John Sipher on Mueller's Report on Russian Intelligence Operations
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2019
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Mueller report is out, all 448 pages of it, and its first volume tells a detailed story of Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The report recounts the Internet Research Agency’s trolling and disinformation campaign. It explains the GRU’s hacking and email dissemination operation. And it details 100 pages of interactions between Trump campaign affiliates and Russian nationals. To better understand whether and to what extent the public should understand those interactions as part of a deliberate Russian operation to make contact with the Trump campaign, earlier this week, Benjamin Wittes spoke to John Sipher, who ran Russia operations for the CIA in Moscow. They talked about how Sipher read the Mueller report, the respective roles of the CIA and the FBI in counterintelligence investigations and operations, and whether an investigation like Mueller’s really had a chance of understanding the full scope of Russia’s intentions and activities in the 2016 election.
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| 0:49.0 | There's a variety of things here in terms of disinformation and deception |
| 0:53.0 | and sewing chaos, but as part of that, |
| 0:55.0 | they were very interested in suppressing the vote, |
| 0:59.0 | often of black or what they saw as democratic voters, |
| 1:03.0 | and stoking the anger among maybe right-wing voters who normally |
| 1:07.0 | don't vote to maybe push them to vote. |
| 1:09.0 | And they did so in a very systematic way and in specific places, |
| 1:13.0 | in specific states and in specific counties. |
| 1:15.0 | That suggests to me a knowledge of where to deploy resources |
| 1:19.0 | that's pretty impressive and is probably underpinned by somebody |
| 1:23.0 | providing them information or telling them what to go. |
| 1:25.0 | I'm Matthew Khan, and this is the LawFair podcast May 11, 2019. |
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