It's great to welcome to the program today.
David Shimer, who's a fellow at Yale University and also author of the book Rigged America,
Russia and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference.
David, the title already tells us a lot about Mike.
My first question, but in the in the discussion about alleged Russian interference in the
2016 election and planned interference in 2020, there's this bigger discussion of how
long has trans national election interference been going on?
So.
So maybe let's start there where we're how long has it been going on?
Sure.
So what I do in my book is I restore history to the subject of Koeberg electoral interference
because a myth that is prevailing in our discourse today is that Russian interference in the
2016 election was somehow new or novel or unprecedented.
And that's dangerous because it something street, it is unprecedented.
Then it's treated as something that there's no history behind.
And it's very easy to manipulate how people perceive it and whether people even believe
it happened.
And what I do in this book is show that, in fact, for the last century, beginning in 1919,
the Soviet Union, for a period the United States and the now Putin's Russia have been
interfering in elections all over the world.
I show where.
I show why.
I show how they have used their intelligence services to direct and disrupt open elections.
And I then use that history to shine new light on what actually happened in 2016, how we
can understand what Putin achieved and what we should be doing now to defend our elections
both before November and thereafter.
So there's like five different branches that we could explore.
Let I'll just pick one to start with.
What would be since 1919 the most successful examples of that interference?
Sure.
So there's one case that that it was actually what sparked my interest in this whole subject,
which was in 1972, there was a vote of no confidence in the chancellor of West Germany,
Willy Brandt.
And this and this vote of no confidence came at a pivotal moment in the history of the
Cold War.
Willy Brandt had been executing a foreign policy of Ostpolitik.
He had been reestablishing relations with the Soviet Union, with the Eastern Bloc.
A real pivotal Cold War figure, which, as a result of his groundbreaking policies, sparked
dissent within his parliamentary coalition.
And there was a vote to remove him from office as chancellor.
That vote failed by two votes, just two after which he was able to ratify the treaty he'd
been pursuing and really pursue to completion or as he saw his foreign policy.
And what I reveal in the book is that there was a covert operation executed by East German
intelligence ordered by Moscow to purchase those two votes.
And I interviewed one of the intelligence officers who participated in that operation.
He now lives just outside of Berlin.
I spent about half a day with him.
I went through a bunch of different archives and re-created this story.
And it's a story of targeting two vulnerable lawmakers who were very corruptible because
of their womanizing, their deaths, their alcoholism, turning them, drawing them in slowly and then
paying them each fifty thousand deutschmarks in exchange for their extensions and then
covering it up.
And it took decades for this operation to come out and had the East German intelligence
agency not interfered in this vote.
The outcome would have been different.
Brandt would have gone from power and the trajectory of the Cold War would have changed.
And it did not as a direct result of covert interference.
Just briefly, do you know offhand how much?
Fifty thousand deutschmarks then is roughly like how many dollars today would we be thinking
about?
Like a little less than one hundred thousand dollars.
OK.
So it's not a crazy amount?
No, certainly given the the way in which it redirected the trajectory of things at the
time.
Now, as the sort of disclaimer moment, you we are not arguing here that Russia is the
only country that does this.
We are just we happen to be talking about Russia, but that's a common defense that no
one other countries also do this.
And number two, the U.S. also does this elsewhere.
You're not denying either of those assertions?
No, I'm denying I'm denying neither of those assertions.
But I do make the argument in my book that the story of covert electoral interference
is primarily to this point.
This may change now moving forward, but to this point has primarily been a story of Moscow
and Washington.
So between 1919, in 1947, the Soviet Union was interfering in elections all over the
world with brief interruptions and very intensely between 45 and 47 across Eastern Europe between
1948 and 1991.
The CIA and the KGB were going toe to toe in elections all over the world in order to
either seek to defeat or advance leftist candidates.
And since 1991, Vladimir Putin's regime has rediscovered and enhance the weapon of covert
electoral interference using the Internet.
He is once again targeting elections all over the world in order to support authoritarian
minded and divisive candidates.
And now one of the countries under attack and a real meaningful way is America itself.
So this is a very old story.
And there are many lessons to draw from that story as we seek to understand our present
moment.
It is not accurate to say that it is just Russia that has been executing these sorts
of operations.
But we also shouldn't minimize the role of Moscow in this history because Moscow really
has been the pioneer.
Beginning with Vladimir Lenin in 1919 to the regime of Vladimir Putin today.
So what was done?
In 2016.
And I think maybe what would be useful would be to contextualize it in, you know, when
you have an election that ultimately comes down to about seventy five thousand votes
in three states and otherwise would have would have been a Hillary Clinton win.
We have to balance what Russia did with James Comey opting to do a second presser about
Hillary Clinton's emails with targeted social media campaigns.
Hillary Clinton not going to win, Scott, right like we can when it's so close.
It's hard to say.
One thing was the difference maker, but that still means we should explore.
What exactly did Russia do?
Exactly, and I think it's a real trap to falling to the question of effectiveness when it comes
to operations to manipulate people, because there are two ways to manipulate in an election
to alter actual ballots and to manipulate minds, public opinion.
And as I said, I've scoured this history.
I interviewed more than 130 people, eight former CIA directors, gone through archives
across six countries.
And what comes out of that history is that for operations to manipulate people, there's
never a clear answer as to how many people were manipulated or how many people's minds
were changed.
It's about making informed analytical judgments and then orienting future policy based on
those judgments since the first point.
The second point is to what Russia did is Russia did three things.
The first is Russia systemically manipulated social media platforms with with propaganda
in spreading propaganda that advanced its two objectives to sow discord and division
and to advantage one candidate over another, which, by the way, is nothing new.
I spent about half a day with the former KGB general and they tried to do both of those
things in many U.S. elections during the Cold War.
They just didn't have social media to do it.
The second thing that Russia did was hack and release sensitive e-mails that were damaging
to Hillary Clinton's candidacy.
And the third thing that Russia did was systemically target our voting systems, which was actually
what captivated the Obama administration in the summer and fall because Russian military
intelligence was scanning, probing and penetrating our election infrastructure to the point where,
according to folks like John Brennan, Russia had the ability to alter the vote tallies
and voter data of U.S. citizens on Election Day itself.
So there's people who will look at that and they'll say, you know, that's a lot of work
for ultimately getting Donald Trump elected.
To the extent that it helped and in the end, Donald Trump really hasn't done that much.
That seems great for Russia.
And you'll have people provide lists on both sides.
Here's things that Trump did that seem good for Russia.
Here's things Trump did that seemed not so good for me.
It's never really been about that.
It's been about, listen, the U.S. now is a laughing stock in a way that it was not prior
to 2016.
The U.S. is not in conversations about climate change because Trump says it's a hoax created
by the Chinese.
The U.S. is increasingly I mean, on coronavirus, we're not leading.
For me, it's not about getting specific concessions.
It's about questioning how stable is the U.S. and how clearly are people thinking.
And it's a bigger picture thing where it's sort of the downfall of American democracy
broadly more than about Trump doing things for Putin.
Is that the right lens or is it a different lens we should be thinking of?
No, you're spot on.
I think a real misconception is that Putin Godhra helped to get Trump elected.
So therefore, Trump is going to cede Ukraine to Russia or something like that.
And that kind of transactional view of why Trump is of value to Putin.
And that really misunderstands Putin's foreign policy and his and his and is his strategy
really, which is in America, to degrade, disrupt and discredit American democracy, to corrupt
American this democracy in itself.
So when Trump causes chaos, when Trump sows discord, when Trump erodes democratic norms,
that is the dream of Russia that matters so much more than what might be happening regarding
a specific foreign policy decision.
Because what Vladimir Putin wants is for American democracy to erode, for him to therefore be
able to say to his own people, see, democracy doesn't work.
The story of American democracy was a myth, and you shouldn't want that.
It opens up new opportunities for influence for him, because as America retreats as a
leader abroad, that means that states will therefore be more susceptible to Russian influence.
And it also makes it so that America is so divided at home, is so disrupted at home that
America can't push back against Russia abroad and can't engage with Russia in it in a meaningful
way abroad.
So Trump could do nothing.
Transactionally that helped Russia edit the Trump presidency can be of enormous value
to Putin.
And that is the best way to understand what Trump's presidency has thus far been, for
example.
What we see happening in Portland right now, you know, it's having soldiers or DHS officials
who don't have marks on their uniforms.
It's reminiscent of what Putin did in Ukraine with his soldiers being unmarked.
And it also shows that America and Russia, you know, it enables is what about a sort
of argument that that America should be seeking to rebut because there is no equivalency or
should not be between Russian and American behavior domestically when it comes to the
other superpower of China.
One of the allegations that has been made is that Donald Trump specifically asked the
Chinese president for help when it comes to farmers, the idea being China buy stuff from
American farmers.
This helped frumps, helps Trump with the farmers that helped him get reelected in 2020.
That's a.
A really specific ask more broadly, there's this interview from last year where Trump
was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos and Stephanopoulos said, if Russia or China came
to you with information that was useful to you.
Would you call the FBI?
Would you accept it?
And Trump said, well, yeah, I would look at it first and then, you know, maybe I'd tell
the FBI, maybe I wouldn't talk a little bit about either abstractly or concretely the
role of China in the 2020 election.
So I think that's a really open and interesting question, because 2016 was a turning point
in this history and a couple of ways, one of which was it was the first time the issue
of covered electoral interference was really broadcast to the world.
It exited the shadows and it showed China, Iran, North Korea, whomever.
You can really disrupt American democracy with not that much money and with relatively
simple ideas because of how exposed our country is.
So I think the question on my mind is whether China seeks to imitate and further the Russian
model or whether this will continue to be a Russian tradition.
I don't know the answer to that.
I think we will know the answer in the coming months.
But I think something that we should be clear eyed about is that to this point, this has
been much more a Russian story than a Chinese story.
So folks who say China will break new ground here or North Korea or Iran, and it's as if
everyone's operating from the same starting point, that's just not true.
You know, Vladimir Putin worked for the KGB for 15 years.
He was a part of an agency that was interfering in elections all over the world.
There's a history here.
There's a reason why Russia is at the forefront here.
And I think we should keep that in mind.
And a brief point on Trump.
I also think Americans really need to keep in mind that regardless of what he says, this
is not a political issue.
If you believe in this thread, that doesn't make you, you know, a Democrat.
The Soviets targeted Ronald Reagan during the Cold War.
A Republican, they targeted Richard Nixon, a Republican, to destroy their campaigns.
Now, they just so happened to be helping a Republican.
But the point isn't to help a Republican.
The point is to further the interests of the Russian state, which is to degrade, corrupt
and tear down American democracy.
And that is not in alignment with the interests of any American citizen, regardless of political
party.
So to touch on 2020 and Russia, then if you look at the polls now, they certainly don't
look good for Donald Trump.
But as I've been telling my audience, you have to assume nothing.
You have to vote as if your vote is the deciding vote in your state.
That's really the only the only intelligent way forward.
But this does Russia's ability to medal become diminished if indeed the election is not close?
Or do their priorities change or how does that affect things?
So their priorities change because another myth here is that Russian interference is
just about getting Donald Trump elected again.
Not true.
Russia's operation to interfere in the 2016 elections started in 2014 before Trump even
announced his candidacy.
And as I reveal in my book, based on my interviews with John Brennan and Jim Clapper, Russia
had plans to continue interfering in our politics to undermine Hillary Clinton had she won the
election.
And they were basically starting that operation before Trump even won, which surprised Putin.
So as we await Election Day now, it's important to keep in mind that the foremost Russian
objective, again, is to undermine our democracy, to sow doubt about the functioning of our
democracy.
And, yes, Trump might be losing, but new opportunities emerge, such as if Donald Trump is alleging
that the election will be rigged.
It is in Russia's interests for Americans to believe their election is rigged.
That makes hurricanes no longer believe in their democracy.
So Russia could and this is hypothetical.
But Russia did have this capability four years ago.
You know, scramble a voter registration database is cause chaos at polling places anonymously
to therefore provide fodder to those who would allege that the election was rigged for the
Democratic side.
So therefore, after the election, half the country might not actually believe in the
outcome of the election, which would only sow further division and further discredit
American democracy in the eyes of the world as well as its own people.
So there are many ways to achieve the Russian objective.
Donald Trump is a means to an end of that objective of undermining American democracy.
But he's not the end in itself.
And Americans should keep that in mind because this threat will not disappear regardless
of whether Donald Trump loses.
Because this is a long running Russian mission, the KGB is targeting American elections.
For decades, Russia has been interfering in our politics since before Trump came on the
scene.
And that story will continue in 2021 and beyond.
The book is rigged.
America, Russia and one hundred years of covert electoral interference.
We've been speaking with the book's author, David Shimer, a fellow at Yale University.
I so appreciate your time today.
Thank you very much.