U.S. 'ignored tips about Russian plot to undermine elections'
American intelligence knew as early as 2014 that the Russian government was planning on carrying out a massive espionage operation to undermine Western democratic institutions, but failed to act until it was too late.
That is one of the startling revelations made in the new book, Russian Roulette by investigative journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn.
"The U.S. government had a secret source inside the Kremlin who was talking to a U.S. official about Vladimir Putin's plans," Michael Isikoff tells The Current's Friday host Laura Lynch.
"This secret source inside the Kremlin starts talking about this aggressive plan the Kremlin has for attacking and undermining liberal democracies in Western Europe and the United States."
"Information warfare, cyber attacks, subversion, using Russian state propaganda organs, such as RT and Sputnik [Russian government-owned news sites] — all part of a grand plan to essentially attack and sow discord in the West."
"Much of what was to come was laid out in graphic detail for the U.S. government. The problem was people in Washington weren't paying attention."
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Isikoff says President Putin had a number of reasons for launching the campaign.
The Russian leader believed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to undermine the Russian presidential elections in 2012, by accusing the government of committing voter fraud.
Those elections saw Putin returned as president for the third time.
But perhaps the most important motivating factor were the sanctions levied against Russia for its annexation of Crimea, and attack on Ukraine using Russian proxy soldiers.
According to Corn, the FBI realized pretty early into the 2016 election that Russia had been behind the hacking of computers at the Democratic National Convention, and the dumping of stolen emails that created havoc for the Clinton campaign.
"It was a little bit like watching a train wreck in slow motion," Corn says about how the FBI dealt with the information it had on the Russian operation.
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"The FBI contacted the Democratic Party in September of 2015 and said: 'We think that some folks, the Russians, may have gotten into your servers,' but what they did was they called the DNC helpline."
"And they were passed along to an IT person who was not in charge of IT security, he was in charge of making sure the email system worked."
For nearly eight months the FBI and low-level IT staff went back and forth on the presence of hackers, until a serious effort was made to get the Russians out of the system.
The Obama administration had limited options on what to do with the intelligence they had collected, regarding the Russian attack on the election. Some hardliners in the administration suggested they hit back hard against President Putin using their own cyber capabilities. But they were told to stand down.
"They were worried it would lead to a cyber escalation," Corn says.
"It would be tit-for-tat. The United States, which is more wired than Russia, was more vulnerable."
"At one point James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, says at one of these meetings: 'You know if we get into this, Russians might be able to take down our electric grid.'"
The Steele dossier
Corn wrote the first story about the Christopher Steele dossier.
The former British spy had been hired by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign to gather information about Donald Trump.
The resulting dossier included unproven claims about President Trump hiring prostitutes.
There were also claims that there was an attempt by the Russian government to co-opt and cultivate Trump.
"There's a lot of evidence to show that that's indeed what was going on," Corn says, "they were trying to penetrate his campaign and his inner circle, and that there was some co-operation."
The dossier also alleged an exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, Corn tells Lynch.
"Now," he says, "we do know that there are members of the Trump campaign that were reaching out to the Russian government."
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"The top prosecutor in the government tried to give the Trump campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton at that infamous meeting at Trump Tower in June of 2016, with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law."
"There are some big elements of the memos that do overlap with what we've subsequently learned."
In Jan. 2017, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were briefed on the dossier.
"Biden has this visceral reaction," Corn says, "'If anything of this is true,' he exclaims, probably shouts, 'It's treason.'"
Listen to the full conversation at the top of this page, where you can also share this article across email, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.
This segment was produced by The Current's Howard Goldenthal.