The Putin Files

Intervention in the U.S. Election

In 2015, the NSA detected an intrusion in Democratic National Committee servers by Russian hackers and notified the FBI. Another Russian hack gained access to the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. With the general election campaign underway, hacked material began to trickle out from WikiLeaks. Russian propaganda, trolls and bots spread negative stories and “fake news” about Clinton as Donald Trump trumpeted the WikiLeaks revelations. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence officials worried about Russian incursions into state voting systems.
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“The mainstream press, were more interested in the contents of the leaks than where they had come from, or what the democratic threat really was for a foreign government interfering in our election.”

John Podesta

Clinton campaign chairman

“I would say freaked out would be the technical term for how the campaign felt at that point about what was going on. And we immediately sounded the alarm.”

Jake Sullivan

Chief policy adviser, Clinton campaign

“There's no question he’s looking at revenge at Hillary Clinton. There's no question that he sees Hillary Clinton as an adversary, as somebody who if got in office would be a problem for him.”

Peter Baker

The New York Times

“Putin is not a madman. He’s not a grand strategist, but he is an acute calculator of power and power relations.”

Thomas Graham

National Security Council, 2002-07

“We have no reasons to do that, and we do not want to do that, and we never tried to do that as a state. What happened with some individuals, I don't know.”

Andrei Klimov

Russian Senate

“This kind of operation could not be run without an approval from the very top level of the Kremlin...”

Andrei Soldatov

Co-author, "The Red Web"

“What Putin did is, he grabbed that chaos button, that chaos button that was part of hybrid warfare, and he just cranked it a few more notches to turn up the chaos in the United States...”

David Hoffman

The Washington Post

“The single most important thing we can do to combat this in the future is not going to be a software patch. There is no cyber cure for this. Rather, it’s to form the consensus that we lacked last year...”

Adam Schiff

D-Calif.

“We were wholly unprepared for a widespread, very well-thought-out, methodical attack on the actual infrastructure of the election. That will remain a vulnerability for a number of years to come.”

David Sanger

The New York Times

“That is actually almost [the] official ideology of today’s Russia, that every politician is corrupted. Any election is rigged.”

Mikhail Zygar

Author, "All the Kremlin’s Men"

“John Brennan said to me, 'I'm going to come brief you.' Now, it was not often that the CIA director, by himself, came to DHS to meet with me by myself, to share intelligence.”

Jeh Johnson

Secretary of Homeland Security, 2013-17

“If they did that, it clearly would be a sign that Putin had authorized an exceptionally, an unprecedented, aggressive assault against this country that to me would have been tantamount to war, actually doing something against the voters or the votes on Election Day.”

John Brennan

CIA Director, 2013-17

“I've seen a lot of bad stuff in my 50-plus years in intelligence—that really shook me, because of what this represented as an attempt to undermine the very pillars of our democracy.”

James Clapper

Director of National Intelligence, 2010-17

“Let’s be clear: The Russians violated the sovereignty of the United States of America.”

Michael McFaul

U.S. ambassador to Russia, 2012-14

“He successfully calculated that the hammer would not come down on him in a critically painful way if he did things deniably, stealthily, if he probed and if he boiled the frog hotter and hotter...”

Victoria Nuland

U.S. ambassador to NATO, 2005-08

“It was no longer just political espionage; it was information warfare.”

Ellen Nakashima

The Washington Post

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