Jack - Russian Roulette (Ch. 13-16)

Episode Date: April 11, 2018

BOOK - Our fourth installment of the “Russian Roulette” book series is here! Today we discuss chapters 13-16.  This book covers the incredible, harrowing account of how American democracy was hacked by Moscow as part of a covert operation to influence the U.S. election and help Donald Trump gain the presidency. Enjoy!

I'm Greg Oliar. Four years ago, I stopped writing novels to report on the crimes of Donald Trump and his associates. In 2018, I wrote a best-selling book about it, Dirty Rubels. In 2019, I launched Proveil, a bi-weekly column about Trump and Putin, spies and mobsters, and so many traders! Trump may be gone, but the damage he wrought will take years to fully understand. Join me and a revolving crew of contributors and guests as we try to make sense of it all. This is Preveil. Thanks for listening to Muller She Wrote. The She in Muller She Wrote is no accident. Did you know we are 100% women owned and operated?

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So to be clear, Mr. Trump has no financial relationships with any Russian oligarchs. That's what he said. That's what I said. That's obviously what the opposition is. I'm not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn't have, and I have communications with the Russians. What do I have to get involved with Putin for? I have nothing to do with Putin. I've never spoken to him.

I don't know anything about a mother than he will respect me. Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. So it is political. You're a communist. No, Mr. Green. Communism is just a red herring.

Like all members of the oldest profession I'm professional capitalist. Hello, welcome to Muller She Road. This is our book club. We're reviewing Russian roulette. This week we're doing chapters 13 through 16. And I'm A.G. Your anonymous host crash in the hatchet.

With me as always, it's Jolisa Johnson. Hey guys. And Jordan Coburn. All right, let's get into it. Chapter 13 is called Next. They're going to put Pallonium in my tea. Who's covering the chapter? This is me, this is Jolissa.

Hit it. All right, so Assange tweeted on July 22nd, the Friday before the DNC in Philly, quote, we begin our series today with 20,000 emails from the top of the DNC. So the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, I've been waiting for this for weeks. And if the primary purpose of Russian information warfare as outlined in the GRU 2013 doctrine was to so confusion and exploit divisions within Western democracies, then this document

dumb worked perfectly. So just as it was supposed to, this dump of emails from the top of the DNC favoring Hillary and created Bernie supporters. And a Wasserman shelt's email, she called Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver, a quote, damn liar. And in another email, she said, he's an ass. Well, she know, I mean, it looks bad out of context,

but we've all said those things. So Brad Marshall. Yeah, sometimes I wonder about these emails, like, like everyone's like, oh my God. But I'm like, it's pretty human. Yeah. If you're running a campaign and you're trying to somehow disparage your opponent, oh, it makes sense to call someone an ass, right?

Like, I call my girlfriend an ass all the time and I love her. So Brad Marshall was a... And an especially an embarrassing email chain proposing a line of attack on Bernie Sanders' religious beliefs saying, quote, can we get someone to ask his belief? Does he believe in a God? He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he's an atheist.

My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist. And a quote. Yeah. And Daisy replied, a man. The only thing I find offending offensive about this email personally is that you think atheists are somehow not fit to be an office. That's offensive. Also just saying a Jew is pretty generally known to not be a good one

I think it was Louis the K. He's like just put a little stank on it like No, he's a Jew, you know, yeah, you're gonna immediately make it sound terrible Definitely didn't the Jewish heritage part. It's true. Didn't sound stanky. He's skated on saying he has Jewish heritage That's fine, but I think he's an easy He just done He has Jewish heritage, that's fine, but I think he's an atheist. I don't hear part there. And my Southern Baptist peeps. I'm racially a problem head. I don't know if we need Southern Baptist peeps.

Anyway. Weird stuff. So, yeah. But campaigns strategy. That's that response. Amen. Yeah. That's too religious for me.

Exactly. I don't know if I like your establishmentarianism. Yeah, exactly. That religious for me. Exactly. I don't know if I like your establishmentarianism. Yeah, exactly. That's very weird. Anyway. I know. So Mark Pottenbach or Postenbach, what an interesting last name.

He suggested a narrative saying, quote, wondering if there's a good Bernie narrative for a story that Bernie never ever had his act together that his campaign was a mess, unquote. I would do this too. If I were, if I were, first of all, Bernie Sanders is great, but if I were running against Bernie Sanders's hair, his suits, you gotta go for what you can.

He just looks like a mess. Yeah, a lovely, lovely little, like a crazy grandpa. Mess of a man. Yeah, and this is with love. Yeah, but I mean, Well, not when you're using it. Well, exactly.

Here's the thing, you're trying to find things to attack Bernie Sanders for. It's gonna be his religion, it's gonna be his looks, it's gonna be, it's gonna be, it can't be his policy. The ideology is on point. Well, because most of the Democratic Party agrees with it, and in fact, that's what pushed Hillary to the left,

which she did accept. I love it legitimately. Yeah, no Bernie's got some great ideas, but you're right, he looks very undone. So by the time he's pretty, he's pretty unkempt. Yeah, no Bernie's got some great ideas, but you're right. He looks very undone. So by the time he's pretty, he's pretty unkempt. Yeah, if he will. He looks like he got a suit at Savers and was like, it's good enough. It's like shiny anything. Moth like sort of shiny, you know? Definitely. Like if he ever wears like a not shiny suit, I'll be like, did you run out of suit polish? Right. That is so true. Oh my God. Also nothing wrong with savers.

Not at all. Come on. I love how we have to be like everyone. I know, I'm scared. I don't want people to get mad at us. Right, we gotta make it clear. That's why people, and I never thought about this before, but why people on TV are like, don't send me any emails.

Okay, I'm just gonna, I put on this. Right, because they'll be at the end of it. I get it now. You're totally right. We do have a certain protection when we're on stage as comics. We don't have to preemptively apologize and explain. If you heckle us as a comics, you could kick the fuck out. You're going to comedy club, you fucking ass. Yeah. Very good point. So by the time the Sanders delegates got to Philadelphia, they were

pissed. So Trump fueled this fly. It's fire by saying, quote, leaked emails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders mocked his heritage and much more. And I have to say this is the one part that probably the only thing he's ever said that I agreed with. Exactly. Yeah. It was smart to play this. He also went on for him. Mm-hmm. He went on to say, quote, the WikiLeaks emails released today were so bad to Sanders that it will make it impossible for him to support her unless he is a fraud. So, I mean, like you said, he's got a good point about this angle. And it actually sounds a lot like that line was planned and intended to split the Democratic Party, right? Like it was as if he Trump knew he was going to use that line.

Yeah, right. Like, oh, it's impossible for him to support Hillary unless he's fraud, and that just drives that wedge into the party. Yeah, it was a good chess move, but it's not very competitive. Every little thing that he could do to make it harder for Bernie supporters to come on board with Hillary Clinton. He did it.

He did it. Absolutely. And that's actually, when you run on division and not on unity. That's the way to go. You're right. So Hillary told MOOC, the campaign manager, that she was convinced this was all payback against her and said, quote, next they're going to put Pallonium in Mati. So this was a reference to the 2006 assassination of Linvin. Well, how do you pronounce that? Linvin, yeah, go. Linvin, yeah, go. Yeah. So you pronounce that? Lynn Vignyeko. Lynn Vignyeko. Lynn Vignyeko.

Yeah, so you're done, done, done moment there. Name of the chapter there. Hillary was concerned that, I mean, whether she was joking or not, who knows? I just feel like it's always a very real possibility when you were a target of Putin's. She had to have some fear there that she was probably on his hit list.

Luckily, she wasn't. So, at least not murderous hit list. And the communications chief of the DNC, Luis Miranda, was enraged the most because he was the main target. More than half of the leaked emails were his. So, here's the kicker. The anti-Bernie emails were from May 2016

when the hack was first discovered in April. So it's a whole month after that. And the hackers weren't even booted from the servers until June. So for three months, they were just chilling and hacking and collecting data and Miranda wondered why it took CrowdStrike 6 weeks to turn off the network. So the DNC believed CrowdStrike acted as quickly as it could have and that the DNC had no choice but to keep the hack a secret.

But because of this lack of public urgency, the most damaging information from the whole leak was stolen after the DNC knew they were hacked. It's like someone gives you the heads up like, hey, someone might be robbing you tomorrow and then you just like, don't do anything about it. And then you get robbed the next day. It's like, come on, how much responsibility is on the DNC? I think quite a bit in this case. But the Hillary campaign was trying to figure out how to respond to all of this. And some of them wanted to be bold and say it was a Russian hit job, just come right out with it, and that WikiLeaks and Russia were working together in a plot to elect Trump.

But others thought they would sound insane, which they're right. And wanted to make or take a more gentle approach and stop short of saying that they were out to help Trump. So move went on to the State of the Union with Tapper and did a former, or did the former. He basically told the world that the Russians were hacking them to help Trump. He just went out with it. Mooks are campaign managers. Exactly. Yeah. And Tapper pressed them for evidence and said, quote, this is a very strong charge you're leveling suggesting the Russians hacked into the DNC and are releasing the files through the WikiLinks to help elect Donald Trump.

Tapper also asked Donald Trump Jr. to respond and he went into MOOC. So he said, quote, Well, it just goes to show you their exact moral compass. I mean, they will say anything to be able to win this. I mean, this is a time and time again, lie after lie. There's nothing wrong with a fair fight, Jake. I don't mind a fair fight, but these lies and the perpetuating of that kind of nonsense to try to gain some political capital is just outrageous and he should be ashamed of himself. What a good I mean that their argument sounds. Yeah it's just met with Russians. Yeah I know it's crazy. This is a Manafort used a similar line on another show so by then

Manafort Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. had just met with the Russian lawyer, like he was saying, A.G., hoping for dirt on Hillary and Papa Doppler's already emailed Manafort about a Trump Putin meeting. So a lot of this shit was already going down, and the Sanders people the whole time were just being screwed. They were still pissed, and Luke, when at Wasserman shoots or a shult to resign, but she refused to leave. It wasn't until Obama pushed her to leave

that she complied and it didn't do anything though to unite the party, it still didn't prepare them. Yeah, she was like, I'm not listening to you, Mook. I want to talk to Obama. And Obama was like, oh, you gotta go. You shouldn't go. She listened to Obama, we all would, of course. So Bernie spoke at the convention

and his delegates booed Hillary's name and started anti-Clinton Chants, which I'm sure Russia loved. And Sanders gave a forceful speech still and he moved to Han Clinton the nomination by acclimation. So he was on board but meanwhile Paul Meary and Jake Sullivan they hopped into their golf cards and went around to all the reporters tense pretty much talking up the fact that the Russians hacked Hillary, Trump has passed links to Russia, the GOP had a platform shift, Manafort has ties to Ukraine.

They were trying to make it clear that all of this was a big matter of national security, but Sullivan said everyone looked at them like they were wearing tinfoil hats, which makes total sense. And most of the press and Sanders supporters were focused on the content of the stolen material as opposed to who stole it or why. That's like what you were talking about in the main episode. Like, dude, you cheated on me.

Yeah, well, you shouldn't look through my phone. Exactly. It's actually pretty genius. So, Sanders supporters felt like talking about Russian hacking, the election was just the DNC not taking responsibility for their own shitty email. So, they just assumed they were deflecting. And like I said, this is pretty brilliant for the Russian hackers because yeah,

the DNC did say some crappy things in those emails, but their opponent is going to see them blaming Russia as an excuse. They're just gonna see Trump. You know, just like Trump said, Russia's the investigation is a hoax dreamed up by the DIMS who were just pissed off they lost. It's the same narrative.

It's pretty much like the DMC is fractured. The whole Democratic Party is split and probably beyond repair at this point. So it sucks because all of this Obama and the White House, they weren't even willing to publicly back up Hillary. So they didn't want to get ahead of the intelligence community and all of this. And like you said before, A.G., they didn't want to make it seem like Obama was trying to tip the scales you know especially since he was campaigning for that was his number one fear was that

he didn't want to make it seem like he was interfering in elections meanwhile Russia and Trump are fucking interfering in our election. Yeah, I mean they were they had a huge like leeway here because Obama was being so easy on them and a senior White House official later said that they were afraid that they quote be accused of doctoring the intel and politicizing it to affect an election. Which like you were saying, it makes sense but man did it, screw us a lot. So Obama's unwillingness to just come out with it, frustrating the Clinton campaign and Democrats on the hill.

And because if Russians were targeting their candidates, they believe the public had a right to know. And this huge splinter in the party didn't help their message at all. The fact that the Clinton age were driving around on golf carts saying, Russia hacked us to help Trump win, but the president wasn't saying anything similar. It just made them look crazy. The whole party just looked like weak tea. No one cared.

They thought we were crazy. And on the third day of the convention, Schiff and Feinstein sent a letter to Obama noting that if Moscow had engineered the wiki dump, then quote, the episode would represent an unprecedented attempt to metal and American domestic politics, one that would demand a response by the US. Boom, right, but still Obama and the White House did nothing. So Clinton was obviously pissed,

and it was about this time that the FBI was receiving the message from Australia about Papa Doppler's drunkenly bragging about having Hillary's emails. So the FBI at this time already had the dossier. They had pages trips to Moscow and July. They had the hack of the DNC and the subsequent release of Gooseph or 2.0's WikiLeaks documents. They were all tied to Russia and they had Manafort's information on the pro-Russian payments for his work in Ukraine. They had everything. They had the Dutch intel, the British intel about Russian hacking. I mean, this is what we talk about when Mueller decides what collusion is politically. There are so many dots here and Poppodop was the last straw before Komi opened up the investigation and to Trump rush a tie.

Meanwhile, the rest of the IC was pretty slow to come around. So Clapper, the director of National Intel said, quote, no one should be hyperventilating. He said, pretty much indicating that the hacks were a very common place. And Russia clung on to that. They actually published an article called US Intel Head calls for end to hyperventilation over Russia's alleged role in the DC hack. So we just gave them a headline basically just helping their narrative. Of course, Trump denied the whole thing. He mocked the DNC in various tweets.

However, on July 27th, he made what is probably his most remarkable statements on his campaign. He said, quote, nobody knows who it is. But if it had been the Russians, he had a message for them. So Trump said, I will tell you this Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you'll probably be rewarded mightily by our press. So this was an unbelievably clear and unmistakable message from Trump to the Kremlin. Trump had just invited a foreign adversary to hack his political rival. And that's chapter 13. That's a lot. That is. That was a big chapter. That was a beefy chapter. Oh yeah. Anyway, thank you so much. Of course. All right, you guys

chapter 14. We've been told to stand down. Jordan, are you doing this one? I'm 16. You're 16. All right. I'm going to do 14 then. All right. So we start this out in February of 2015. A Russian FSB guy named Bortnikov came to the US uninvited, by the way, which pissed off the world because this was an EU sanctioned dude, and he was responsible for some of the decision making as far as invading the Ukraine. Right. So for some reason, CIA director Brennan invited him into his office and Brennan would say it was a quote, keep your enemies closer. Thing. Brett Nakhauf won the exchange simply by being invited to sit in his fucking office. No deals were

cut. A year later, Brennan was on the phone with Britnikov after the normal talks on Syria, which went nowhere. Brennan asked about the harassment of U.S. diplomats in Russia. Member two months earlier is when that guy was attacked in broad daylight outside the U.S. embassy. Exactly. That's the incident that exposed the division in the Obama administration about how to deal with Russia.

Some of them were hardliners, some were like, fuck that. Exactly. And others were like, be quiet, be careful. Be careful. Well, then he brought up the election. He said, if Russia continued, there'd be a price to pay, but he didn't specify the price, really, it was like $1.50 or whatever. Baritnikov denied Russia's involvement, like they do.

And this was the first of several warnings about the Russian interference. That was the first one. Brennan knew the attack on the election was wide-ranging, right? Several EU intel services had reported to the CIA that Russian operatives were reaching out to the people in Trump's circle. He wondered if the Kremlin had the cooperation of anyone in the Trump camp. Brendan dispatched Comey and Rogers experts to form a working group. So basically he said, Hey, Comey, Hey Rogers, Mike Rogers and James Comey put together a working group at Langley Air Force Base

to review the intel and determine the scope of the operation. That was in August of 2016. Right. He was concerned because 9-11 happened largely due to the intelligence community's poor interagency communication. So he wanted to get everybody in the same room together. Exactly. While Brennan was working, Obama had a series of meetings to devise a response.

The most sensitive information was only available to John Kerry, Tony Blinken, that's the Deputy Secretary of State. Dan Smith, head of the Intel Bureau, and John Finer, Kerry's chief of staff. No plus ones. These are the only guys that can come. Yeah.

Rice would chair the principal's meeting, Susan Rice, which included Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Carrie, Ash. Ash was the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, Jen Johnson, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Loo, Attorney General Lynch, and General Joseph Dunsford. He was the chair of the Joint Chiefs. Okay. Those are big fucking people. Oh yeah. The shit in these meetings was not put into the PDB, the president's daily briefing. They didn't put it into the PDB because it was too sensitive.

Too many people saw the PDB. Wow. You know, Opsack was incredibly tight. That's operational security for you. Mm-hmm. I know what Opsack is. Okay. What they knew, here's what they knew. Russian state sponsored hackers were behind the cyber attacks and the release of the swiped material and they knew who the cutouts were.

The cutouts are like the go-betweens. Exactly. What was unclear to them is how far and wide within the Kremlin this effort ran? Was this a few rogue outfits, or was it directed from the top, from Putin as part of a large project, and Moscow's primary aim? Was it to sow discord in chaos? Was it to delegitimize the election? Was it to weaken Western governments? Was it because Putin despised Hillary Clinton? He blamed her for the post-election riots in 2011. Exactly.

In Russia. Was it to help Trump? Did they think they could affect the results? All of these motives were... Is it all of the above an answer? It has to be. Well, that's what this last bullet is. All of these motives were not mutually exclusive.

It's not the best answer. It's pick all the answers that apply. Absolutely. So all of these motives were just, I mean, that's, there's some, and there's probably some that we don't even know about. Right. But most troubling was the Intel reported to the White House during these deliberations. Russian linked hackers were probing the computers of state election systems, particularly voter registration databases. Illinois reported in June that hackers accessed data on up to 200,000 voters. Arizona reported county election officials credentials were stolen, and they had shut down voter registration for a week. Okay.

Florida then reported some malfeasance. Some believe the Russians were deliberately plotting digital manipulations to alter results. Michael Daniel believed the Russians' ability to mess with our vote count and swing an election was near impossible. He said, we have 3,000 jurisdictions. You have to pick the county where the race was going to be tight and manipulate the results. The level of precision was not feasible.

That's what he said. Okay. Enter Cambridge Analytica. Yeah. Hold my beer. Yeah. Anyway, he was worried about other kinds of issues, such as deleting every 10th name on voter roles or flipping two digits in voter IDs numbers to make them illegitimate.

Either way, the potential for disorder was immense. Like everyone's like, weeks earlier, Trump started saying, if he lost, it would only be because the election was rigged. I'm pretty sure he was fed that line. Obama instructed Johnson to shore up the defenses of state election systems. First, he ran into a lot of resistance, Johnson did, especially from red states. They didn't want the federal government to take over our voting. What do you know, which I understand? A lot of those red states don't have a lot of faith in the government.

That's fair. He tried to explain that he could help them reduce vulnerabilities and encourage basic cybersecurity, but there was just a lot of big brother skepticism. This was a warning for the White House. They would need GOP leaders to vouch for the federal government in this cause. Brennan announced at the first principles meeting that Putin had ordered or was overseeing the cyber ops targeting the elections. The IC now viewed it at the intelligence community.

Sorry, now viewed it as a full-scale active measure from Russia. Right. The principles were surprised, really. Yeah. My grandpa is my mind. Like, what? That's new for you? Yeah.

Maybe I should have your job. Seriously. The Kremlin's secret source warned about this two years earlier, first of all, the Gera Mass Off doctrine spelled it out in 2013. Julie, see you talked about that. There was an Intel report in May noting that a GRU officer had bragged of payback operation that would be Putin's revenge on Hillary. So yeah, this is new to you.

The White House was unsure how to respond. A high profile US government reaction could amplify the psychological effects of this, which is what Moscow wants. Exactly. It could create chaos. It could help Trump and hurt Clinton. How could they respond without appearing partisan? That's a tough and vocal reaction might be seen as a White House attempt to assist Clinton,

and further compromise the ability of Department of Homeland Security to work with state and local officials. That would make it harder. If you think the federal government is working with Hillary and then you try to go to red states and say, hey, check out what we have to say. They'll be like extra fuck you. Was Obama too worried about being perceived as prejudicial? Quote, quote, perhaps there was some overcompensation.

A top Obama aid would later say. I want you to first black president. It's a lot of pressure. Obama had a tough job. He really did. He had to inform the public about Russian attacks without triggering widespread unease about the election. He had to be proactive without coming across as partisan and bolstering Trump's claim the election was a sham. Remember, everyone figured Hillary would win. He had to prevent putting forth further the cyber aggression without prompting Putin to do more, right?

So he had to, like, that's a lot of pressure. It is. Michael Daniel and Victoria Newland and Celeste Wallender, three of the NSC's top Russia analysts, prepared a list of shit they could do to hit Russia back. They knew the only way to deal with Russia was to hit back hard, right? Hit them until you can see bone. If they didn't, Russia would keep pushing and pushing, so they made a list of ideas. Nice.

Michael Daniel, Victoria Nuland, and Celeste Wallander. Three of the NSC's top Russia analysts, prepare a list of shit that they could do to hit Russia back. Hard. They wanted to hit Russia hard. These were the hardliners in the Obama administration. They knew the only way to deal with Russia was to do this, to hit him back hard if they didn't, Russia would keep pushing and pushing and pushing. So they put together this list of ideas. First of all, unleash the NSA to mount a series of cyber attacks to dismantle Goosef for 2.0 and DC league's websites that had all the DNC memos.

Like, first of all, if you could do that, why didn't you fucking do? Yeah. Second, bombard Russian news sites with a glut of automated traffic called a denial of service attack and that would shut their sites down. Three, attack Russian intel agencies to disrupt their command and control modes.

You could also target Putin himself by leaking classified intel, such as his daughter's secret bank accounts in Latvia. Dump dirt on Russian websites about Putin's money. The girlfriends of top Russian officials, you could talk about the corruption in the United Russian party, like all sorts of things. Or you could have NATO announce fake public cyber exercises against a mythical Eurasian country. They actually wanted to do this.

They specifically wanted to have NATO announce a fake public cyber exercise against a fake Eurasian country to demonstrate Western nations could shut down Russia's entire civil infrastructure and cripple its economy. So they wanted to put out this disinformatia. Like, hey, you know that country of Bob, we completely fucked them over. And everyone would be like, oh shit,

Bob's fucked over. And they would totally believe it. Like you couldn't just Google if that was a real country. Anyway, I thought that was weird. It sounds like a bad idea. I just thought it was hilarious. It is funny. Yeah. Well, maybe if they don't bad idea. I just thought it was hilarious. It was funny. Yeah. Well, maybe they don't have the same Google we have in Russia. The White House was not on

board for any of this. Susan Rice told them to stand down. She even said like knock it off, you guys. Just knock it off. And then they were like in disbelief. Why the hell were they told to stand down? This is immense insanity. And Rice said they were concerned that if the options were to leak, it would force Obama to act. And we didn't want to box the president in. That was her thing was to protect the president. Some attorneys general protect their president's role. This was a critical moment.

And the NSC felt they blew it, right? Quote, the longer you wait, it diminishes your effectiveness. If you're in a street fight, you have to hit back. But Obama believed the first order objective was to preserve and protect the integrity of the election. That was his number one priority. It almost seemed like we let the election be stolen so that we wouldn't upset Trump and have him blow the whole thing up.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how I feel about that. I get where his heart was at and stuff, but I mean, where would we be now? Exactly. Yeah. The State Department and Treasury whipped up the, the use, right, sanctions against Russia, or expulsion of diplomats. But Obama put everything on hold.

He decided to try to reach out to the states again, but he would need Republican backing. So he reached out to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. The book doesn't mention this, but we've had report, oh wait, you know what, it does mention this later. I'm not gonna say it. Okay. Does talk about this later. The only thing Obama, the Obama White House came up with

was for Obama to privately warn Putin. Because basically, McConnell wasn't having it. So he's like, well, I guess what we can do is we can privately warn Putin and vow overwhelming retaliation for any further intervention. This upset the people who wanted to strike back hard, the NSC Hawks. So Obama warned Putin at the G20 summit in September that if they tried this again, he'd pretty much slap sanctions on him. You warned him pretty sternly. Yeah, we'll go into that in a little detail in a minute. So you guys will be right back. Hey Mueller junkies, A.G. here. Starting on April 23rd, we're going to be reviewing a higher loyalty by James Comey. So order your copy and then join the Mueller She wrote Book Club by subscribing at any level. For as little as $1 you can join us for our weekly full length

episodes on the book by our beacon of sexy justice, our dearest homey, James Comey. You'll also be invited to our closed Facebook discussion group, and our pimp.newsletter will end up in your mailbox every week, and that includes my personal show notes and my research. So head over to mullershearove.com and sign up now. It's totally worth it, and thanks for supporting Women in Podcasting. Alright, thank you guys. We are back. We are now going to start in with chapter 15. Gosh,

this is the fourth of these that we've done. And I love this so much. This book is so good. This is a heavy, this is a heavy chapter specifically. This is like a Pinot Noir chapter series. Settle down, settle in. And we're going to go through it. First of all, this starts out with Manafort making a comment about a terrorist attack on Turkey in a Jake Tapper interview. Clint Watts, the former FBI analyst, took note of this weird comment that he made, and it turns out it was complete Dez Inframazia. I don't know if Manafort saw it on like Russian state television and just re-reported it thinking it was true, or if he knew it was Dezimframatia.

And Watts was among a handful of private researchers looking into stuff coming out of Russia on Twitter. So that was just really weird. Another issue is when a petition appeared on the White House website demanding Alaska be returned to Russia. That was retweeted several times and pushed on Facebook by Russian bots. And Watts found out that most of these were Twitter bots with Russian origins. And the pattern matched the Internet Research Agency.

That's a Kremlin troll farm in St. Petersburg. So Manafort's comments were a sign that Russian active measures were creeping into the mainstream media. So the fact that Manafort brought this weird fucking Russian troll farm, Desinframazia, on to Jake Tapper's program, that's scary. So then the story from the New York Times dropped on Manafort that he'd taken $12.7 million from Vienna, Covish in undisclosed cash. Maniford denied it, denied denied, but Trump fired him anyway, and Bannon was now the new CEO of the campaign. The FBI investigation was just getting underway, and in August, a meeting was held in McCabe's office, my husband, deputy director of the FBI.

Strock was there. He was the head of the counter intelligence division. He had been in charge of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Strock was not a partisan. He helped Comey draft the statement, calling Clinton's handling of the email server extremely careless. So rude. But he also hated Trump.

He was texting a woman he was having an affair with in the FBI. Her name was Lisa Page and she and he described Trump as an utter idiot, a menace and a douche. In one exchange, he said, God Trump is a loathsome human. It's true though. I know, it is true. I wish he could. I would have got credit for that. I'd be mad. That's nice.

Page, his lady thought that Hillary would win, but struck saw that the investigation was an insurance policy. He's like, I don't know, it could be weird. So two days later, Trump would have his first IC briefing from, intelligence community briefing. So Trump had already complained about not trusting the intelligence community. So the meeting was tense to begin with. The intelligence community was concerned about briefing Trump because he's a dipshit basically. They like, what do we tell this guy about all of our global secrets? They told him about Russia in Goosefer and Putin was involved with a whole thing. Clinton was given a similar brief, and this immediately made Trump distrust the briefers.

A few days later, another cyber strike occurred. This time on the DCCC, that's the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Many internal memos were dumped. They, like, just internal emails, memos. Kelly Ward, the executive director of the DCCC, was pissed that the DNC didn't tell her about the threat. And she hired crowd strike. Turns out the hack was from fancy bear. She met with Jim trainer, the FBI cyber chief, cyber chief, but she felt like Jim just read her the wiki page on what fancy bear was. Wiki, fancy bear. Then Goosefer leak DCC logins and addresses and phone numbers, like home phone numbers and home addresses of all the dumb members of the house.

And they got a ton of threatening calls and letters. That's creepy. Then this was just the beginning apparently, because in the following weeks, Goosefer released a series of DCC's strategy files, financial documents, voter data. These were very damaging documents that included candid assessments of democratic candidates. So if you can imagine if you're assessing candidates, running for your party, and you're just saying whatever you think,

do you remember when we talked about this, when I said to you, ladies, please, whatever you do, email like everyone's watching? Yeah. They didn't do it. Exactly. There were blunt memos calling candidates poor fundraisers are saying candidates were

embarrassing or gross. They said, oh, I saw that guy pick earwax and eat it on TV, like just really, don't put it in email. Pick up the phone. That's gonna be the that's me And things well that's gonna be the downfall this generation. Oh, yeah, is there not gonna pick up the phone? You got to pick up the phone. There's gonna be proof everywhere. There's no such thing as privacy on the phone unless your phone is tapped Pick up the phone. Yeah, so what else you want and deny it there or it's what do you call it telegraphing or like? But if you put it in, you know, that's recorded. Oh snap, I didn't know.

But if you put it in an email, there's a trail. Just don't. Yeah, paper trail. So Obama still did nothing about any of this and the media wasn't covering it. So Ward tried to get help from the GOP. But not only did they ignore her, they used hacked email materials and key races against the Dems

Yeah not Not in the book, but this is not in the book But Pelosi would pen a letter to Paul Ryan insisting they stop lest he be complicit in the Russian interference and he ignored her That didn't show up in the book. Maybe I'll show up later. Interesting With Mana 40 out of the picture Because he was fired, the Democrats started focusing on stone, Roger Stone.

64-year-old self-proclaimed practitioner of the dark arts of politics, thanks Snape. He has a tattoo of Nixon on his back. I'm sure you've all seen it. It's so gross. He's a mud slinger. His philosophy is admit nothing, deny everything, launch a counter attack. He's a conspiracy theory trafficker, self-proclaimed, 40-year friend of Trump, one of the first hires of the Trump campaign. Trump fired Stone in August of 2015, though Stone and Sissy quit. Again, admit

nothing to Nye everything, launching a counter attack. Yeah, he gave a way of saying it. Yeah. Yeah. Here's my strategy. Oh, shit. Now you know my strategy. But he still remained a Trump loyalist. At the RNZ, he hung out with Alex Jones and hosted a rally calling Hillary a short-tempered, foul- tempered foul mouth bipolar mentally unbalanced criminal. Oh my gosh, I wanna punch them in the face for all of those words. But you have a nixon tattoo on your back. It's just so many must-dustin' inscribed

their fucking candidate, too. Yeah, that too, it's like, oh, she's a nasty woman, she's ill tempered, but foul mouthed. And no, unbalanced criminal, that's... I'm gonna go off my meds and do some shit. But I'm gonna do an Instagram post while I put a giant fucking cigar in my mouth and say that my friend's a coke. Exactly.

Yeah, your mentor, you apparently. Your totes normal for 64 years old. Ridiculous. Nix and tattoo. In early August, the DNC herdstone was tied to WikiLeaks, Russia operation, right? And on August 8th, he gave a speech claiming Clinton's emails would emerge. When asked what a sange was going to do for an October surprise, Stone said, quote, I actually have communicated with a sange.

I believe the next tranche of his documents pertained to the Clinton Foundation, but there's no telling. A few days before his speech, he wrote a piece for Brightbart. Claiming Gussifer was a lone hacker and the Russians weren't responsible for the hack. Oh, that sounds familiar. Could that be a narrative that everyone is pushing, including Trump? Sounds like DeSimple Maksia. He hailed Gussifer as a hero. Stone and Gussifer traded private messages on Twitter where Stone asked Goosefer to promote a story for him that he wrote. And Goosefer called him a great man and said,

please tell me if I can help you, any how, it would be a great pleasure to me. Yeah, you're totally not Russian. Stone championed WikiLeaks and kept suggesting he knew what was coming next. All of his tweets are bright on the money. In an interview, he just can't shut up. Yeah, seriously. In an interview with the far right wing site, Stone said he had direct contact with the Sange and he learned that Wiki had a set of 30,000 personal emails that Clinton had destroyed. Gosh, the number 30,000 sounds familiar. So familiar.

In another interview with Dana Loach, do you guys remember her? Yeah. NRA, Twatt, NAP. And that one. So he interviewed, he was an interview with Dana Loach and said he believed a song had all the emails that Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills had destroyed.

Those are two of Hillary Clinton's helpers. Huma Abedin was the wife of Anthony Weiner. Correct. Was. I'm saying. Yeah, she's been through a lot. Stone tweeted on August 21st, quote, soon it will be Podesta's time in the barrel.

That was before the Podesta emails were released, but after they were hacked, obviously. Exactly, yeah, yeah. Stone would claim he never communicated with the Sons directly and everything he knew he had gleaned from Sons' tweets, which he confirmed through a go-between named Brandi Criteco. That's a New York radio guy, a comedian, a New York comedian, a Bernie supporter. Interesting.

Why do we have to drag comedians into this? The problem with Stone's story is that according to Kredeko, he had never spoken to Assange until the wiki founder was a guest on his show on August 25th, 17 days after the first time Stone proclaimed to have communicated with Assange. Kredeko, again, like I said, he's a left-wing guy, Bernie supporter, said he never told Stone anything about Assange or any Assange plan to release Hillary emails because he never told Stone anything about a Sange or any a Sange plan to release

Hillary emails because he never knew anything about it. And he said, quote, he's got me at the fall, he's got me as the fall guy. It's ridiculous. And quote, comedian. All right, you guys. And now on to chapter 16, quote, does it even matter who hacked this data? And this is just the whole, it's the content, not the hacking argument, which is actually both sides have used. So Jordan, I think you're going to go over this one. Yeah. Alright, let's hit it. So the chapter opens up back at the G20 summit in Germany where Obama, which is just like an economic global, global globalized economy economic group of it's a conference basically it's summit they already call it what it is and

this chapter opens with Obama and Putin having a closed-door meeting where their aides aren't even allowed it's just a private meeting it's just them and their translators so they talk for an hour and a half and Obama briefed after this conversation happens Obama briefs and a half and Obama briefed after this conversation happens. Obama briefs his aides and says that he delivers the message that he crafted says, basically what the message is, we know what you're doing.

If you don't cut it out, we're gonna have to impose honoris and unprecedented penalties on you. Basically, if you fuck us over this election, we're gonna have to crash your economy. I love that transition. That was my favorite part. You fuck with us over this election,

we will crash your economy. And you've seen that, everyone's always seen that photo, where this is how you look at Putin and it's Obama looking down at that little fucking guy. He's like, giving him the stinking guy. I think that was after that meeting. I think that was from the G20 something.

Yeah, that's reported from the AIDS that they walked out just totally looking. Both of them looked remorse and just stone face, kind of just like, well that was unproductive. Yeah, because Putin denies everything in this meeting. In an earlier interview prior to the summit, he echoed a sange and said, this does it even matter who hacked the data sentiment? Isn't it what is about, isn't it about what was in the data? And it's the content that matters. It doesn't matter who cares who hacked it.

You know, like who cares who looked in your text messages, baby, you were fucking somebody. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So publicly Obama speaks in generalities about it, trying to not, I don't think really show his full hand to the American people, which some people kind of criticized him for towards the end of his presidency. But obviously, Podesta and other Hillary Clinton needs were disappointed with the outcome of that talk. They wanted Obama to publicly decry the attack so that the American people would take notice and

He didn't do that, but Komi wanted to speak out. So Komi drafts an op-ed. This is really interesting I didn't know this until I read this book. I didn't know this. Yeah, so Komi guys already some for some fucked up shit Yeah, it's pretty fucked up. Guess what my homie did. So, Komi drafts an op-ed for the New York Times. That was going to run the week after the G20 summit and it was to spell out all of Russia's meddling and a warning of an actional security threat that that meddling poses. And just to reiterate to the American people, this is something that should be taken really seriously. It's a pressing concern and it needs to be on the forefront of not only our legislators'

minds, but just the US in general. For sure. But the weekend that it was going to get released turns out was 9-11. It was supposed to be released on a Sunday, which was going to be 9-11. And the White House is like, that's probably a bad idea. You know, you don't want people to be like, well, how insensitive of the White House, putting out this very patriotic document on 9-11. But I understand, I get it. It's supposed to be a day of mourning for all the people that lost their lives and all the people that lost their lives subsequently after that. So they don't wind up releasing it. And then it winds up never running.

Right, that hold off for 9-11 gives them enough time to think about it. And they're like, that's like a thought. It's not put it out at all. Yep, the White House decides to not run it at all. I want to read it. Me too. It's never been published.

Yep, maybe it's in a higher loyalty. Oh, that'd be really cool. We'll find out. I wonder I wonder if the New York Times will allow that. So during this whole thing, Trump, of course, is still dismissing the notion that this is the case and saying that Democrats are making it all up because he would rather revel in his own quote-unquote victory. in his own quote unquote victory. So when they get back from G20, Obama called the four congressional leaders to the Oval Office in these four are McConnell, Ryan, Harry Reid, who I love. And I know, I went to school with his granddaughter, the Reads, and his dad, Roy Reid, was a friend of my dad's.

They practiced a lot together. Roy Reid. Roy Reid. Roy Reid. Yeah, they're at a great family. Harry Reid's a lot together. Roi-read. Roi-read. Roi-read. Yeah, they're at a great family. Harry reads a great guy. Uh, McConnell, Ryan, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi. They had been trying for a couple of weeks, but McConnell and Ryan always had a schedule

in conflict so they can never attend the meeting. They can't make it to the whole office. Right, like, I'm sorry. You work for the government and the president asks you to come to the White House and you're like, I'm gonna get other things. Yeah, I'm clearly don't know how to prioritize the White House. Yeah, sorry. I got in a point with a tuna sandwich in the White House cafeteria. It really seems to me that if the president calls you the Oval Office, like that is the one you go to.

Yeah. You're like, hmm, hey boss, which one of these meetings should I go to? Should I go to the conference on how to time a shoes or the butthole cleaning convention? Or should I go to the blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Now, Ray's suspicion that there might be something else going on within the GOP thing. He is right. Yeah. So, Obama said that the meeting was to brief them on the G20 subject, but sorry, summit, but it was really to tell them about Russia and that trickery. So, we had to lie to him to finally get him together. No, no, no, it's about the G20. I want to tell you about the G20.

Yeah. Come and talk to me. I mean, it's like technically, it's kind of about the G20 in the sense that it's a conversation he had there. Poo-t was at the G20. He had. And this has to do with poo-t. Yeah, exactly.

There we go. Whip so fat, dude. Squid pro crew. But the meeting was really to tell them about Russia and that they had launched an operation to derail the election, harm Clinton, and possibly help Trump. And the kicker, that the whole operation was likely directed by Putin. No one was supposed to bring staffers to the meeting.

He told them he wanted everyone to come together and then put out a joint statement on this, on what was going on, the information I was being discovered that Russia did this and was currently doing this. Yeah. And I just wanna say that's pretty rare to not bring your staffers to a meeting. I've been to a lot of these to not have your staffers there. That's, whoa.

Yeah. Don't want anything getting leaked. Yeah, when someone's like, come alone, you're gonna be like, shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and the idea basically of them coming together and issuing a joint statement that was gonna give an accurate depiction to the American people of what was happening in our like Toral system was undermined by essentially by the doomed political environment. That's the most bitter we've seen in decades

The main roadblock though if we we can blame it on one person, was definitely Mitch McConnell. He told the president that he thought he was trying to politicize the matter. He thought Obama was trying to politicize the matter, and that he was not going to help him because of that. He didn't want to hurt the GOP's chances and any of the elections in 2016. He didn't want his position to be threat and desk speaker of the house basically. So when you think of it from a selfish point of view it makes sense I guess. Not okay. Not okay. But logic. Not okay. Even Paul Ryan tried to persuade McConnell, but McConnell was not going to budge. So the White House

was caught in a squeeze. It had been two months since the intelligence community had reached the conclusion that Russia was threatening the election, but the White House had said nothing so far. Fine scene and shift, we are all very aware of them now, they're on our sexy justice calendar. They are respectively the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee. And they were pissed. Minority, leaders. Yes, minority leaders. Yes, sorry, very important detail,

especially in this climate. So they're very, yeah, if they were the majority, wouldn't that be lovely? Then do we just kick McConnell to the side? November. November. Shifts gonna be in charge of the house until I'm gonna be so beautiful lovely saying.

Uh, yes. So fine seen in shif or pissed, they kept pressing the White House and were prepared to issue their own statement. Like fuck this shit, the people need to know this is our job. We're gonna have to tell them ourselves. White House if can I be the White House in this scenario? No, no, no, no, I am not happy with that. If you go out on your own,

it would reinforce the view that the whole thing was partisan. Oh. Thank you. Thank you. It's a very good question with the White House. Yep, yeah, exactly. And Macdonough, he's a chief of staff. He was assigned the task of keeping fine-seen and shift quiet essentially.

You put him in a closet like time. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah, exactly. They did take it a little too literally. So he asked fine-seen and shifts to just lay off the subject. They said that it was going to play into Trump's narrative that the election was rigged, which would undermine the American people's belief and the legitimacy of our democracy, which is so ironic that that was one of the reasons for that. Yeah. It would impede their effort to work with somebody cared about it. Yeah.

It would impede their effort to work with state and local election officials, especially in red states. So they'd say, who the fuck are you guys? This is all just a scheme. Or at least this is what McDonald is saying is going to happen. Exactly. That the people in the red states wouldn't even believe them if they tried to help them guard themselves against tacking, which seems like a bipartisan issue, but I guess it's not nowhere to far pass that. And so basically they're saying, just please wait so we

can sort out this shit with McConnell. And we can all come together on some sort of unified front They waited they waited for a couple days. They waited for five sign they waited they were like And then they get tired of waiting Yeah, and on September 22nd they released for They released a powerful statement. It was four paragraphs long. And it said, quote, based on the briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence

the US election, intended to sow doubt about the security of our election, and may well be intended to influence the outcomes of the election. We believe that orders for the Russian intelligence agencies to conduct such actions could only come from very senior levels of the Russian government. AKA Putin. It's kind of a snoozer of a memo, really. Yeah.

They've edited their statement with the IC, the intelligence community who had no objections to it. This is at the time when, again, it was agreed upon by fucking every every intelligence department and their dog. Yeah, it's everybody's. Intelligent dogs. Yeah. The statement was a dud though and it got little to no media, mainstream media coverage. It was boring. Who wrote it? I mean, I know it was a fine-stand shift member, but who wrote it? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know who actually wrote it.

Sounds like fine-stand. Yeah. Uh, finally, snap out of it old girl. Gotta be exciting. Fresh and new. Yeah. This is grab the attention of the American public and the media. And you have to be like, look, rushes interfering.

The rushes like literally interfering with our election. Like, we cannot even right now. OMG, I can't even rush a hashtag. Oh my God. Yeah, there's like a Snapchat filter that's like totally concluded. Yeah, you can like, you can make yourself have like the big Russian, like USSR,

sickle, and turns your whole face into that Russian font on the front of the book and just like, just buying bars. Baby, baby, baby. Yeah, come on, spice it up. Mm- bars. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Yeah, come on, spice it up. No one listened though. It totally died.

I was like, mm-hmm. Well, yep. And so finally, the four leaders of Congress, McConnell, Ryan Reed, and Pelosi, they issue a statement, but it was super weak. It states that, quote, states face the challenge of possible cyber attacks to disrupt the administration of our elections. It doesn't mention Russia,

and it has zero sense of urgency. Yeah, and that statement's pretty much true for every election that we have. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, people could hack into your shit. Yeah. Have a nice day. Which to be fair, Obama released a statement that was basically that, which is, yeah, this is happening, and it is be fair Obama released a statement that was basically that which is yeah This is happening and it is kind of what happens and that was why he got criticized Well, he was so afraid of me making it look like he was putting his thumb on the scales. Yeah He was more afraid of looking like he was influencing the election Then Trump was of allowing Putin to interfluence. Yeah, exactly

looking like he was influencing the election. And Trump was of allowing Putin to interfluence. It's interfluence. Yeah, exactly. Influenced the election. It's disgusting to me how careful and in what reverence the Obama administration holds our elections and how important it is to not interfere and how cavalier Trump is in allowing not only Americans but foreigners. He's like, shredding the rule of law. It's just insane. Well, he just has no reverence for the, I don't know, the Constitution, for the...

Exactly. The institution of the United States of America, the sacredness of our elections. Because he's always been above it Like always important a way of important that is that he would just allow An ad adversarial world leader to walk in and influence while Obama is tearing his hair out Yeah, trying to figure out what he can and can't say so he doesn't look like he's influenced You know quick if I may I don't want to digress too much, but I love that point. Hey, gee But just so I can say as far as the Constitution goes goes, like when it was created, the, you know,

all men are created equally, that was just white straight, you know, men who own property. And just seeing the difference, I know it's not all a race issue, but it's just so interesting. You bring up the Constitution because to Trump, that's like an old outdated, like, you, listen, he doesn't care about the Constitution. He's already had so many more rights since he was born. Like, you know, he just has so much privilege that to him, that basic foundation means nothing into Obama. It's everything because he had to fight or his ancestors, at least had to fight just to even get there. That's interesting that Obama, a black man, is a constitutionalist,

even though it excluded him. Exactly. And Trump shits on it. Yeah. Even though it was all about him. Yeah. Trump is very disconnected. His privilege just goes right over his head. Well, fortunately, our founding fathers have the foresight to understand that things will change and can change and now it includes everyone. And again, to be so disrespectful of our country to allow a foreign adversary into influence our elections and call our vote fraudulent and to say that illegal immigrants

are the reason that Hillary won the popular vote and to call voter front out. And while, and I'm just, I just picture Obama toiling. This is why he has gray hair now, toiling and just going insane over trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that he wants to tell everyone that Russia is interfering in our elections, but he's so... His hands are so tight. Well, he's so careful and so respectful of the document that

discluded him from the beginning. Exactly. That he still wants to make sure that it's respected. And that is... Very good point. Incredible. Mm-hmm. I really is.

Yeah. So, basically, after they released that, it turns in, it's a nun burger. Basically. Nothing happens. Yeah. Also, that September, a guy named Peter Smith called Matt Tate, that cybersecurity expert that helped expose Gussford 2.0 as Russian. Yeah, he's the one who saw that they used a Russian language option and found the codes and stuff.

Good work him. Yeah, Matt Tate. Yeah, and Smith was on a quest to find the clean emails and ask Tate to help him determine if a bunch of emails he got from a guy on the dark web were authentic. Tate was suspicious because he wouldn't say who his dark web contact was and he got the impression that Smith was working for the Trump campaign because he said he wasn't touched with Flynn and Flynn's son and other top Trump aids. Smith accidentally sends a memo to Tate saying that he was planning to set up a Delaware LLC called KLS Research to conduct opera research for Trump, but in

a way, quote, to avoid campaign reporting. The memo also noted that several top Trump aids were involved in the operation, including Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Flynn, Clovis, and Lisa Nelson. Tate's name was on there too, though he'd never agreed to be part of it. Their conservation... I know makes you wonder how truthful he was being about that. Exactly. Yeah, I know all these people are totally with me, and I'm just creating a business so that

you know, it doesn't have to be reported to campaigns. Trump will hire me, and I'll be a million every day. Nothing to see here. Yeah. Yeah, he had it all laid out. His plan was success. It just sounds like an insane person. For sure. Oh, yeah.

Their conversations petered out and tape was never clear whether or not Smith had any contact with Trump insiders. Bannon and Conway would say later that they didn't even know who he was. This is actually one time where I think I might believe Bannon and Conway. Yeah. Like, this guy sounds like the dad. This guy's crazy. Yeah, total Ires.

Yeah. Smith later tells the Wall Street Journal that he had found five groups of hackers that claim to have the Clinton emails and suggested that they take them to WikiLeaks. Hmm. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal came across a piece of intelligence that the IC had collected information indicating the Russian hackers were indeed discussing how to find Clinton's emails and how to get them to Flynn through a cutout through a backdoor channel. It was never determined if Smith was that backdoor channel though.

And now we have Schmitz this week coming out and trying to look for these emails too. It's super interesting. Yeah. And then in a really sad wrap- of all of it in May 2017, Smith committed suicide by fixating himself in a hotel room in Minnesota and left a note behind that red no foul play whatsoever. I mean to joke, but could it have been auto erotic as fixing. I guess the first thing I thought of, but then if he left the note, then no. Yeah, but the notes said no foul play whatsoever. they like to go out, because I've heard some

like things that could be a receipt. It's a pleasurable way to go out, right? Like, here's a scenario. And I'm a veteran, I have PTSD, I'm not trying to diminish suicide at all. But okay, so here's a scenario. I'm a dude, I'm a weird dude, I'm a Republican dude. I'm an 84 year old dude.

Yeah. And I invite a lady over who I pay to come over. Yeah. And I say choke me while we get it on. Right. Uh, and, uh, and oh, but I need you to leave me a receipt. Okay. Because I'm going to write you a check.

Um, but I'm going to put in the memo, no foul play whatsoever. Oh. Wink, wink. Oh, my gosh. Do you imagine? As a, you know, like a, this isn't anything bad that's happening. It's just room service. And then he's found an excess style, you know. Yeah.

Hutchins style. I wonder. I imagine something like that. So it's probably not it. He probably killed himself. Yeah, I was going to say I imagine something would have come out. He actually did. He actually did. And since he was already mentally unstable

He was and he truly he actually had failing health like it was like he was he was his health was diminishing and yeah My health was failing. I wouldn't mind going out like that I probably asked for an injection of something I don't care why might as well just go for you But some corvorkian shit. Yeah, so we had to remove him from our Yeah, but some Kervorkian shit. Yeah. So we had to remove him from our fantasy and diet mainly because because of that. Yeah.

He committed suicide. I didn't know that. That's tragic. Yeah. It doesn't matter to me what part of you're from. Who you're affiliated with. It's a terrible thing. Mental illness is serious.

It needs to be addressed in this country. Yeah. And I hope that it does. Yeah. And a lot of these people, I don't think't think you know that commit these high crimes and stuff are Absolutely mentally ill. They like a lot of them could be diagnosed as sociopaths like opaths Yeah, the spectrum is very broad. You're absolutely right Yeah, and if these people got help when they were younger too, you know, you wonder you wonder

But also I'm not apologizing for them at all. No, no, no, it's their behavior right they need to own it But they also but we also don't need a revel in one of them killing themselves. No, and I won't do that No, totally. No, I don't think you are. Yeah, that's no. We aren't gonna do that. No on this show Yeah, I'm a little she wrote it's still it's very tragic, but being an asshole is an asshole. Yeah I Have PTSD. I'm 80% moderate to have PTS I'm 80% moderate to severe PTS and I don't beat anybody up or kill people or steal money or

Try to allow Russia to interfere in elections. They're absolutely right look for false emails or punch people in the face. I choose to Take my yeah, well, you can't choose to be fun. You're right. Get it up. I It's it's a hard question. Like, there's a lot of schizophrenic people out there. There's a lot of multiple personality disorder people out. There's a lot of PTSD people out there. You beat your wife and stab your children. Is it because you have PTSD or because you're,

is it because you're an asshole with PTSD? I don't know. The answer. Yeah, exactly. It's case by case, but I like the point you're making. There is a point as an adult where you can choose to get help, I think. Yeah, but this, you know, society rewards that kind of sickness,

though, the psychopathy and sociopathy and, I mean, it rewards it in a lot of, like, criminal ways, you're totally right. Yeah, society rewards people. Yeah, exactly. They're winning, being how they are. And no one's gonna ever diagnose that as a legitimate mental-honey, exactly. They're winning, being how they are. And no one's going to ever diagnose that as a legitimate mental handy cap because they're

winning. No, but they'll call transgender a mental handy cap. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, not that. Yeah, not that. In a long leave though. Sorry for our little diet tribe at the end there.

Yeah. I just, I do think it's tragic that he killed himself. I, I, we do have to take him off our fantasy indictment team. We do make jokes about stuff like this because we're comedians and that's how we cope. Right, we're all darkened to press. If we don't laugh, we'll cry. And I hope that you guys enjoy this book report.

And I swear to God, the last installment's gonna be a little more upbeat. Yes. Actually, probably not. Positive note, we'll try. It's still a Russian collusion book, so I'm not quite sure, but I've had a really good time going over these chapters. You guys thank you so much for being here. I'm A.G.

I'm Jolisa Johnson. I'm Jordan Covern. This is Mola She Wrote. Mola She Wrote is produced and engineered by A.G. with editing and mixing by Jolissa Johnson, market consulting by Amanda Reader at Unicorn Creative. Our digital media director and subscriber manager is Jordan Coburn. Fact checking and research by AG will support from Jolissa Johnson and Jordan Coburn. Our web design and creative is by Joel Reader with Moxie Design Studios and our website is mullishe wrote dot com. Season 4 of How We Win Is Here. For the past four years we've been making history in critical elections all over the country.

And last year, we made history again by expanding our majority in the Senate, eating election denying Republicans and crucial state house races, and fighting back a non-existent red wave. But the Maga Republicans who plotted and pardoned the attempted overthrow of our government now control the House. Thanks to gerrymandered maps and repressive anti-voter laws. And the chaotic spectacle we've already seen shows us just how far they will go to seize power, dismantle our government, and take away our freedoms.

So the official podcast of the persistence is back with season four. There's so much more important work ahead of us to fight for equity, justice, and our very democracy itself. We'll take you behind the lines and inside the rooms where it happens, with strategy and inspiration from progressive change makers all over the country. And we'll dig deep into the weekly news that matters most and what you can do about it, with messaging and communications expert, co-founder of Way to Win, and our new co-host,

Jennifer Fernandez-Ancona. So join Steve and I every Wednesday for your weekly dose of inspiration, action and hope. I'm Steve Pearson. And I'm Jennifer Fernandez-Ancona. And this is How We Win. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ M-S-W-Media.