Investigating the Russia investigations. What's left to learn?

0:00Was Russian interference in the 2016 election the reason Donald Trump won the presidency the first time? That question dogged Trump most of his first term. It's been asked and answered again and again over many investigations. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here. There was special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Russian intelligence officers who were part of the Russian military launched a concerted attack on our political system. The 2019 report which came of that investigation did not find any evidence of collusion, but it did document Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign.

0:38There was also the bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020, which confirmed and built on some of the findings from Mueller's investigation. I will let every American who wants to read the report draw their own conclusions. That's the committee's vice chair, Democratic Senator Mark Warner, speaking with NPR's All Things Considered in August of 2020 when that report was released. There was unprecedented level of contacts from Russians and their agents with the Trump campaign and Trump-related officials at a level that was unprecedented. Despite the findings of multiple investigations, Trump and his allies have downplayed and undercut the conclusion that Russia interfered in the U.S.

1:17election. Here's what he told NBC's Lester Holt in 2017. This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won. And even though that question, did Russia help Trump win, has been asked and answered again and again, the second Trump administration is looking for new answers. Last month, Trump's director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, declassified documents, and she leveled an unprecedented accusation. There is irrefutable evidence that detail how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false.

1:59And now Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched a grand jury investigation into U.S. intelligence about Trump and Russia ahead of the 2016 election. Consider this. After nearly a decade, Donald Trump is ordering new investigations into Russian election interference in hopes of finding different conclusions. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro.

2:32It's Consider This from NPR. For the better part of a decade, federal government investigators have been looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election. And now people are investigating the investigations. From the beginning, Donald Trump has called Russia's influence campaign a hoax. He's urging his appointees to reopen the case against those he accuses of persecuting him. Renee DiResta of Georgetown recently wrote about all these investigations for the website Lawfare, and she's with us now. Welcome to All Things Considered. Thanks for having me. Just to build this conversation on a foundation of facts, what do we actually know about how Russia tried to influence the 2016 election?

3:12Sure. There are three different types of interference. There was the troll factory disinformation campaign by the Internet Research Agency. So people have heard about the Russian bots, fake social media accounts. There was that. Then there was the GRU, which is Russian military intelligence, which ran a series of hack and leak campaigns targeting the DNC, the Clinton campaign and others. They would obtain emails, and then at strategic times, to hurt one of the campaigns, the Clinton campaign, to detract attention from, for example, when the Access Hollywood tape came out, they would drop a new tranche of documents that was trying to shift media focus.

3:48So the hack and leak campaigns were trying to sort of steer the public conversation. And then the third form of interference was the effort to hack machines and databases concerned with voter rolls. It's important to note that they did not alter any voting information. No vote tallies were changed, but actors that were identified as, quote, Russian cyber actors did try to hack voting machines. And so these three forms of interference were what the intelligence agencies, the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA wrote about when they described Russian interference in their reports. And those are not really in dispute.

4:24Republicans even for many years have agreed with the conclusions that Russia did those things. Let's talk about how those conclusions were reached. Can you just give us a couple of highlights of how this was examined? So there were two main investigations that the public can go look at. There was the Mueller investigation, which went through all of the different forms of interference. And then there was the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. That's the big second one. Huge five-volume report looked at the data that social media platforms turned over from the Russian trolls, for example, looked at all of the different ways that the hack and leak operations had been used to try to shift the public narrative, to transform the media conversation.

5:09I think those are the two big investigations that really lay out in incredible detail that we're seeing as very, very bipartisan, particularly the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. And that's where the public should look if they want to understand what exactly the facts of the matter are. And in the present day, as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Attorney General Pam Bondi both try to revisit this, there seem to be a couple things they're focusing on, which I'd love for you to explain for us. One is the difference between Russian influence and Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.

5:44So Russian Interference asks the question, how did Russia manipulate the 2016 election? Or how did they seek to engage with the American public and to put false information out into the public in ways that would potentially further their strategic interests? The question of collusion asks, did the Trump campaign know about it, support it, or work with it in any way? That's a very, very different question. Even if Russia was trying to help the campaign, if the campaign didn't know about it, these two things are distinct. However, the investigation into collusion began six months prior to the intelligence community assessments of the interference.

6:25And that's because in July of 2016, there was a tip from Australian intelligence saying, hey, there are these aides from the Trump campaign who are bragging about knowledge that Moscow has a tranche of emails that are going to be damaging to Hillary Clinton. And that in July of 2016, so months prior to Trump winning the election, is what actually triggers the collusion investigations. Another argument we're hearing the Trump administration make today is they are claiming that Russia actually wanted Hillary Clinton to win in 2016. Now, it's clear from the investigations you've described that Russia expected Hillary Clinton to win in 2016, but that's not exactly the same thing.

7:05So most of the world expected Hillary Clinton to win in 2016. That was where the polling was. It was a surprise even here in the United States, if you recall. The allegation that Russia, quote, wanted Hillary to win hinges on one report that they declassified, an investigation run by Devin Nunes, who's now the CEO of Truth Social, who at the time ran the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Now, that investigation alleges that there is a tranche of emails held by Russian intelligence, the SVR specifically, that are shockingly damaging to Hillary Clinton, that say that she was on all sorts of tranquilizers, that say that she has emotional problems.

7:42So there is supposedly a collection of shocking emails that exists. Nobody has ever seen them, to be clear. But because Russia did not release these shocking emails that nobody has ever seen, that is the argument that they make to justify the fact that Russia wanted Hillary to win. Because they did not hurt her as much as they theoretically could have is the argument Gabbard and the others are making. That means that they could have wanted her to win. When you have Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassifying documents reportedly over the objections of the CIA, when you have Pam Bondi assigning prosecutors to look into some of these former senior intelligence officials who oversaw these investigations, what does that do for the ability of this country to conduct intelligence work?

8:31Well, some of the materials that are being declassified are rather shocking as far as the amount of information that they expose about what the intelligence community refers to as sources and methods. What I think Gabbard's document release does is it undermines U.S. intelligence. It exposes those sources. It damages trust with allies who share intelligence with us. And it turns national security into partisan fodder. And it's doing this all for a political narrative. That is Renee DiResta. you can read her piece in Lawfare. And she is an associate research professor at George Towns McCourt School of Public Policy.

9:05Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. This episode was produced by Michael Levitt with audio engineering by Ted Meebane. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. Thanks to our Consider This Plus listeners who support the work of NPR journalists and help keep public radio strong. Supporters also hear every episode without messages from sponsors. Learn more at plus.npr.org. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.