.

The IRA starts in 2013,
in St. Petersburg.

To tell the story of the troll factory,

we compiled hacked
and leaked materials

and spoke to former employees and
journalists who had gotten inside.

Can you hear me OK?

The whole organization was built
from scratch.

But the factory itself started in 2013.
It took off from there.

The troll farm itself is like
a Disneyland

for investigative journalists.

There is always something
going on there.

It's a very evil organization,
but it was very fun to investigate.

When was the first time you heard
of this thing

we've come to call the troll factory?

In the year 2013, I was the first
journalist to report

about the troll farm.

I've seen a post on social media.

A woman told about a very strange job.

And I decided that I need to check.

So I went undercover.
I bought a new SIM card.

I created a new social media profile.

And I came up with another name.

They rented this big building
on Savushkina Street, 55.

I went to the interview and I was
asked just two simple questions.

What's your attitude towards Kremlin?

And what's your attitude
towards Russian opposition?

That's how it worked.

Videos shot inside the troll factory

I met another investigative
journalist there.

We know each other since childhood

and it was very difficult
to hide our laughs.

She said, "Hi, Andrei.
Good to see you here."

"You also looking for a job?"

Yeah! I will write stuff
on the internet about Kremlin

and praise Putin and stuff like this.

And she said, "Wow, I will do
the same thing."

It shows how unprofessional
they were on their first days

because they had two investigative
journalists in the building

at the same time.

They had several levels.

Some doors has just a hashtag.

A special department creating
hashtags, maybe.

They had two types of people,
simple trolls and analytics.

The job of analytics is to create
the agenda for the troll.

You have to use these words
and these phrases

to promote our opinion.

A very short task,
we call them technical assignments.

They were really interested in the
comments sections of media websites.

Putin is good.
Putin is the best president.

If someone had doubts that Putin
is the best president...

And they had to send their bosses
pages of forums

with examples of their posts.

I spent one day there.

I literally wrote the story
in the evening

and the next morning it was online.

A very short story.

I thought they were amateurs.

And how people who were hired
from the streets could establish

such a sophisticated
disinformational campaign

against a strong Western democracy?
Absurd.

It seemed absurd back then.

The trolls' skills just didn't match
their ambition

to move fast and break things.

So the people in charge
tried to scale up.

They boosted pay
to attract better employees

and brought in outside consultants
to train them.

Hello, my name is Oleg Matveichev

and this is Ears Wag the Donkey,

a channel for anyone
who doesn't want to be a loser,

a channel for anyone who doesn't
want to be a victim of manipulation.

I've always been a big fan
of the internet.

I'm a pretty well-known blogger.

I always support the authorities
and criticize the opposition.

One day, I went to St. Petersburg
to give a lecture

for students
on mass communication theory.

This young guy introduced himself.

He said, "I know you're this great
blogger. You're famous."

"Would you be up for teaching
my blogger friends"

"how they can get good
at blogging too?"

We went to the outskirts
of St. Petersburg.

And I saw a big hall there,

with about thirty to fifty people.

So I gave a lecture on how I work
in the blogosphere.

From the questions I started getting
after the lecture,

I realized that these people,
these kids,

were very unprofessional
in this area.

It turned out that they didn't even
have their own accounts,

they were just commenting on stuff.

I told them, "Guys, what you're doing
is crap."

In this gigantic sea of the internet,

with all these different resources,

your comments hardly get noticed.

If you want to create a system
that would have an impact

on the internet, this has to be done
completely differently.

First, everyone sitting here
should create their own accounts.

Join them together
in a network.

Then when someone posts something,

it'll instantly get distributed
to a huge number of people.

It'll be way more effective.

The trolls were building a machine for
influencing conversations on the web.

So what?

Every PR firm in the world was
doing the same thing in 2013.

But the trolls wanted to do more
than monetize social media.

They used their network to help
the Russian government

in a war against another country.

What they really did,
they did with Ukraine,

and Ukraine is the main victim.

Kyiv, Ukraine

Ukraine is fascinating because it is
caught between the West and Russia,

both politically and physically.

There's the eastern part
which is more Russian

and it's also the wealthier part.

Russia has enormous control there

because of oil and gas,
which Ukraine needs.

And so there's this tug of war
about Ukraine

whether it's gonna be a Russian
sphere of influence or not.

Before the IRA did a major operation
in the US,

Ukraine became frankly the lab

for all the latest and greatest from
Russia's information operations.

November 2013

Viktor Yanukovych
President of Ukraine

Yanukovych was the pro-Russian,
pro-Putin president.

But he was going to sign legislation

that would put Ukraine further
in the sphere of Western influence.

I believe that we should push on
with our partnership

with the European Union.
It's an imperative.

Originally, Yanukovych became
president with the promise

of signing an EU association
agreement.

There was a lot of political support
because it was going to be good

for Ukrainian business.

It would have given them freedom
of movement for their citizens.

It would have given them
complete trade preferences.

It would have been a free, prosperous,
increasingly European Ukraine.

Putin wakes up in October of 2013

and decides that he has to move
very quickly to end that.

Ukraine is not our closest neighbor.
It's our fraternal nation.

So he offers Yanukovych
these big loans

and Yanukovych tells his citizens,

"We're gonna put this
on the back burner."

This is Ukraine's moment to meet
the aspirations of its people

or to disappoint them and risk
descending into chaos and violence.

It was political for Putin.

He was afraid he was losing Ukraine
to Europe

and the next step would be that
his own citizens would want that too.

Putin needed to show Russians
that Ukraine's turn toward Europe

was bad news, a perfect
opportunity for the troll factory.

While the trolls tried
to sway public opinion,

Putin invited Yanukovych
to the Kremlin for a friendly chat.

Rumors are that Yanukovych was
paid a bloody fortune under the table.

He lived this incredibly opulent life

that you couldn't possibly live
on a government salary.

When he reneged
on the European deal,

there was this huge popular uprising.

Boys, attach this one too.

We are ordinary Ukrainian people
here to defend our rights.

No to Yanukovich, no to him being
president for one more year!

He's got until 10 AM tomorrow
to resign!

It started as peaceful protests
in December of 2013.

Those protests turned violent
in January of 2014.

Putin was encouraging Yanukovych
throughout this period

to do what he himself would have done
and has done in Russia,

which is to be very heavy-handed
on the street against protestors,

locking up mass numbers of people.

- Ukraine!
- Above all!

He thought that Yanukovych was
a chump to allow it to go on

as long as he did.

Ukrainian security services, possibly
with some outside help,

began to shoot at the protestors.

You've probably seen the films of the
blood baths in January of 2014.

In Ukraine in 2013 and 2014, people
mobilized for a very simple thing.

People, especially young people,

wanted to look forward to a future
with predictability

and the rule of law and Europe in it.

That mattered to them enough to go
out on the street and take risks.

And in the end, some of them paid
with their lives.

That's the story of the revolution
in Ukraine

which is thought of as the Maidan.

The whole world is watching.

There is a way out for Ukraine,

it is still possible to save
Ukraine's European future.

The EU finally managed to broker
a de-escalation agreement

that would constrain Yanukovych's
authoritarian trends and power.

But he was going to stay
in as President.

I have no doubt after our meeting

that President Yanukovych knows
what he needs to do.

There was actually a plan
for Vice President Biden

to speak to Yanukovych.

I was supposed to be in on
that phone call, taking notes.

And they said, "We can't find
President Yanukovych."

We all were like,
"That's kind of strange."

We woke up the next morning
to find out

that Yanukovych had actually fled
to Russia.

And then, the Ukrainians had a vote
to create an interim government.

The Russians were not happy
about this.

On the next day I got a call
from the Situation Room

saying you need to come in
and see something.

And it was the first movement
of Russian forces invading Crimea,

which was a strategic part of Ukraine
for Russia.

Within 24 hours of Yanukovych
having run away.

We fear that one wrong move,
one stray bullet fired

by some psycho will lead to the
start of something truly terrible.

And they managed to cut off Crimea
from the mainland

within a couple days. The whole
invasion was done within a week.

The invasion became a war
for Eastern Ukraine

with pro-Russian separatists
receiving support from Moscow.

And the troll factory
had a key role to play.

They created fake news websites
which they used to drive a wedge

into Ukraine and push the two halves
of the country apart.

Targeting Russian speakers
in Eastern Ukraine,

they portrayed the protesters in the
capital as a neo-Nazi movement

trying to seize power by coup d'état.

If you were an American,
or a European,

following the war in Ukraine,
and you were looking at Facebook,

if you were on the left, the Russians
would be telling you

that Ukraine was a fascist
or a Nazi regime.

With the lack of peace and stability

and the rise of neo-Nazi hardliners,

many Jews are considering
fleeing the country.

If you were on the far Right, the
Russians would be telling you

that this whole Ukrainian
thing was a part

of the Jewish international conspiracy

and the Ukrainian state was just
propped up by Jewish oligarchs.

Those two stories
don't go very well together.

But people on the Left and people on
the far Right are in their own bubbles.

So, they learned that you can do that.

And you can motivate and demotivate
by telling contradictory falsehoods

that are targeted
to different audiences.

And by doing that get the overall
result that you want.

It looked Ukrainian and said
it was based in Kyiv, I think.

It was actually in St. Petersburg.

The media department on the 1st
floor had a big Ukraine team.

There were so many sites.

Russian sites
and fake Ukrainian ones.

They would rewrite the news there.

You had to find 20 articles
about Ukraine

and replace terrorist with militia.

They wanted to make them look
like the good guys.

It wasn't journalism.
A teenager could do it.

They were preparing the informational
background of these operations.

They created so many fake news
and videos,

like to say that Ukrainian soldiers
torture people who speaks Russian,

to cover what was really
going on there.

Let me lay it all out for you.

The fake Ukrainians on the 3rd floor
post on a blog:

"Kyiv kindergarteners are eating
slop and starving."

On the 1st floor, the news sites
write an article:

"Ukrainian blogger says Kyiv kids
are starving."

The article then gets shared
on social media.

If someone's curious and clicks
through, everything looks confirmed.

I came up with a term for it.
It ends up being a carousel of lies.

There were two departments.
Ukraine 1 and Ukraine 2.

There is Coca Cola
and Coca Cola Light.

Ukraine 2 was light propaganda.

Ukraine 1 was hard propaganda.

They were the ones who did
all the stories about fascists.

We're the fighters of the Azov
battalion fighting the Russian scum.

I would watch these videos about
fascists in Ukraine and Nazis

and all this sort of insane stuff
and be like,

"No one could believe that."
And I was wrong.

I was insufficiently attuned to how
those Russian operations

could be persuasive in the context
of social media

if they were properly targeted.

People who worked on the troll farm,
they changed history.

They really influenced the situation.

When the troll factory manufactured
its campaign on the US election,

it used tools developed in Ukraine.

The motive developed there too.

Before Yanukovych fled,
the Russians were furious

about the role played by
the Americans on the ground in Kyiv.

We had a stream of Americans
going out to Ukraine to mediate

between Yanukovych
and the protestors.

The US ambassador on the ground
called me. It was an open line.

I knew the Russians were listening.

I think we want to try to get somebody
with an international personality

to come out here
and help to midwife this thing.

That would be great I think
to help glue this thing

and to have the UN help glue it.
Fuck the EU.

And at that point I used
this barnyard epithet,

never thinking that the Russians
would put this out publicly.

In fact, they hadn't dumped a phone
call on the street in 25 years.

A new political scandal
is brewing in Ukraine.

Fuck the EU.

I did a great apologia tour.
Called everybody.

It was pretty impressive tradecraft.
The audio was extremely clear.

So, I don't think Klitsch should go
into the government.

I don't think it's necessary,
I don't think it's a good idea.

It sounds like they are playing
a game of chess

with the opposition leaders
as the pieces on that chess board.

Others are trying
to make decisions for us.

I think Ukrainian politicians should
decide this by themselves.

The hack and release
of the Nuland phone call

was a new kind of cyber attack
pointed at the US State Department

and, by extension,
its former Secretary, Hillary Clinton.

Only a few years before,
Clinton had wondered out loud

whether Russia's 2012 election would
be rigged in favor of Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Putin, like all tyrants,

faces a very challenging kind
of politics every day.

It's not that democracy is hard
and tyranny is easy,

or the other way around.

They're both hard. They just
have different kinds of challenges.

In 2011 and 2012 in Russia,

there were parliamentary elections
in December

and then there were presidential
elections in the spring.

The parliamentary elections
brought Putin's party

a majority in the parliament

and the presidential elections
brought Putin back to power.

But in fact, his party only won
about 26% of the votes

and, in fact, Mr. Putin himself didn't
win enough votes in the first round

to actually clear and be president
after one round of voting.

So everything was faked.
And everybody knew it.

And people did protest.

There were protests
in 99 Russian cities.

There were hundreds of thousands of
people simultaneously on the street

and the message was a very simple
one, for free elections.

Freedom!

Russia will be free!

Putin, get out! You don't know
your own people!

Putin is a thief!

That was a crucial moment, because
it was the last moment where,

if you were Russian,
you could maybe still believe

that voting might make a difference.

5 minutes before polls open

The time is now five minutes
to 8 AM.

I can see the ballots from here.

What's the problem?
What are you trying to start here?

- Can you look inside the ballot box?
- For what?

Do you see all the ballots
already in there?

No, I don't see anything.

You don't see anything?
Everyone else can see them!

I believe the elections were
completely rigged.

There's proof,
eyewitness accounts.

They violated
our constitutional rights.

There are plenty of Russians
who care about democracy.

There are plenty of Russians who'd
like to have their votes counted.

There are plenty of Russians who
would like to have the rule of law,

who would like to have a free press.

Putin could have said,
"Yes, let's have free elections."

But his reaction instead was a hundred
and eighty degrees the opposite.

Please, don't disperse!
Fight and don't disperse!

Russia will be free!

Journalists, disperse!

Putin's reaction was to say,

"All of these protesters
are foreign agents."

"They all have been inspired by
the American Secretary of State,"

"Hillary Clinton."

We do have serious concerns
about the conduct of the elections.

The first thing the Secretary of State
did was to characterize the elections

as unfair and dishonest.

Putin was furious because he believed
that it couldn't possibly be the case

that the Russian people didn't like
what he was offering.

It had to be inspired
from the outside.

She set the tone for some of our
political figures within the country.

She sent a signal.

They heard the signal and, with the
support of the State Department,

set to work.

He blamed her publicly
for the protests.

And also her foreign policy
was very tough on Russia.

The Russian foreign policy elite
understood that if she were elected

President of the United States,
it would be possibly even tougher

and they didn't want that.

You know, it's better not to argue
with women,

it's better not to engage
in arguments with them.

When people cross the boundaries,
boundaries of decency,

they don't look strong,
they look weak.

But weakness is not the worst quality
for a woman.

Look, Putin is a smart,
calculating guy.

We're talking about a different league
of street smarts or intelligence.

Even before 2016, Putin had
a big fan in Donald Trump.

In Ukraine, Putin had done
the unthinkable.

He had annexed the territory
of another country,

something that hadn't been done
in Europe since World War Two.

But for Trump, Putin's moves
were a sign of strength.

Ukraine is not our backyard.
It is his backyard.

Just look at the way he did Syria.

Look at what's going on with Iran,
where Russia's backing Iran,

big league backing Iran.

It is absolutely insane what's
happened to this country

over the last four or five years.

Small wonder that, in Russia,

Trump's announcement that he was
running for President got rave reviews.

Telling horror stories about Russia

is one of the candidates' favorite
pastimes. Trump has broken the mold.

He is one of the few who has so far
resisted the temptation to use Putin

to scare Americans.

I was over in Moscow two years ago.

You can get along with those people,
and you can get along with them well.

I would be willing to bet I would have
a great relationship with Putin.

- It's based on leadership.
- Based on what?

Trump's attitude towards Putin
was part of a different kind of game.

From the beginning, the only consistent
principle of Trump's campaign

was that you never knew what would
come out of his mouth next.

No, it's so great.
Twitter is so great

because when they lie on television
I type out,

I'll do it myself, press,

and they go like twelve seconds
later we have breaking news

from Donald Trump. Here's the story.
It's the craziest thing.

Being an agent of chaos was part
of Trump's brand.

The more chaos, the better.

And I said, "somebody should
run against John McCain."

He's a war hero
'cause he was captured.

I like people that weren't captured,
okay? I hate to tell you.

He made disparaging comments
about John McCain.

For virtually anybody else, that would
have been a total career ender.

And yet, he seemed both to be able
to absorb that,

bounce off it, and actually to some
extent strengthen from it.

If I didn't have a big speaker system
in terms of my mouth,

but the people that listened to it,
and Twitter, @realDonaldTrump...

People ask, "Was the IRA pro-Trump?"

I think that's a tricky question.
The IRA was anti-America.

In general, they were interested
in any message that weakens

the democratic institutions of the US.

Create chaos was the primary goal.

Weakening Hillary's messages
and position and identity

and amplifying Donald Trump's
campaign

is a good means to create this chaos.

I think the target is trust.

Trust is a funny thing.
So hard to earn.

So easy to lose.

If the US system depends on trust
in democratic institutions,

who benefits if Americans lose
that trust?

Is it Vladimir Putin?
Oh my gosh, I can't believe it.

In Russia, Putin has built a political
system that depends

on personal loyalty.

Putin can claim that the trolls
didn't work for him.

But they do his bidding
because they work for someone

he trusts to serve him. Literally.

He is Evgeny Prigozhin. A former
hot dog salesman

who worked his way up the Kremlin
food chain and earned the nickname

Putin's Chef.

It didn't surprise me that Prigozhin
had been the source of funding

for the Internet Research Agency

given that he had been involved
in some other Putin operations.

He was a go-to guy.

This is a very powerful
Russian businessman,

allegedly very close to Vladimir Putin,

behind a troll factory operating
out of St. Petersburg.

Prigozhin is well known in Russia
for his friendship with Putin.

But his hidden web of business
relationships is hard to penetrate.

He wouldn't speak to us
and refuses most interviews.

When he does talk,
he denies any wrongdoing.

To solve the mystery
surrounding the man,

we sought out the former cop
turned journalist

who's been tracking Prigozhin
for years.

It's not entirely accurate to say that
I started investigating Mr. Prigozhin.

I was working on different stories
that were developing at the time.

And Yevgeny Prigozhin kept
appearing in those stories.

It all started in 2012.

Not much was known about him
at the time.

At 18 or 19, he was convicted
of theft, robbery, armed robbery

and involving a minor
in criminal activity.

From age 20 to 30 he was imprisoned
in a Soviet open prison.

After many years in prison,
he emerges in St. Petersburg.

He immediately tries to get involved
in some food business,

primarily fast food.

He established a company
with a very funny name,

BlinDonald's.

There is McDonald's, and then
there are pancakes.

In Russian, pancake is blin,
so he combined Donald's and blin.

Have you ever eaten at BlinDonald's?

I think when I was young.
It was not delicious.

You should try it. It's very tasty.

He also had this famous restaurant
called Russkiy Kitsch.

All the Russian stereotypes
were gathered in one place.

It was just a museum
of Russian stereotypes

and also he had
some luxury restaurants.

A lot of those people
who now rule Russia

worked in St. Petersburg in '90s

and most of them visited
Prigozhin's restaurants.

Many Western leaders
visited St. Petersburg.

There is one famous picture
for example of Evgeny Prigozhin

and George Bush.

Honestly, no one knows how
he's earned the president's trust.

But the trust is there.

In fact, for many years now

Mr. Prigozhin is the one serving
the president his meal.

Have you ever met Yevgeny Prigozhin?

Yeah, I met him several times.

During dinners with Putin
because he usually serves them.

What is he like, out of curiosity?

I don't know. He's the man
who serves nice food.

You can ask him
"What is this made of?"

and he says, "It's veal."

- Is the food good?
- Yeah. The food is good.

He became a basic contractor
for Kremlin catering.

Then he received contracts
for school catering.

Students in several Moscow schools
have been left without proper lunches.

Facts are facts.
Here are first graders during lunch.

Grimacing from the smell,
the children send the patties,

generously paid for from the city
budget, straight into the trash.

Prigozhin kept failing up.

After delivering
subpar school lunches,

he was mysteriously awarded bigger
and bigger government contracts

for services including construction,
sanitation, and utilities.

Investigators discovered his ties
to hundreds of enterprises,

loosely connected to a holding
company owned by Prigozhin

and his mother, called Concord.

Concord eventually got the lucrative
catering contracts

for the Russian armed forces.

Concord is a very sophisticated
big network of companies

under control of Yevgeny Prigozhin.

He receives lots of money
from public procurement

and then he can invest this money
wherever he wants.

He wants to establish a troll farm?

Okay. He wants to establish a private
military company?

Okay. There's always money for that.

Did he receive instructions,
requests, orders later on?

Definitely no direct orders
from Mr. Putin.

Indirectly, possibly without
Putin's knowledge?

Absolutely.

Prigozhin rose with Putin.
Owes his position,

his wealth, his protection,
to his relationship with Putin.

And those are the people who matter
in Putin's Russia.

Someone who really needs to deliver,

because if you don't deliver,

all that wealth and all that power
and all that protection goes away.

It makes perfect sense

in terms of mitigating vulnerability
and keeping control of an operation.

Putin will use folks over whom
he has influence.

You do a little bit of this for me, and
we will do a little bit of that for you.

And particularly if they're not part
of the formal intelligence apparat,

then he has deniability
when things go wrong.

Putin has developed what I would
call the franchise model.

That also gives you
a thousand flowers blooming.

You can try lots of different things,

throw lots of spaghetti on the wall
and see what's effective.

Some projects like the troll factory
generate political support.

Others take a more physical approach
to doing the Kremlin's dirty work.

We found out that Prigozhin
apparently gave an order in 2014

to create this group knows as
the Wagner private military company.

You won't find this name
in any official documents,

but that's what they call themselves.

Videos shot by Wagner

At first it was a small, fairly compact
group of people who participated

in the events in Crimea.

Over time, Wagner fighters directly
engaged in the military actions

in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions
of Ukraine.

Those were full-fledged assault units,

armed with heavy infantry weapons.

Here we are on the fourth day of our
mission being fucked by mortar fire!

7.62 and 12.7 mm machine guns,

automatic grenade launchers,
RPGs.

No other private military company
has such weapons.

And our tanks are fast!

Say hello to your mom!

Denis opened this name Wagner
to the whole world.

Nobody knew about Wagner before
Denis wrote about that story.

And that's why he became
Prigozhin's enemy number one.

They published my home address,

posted wishes for me to burn in hell,
to be impaled.

I worked in Novaya Gazeta back then.

They brought funeral wreaths
to the Novaya Gazeta for me

and the editor-in-chief.

They also delivered
a severed ram's head.

And to my house they brought only
a funeral bouquet, a modest one.

For the office,
they brought a huge wreath,

but at home I only get four wilted
carnations?

I said: "At least have the decency
to send me some roses."

It's easy to see why Prigozhin
was so angry.

Korotkov exposed how Prigozhin used
disinformation from the troll factory

to soften the ground
for military operations

carried out by his Wagner forces
in Ukraine.

Prigozhin's organizations were involved
in Ukraine in a number of ways.

On one hand,
we've got the internet trolls.

On the other hand, the Wagner group
with its tanks and artillery.

The troll factory
is not a self-sufficient business.

For Mr. Prigozhin, everything is
absolutely tied up into a single story.

Things are bad everywhere.
Where is it better?

Who should we aspire to be like?
Where are the things good?

In America?
Democracy! Hello!

The St. Petersburg trolls say,

"What we're really doing here
is geopolitical marketing."

"Russia's a brand, and we need
to defend our brand."

So, the fact that the IRA is focused
on the rest of the world,

and not just Russia,
comes in quite quickly.

A different team handled memes.

They were officially called
cartoon artists.

Some of the specialists
were pretty funny.

And they were using pop culture
references a lot

to build an audience
and to gather followers.

There were definitely things they would
steal and rebrand

and stuff that's original IRA creation.

Citizen of the world's "best" country

They were creating pictures
with certain messages.

For example,
Angela Merkel as Hitler.

Obama is a chmo.

Chmo is a word that's hard
to translate into English.

Chmo - chump

It's not all overtly political. Some
of it starts as wacky and fun.

A guy in a Spiderman costume,

running around the streets of St.
Petersburg and harassing people,

saying rude things to people.

And in the end, it appears
he's Barack Obama.

So it is you, stuffed Obama!

Some people who worked
for the IRA were thinking,

"I signed up for a job in which I was
basically doing digital content."

"And I woke up in some James Bond,
espionage shit."

I first heard about it
in November 2014.

There were rumors about
a new English-speaking department.

I wasn't surprised it had something
to do with the US election.

They start Project Translator,

which is the IRA department
that's focused on the US,

trying to figure out what types
of narratives work in the US.

The entire strategy is to influence
by pretending to be Americans.

The program coordinators took trips
to the US and to very specific cities.

Hello!

These are the best blogs
and online publications

where you can post comments.

I'm still working on popular
twitters and channels.

They're not Russian spies, but they
do intelligence gathering missions

in order to better tailor
their influence campaign.

Because the IRA starts with a focus

on controlling the Russian
domestic conversation,

it's really good at Vkontakte.

It's kind of the Facebook of Russia.

They quickly realize that, if we're
going to bring this to America,

we're not going to go very far
with Vkontakte.

Regarding Facebook, we know that
the IRA had pages, it had profiles.

We know a lot of what the IRA did
on Twitter.

We know they liked YouTube.

We also know that the IRA
came to love Instagram.

We know that they used Reddit.
We know that they used Pinterest.

They really were constantly testing
new platforms

and adjusting their strategies.

This is Jenna Abrams.
On the face of it,

she is a woman in her mid 30's

and she claims she lives
on Main Street, USA.

But of course, she's not a real person.

When Jenna tweets, it's actually
a team of specialists in St. Petersburg

who are crafting this persona
and thinking,

"What should Jenna be saying today?"

"Is it a racist tweet or is it like
a Kim Kardashian joke?"

And they create this sort of mix
of pop-culture references

and damaging political commentary.

She was mostly designed to speak
to conservative audiences.

And she has quite
a lot of followers online.

She has about 70 000 followers
on her Twitter.

So, she is in the position to actually
shape the political discourse

because of how well she has
embedded herself within the fabric

of American political discussions.

That is also how she managed
to get into actual mainstream media.

People would say, "Political activist,
Jenna Abrams, said on the internet..."

Of course they had no idea there was
no such person as Jenna Abrams

and this was not a real,
conservative American activist

from Main Street, USA.

They used social media to talk to
people directly in private messages.

They used social media to contact
campaign officials

that they were having
conversations with.

They also used social media
to talk to activists.

We have this idea that all the content
the troll put out was fake or wrong

or bad, but, you know,
the trolls also amplified content

that they've stolen from elsewhere,

which is things that people actually
believed in and resonated with.

Before the election,
they were focused on specific issues.

And they realized that, if you wanted
to make those issues divisive

and hurtful for America, you needed to
have a hand in both sides of the issue.

They're designing conflict between
polarized groups in America online,

but also offline. And so they
conduct protests in the US.

When they organize a protest,

they reach out to one group,

and make sure that on the other side
of the street there's another group

who's going to do
the exact opposite position.

All these things are instrumental
to white supremacy.

Online, when they talk about
immigration for instance

they encourage messages that are
inflammatory against immigration.

But they also encourage,
in the same stroke,

pro-immigration messages
and campaigns.

Then, they have an anti-immigration
group do a demonstration,

and a pro-immigration group
do a demonstration

on the very same street,
on the same day

The anti-Muslim protesters were
responding to an event.

called Stop Islamization of Texas.

It was organized by a Facebook
group named Heart of Texas,

generated by Russia.

Posts on the Facebook event page
threatened to, quote,

"blow this place up."

They're designing for violence.

They've done their research
and so the content they curate

and how they behave online
is unfortunately a reflection

of how polarized the actual online
political conversation was at that time.

Of course they picked the most
egregious parts of the content

and the most divisive ones, but they
are not injecting in that bloodstream

anything that wasn't already there.

They're really holding
a mirror to our face.

It's hard to look in the mirror.

It's even harder
when you don't like what you see.

The trolls had spent years looking for
the divisions In American society.

They knew that immigration and race
were the sites of our deepest wounds.

Hands up! Don't Shoot!

Their fake personas exploited
the very real social horror

of police violence against
black Americans.

Don't touch me!

On the anniversary of the brutal murder
of Eric Garner

by New York City Police,

the trolls tried to exploit
Garner's memory

to call on Americans not to vote
to reform the system,

but to tear it down.

If you take a group
like BlackMattersUS,

it had a page on Facebook,
but also a Twitter account.

It had a website. They were slowly
gaining influence and traction.

And they became key assets used
to manipulate American audiences.

When they target the black community
in the US,

they craft messages saying,
"Hey, we shouldn't vote."

There's nothing more undemocratic
than convincing people not to vote.

But for the trolls, voter suppression
was a pragmatic strategy

intended to hurt Clinton.

And it may have worked.

In Detroit, Michigan, a city dominated
by black Democratic voters,

75 000 people who had turned out
for Obama, stayed home in 2016.

Clinton lost that key swing state
by only 10 000 votes.

Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary
and the rest.

Do you think the trolls were effective?

You're asking me a question.
"If there is life on Mars,"

"do you think they have babies after
nine months of pregnancy or twelve?"

I don't know if there's life on Mars.

How could I possibly think
of how they give birth.

I don't know what these kids thought
or didn't think,

or why they worked there,
because I don't know if they ever did.

NBC, an American TV channel,
has finally found,

it took them long enough,
the Russian troll factory.

The one created by Putin

and the one that ultimately elected
Donald Trump for the Americans.

And NBC even managed to catch one
of the trolls behind all that.

Russia One showed a piece
of my NBC interview.

They cut out me talking about Ukraine.

Then they started showing photos
and videos from my social media,

portraying me as a person
who's out of his mind,

who gets tattoos, goes clubbing,

and might even be a drug addict.

They shifted the focus from what
I said about trolls onto my tattoos.

In our studio is Margarita Simonyan.

I don't go to nightclubs
and I've got no tattoos,

so I'm not interesting enough for NBC.

But everyone else finds us
very interesting.

I don't know whether it was done
or wasn't.

But apparently, even the people
who think it was done,

see it as a hugely ineffective
operation.

It's not a simple answer to just assess
the impact on the result of the vote.

It's not something
you can just compute.

We know the IRA was pleased
with themselves,

but we also know they had all the
incentives to celebrate this

as a victory.

We know from the senate report that
when election night came through,

they uncorked the champagne,
and toasted,

saying that they
had "made America great".

How do we evaluate whether
the IRA was a success or not?

You have to ask yourself,
"Who is the audience of the IRA?"

They also had internal stakeholders.

The moral panic that unfolded around
Russian trolling in America,

in itself, is a strategic win
for the organization.

After the election, a source provided
us with chats

from inside Pregozhin's organization

in which key executives discussed
the best way to promote

the accomplishments of the trolls
work in the US.

The reports boasted
their numbers state by state.

The Heart of Texas Group,
the largest internet resource

on the theme of secession. It had an
audience of about 300 000 people.

Atlanta, African Americans
make up 54% of its population.

Our Williams and Kalvin resource
had 123 000 subscribers.

Company work influenced the opinions
of citizens in swing states,

Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin,

with the result that Trump
received 59 electoral votes.

Prigozhin likes his role in the world,
like one of the devils of the world.

The more he looks like a devil
in the world,

the higher his position
is in the Kremlin.

The Kremlin has several towers.
It's like a symbol of several groups

inside the Kremlin.
So, Prigozhin is inside one group.

And for this group, it's a very good
flag to show "we did it".

We've got a completely different
understanding of what patriotism is,

what love for one's country
and pride for it are.

Mr. Prigozhin certainly considers
himself the biggest patriot of all.

In my opinion, what Mr. Prigozhin
and his subordinates do

is a hell of a disgrace. It will take
us a long time to wash it off.

I believe if the activities of the
Wagner Group are ever investigated,

crimes against humanity
are quite a serious thing.

But as for interfering
in some election...

I've always found this hard
to understand.

They say, "The US is outraged."

Journalists are outraged,
everyone is outraged.

Guys, what are you outraged about?

Do you really think that 100 people,
scribbling comments,

brought down democracy
in the US?

If so, I am sorry.
It that's true, I'm a little surprised.

I prefer to believe things
aren't as dire yet.

Unless for the next election,
he hires another 300 people,

and will get someone worse elected.
Watch out.

In 2016, you still see that the IRA
is a strategic blindspot

in America's understanding of what
really happened with the election.

We want to think about it in terms
of volume.

"How much did they troll?"

The thing that's more fascinating,

is to see them experiment with
different techniques of trolling.

How does it look like to do this
trolling on different platforms?

How does it look like to do
this trolling hand-in-hand

with hacking information
and more serious cyber operations?

There's no evidence to suggest
that the IRA ever did the hacking,

or, frankly, was able to do so.

So it bears the question,
who's doing the hacking

and how closely does the IRA
coordinate with the hackers?

The troll operation was ambitious.

It lasted for years
and had clear goals.

But during the campaign, the trolling
operation was almost invisible

to those Americans who were
tasked with protecting the country.

The national security experts inside
the White House were focused

on a different kind of internet threat,

But instead of being written in memes,
it was written in code.

Hack

The hacking of Democratic National
Committee emails,

experts say,
by the Russian government...

Somebody hacked
into the DNC computers...

We have new details now
on the email hack at the DNC.

The machinations of the Democratic
party machine are all online.

Would you walk me through
the hack into the DNC in 2016?

Sure. Imagine that you are Russian
intelligence services

trying to get access
to the DNC network.

The first thing you might try and do is
get someone at the DNC to give you

their username and password,

so you can log into the network
using those stolen credentials.

And then what you're going to do
is reconnaissance.

What does this network look like?

What kind of security software
is it running?

And, based on that, you will customize
malware that you will install

on that system.

They had a particular malware product
we knew as X-agent.

They could do screenshots
of what you were doing.

They could do keystroking.

You're sitting there,
typing on your computer,

and someone's literally seeing it.

It's coming up on their screen
as if it's coming up on your screen.

You're going to begin moving
through the network,

to other machines and servers,
looking for information.

And then you will extract that from
the network without being detected.

Maybe a network that you are trying
to get into has a rule

on its firewall that says,

"Yeah, if it's an IP address
from Russia, maybe not."

So then what you might try to do is
connect to something here,

in the United States.

Then use that to connect to another
server and maybe to another server,

and from there you're gonna
move it back

to wherever you are conducting
your operations from.

Most of the advanced actors out there
use a combination

of off-the-shelf commercial tools
that you can buy

from other criminal groups

and custom malware
that they write themselves.

Sometimes these tools,
if they're highly customized,

that's almost like a fingerprint
for malicious actors

and it's very hard to fake that.

And in this case, when we assembled
all of that information up

and you looked at the potential
alternatives and other things,

the most likely result was that it was
in fact the Russians.

Moscow, Russia

Using warrants
and open source tools,

an FBI cyber unit identified the digital
fingerprint of the Russian servers

and tracked the Russian operators
in real time

on their networks
and through social media.

Emails with fake links were sent
by Aleksey Lukashev.

Nikolay Kosachek,
call-sign cossack,

rented servers
in Illinois and Arizona.

Artem Malyshev installed
an updated version of X-agent.

Ivan Yermakov burrowed
into the flimsy security systems

of the Democratic Party networks,

then built digital tunnels
to exfiltrate troves of data.

They harvested hundreds
of thousands of documents,

including fundraising records
and opposition research.

But stealing secrets was nothing new.

Espionage is part
of international relations.

It always has been
and it always will be.

We conduct espionage as well,
across the world.

We are looking for and collecting
information and bringing that back.

And so, as a government,

you try to prevent as much
espionage from happening,

but you don't really get your nose
out of joint when it occurs

because that's part of the normal
international relations process.

- He's coming back
- Where? I can't see!

There he is!

For years, countries have silently
spied on each other.

Sometimes things got violent,
but that was mostly in the movies.

I'm an American diplomat!

When the internet came along,

spy agencies got
into the hacking business,

but the old rules still applied.

Armed forces fought wars,

while intelligence services
just stole secrets.

Those of us who are my age
remember the KGB.

Or if they watch television,
they remember the parodies of it.

In Maxwell Smart, it was called
KAOS and in James Bond,

it was called Spectre.

It's important to talk about two real
spy agencies in Russia today.

There's the GRU,

which is the intelligence service which
works for the Russian military.

And then there's the SVR.

Typically, the SVR is focused more

on what we would consider
traditional espionage.

- More like the CIA.
- Correct.

The SVR is much more of a traditional
foreign intelligence service.

It runs its own agents
that serve abroad, undercover,

whether at embassies
or as private citizens.

And it's an intelligence
collection operation.

Its job is more to watch
and collect. Not to act.

The GRU is military intelligence.

So it collects more on American
defense capabilities,

on conflicts.

The GRU had been sent in early
in Syria.

The GRU had been one
of the lead agencies

in the intervention in Ukraine.

I was told that the GRU
was a little sloppier

than some of the other Russian
intelligence services.

Prior to 2014, if you discovered
the Russians in a network,

they tended to vanish like ghosts.

They are very quiet,
they are very stealthy.

They have excellent trade craft.

But starting in 2014, they actually
became much more aggressive.

I think it was a broader shift
in Russian strategic thinking

about how aggressive
they wanted to be with the West,

and the United States in particular.

And the GRU is a reflection of that.

And it's the GRU that carries out more
of the activities that actually generate

an effect in the physical world.

The GRU used the Ukraine invasion
in 2014

as a cyber playground, including a
power grid attack in December 2015.

Two days before Christmas, the lights
went out in Western Ukraine.

In a display of Russian cyber power,

the GRU hacked
into the control systems

of the Ukrainian power grid

and commanded distribution centers
to shut down.

- Should we call the IT guys?
- Maybe they did this.

Leaving more than 200 000 people
without electricity.

The entire system was subjected
to outside interference.

In total, 27 substations
have shut down.

That's what you'd call a cyberattack.

The GRU obviously felt like they had
a greater degree of freedom

operating in Ukraine
than in other places.

Nothing was off limits for the GRU.

A year earlier, it had caused chaos
by hacking

into the voting computer systems
during the election

to replace President Yanukovych.

The Russians actually hacked into the
main server and created an outcome

in which a minor nationalist candidate
was portrayed as the winner.

And they actually broadcast it
on their evening news.

This strange picture emerged
on the main server

of the Central Election Commission
of Ukraine a few minutes ago.

Dmytro Yarosh seems to occupy
the 1st place in the election race.

Fortunately the Ukrainian state
caught up with that

and they manually recounted
and they got the right result out.

But imagine if that had worked.

Russia was telling the West over
and over again,

"Ukraine is a bunch of fascists."

"We have to intervene to defend
civilization against these Nazis."

And then you pick out a fascist,

and you claim that he's won
the presidential election.

Even if that had only worked
for a few days,

imagine how that would have affected
our impression of Ukraine.

The cyber-attack that caught the eye
of US authorities was an intrusion

into a nuclear reactor in Ukraine

owned by a Pennsylvania
company, Westinghouse.

Marked by the fingers of the GRU,
and the potential dangers posed

by a nuclear hack, the strike attracted
the attention of federal prosecutor,

David Hickton.

Westinghouse is the designer of about
50% of the nuclear reactors

in the world.

So, our larger concern is how many
Chernobyls do you want to have

because someone is stealing
the technology

and building the nuclear
reactor backwards?

Along with the FBI, he started watching
the GRU's activities very closely.

We opened up a criminal case
in December 2014,

which ultimately became Fancy Bear.

Sorry, I'm going to interrupt you
for a second here.

From a straightforward point of view,
who is Fancy Bear?

Fancy Bear is a Russian hacker group.

The dudes from that intelligence
organization.

Cyber security experts will attach
an adjective to the word bear

for any group associated
with the Russian government.

And it's kitten for any group
connected to Iran.

Fancy Bear was the name
for hackers from the GRU.

Fancy Bear liked to show off.
It didn't hide its tracks.

Not surprising for a spy group
whose logo is a bat

with its wings across the world.

For the GRU, it's like, how much effort
do you put into obscuring

what you're doing?
How good is the disguise kit?

Is it just
glasses with the funny nose?

Is it just a bandana across the face

or is it actually like the full
Mission Impossible mask?

In the end I concluded they were
sort of an in your face group,

because they had created
their own website

Fancy wasn't the only Bear.
There was also Cozy Bear.

Cozy was quiet.
Snug as a bug in a rug.

It haunted networks like a ghost.

It belonged to the traditional
spy group, the SVR.

SVR - Cozy Bear Headquarters
Russia

In 2015, Cozy Bear hacked into
the Pentagon email system.

Then Cozy sneaked into the
Democratic National Committee

and quietly set about stealing
information.

The FBI watched the data flow while
they tried to contact the democrats.

That was kind of the first interactions
we had with the DNC,

which is basically the same sort
of outreach that we give

to private corporations
and academic institutions.

Our cyber folks will call and say,

"Hey, we've seen some probing activity
coming from a particular location."

"You should go onto your systems
and look through your logs."

"If you are seeing any of these things,
come back and let us know."

For six months, as spies
roamed through the DNC files,

no one seemed too alarmed.

DNC tech support didn't return calls
from the FBI,

and the FBI never bothered
to contact senior officials.

Then, Fancy Bear, the group
of Russian military hackers,

decided to find their own way
into the DNC,

by sneaking in through another door.

The two groups may not have even
known that they were attacking

the same network.

You will often find multiple Russian
agencies targeting a similar target

to actively encourage
bureaucratic competition.

Probably both of them had been
given the DNC as a high priority.

In March of 2016,
we learned that Fancy Bear,

which we had an active criminal
investigation into,

had hacked the DNC.

And so then my next reaction
to that is, "Well, who else?"

I fully expected that we would learn
that they were hacking the RNC

and the Trump campaign too.

I later became surprised to learn
that they were not.

And then it was the very next day.
And it's John Podesta.

There's what looks like, a prompt from
Google to change your password,

saying your account's being attacked.

We asked one
of our cybersecurity people

"should we change, is this real?"

Later, he claimed that it was a typo
but, email went back saying yes.

My assistant clicked on it, changed
the password. The rest is history.

Shortly after the initial theft
of documents from the DNC,

They settled for DCLeaks,
and waited.

A month later, Hillary Clinton sealed
her victory in the Democratic primary.

We are on the brink of a historic,
unprecedented moment.

The next day, DCLeaks went live

with its first dump of the Democrats'
documents and emails.

I first thought, "Wow, now it's being
weaponized,"

"and it might have an impact..."

But I discounted that
because I thought,

"The only people who are going to read
this are the people who read Politico."

The first dump was small
and not widely publicized.

But when it came to emails, Hillary
Clinton was particularly vulnerable.

Hillary Clinton is underfire. This
morning's New York Times reports

that the former Secretary of State
may have violated federal laws.

Clinton used personal email
to conduct official business

during her time
as the nation's top diplomat.

Hillary Clinton's email controversy
growing by the day.

You could say her inbox is full.

There was a backdrop
to the email story,

which was the investigation
into her private use of emails

when she was Secretary of State.

But the hacks and leaking kind
of brought the topic of emails

back to the campaign.

The Clinton campaign knew Russia
was behind DCLeaks.

Their cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike
had reached the same conclusion

as the US government.

But despite compelling evidence,

the government refused
to blame the hack on Russia.

So the campaign took steps of its own.

What we knew in the summer of 2016,

was that the Russian government
was hacking the DNC,

and now making efforts to hack
the Clinton campaign

and campaign officials as well.

We were under attack
by a hostile foreign power.

We tried, as best we could, in the days
that followed those initial releases

of information, to raise the alarm,

to make the American press see
just how dramatic this was.

And so we went public in a
Washington Post piece in early June.

The GRU moved quickly
to try to discredit the story.

Eight hours after the Washington Post
article went online,

hackers were hard at work trying
to hide the hand of Russia.

To distract onlookers, Fancy Bear
had a special card up its sleeve,

a joker named Guccifer 2.0.

This is my personal project
and I'm proud of it.

Personally I think I'm among
the best hackers in the world.

Guccifer bragged about outsmarting
the US intelligence community,

and even had a Twitter handle.

This persona Guccifer 2.0 says,

"The DNC intrusion was done by me,
I'm a lone hacker in Romania."

I'm a hacker, manager,
philosopher, woman lover.

- Where are you from?
- From Romania.

This persona had appeared
right out of seemingly nowhere.

When you're in this kind of
environment, you're like, "Really?"

"That seems like an interesting
coincidence."

I'm a man. I've never met a female
hacker of the highest level.

Girls, don't get offended, I love you.

There probably was a Romanian
platform involved in the operation,

but it was eventually attributed
back to Russian origin.

Inside the National Security Council,

that conclusion came back pretty
quickly that this was not

a lone Romanian hacker, that in fact
this was a front for the GRU.

They based their creation
on the original Guccifer,

a Romanian who had hacked
US politicians like Colin Powell

and George W. Bush.

It created just enough deniability
about the origins of the hack.

The claim that the Russian intelligence
agencies were involved

in the procurement of these documents,

thus far there's been
very little evidence presented.

Russian officials are calling
Americans paranoid.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
dismissed the allegations

when he was asked about them today.

Well, I don't want to use
four-letter words

The public was still at sea for some
time in terms of Guccifer 2.0.

We had decided that we would not
support the idea

that it was a lone hacker,

but that we were not going to try
to aggressively debunk that.

Guccifer was a flimsy disguise,
but it worked.

The identity of the hackers
became a sideshow.

The story wasn't that Russia had
hacked the Democrats,

but that the Democrats
were falling apart.

On the eve of a democratic convention,
a bombshell.

Wikileaks released thousands
of internal DNC emails.

Just when Hillary Clinton was hoping
to put the whole notion

of an email controversy behind her,

here comes an entirely different email
controversy, and one that threatens

the unity the Democrats
are hoping to show.

1 700 new stolen emails.

Thousands of leaked emails show
Democratic party officials

possibly plotting against Bernie
Sanders in his race against Hillary.

In one, a top official wonders, "Can
we get someone to ask his belief?"

"Does he believe in a God?"
The response, an "Amen".

The idea that we've heard, of course,
from the Sanders' campaign

is that the DNC had a finger on the
scale to try to help Secretary Clinton,

and now you see these emails.

Does this not give credence
to their argument?

Does this not validate their concerns?

It has been a tumultuous 24 hours here,

at the opening of the Democratic
National Convention.

This is exactly the kind of tension that
the party was hoping to avoid here.

Tonight, Sanders' supporters
are furious.

Walk out! Walk out!

The Chair of the DNC, Congresswoman
Debbie Wasserman Schultz,

has announced her resignation.

She was booed off the stage.
I've never seen anything like this.

Could we talk about the controversy
around the emails that came out

and how it suggested that the DNC
was clearly on the side of Hillary?

The Democratic party does
not care about you.

The Democratic party does not care
about America.

We are going to show the Democratic
Party that if they will not have us

and they will not welcome us
into their party,

then we will leave and they will lose
to Trump. It will not be our fault.

I found the content of the emails
pretty damning.

The Democratic party was putting
its finger on the scale,

favoring Clinton over Bernie Sanders.

The emails were evidence
that the system was corrupt

and even Sanders
couldn't put a good face on it.

We have got to defeat Donald Trump!

And we have got to elect Hillary
Clinton and Tim Kaine!

What's your reaction to these emails?

Outrage disappointed.

And it doesn't matter necessarily
that it was the Russians.

It could have been the men from Mars.

But it didn't come from Mars. It came
from Russia, and not with love.

That should have been
an important part of the story.

You always want to know the source.

But the Russian hand was hidden
by the volume of the data

and the chaos it caused.

That chaos and confusion was fed by
a controversial figure I knew well.

I had already made one movie
about him.

You were the one who released
these twenty thousand emails,

Julian Assange.
Where did you get them?

Can we address the question at hand,
and that is, whether or not,

you can say definitively that Russia
had no part in this hack?

I am a journalist.
We don't reveal our sources.

I don't like leaked emails,
but in this one case, God bless you,

WikiLeaks, for proving
what we suspected.

Thank you, WikiLeaks! Told us that she
doesn't even like Americans.

I find WikiLeaks very refreshing.

This is the Hillary Clinton
I always knew existed.

I just never had proof of it.

Hillary cheats!
Thank you, WikiLeaks!

There was a lot of support for
WikiLeaks in the United States.

Sort of this freedom of information
operation, which I never understood.

But some people thought that,
so it had that credibility,

that sort of heroic credibility.

They were one step ahead of us
by using a platform

that had that kind of aura
of legitimacy.

Right now, we have a serious,
serious allegation!

We wouldn't have this information
right now,

the American people would not have
this information if not for this.

I certainly do not condone
cyber security and hacking,

but this all plays into the same thing.
Look at what Hillary Clinton did.

She put an unsecured server
in her home by jeopardizing...

But that's not WikiLeaks.

A lot of this was, in terms
of the public's mind, confusing.

It's almost impossible for you
to keep track of all these emails.

We didn't fully appreciate

just how insidious the releases
of these emails were.

The words Hillary and email
and revelation

were coming out day after day
after day.

There's a Gallup poll that visualized
what word was most associated

in people's minds.

For Clinton, email is this big,
much bigger than anything else.

In people's minds, there are secret
documents that are authentic and real

'cause they are real emails
that show that somehow she's bad.

And I've never read them and I don't
really know anything about them.

I just have a gut feeling that there
is concrete evidence that she's bad.

She is framed by email
the entire campaign.

That makes that particular vector
of attack so powerful.

It was such an intelligent propaganda
operation by the Russians

to hack the emails and dump them...

Email is bait.

The professional reporter comes
to them as a trove of occult knowledge.

Another batch of stolen emails
published today by WikiLeaks,

offering an even deeper look at the
calibrations of the Clinton campaign.

It's a drip drip drip of distraction,

released on a daily schedule
by Julian Assange.

Throughout this time, journalists
make this effort to be objective

by being negative equally
about both candidates.

For Trump, it's a focus on his issues,

because they draw people to them
in the same way

that things that are on the verge
of obscene draw people.

With respect to the Muslims,
hey, Maria, there's something going on.

Go to Brussels. Go to Paris. It's like
living in a hell hole right now.

It's political clickbait.

Clinton's policy agenda is so much
more in line with the mainstream.

She's basically a centrist candidate.
The focus to be negative on her,

was the implication of scandal.

The private server,
followed by Benghazi.

Nothing about her substantive agenda.

That's a profound form of failure
of these media

that the majority of Americans rely on.

As these materials were being leaked
and washed through the press,

I went out to each of the major
networks to make a presentation

about what we understood
had happened.

Russian military intelligence
were penetrating

various American campaign organs,

turning that information
over to WikiLeaks,

who would do their bidding.

And then WikiLeaks put it out in
the public for the express purpose

of trying to undermine Hillary Clinton's
campaign for president.

Their initial reaction was,
"Some of this is pretty far-fetched,"

"it doesn't seem like it could happen
here in the United States. "

"By the way, you also have a political
interest in pushing this narrative."

Robby Mook, the campaign manager,
went out on television and said,

"We believe this is the Russians."

And the pushback from the press,
when Robby did that, was pretty fierce.

That's a very, very strong charge
that you're leveling here.

You're basically suggesting that
Russians hacked into the DNC

and now are releasing these files
through Wikileaks

to help elect Donald Trump.

Well this isn't my assertion.

There are a number of experts
that are asserting this.

I think we need to get to the bottom
of these facts.

Experts have said that it is the
Russians that in fact went in

and took these emails and then,
if they are the ones who took them,

we have to infer that they
are the ones releasing them.

From Moscow today, an epic shocker.

Russian president, Vladimir Putin,
denied that his government was behind

the hacking
of the Democratic party's emails.

I know nothing about this.
There are a lot of hackers today.

Besides, does it really matter who
hacked it? Is that really what matters?

What really matters is the content
that was shown to the public.

Putin was playing
three dimensional chess.

He was right, the content did matter.

It also mattered that a foreign power
was stealing and leaking data

from one campaign while leaving
the other candidate alone.

Now regarding hackers...

They are free souls,
like artists.

If an artist wakes up in a good mood,
they'll paint all day.

The same goes for hackers.

They wake up one day and read
that something's happening

on the international stage.

If they are feeling patriotic,

they will start contributing
as they believe,

to the justified fight against those
speaking ill of Russia.

Is that possible?
In theory, yes.

At the government level,
we never engage in this.

This is what is most important.

It was very clear that the purpose
of this operation was to harm

the Clinton campaign,
and it was coming from Russia.

At that point, it was still not clear
at what level it had been ordered.

But my own take and my own advice
at the time

was the Russian military
doesn't operate rogue.

They take orders
from the commander-in-chief.

They absolutely take orders from
the commander-in-chief.

The way that oligarchies work
is that they substitute

a spectacular foreign policy for
the really absent domestic policy.

If you're Russia, you can't really
have domestic policy.

Because a few men have all the money

and everything is blocked up
by corruption.

How do you get people to think that
the government is in some way

on their side? You have to generate
a foreign policy with clear enemies.

Since Putin came back to power,
foreign policy for Russia has been

all about creating
these spectacular enemies.

The big enemy is the United States.

The United States is a great enemy to
have for Russia because of prestige.

The Russians think of themselves
as a superpower.

An average Russian might say,

"Well, yes, you know,
my plumbing doesn't work"

"and no one ever clears the snow,
but we're a superpower."

And having America as an enemy,
proves that you're a superpower.

So Putin has tried to persuade
his people

that there was a kind of great
American/Russian conflict going on.

In recent years, US politics toward
Russia can hardly be called friendly.

There are a lot of people
in the governing body of the US

who are overly obsessed with
the idea of their own exclusivity

and their superiority
over the rest of the world.

The question that haunted
the 2016 election

was why the White House refused
to reveal what it knew

about Russia interference.

The United States
is a really powerful country

and it's unlikely that we can be
defeated abroad in a military conflict,

but in the last couple of years
we have seen

that we are actually
pretty vulnerable at home.

It's a privilege to serve
in the government,

but it's also a responsibility,
and you have to take responsibility.

The American citizens were counting
on us and I think you can say

we didn't live up to the highest
standards of protecting the country.

2016 was pretty awful.

We were dealing with the growing
horror of Syria

and the helplessness of our attempts
to get the Russians to help

end the conflict in Syria.

And trying to get the Russians
to end the conflict in Ukraine.

The key to success in government is
being able to distinguish between

the urgent and the important.

And I think we failed in 2016,

and we allowed ourselves to be
distracted by the urgent.

It prevented us from really grasping
what was important.

The real challenge in 2016
wasn't Syria,

important though that was.

I regret to say this, it wasn't Ukraine,

compared to the Russian interference
in the election.

But it's not like one day you think

the Russians are interfering
in our election,

and the next day you go to the
president's desk and say

this is what we need to do.

Patterns that you've seen elsewhere
and that you have experience with

are clearer at that level of government
than they might be at higher levels.

I was working with Victoria Nuland.

We would kind of put our heads
together on what was going on.

She pushed a lot.

She sometimes was impatient
with our pace, which was fair.

What I felt at the time was our
intelligence community was too slow

to validate what our experience
told us was happening.

They ultimately did, but it would have
been far more useful to the President

if they had been able
to validate more quickly.

What we were seeing bore the
hallmarks of Russian tradecraft

in Ukraine.

What we were asking for then
was more US intelligence resources

so that we could give better
information to leadership.

But it was too early for the
intelligence community to validate

with the kind of certainty
a President wants.

Those standards
have to be impeccable,

with all strands of the US intelligence
community in agreement

before you can say to the President,
"We're confident."

If I'm going to talk to the President
of the United States,

I wanted to make sure I was intimately
familiar with every detail.

In the summer of 2016, I became
exceptionally knowledgeable

of all the information
that we had access to,

and all of the work that we had done.

No one in the US government
had complete knowledge

of the Russian operation,

but CIA Director John Brennan
probably knew more than most.

By mid-summer, Obama's national
security team decided

it was time to send Russia a warning.

Brennan was tapped to reach out
to one of his Russian counterparts,

an intelligence official
named Alexander Bortnikov.

Bortnikov had direct
and immediate access to Mr. Putin.

I think I was the first senior US
official to confront them directly.

I must say Mr. Bortnikov is a very
smooth and slick individual.

He said, "Oh, no, we would never do
something like that, Mr. Director."

"We are ready to work with whomever
is going to be elected."

He lies with the best of them.

Brennan calling Bortnikov on this was
a pretty extraordinary signal

of how important this was viewed.

But there wasn't a lot of credible
threats you could make.

Other than, "Relations between
the United States and Russia"

"are going to be really, really bad."

Well, relations between the United
States and Russia already are bad.

There was an increasing trend
of Russian intelligence agents

to harass American diplomats,

including a physical assault outside
the American embassy.

He was trying to walk
into the embassy

and he was assaulted
by a Russian security officer,

which was outrageous

She called the American a diplomat,
but he's actually a CIA officer

with diplomatic cover.

Even still, the extraordinary assault
became an international incident.

I said to Mr. Bortnikov,
in no uncertain terms,

that some of the tactics
that the FSB thugs were using

against US diplomats in Moscow
was intolerable

and that there are limits to the
espionage and intelligence profession.

Those limits are often flexible.

But between spies there
is a rough equilibrium,

and when the tacit rules are broken,
spies wonder why.

In 2016, Russia was breaking
the rules of the game

and stability was giving way
to a kind of chaos.

You have to think about this
the way that they think about this.

This is not a legalistic process
or a bureaucratic process.

This is not a diplomatic process.

This is making a play.

You make a play and sometimes it
works and sometimes it doesn't work.

And then sometimes it works
better than you think.

We needed an effective threat.

You deter actions by raising the costs,
and one of the most effective ways

to raise costs is to threaten
reciprocal and more costly retaliation.

That's one of the reasons why
I developed options

for steps that could be taken
or things that could be signaled

that could make it
a more effective threat.

One of the steps
one sensibly might consider

would be to release embarrassing
information about Russian officials.

Was it something that was
under consideration?

Those options were explored.

We put together pretty aggressive
options that we could use to counter

the Russians. Things like sanctions
on individuals.

Could we identify Russian operatives
in the US and kick them out?

Are there Justice Department options?

Actors that we could bring
legal charges against?

The Justice Department was already
investigating one crime

they could charge:
the hacking of the DNC.

In Pittsburgh, David Hickton
wanted to target Fancy Bear

for a federal indictment.

He'd gone after foreign actors
like this before, years earlier,

his unit had named and charged
Chinese government hackers

for stealing industrial secrets.

The hackers never saw the inside
of a courtroom,

but the indictment itself did curb
China's hacking for a time.

I really wanted to bring a case.

But the historical position
of the Department of Justice

is you do not get involved
in election litigation.

We weren't even allowed to appear
with candidates

sixty days before they were elected.

So if a case was not brought two
months before the November election,

it was not going to be brought
until after the election.

But, in simple terms, the case
was not going to be ready

unless we did something
herculean to do it.

After I had written up
that options paper,

Susan Rice,
the National Security Advisor,

discussed it
with some of the principals.

And their reaction was, "too risky,
too edgy, too aggressive".

There were options in terms of what
we could do even in the cybersphere.

Rattle the Russians' cyber cages.

Very uncertain as to what the Russians
then might have decided to do

in response.

Would we have then engaged in some
kind of escalatory war

with the Russians in the cyber realm?

There were things that
they could have done

that could have been even more
serious and potentially more impactful.

So we didn't want to make it
a self-fulfilling prophecy

about what the Russians
were trying to achieve

by escalating that could be cathartic
on our part

but really would have, again,
further undermined the election.

There was a reluctance to take steps
that would undermine

the Syria negotiations, supposedly,

which were not going well anyway,

undermine the chance
to rescue arms control,

or take actions that might not deter
Russian interference

but actually escalate
Russian interference.

And those arguments won the day.

It became pretty clear to me the
election case was gonna be deferred.

I thought that if we had said,
"Pittsburgh's gonna do the case,"

surged resources into Pittsburgh,

we would have been able to identify
and indict the people.

But what would that have done?
Would that have changed anything?

The Democratic nominee for President

was President Obama's
Secretary of State.

It would look like the President was
putting his hand on the scale

of the election, if he was more active

than precedent had dictated
about this.

The better weight of wisdom would be
to wait until after the election.

It's not for me to evaluate
his decisions. He was the President.

Traditionally, war is a way
of one sovereign state

making another sovereign state
do what it wants.

War doesn't have to be carried out
by way of traditional military force.

I can break your will, my nation can
break your nation's will, in other ways.

I try to figure out
what makes you tick.

I try to figure out your strengths,
and above all, your weaknesses.

And then I appeal to those weaknesses
to try to get you to do something

that's not really
in your interest to do.

What Russia did in 2016 was
understand and take advantage

of a new technical environment
faster than anyone else.

They used an instrument that allowed
them to get inside the will

of a country that they understood
as their enemy. And they succeeded.

But they were also very lucky.
They were lucky to have Mr. Trump.

He does things for them in public
which they can't do themselves.

They can pretend to be Americans
on the internet

but they can't pretend
to be Americans in real life.

He's got the accent.
He's a white guy.

He can wear a tie. He gives
a good off the cuff speech.

He knows how to work an audience.

It's pretty clear that cooperation
is taking place.

At what point did you become
concerned or conclude

that the Russians had also reached
out to the Trump campaign?

During the summer of 2016,
we were seeing reports

of Russian officials claiming contacts
with individuals in the Trump campaign.

And I was explicitly told that the
White House cannot be involved

in tracking what Americans are doing.

It is illegal.
It is not constitutional.

I was told by my leadership to stand
down, and I took that seriously

and I stopped.

I also remember walking back
to my office thinking,

feeling helpless.

They did make clear to me that the
proper authorities were looking into it.

We started immediately identifying
direct connections

between campaign people
and Russians.

Paul Manafort was an obvious target.
General Michael Flynn.

Carter Page. George Papadopoulos.

A lot of questions about their behavior,
connections,

network of friends and associates.

The combination of those things
brought to a head this idea

that we needed to now investigate
potential collusion

between the Trump campaign
and the Russians.

It was just like stepping off the
rollercoaster into the rocket ship.

Is there somebody
disturbing us up here?

Once inside the Trump rocket ship,

it was hard to miss the crazy way
he seemed to be steering a course

guided by the Kremlin.

Those who suspected collusion,

played one particular clip
from 2016 over and over.

What do I have to get involved with
Putin for? I have never spoken to him.

I don't know anything about him
other than he will respect me.

See, he starts by saying
he doesn't know Putin.

Trump loves saying this, almost as
much as he loves saying the opposite.

- Have you ever met Putin?
- I've met him once.

As an example, I own the Miss
Universe. I was in Russia recently.

And I spoke indirectly and directly
with President Putin,

who could not have been nicer.

If it is Russia, which it's probably
not, nobody knows who it is...

He's talking now about the hacking
of the Democrats. And he's right.

The US government, at this point,
hadn't publicly attributed

the hacks to Russia.

But this is where it gets really good.
Now that he's denied

Russia hacked the Democrats,
Trump spins like a top,

and openly asks Russia
to hack Hillary Clinton herself.

Russia, if you're listening,

I hope you're able to find the
30 000 emails that are missing.

Trump said that this was just a joke.

But five hours later,
Russian military intelligence,

aka Fancy Bear,

was looking for honey
in Clinton's email accounts.

So was this just cartoon collusion?

Or a real back and forth hiding
in plain sight?

It's the hottest thing out there,
this hat.

That's the crazy beauty
about the politics of chaos.

It's hard to tell a joke from a crime.

Getting help from the Russians?
Just part of the game.

It doesn't matter how you play,
or who you play with.

As long as you wind up on top,

who cares if the whole motherfucking
system burns to the ground?

END OF PART I