137. How Russia Made Trump: MAGA Take The White House (Ep 6)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Was Vladimir Putin behind the election of Donald Trump in 2016?
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. And I'm David McCloskey.
What were the key elements of Russia's active measures during the 2016 election?
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. Well, that's right.
And meanwhile, as this tranche of new WikiLeaks data is about to come out, the intelligence picture...
How did the intelligence community assess Russian interference?
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?
What impact did the WikiLeaks releases have on the election?
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
How did the Access Hollywood tape affect the election narrative?
to not get out in front of the intelligence. So 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 participated in the drafting of such papers, and I would struggle to identify a more miserable process 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
What were the consequences of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails?
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, voluntold to go and join this process, view it as sort of like an absolute nightmare. And it's the only time
Did Russian interference ultimately affect the election results?
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 intelligence assessments like this one on Syria where 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.
Yeah.
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 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 counter-espionage experts, but that won't stop them getting targeted by cyber criminals seeking to extract their secrets.
HP understands that approximately four in 10 UK businesses have reported cyber breaches in the past 12 months alone.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:03–0:25
2
Was Vladimir Putin behind the election of Donald Trump in 2016?
0:25–0:39
3
What were the key elements of Russia's active measures during the 2016 election?
0:39–1:16
4
How did the intelligence community assess Russian interference?
1:16–1:42
5
What impact did the WikiLeaks releases have on the election?
1:42–2:00
6
How did the Access Hollywood tape affect the election narrative?
2:00–2:34
7
What were the consequences of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails?
2:34–3:01
8
Did Russian interference ultimately affect the election results?
3:01–1:04:28
Speakers
5 identifiedMore from The Rest Is Classified
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