(ominous music)
(people chattering)
Russians have learned that there
is an asymmetry in conventional warfare.
The Russian military does not match
that of the United States by far. http://worldmkv.com/
How do you then balance out the asymmetry?
One way to do that is to invest in much cheaper measures.
These nonconventional active measures
to try to weaken western institutions,
undermine western democracies versus sending in the tanks.
Putin realizes that if we're divided as a nation
we cannot protect ourselves from threats within and without.
From the Russian point of view,
political warfare is just part of the art of war.
What they're driving at over the longer term
is to watch democracy crumble from the inside out.
I'm sitting with him at dinner.
I told him I'd been at the memorial
of the siege of Leningrad.
He said I'll tell you a story.
He said my father was one of those people
who was on the front lines.
And had gotten 24 hours off to go home.
As he was walking down the street to his apartment,
he saw a big pile of bodies which was not at all uncommon.
He saw a leg sticking out and a shoe on the foot
and he recognized that as being his wife.
So he stopped and he screamed
and said, well, that's my wife.
That's my wife.
I want my wife.
The body collectors told him to leave and he kept demanding.
At this point he's pulling his wife from under the pile.
He took her to their apartment
and nursed her back to health.
And then after the war she gave birth to Vladimir Putin.
Putin sees himself as literally pulling the body
of Russia out of the pile, the dust bin of history.
You know, we are going to revive you.
You are not dead.
And I will take care of you.
I mean, that is the mindset.
I think his ambitions always were to be the president
and then gather all the instruments of power
into the presidency.
His devotion to reasserting Russia's greatness
is certainly in his self?interest
because he wants to be the czar.
He wants to be the richest man in the world
and he wants to settle scores.
He made his way up through the KGB.
His role in the KGB
was to support Russian intelligence officers
living under assumed identities
under deep cover inside the United States
and developing active measures
to impact the policies of the United States.
The KGB was power.
If you said that you were with the KGB, doors were open.
People would stand aside.
In 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed,
every republic that emerged from the debris
of the Soviet Union agreed at the time
to recognize the republics in their then existing borders.
Putin, like many Russians, feels that the dissolution,
the dissolving of the Soviet Union
was a horrific thing because it made the Russian people
and Russia itself smaller.
And the Americans are celebrating all of this.
(speaking in foreign language)
I think he's dedicated to building it back up.
(downcast piano music)
The first time I met him in the spring of 1991,
he was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg
working for the mayor whose name was Anatoly Sobchak.
Sobchak was this charismatic western leaning guy
allied with Boris Yeltsin.
His deputy was the exact opposite of that.
Non?descript, grave bureaucrat.
A very soft spoken.
Had you asked me back then to name a thousand people
that might be the next president of Russia
he would not have made my list.
He supported Mayor Sobchak
but he was also organizing this incredible network
of former KGB foreign economic interest and local interest.
In the 1990's St. Petersburg was known
for organized crime and corruption.
State institutions were partnering
with Kremlin organizations to rip off
as much as they could as fast as they could.
Putin was a pretty good fixer.
He could make stuff happen.
He knew how to work the system.
[Heather] Mr. Putin was able as deputy mayor
to be the focal point of all of these different networks
as they came together.
He was made FSB director.
The FSB is responsible for internal spying.
These are the guys who have the most funding,
the most resources.
He learned which served him in good stead
how to maneuver politically.
That became his primary goal.
Power.
The FSB was simply a ladder.
Almost immediately after the breakup of the Soviet Union,
these oligarchs were able to take over
state owned enterprises at bargain basement prices.
It turned some of these individuals into multi?millionaires
or even billionaires almost overnight.
Under Yeltsin, the oligarchs
became very powerful and very independent.
And the power of the state was crumbling.
The end of the Yeltsin years he obtained
almost sort of a buffoonish type of personality.
You know, a drunk.
A little bit out of control.
Yeltsin was nervous and he chose to go with a guy
that he thought would protect his family and their assets.
That's, I think, the sole purpose why Putin
was selected to then run for president.
Followed by the bombings of the apartment houses.
There were a series of terrorist attacks in 1999.
(somber piano music)
They found evidence of the FSB
having been there and set that all up.
I know what has been alleged.
I find the evidence compelling and I know
those terrorist attacks helped Vladimir Putin
win the election.
I'm not ready to believe yet
and maybe that's just my idealism getting in the way
of my analytic side that the Russian government
would kill its own civilians to elect Putin president.
The apartment bombings were KGB operations
using a type of explosive that's only made
in a KGB facility.
Oh, sure.
It was very clever and the Russian people
began to look for a leader.
It's not the first time in history.
You can compare it in some degree
to the 1930's and the rise of Adolph Hitler.
With respect to democracy, I think it's pretty clear
from the very get go he feared independent actors.
(speaking in foreign language)
Putin started forcing the independent media
to knuckle under, putting in state control,
turning it into propaganda outfits.
Started arresting people who had different points of view.
(men yelling)
Then he starts going after independent journalists.
They start ending up dead.
Assassinated.
The most prominent journalist in Russia,
Anna Politkovskaya was murdered on Putin's birthday.
Putin brought the oligarchs to heel.
A number of them were forced to leave the country
Some were killed in mysterious fashions.
Those who remained are basically lapdogs of his.
Putin was letting everyone know
that this period of everybody getting to do
their own thing was very much over.
And then he brought his most trusted friends
and confidantes from the intelligence services
into the key positions, controlling all those businesses.
Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs used money,
essentially stolen from the Russian people.
If you're one of these big kleptocrats,
getting your stolen proceeds into a rule of law system
is one of your highest priorities.
Once that money is laundered, they have access
to western banks and they can do whatever they want.
Semion Mogilevich was the first big organized crime figure
in Russia who figured out how to launder massive amounts
out of Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Semion Mogilevich is worth about 10 billion dollars
according to FBI reports.
He's considered the money laundering genius.
He's sometimes called the brainy don
'cause he has a economics degree.
[Scott] The most important of the Russian crime bosses.
The man who was for years on the 10 Most Wanted list
in the United States.
[Jonathan] He still lives happily in Moscow today.
[Reporter] In Russia he still gets the VIP treatment
and is rarely without a bodyguard who chauffeurs him
and his 200,000 pound armor plated bomb proof limousine.
[Reporter] Why did you suss out companies
in the Channel Islands?
The problem was that I didn't know any other way.
Well, they taught us geography at school.
I was sick that day.
The Russian mafia is an adjunct of the Russian government.
I've described it as going from organized crime
under the Soviets to disorganized crime
under Yeltsin to organized crime again under Putin.
His networks recycle back to Mr. Putin's inner circle
and they continue to help maintain Mr. Putin's power.
To the point where today Putin may well be
the wealthiest man on the face of the planet.
Yeah. (laughs)
Yeah.
Everything I know that's interesting I can't tell you.
Now let me try to think of a way to go at 30,000 feet.
Yeah, I know where you're going with this
'cause I know we're gonna talk about Trump in a few minutes.
(upbeat electro music)
In the 70's Donald Trump is a scion
of one of the biggest landowners along the east coast.
He played monopoly.
Yes, indeed.
More than monopoly, he played with building blocks.
Always with building blocks.
He has huge ambitions, huge ego as we know.
Because not everybody is meant to be a business person.
They'll ruin their lives.
I mean they'll go and they'll,
they'll put up their house and they'll mortgage their cars
and everything else they own.
And he is starting to move into Manhattan.
Trump Tower was structured in a way
that made it a money laundering paradox.
[Nina] Trump Tower became one of the first buildings
in New York where Shell companies could buy and sell condos
without identifying yourself.
If you go back to the 80's, Senator Henry Scoop Jackson
got a bill through Congress allowing the immigration
of Soviet Jews into the United States
at a time when immigration had been highly restrictive.
We'll honor the right of a person
to leave a country freely
and return freely just as clear as anything can be.
[Craig] The Russians saw it as an opportunity
to open their jails.
That's when you see members of Russian organized crime
come to the United States for the very, very first time
and end up in Brighton Beach.
There were certain techniques
for money management and money movement
that were prized above others.
And these involved real estate.
It started off simply as money laundering pure and simple
and you had in 1984 for example David Bogatin,
who was a Russian mobster, met with Trump.
Trump Tower had just opened the previous year and Bogatin,
who had no legal way of making that money,
sat down with Trump and bought five condos
and the state attorney general ruled
that that was money laundering.
Vyacheslav Ivankov, who was very close
to the great mastermind of organized crime,
Semion Mogilevich, and he was sent to the United States
to oversee the rise of the Brighton Beach mafia.
And when the feds were looking for him they looked all over
and they couldn't find him anywhere in Brooklyn.
Instead, he was living in Trump Tower.
Donald Trump marries Ivana.
The Czech Secret Police takes note of this.
The intelligence that they gathered was that Donald Trump
was being pressured, not clear by whom,
to run for president as early as 1988.
They thought that it would be good for Czechoslovakia
if this husband of a Czech citizen became president
of the United States.
After his successes in New York City
he got into the Atlantic city casino business.
He goes big.
Builds the Trump Taj Majal.
Which will be the largest hotel casino in the world
and I think it's gonna be a tremendous success.
That turns out to be his undoing.
In a town where for the last 10 years
no casino with 60,000 squared foot
has ever been fully utilized.
On what basis would someone build one with 120,000 feet?
He was destined to fail.
Trump Casino was hit hard for having
violated U. S. federal anti?money laundering regulations.
It suggests a culture of willful disregard of the law.
[Nina] He basically unravels financially.
He also was unraveling personally at this same time.
His marriage was falling apart.
[Jonathan] By that point he had filed,
I believe it was six bankruptcies.
He had no way to move forward professionally.
He couldn't get a bank loan anywhere.
There is a homeless person sitting,
sitting right outside of Trump Tower.
I remember my father pointing to him and saying, you know,
that guy has eight billion dollars more than me
because he was in such extreme debt at that point, you know.
The Russians have a particular type of mark
whom they go after.
They go after somebody who has business resources,
perhaps some shady morals so that they're amenable
to the bribery.
Or perhaps are in a difficult financial situation.
And either has political connections or aspirations.
I've just described Donald Trump.
He was the perfect mark for the Russians.
The Russians saved him.
They rescued him.
He would not have gotten back in business without them.
I think it's safe to say he couldn't have run for president
if he had just been a guy
who was four billion dollars in debt.
When the Russian mafia does something
it's with Putin's permission and it's serving his interests.
Have you ever knowingly done business
with what I like to call organized crime?
(audience laughing)
Have they ever stopped by and??
Well, I really tried to stay away from them
as much as possible. Right.
Although I must say I have met on occasion
a few of those people.
They happen to be very nice people.
You just don't want to owe them money.
Yeah, I understand. Don't owe them money.
Simeon Mogelivich, he made a decision to make the move
on Trump after studying Trump's 2004 bankruptcy filings.
Noticing that Trump had lost his credit lines.
They felt he would not be in the position to say no.
The Russian real estate firm Bayrock
started leasing space in Trump Tower.
Putin needs to keep track of his oligarchs
and one way of keeping tabs is knowing where their money is.
Bayrock may well have been a way of doing that.
To me that's a turning point because what we have here
is a very serious intelligence operation
and it is in the belly of the beast.
It is in the home of the man
who becomes president of the United States.
And it was operating there for many, many years.
One of the key people putting it together, Felix Sater.
A lieutenant in the Mogilevich crime family.
Very connected into the nexus
between the Russian criminal organizations
and the Russian national security organizations.
He became managing director of Bayrock.
He himself had been convicted of two felonies.
Slashing a guy's face at a bar.
Another was a pump and dump stock scheme.
But he ended up cooperating with the feds
and he started providing information
on sales of weapons to Al?Qaeda.
Mogilevich, according to FBI reports,
was selling weapons to Al?Qaeda.
That raised very interesting questions
'cause I don't think Felix Sater would betray Mogilevich.
He famously threatened an investor
with electrocuting his testicles.
Trump worked with Sater for many, many years
after it was revealed that he was a criminal.
He continued to work for Trump and in fact
had a business card saying that he was a senior advisor
to the Trump organization.
[Michael] There's multiple photographs
of the two of them together.
He had an office in Trump tower.
Trump was the public face of Bayrock.
And yet when he was placed under oath in a deposition
and confronted about Sater, he simply says, uh.
If he was sitting in a the room right now,
I really wouldn't know what he looked like.
[Craig] Trump actually personally asks Sater
to escort his two children, Ivanka and Donald Trump, Jr.,
on a trip to Moscow and showed them around the town.
He seems to be playing a consistent role
in assisting the Trump's and tapping Russians
or let's say post?Soviet money
for developing condominium units.
No co?op board has to review whoever is buying.
It's safer than putting it in the bank.
(upbeat electro music)
The Sunny Isles development is the Florida development
that the Trumps own that has been heavily populated
by Russians who want to launder their money.
[Craig] At least a third of the condos
in Sunny isles, Florida have been sold to Russia.
Trump's Soho is one of the promoters of the project.
Alexsandr Mashkevich has been described
as Mogelivich's banker.
The Trump Tower project in Baku is located
in the middle of a post?industrial sledge pool.
It's just sort of a joke that they were building this.
Trump World Tower.
I started looking at who bought into
and the very first name I came across that was Russian
was that of Eduard Nektalov.
He had been indicted for money laundering.
He turned state's evidence and was going
to cooperate with the feds.
He was murdered the next day.
The Toronto Tower.
The source of funding was the Vensheconobank,
the two twin cash management tools of the Kremlin.
They go out and become involved in projects
usually because one man, Vladimir Putin,
tells them to do so.
That would link this project straight back to the Kremlin.
I think this is the tip of the iceberg.
There's been 1.3 trillion dollars in flight capital
since Putin's become president.
There are over 30 Trump Towers all over the world.
That means there are several thousand units.
So many condos that journalists like me have been unable
to investigate because they are in Shell companies.
Shell corporations where law enforcement
and the public and the press can go and see
what the name of the corporation is
but they can't find out who's really behind it.
What's really going on.
Who's pulling the strings here.
So a 500 million dollar condo can change hands
three or four times a year
and you've laundered 20 million dollars or so.
We want to follow the money.
It's clear to me that a huge amount of it
comes from the Ukraine Russian energy trade.
Vladimir Putin particularly
has a strong feeling about Ukraine.
Ukraine was part of Russia for many, many years.
He feels that needs to be restored.
Putin has worked to undermine
democracies across the globe.
[Woman] You had a couple of people running for president.
Viktor Yanukovich who appeared to be
more interested in keeping Ukraine aligned with Russia.
Significant amounts of money coming from Russia
into the Yanukovich campaign.
His competitor on the other side, Yuschenko,
was a Ukrainian politician.
A reputation of being clean and fair and pro?western.
Yulia Tymoshenko entered the Yushenko campaign.
She was a politician.
Tymoshenko, in my experience,
she was by the far the most effective minister
in the Ukrainian cabinet.
Well, I was working for Senator McCain in 2004.
And we visited.
We met with Yuschenko.
They just said, I'm afraid they're gonna try to kill him.
Within a matter of months
he had been poisoned and almost was killed.
A disfiguring poisoning.
It destroyed his looks.
Scarred his face.
Quite convinced it was a KGB operation.
He was off the campaign trail for about four weeks.
It also had a second effect, too,
was it really hardened his resolve.
And not in the Soviet Union republic.
[Steven] During the election there was lots of evidence
that something had gone wrong.
At that time Ukrainian intelligence agencies
detected that there were hackers who actually tried
to break into the central election commission.
So they were trying to change the results of the votes.
And those parts that had voted for Yanukovich
turned out in excess of 100% was reported.
[Reporter] The country's election commission
ignored reports of fraud
declaring Kremlin?backed victory Yanukovich the winner.
The election was, in the eyes of most Ukrainians, stolen.
The Ukrainians had enough.
And the Orange Revolution consisted of people coming out
to the central Kiev square
and saying, no, we're not going to accept a bad election.
The Ukrainian Supreme Court basically ruled a do over.
Russia opposed that idea because they understood correctly
that if it was done in a free and fair way
that Mr. Yanukovich would not win.
[Daniel] And Yuschenko became president.
[Steven] His prime minister was Yulia Tymoshenko.
So this week has a unique feel to it
as we all have the profound privilege
of welcoming president Viktor Yuschenko to??
(audience applauding)
Protection from the regime of mobsters
is only a matter that can cause hope.
We faced a very similar choice.
It was not a choice between the left and the right.
It was the choice between totalitarian regime and democracy.
It has betrayed the future at best.
[Reporter] Viktor Yanukovich predicted more turmoil ahead.
I am ready to lead, he said.
Yuschenko will find out what opposition really means.
Mr. Manafort came to Ukraine late 2004.
Yanukovich had been fairly badly discredited.
The role that I saw for Mr. Manafort
was somebody tried to rehabilitate Mr. Yanukovich.
Paul Manafort has been a Washington political consultant
for a long, long time.
[Reporter] Paul Manafort, a top campaign strategist
for President Bush.
[Woman] Bob Dole was the last one who brought him on
as the head of the convention at that point.
We are ready, not only to continue to lead
in the Congress but to take the White House.
He had disappeared.
No one knew what he was doing.
[Greg] It's impossible that Paul Manafort was not
at least run past the Russian government
because Manafort was very close to Yanukovich.
And Yanukovich was so close to the Kremlin.
The big switch from western, the western point of view
was the Munich security conference speech.
The United States has overstepped its national borders
in every way.
Of course such a policy stimulates an arms race.
No one feels safe.
Senator Joe Lieberman and I were sitting
in assigned seats in the front row.
And he would utter a phrase in Russian
and after he would say, he'd look over at the two of us
like that, you know, I said what is it with this guy?
I very often.
He repeals by our partners.
The effect that Russia should play
an increasingly active role in world affairs.
That was 2007.
Two months later they did the cyber?attack
on my country because we really didn't want a Soviet statue
in the middle of town.
We didn't tear it down.
We moved it.
We figured, okay, this is important for some people.
But even that was sort of enough of an offense.
(yelling)
The 9th of May with the day the Russians celebrate
the end of World War II no one could get into any websites
including the banks, any government sites, news media.
I mean, it's clear they did it.
A year later they invaded Georgia.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Georgia was controlled by mafias and criminal gangs
that were known as thieves?in?law.
Then came the revolution and Misha Saakashvili
became their president.
And made, really, very significant changes
and improvement to the country.
After years of the Georgian economy
being a basket case suddenly starts to roar.
He had a vision of Georgia in NATO and the EU.
The Russians hated it.
As long as you have these blocs,
NATO and the European Union,
they're bigger, richer, stronger, more powerful than Russia.
But if you reduce them to their individual parts
each of these countries is far weaker than Russia.
They kept provoking the Georgians more and more
and more and more.
They wanted a war.
They started to say the war.
At first he started to tell it to me.
To some western leaders.
Looked like the west was the wandering life,
wanted somewhere and Russians knew where they were going.
Then we had direct military attacks.
In the middle of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics,
the Russians invaded Georgia.
(man yelling)
(tanks rapidly firing)
Wake up, wake up.
We are attacked because we wanted to be free.
We are attacked because we wanted
to build genuine democracy.
If Americans and Europeans don't stand up
for their own values, for their own principles,
then those principles and values will be in danger
to the Georgia, tomorrow elsewhere.
But the Russians then spent a lot of time
convincing everyone the Georgians started the war.
It's Saakashvili's fault.
He was dangerous and a madman.
Russia has criticized the western media
for what it's called it's biosphere on the conflict.
Not all journalists blame Russia for the conflict.
Alex Jones?
[Alex] I just hope Russia keeps troops in Georgia
because the dictator,
and we know he was elected under fraud there in Georgia
has said that he plans, he said it last week,
to attack again.
Allegation that Georgia would attack Russia
is so foolish and outrageous and disgraceful.
But it's typical of Vladimir Putin.
They did not achieve the collapse
of the Saakashvili government.
It cost them a lot in respect,
in international relationships.
And their military was really exposed
as something weaker than they all thought.
So there was this whole portfolio of kind of rethinking
what are the political warfare tools
that we have that we can use.
They began to increase their funding to far right
nationalistic white supremacists political parties.
In democracies, public opinion is your battlefield.
It's finding those affinity groups.
They don't like globalization.
They're very fearful of immigration.
They're xenophobic.
And that fear is then used
by Russian disinformation operations to say
you're not being protected from migration crisis,
from the social changes that we see around you.
Gazprom and others, they were purchasing local affiliates
so it looked like less Russian, had less of a Russian face.
Gazprom is the world's largest gas company.
It and its resources are used to help achieve
the political objectives of the Russian state.
When the economics and the politics combine
in fact the, it's state capture.
The national government cannot take independent action
that does not follow Russia's policy interests.
It's far better to expend your energy
on getting a Russia friendly government elected
than it is to have to build up your military
to invade the country.
There was the Russian oligarchy, Ivanishvili,
who was biggest private shareholder of Russia Gazprom.
Suddenly Ivanishvili announced that he was entering politics
and he will run against us.
They wanted to believe
that he was this independent weirdo businessman.
He must be a very successful man.
Nobody wanted to believe he was what he is,
a front for Russian engagement in the country.
The campaign in Georgia before the 2012 election
had been increasingly dirty and hostile and violent.
So the narrative was that no matter
what you will falsify, rig the elections.
And then they would take it to the streets.
There was a lot of discussion
about political prosecution.
If they won they would have put
the entire former government in prison,
that these were all criminal.
Some of it was really cheap stuff.
Saakashvili is really an Armenian.
He's not really a Georgian.
That's a technique the Russians use quite a bit.
The best way to discredit somebody
is to make them appear inauthentic.
They're not part of the community which they say they are.
Then it's picked up by other media.
It's sort of spread about social media.
Eventually people sort of say some of this must be true.
Mafia bosses, (speaking in foreign language) from Russia
try to help to organize mass disturbances.
They listened to our telephone conversations,
especially when we were calling from abroad.
For whatever similar situation would ignite in Georgia
they always had intercepts for all kind of situations.
No party in Georgia could have been
in a real popular way for Russian.
And Ivanishvili knew that.
So you had a new message on Russia.
It was wouldn't it be nice
if we had a better relationship with Russia?
About two weeks before the vote,
there was the release of the first
of what became known as the prison abuse tapes.
The images looked very bad.
After initial shock, people started to look at the image.
In details they explain to us that the whole thing was fake.
Later we discovered that this thing was done by guys
with very well?known Russian intelligence connections.
But it was too late.
[Reporter] On Tuesday President Saakashvili
conceded he lost the closely fought parliamentary vote.
65 or so former officials have been arrested,
detained, or convicted.
Saakashvili will be arrested if he goes back to Georgia.
And then you saw the allowing of Russian money
back into Georgia's full society.
We are returning Georgia product to the Russian market.
His wealth and his fortune
are all connected to the Kremlin.
That means he can never be independent of what they want.
Putin had told the National Security Council
that Georgian elections were the most successful
special operation they ever had.
They learned that any democratic system
is essentially very vulnerable to this kind of meddling.
Full corruption, information campaigns,
character destructions,
and then your adversary's much more vulnerable.
Then it's nothing about their economy size or military size.
It's about their state of mind.
In Ukraine Putin did the same thing.
Ukraine is about 100% dependent on Russia for natural gas.
Instead of there being direct sales from Gazprom
there were a whole series of intermediary companies
which seemed to be controlled by a man named Dmitry Firtash.
Dmitry Firtash, a Pro?Putin oligarch.
He had worked with Mogilevich, the crime boss.
They siphon off lots of money from this Gazprom.
Billions of dollars.
[Michael] Firtash was very close to Vladimir Putin.
Paul Manafort was a business partner of Firtash.
Ukrainian politicians.
It was all just whisper the name Paul Manafort.
He was the dark prince in the background,
orchestrating everything.
He was viewed as a man who was the connection
between the Kremlin and pro?Russian party in Ukraine
to advance Russian political interests.
Russia was buying up utilities.
The oligarchs were doing Putin's bidding.
It cut off Ukraine's energy supply.
It's really a terrible thing
if someone is killed by a bullet
but isn't it terrible if you shut down
the power in the winter?
In 2009, after about two weeks
meeting with President Putin,
Prime Minster Tymoshenko negotiated a deal
that ended the gas cutoff.
[Reporter] The presidential elections
head for a pulsating climax.
In the orange corner
the current poor western prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko.
In the blue corner,
pro?Moscow opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich.
[Reporter] Manafort was remaking
Yanukovych's overall appearance and personality
as a politician to make him more palatable.
[Reporter] When he said no to a TV debate,
she went ahead with it anyway facing an empty podium.
[Reporter] Viktor Yanukovich claimed victory
in the Ukraine presidential election.
Once Viktor Yanukovich had become president
one of the things they were trying
to go after Tymoshenko for was, in fact,
that gas arrangement she had done.
[Reporter] She compared the case
to a Stalinist show trial.
[Reporter] All this was staged in advance
of the president's administration
to eliminate the opposition.
It may have been a bad deal but it certainly wasn't
the criminal action that the Ukrainian government
under Yanukovich charged her with.
[Reporter] A seven year prison term and an order
that she pay 200 million dollars in compensation.
[Reporter] From prison, Tymoshenko staged
a temporary hunger strike
saying she'd been beaten by guards
and needed immediate medical attention.
In a lawsuit that was filed
by the former prime minister of Ukraine,
there were some rather striking court documents
referring to Manafort's role,
and including his business relationships,
real estate deals with a Russian oligarch, Dmitry Firtash.
Paul Manafort was in business
with not one but two Russian oligarchs.
Dmitry Firtash, who was under indictment
by the U. S. Justice Department.
Another, Deripaska, who had been denied entry
into the United States
because of suspected organized crime ties.
Paul Manafort signed a contract with Oleg Derispaska
to promote the Kremlin and the Kremlin's interests.
Quoting Deripaska, Putin told him Manafort's our man.
Paul Manafort got his home in Trump Towers in 2006.
You can easily see billions of dollars being siphoned off
from that Ukraine Russian energy trade
and going through Firtash to Paul Manafort
and to Russians or Ukrainians who were buying condos
in Trump?branded properties.
Russia has three main tactics for engaging
in what we call active measures.
Propaganda, cyber?attacks.
Most people don't focus on a third pillar
of Russian active measures which is to recruit and enlist
and in some cases run agents of influence.
The Russians, with their
full?time intelligence operatives.
There's probably way over 1,000 of those
in the United States.
The FBI does its best to try
to monitor Russian intelligence officers
here in the United States but there are so many of them
and frankly the FBI's resources are so limited.
When I did cases I actually had to decide on which days
I wanted the FBI surveillance group to watch my target.
We had no idea.
They just seemed like a nice, quiet family.
If you look at either as Russian agents or as Russians
who work on disinformation there are more of them
than there are Russians in the armed forces.
So a thousand. (laughs)
These can be individuals who know
that they are spying for Russian intelligence.
Know that they are committing espionage.
Or can refer to some individuals who just aren't sure
exactly who they're dealing with.
Maybe it's bankers, maybe its financiers.
Maybe it's people on the periphery of government
doing something that the Russian government wants.
It seems that anybody who was anybody
in Russian organized crime who came to Manhattan
bought a condo unit in Trump tower.
There were gambling operations going on there
and prostitution operations.
These investigations were leading to Trump
over and over and over again.
Christopher Steele is a former MI6 specialist in Russia.
The U. S. investigator firm commissioned Mr. Steele
to look at Mr. Trump and Russia.
It was a very general assignment
and he found an extensive set of relations with Russia.
[Scott] He was generally held in very high regard.
Had a reputation of also for working with the FBI.
He helped the FBI make the FIFA cases.
[Reporter] Major corruption crackdown
going down right now.
Arrests made around the world.
[Reporter] This is the result
of a three year long FBI investigation.
He broke the case.
He gave them access to the key witnesses
that they used to get the pretty spectacular results
that they ultimately got.
Alexander Litvinenko, who's a former FSB agent.
When he sought asylum in London he started working for MI6.
His handler was Christopher Steele.
He was trying to expose that Vladimir Putin
was closely linked to Semion Mogilevich,
the crime boss of Russia.
Litvinenko was eventually poisoned by polonium
in a murder that was very directly linked to Russia.
So when Mr. Steele was hired to do oppo research
on Donald Trump he was very, very knowledgeable indeed.
The Steele Dossier was a set of reports
that Mr. Steele wrote.
All of its allegations fall into one of three categories.
Not yet proven, proven to be true, and have an error
that is consistent with transcription
or transliteration problems.
It was said to Mr. Steele's sources
that Russia had turned Mr. Trump for many, many years.
In the course of work on Russia matters,
I came to know Mr. Steele.
I work with people who I can trust.
Yes, I trusted Chris Steele.
I still trust Chris Steele.
Look at Putin what he's doing with,
I mean, you know, what's going on over there.
I mean, this guy has done,
whether you like him or don't like him
he's doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia.
And also rebuilding Russia period.
Putin seeks the veneer of democratic legitimacy
but there cannot be choice.
In the Russian constitution you cannot run
for a third term as president.
So what he did was to find a very close member
of his inner circle to agree to be president
while he could be prime minster.
He is someone who is obviously being installed by Putin
and it raises serious issues about how we're going
to deal with Russia going forward.
Putin faces what I call the King Lear problem.
You can't resign to a comfortable life
because of the things you've done when you were king.
But the constitutional forms were observed.
When Putin returned to the presidency,
by that point I think it was about
to the least surprising development that any of us
had seen in Russia in a long time.
I mean, you can imagine the conversation with Putin.
Vladimir.
You think you'd like to be president again?
I think I would. (audience laughs)
The election was clearly unfair and illegitimate.
I said that on behalf of the United States.
We just witnessed a flawed duma election in Russia
including efforts to halt the election monitoring.
And Russian voters deserve a full investigation
of electoral fraud and manipulation.
I wasn't the only person who thought that.
[Heather] He encountered the largest public demonstrations
of his tenure.
(shouting in foreign language)
[Man] They shouted Putin is a thief.
Which terrified him because of the Orange Revolution.
Because of the uprisings that took place
post collapse of the Soviet Union
in places that wanted more than just
a different form of autocracy.
If you look at the crowds of those
that were in the protest,
I'll bet ya nine out of 10 of them were under age 25.
They don't want that kind of a government.
They want to be like the Europeans.
And I think that Vladimir Putin has not seen
the last of these protests.
And then he attacked me and accused me
of inciting the demonstrations
that really were grassroots from the bottom up.
Putin blamed her very publicly.
Privately he did too, by the way.
She set the tone for some of the activists
inside our country.
Gave them a signal.
They heard this signal and started active work
in support of the U. S. State Department.
I suspect that Putin, like Stalin,
read every one else by his own measure.
And being a cynical person, understanding only power,
he probably assumed that we were equally cynical
and our protestations of support for democracy
were meaningless fluff.
So that he sees our actions in Russia
as designed to undermine him.
And he looks at all the democratic activists
as somehow somebody else's puppet.
Hillary Clinton is doing this or Condi Rice is doing this.
It's not that he believes everything
but there is a kind of a grounding in his KGB training
because, remember, during the Cold War
they would fund some firebrand in some country
to became allied with them and we would go in
and try to undercut that person and visa versa.
But a lot of it is just to keep people in Russia in line.
My experience with him was difficult and challenging
because I challenged him.
It's better not to argue with women.
But Mrs. Clinton has never been too graceful
in her statements.
When people push boundaries too far it's not because
they are strong but because they are weak.
But maybe weakness is not the right quality for a woman.
In meetings that I've had with him,
he is in a very calculated way trying to gain advantage,
looking at you with disdain and contempt.
The bored kid in school.
When the cameras are on he will criticize the United States.
When the cameras are gone,
he'll act like he's willing to talk to you.
He's into man spreading.
You know what that is, right.
Putin never really developed a working relationship
with secretary Clinton.
He became very upset about what she said in December, 2011
and was looking for revenge.
If you can use and capture elite in specific ways
you can accomplish your goals
without needing to get public support.
The recruiting tool was money.
You see just so much money flowing to Trump.
It's hard to imagine there's not more to it
than just simple generosity. (chuckles)
All his American banks cut their lines of credit.
Stopped doing business with him
and one bank steps into the breach as his lender of choice.
And that's Deutsche bank.
From the perspective of most western bankers
that was just seen as insane.
He's had a history
of making misleading statements to them.
Threatening them.
They call and he sues them.
He fails to pay the loan.
He publicly criticizes Deutsche Bank about all this.
But Deutsche bank sticks with him loyally throughout.
Not only that they also start making loans
to his son?in?law, Jared Kushner.
Deutsche Bank has been fined before
for participating in Russian money laundering.
[Reporter] The German bank says it's willing to pay
over 600 million dollars in fines for its connections
to alleged Russian money laundering.
When the scandal erupted that Deutsche Bank
about these money laundering operations,
the Deutsche bank CEO was fired.
He became the CEO of the bank of Cyprus.
One of the financial institutions
through which they launder money.
[Scott] Who hired him to be the CEO of the Bank of Cyprus?
Wilbur Ross, tight supporter of Donald Trump,
now his Secretary of Commerce.
The practice of overpaying significantly is something
that falls into the category of Russian methods.
[Scott] The man known
as the Russian potash king, Rybolovlev,
purchases a property for more than twice
what Trump had paid for it.
That's when our country was going through
a financial collapse that largely was caused
by the real estate market.
Did he overpay because Mr. Trump was such a great negotiator
or was there something else going on?
Never does anything with the property.
So the property transaction appears to be nothing more
than cover for infusing a cool 100 million dollars
into Trump's bank accounts.
This same Rybolovlev is also a principal owner
with Wilbur Ross of the bank of Cyprus.
In 2013 there was a bust at Trump Tower
of a massive gambling ring.
It was run by a gun named Taiwanchic.
He has been tied to the Russia crime boss Simeon Mogilevich.
29 people were indicted but Taiwanchic fled to Russia.
[Craig] Taiwanchic appeared again that year,
oddly enough, at the Miss Universe pageant
that Donald Trump was doing with Aras Agalarov.
[Michael] Billionaire oligarch who was known
actually as Putin's builder
because he had done massive construction projects
for the Kremlin and gotten a big award
personally delivered by Putin.
Donald Trump chose Moscow
as the place to have Miss Universe.
I think it would be important for us to understand
just who he met with while he was on that trip.
Whether he talked to Vladimir Putin.
There was a luncheon with
a lot of Russian business leaders in which Trump spoke
and the birthday party for Aras Agalarov.
[Scott] He even appears in the scion
of the Agalarov family music video.
You're fired. http://worldmkv.com/
Compromat.
It's essentially embarrassing information
that's going to put you under somebody else's thumb.
Use money, use sex, use whatever they can
to try to entrap people.
I mean, that's just a fact.
They don't mind blowing up their own bribery scheme
to blackmail an individual and now they've got that person.
There's purely rumors that on his trips to Moscow
that Trump was involved in various sex escapades
that may have compromised him.
[piers] If I can offer you a check for 10 billion dollars.
[Trump] Billion.
[Piers] But the deal is you can't have sex
for the next 10 years. Would that include my wife?
Sergei Million appears in connection with Trump's dealings
in Russia and certainly in connection with his hotel stays
and someone who would know an awful lot about what went on
during those visits with meetings
with prostitutes and so forth.
You know, I was in Moscow a couple of months ago.
I own the Miss Universe pageant.
And they treated me so great.
Putin even sent me a present.
Beautiful present with a beautiful note.
When you look at Steele's report information he gives,
one of those sources could be Million.
We don't know that for sure but the descriptions match.
He likes Russia because there's money to be made there.
He likes Russia because he likes beautiful Russian ladies.
But I hear that golden showers was not the end of it.
There was much more extreme sick stuff.
He was only there two days one night.
He was supposed to be there longer
but Billy Graham's 95th birthday party
was in Asheville, North Carolina.
Trump felt the need to go.
Why?
Because he's getting ready to run for president.
?Happy birthday to you ??
To be honest, the question was just asked
or was asked many times today at the Miss Universe contest.
They said would you run, and it's just too soon to say.
[Reporter] Do you have a relationship with Vladimir Putin,
a conversational relationship or anything that you feel
you have sway or influence over his government?
I do have a relationship and I can tell you
that he's very interested in what we're doing here today.
He's probably very interested
in what you and I are saying today
and I'm sure he's going to be seeing it in some form.
But I do have a relationship with him.
About Russia.
You were asked yesterday if you've ever spoken
to Vladimir Putin and you said I don't want to say.
Yeah, I have no comment on that.
No comment.
I was in Russia??
Well one of the things people like about you
is you answer any questions. Yeah, but.
Let's assume I did.
Perhaps it was personal or, you know, I don't want to,
I don't want to hurt his confidence.
He's done a very brilliant job in terms
of what he represents and who he's representing.
Viktor Yanukovich had been in talks
with the European Union about an association agreement
but then after a visit to Moscow and getting the message
that this was not going to be seen favorably,
Yanukovich came back and decided that
in fact he was not gonna pursue this agreement.
So this square in downtown Kiev,
protestors went there and began demanding that, in fact,
this agreement go into force,
instead of some alternative agreement with Russia.
They protest not just in favor of an agreement
with the European Union
but a protest against Viktor Yanukovich
and the way he was running things at the time.
About a week later the police went in
and broke up that camp.
In two hours shed more blood than had been shed
during the entire Orange Revolution back in 2004.
And at each turn,
Yanukovich became more and more repressive,
more and more bloodthirsty.
You had people shooting into the crowd.
In some cases directly shot to the head
where like snipers were shooting at them.
(guns firing)
Probably 100, you know, odd people killed.
He just infuriated and enraged his entire country.
[Reporter] Yanukovich defied calls for his resignation.
I am not going to leave Ukraine or go anywhere.
Yanukovich packed up in a car and left.
He fled the country and turned up in Russia.
And this is while Manafort is still advising him.
I don't think that Yanukovich was the pro?Putin person
that he's reputed to be and if you look at what??
[Charlie] Well, he went off.
He ended up in Moscow. Well, yeah.
[Reporter] The ousted president is wanted
for mass murder and on the run.
So you have the Ukrainian parliament.
What do we do?
[Reporter] Parliament voted
to free Yanukovych's arch nemesis,
opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko.
Today you have an open road to build Ukraine
the way you want.
That is why you must stay here until the person you trust
is elected in an honest way.
My sense is at that point the Russians panicked.
The Russians had lying in a safe somewhere
the plan how you take Crimea and they activated that plan.
Within a couple of days you saw people
who were very clearly professional soldiers.
They were wearing Russian style combat fatigues
but they had no identifying insignia.
The Ukrainians referred to these people as little green men.
[Richard] Which were in fact special operations forces
and intelligence operatives.
We thought this could be the beginning
of an outright full scale invasion of the country.
That's when the separatists shot down the Malaysian airliner
and killed over 100 Dutch passengers.
[Richard] Separatists initially boasted on Twitter
that they had taken it down.
The unforgivable sin was Putin lying about it.
Suggesting Ukrainians shot it down or CIA shot it down.
Throwing out a bunch of chafe which was an insult.
The European Union had had enough.
They joined us with strong sectoral sanctions.
And that surprised the Russians
and it hit the Russian economy hard
right at the time oil prices started to tank.
So they had a double whammy.
How do you respond
to the greatest geo strategic catastrophe
of the 20th century,
which was the collapse of the Soviet Union?
You try to preempt the collapse of the western system
in the 21st century.
If you can't destroy these structures militarily,
you will destroy them from within.
By actually creating fissures and exploiting them
such that it's the electorate is so divided
that you don't trust the government anymore.
The foundations of geopolitics
is a guiding principle for Russia.
It's something that their militaries
and intelligence services have relied upon
and applied throughout their campaigns.
Russia has helped unite an alternative right movement.
You have certain voices in the media.
Info Wars, for example, Breitbart to capitalize
on these divisions.
And then further encourage them for their own personal gain.
I'd like to punch him in the face, I'll tell ya.
Knock the crap out of him, would you, seriously.
That guy looked like an NFL football player.
Now, they took him out.
And I'll tell you what.
It was really amazing to watch.
Bye.
Go home to mommy.
But if we get a little bit rough in taking them out,
oh, we're terrible people.
It's one of the many reasons our country's going to hell.
Certainly this is all in the interest
of at least one country.
To see this otherwise rather brazen candidate
turn into such a sycophant when the name of Putin
ever came up rang a very discordant bell.
Putin has done an amazing job
of showing leadership whether it's a noble or cause or not.
Let's not discuss that.
He is now the world leader.
I respect Putin.
He's a strong leader, I can tell you that.
Unlike what we have.
We have a pathetic leader.
I think in terms of leadership, he's getting an A.
As far as an individual
who poses a threat to the world literally.
A person who has no moral standards
that I've been able to detect.
F is not low enough.
He was certainly very vocal about Russia,
wanting a better relationship.
Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing, frankly,
if we actually got along with Russia?
Who's against getting along with people
but that's not a policy.
More noticeable perhaps is the absence of any criticism.
The fact is that, you know,
he hasn't been convicted of anything.
Some of the things he was saying
was actually talking points that sounded very similar
to what the Russian media will put out there.
[Reporter] The fact that Ukraine
has not published radar data
leads us to the conjecture the missiles,
if it was a buk, was launched from territory
under the control of the Ukrainian military.
If it was a Russian made buk missile that took down
that plane would you hold Putin and Russia accountable?
Would there be sanctions?
Well, you know, they say it wasn't them.
It may have been their weapon but they didn't use it.
They didn't fire it.
They even said the other side fired it to blame them.
He never provided his original birth certificate.
What he provided was a photoshopped computer image
of something that was issued only in 2007.
A certificate of live birth is not even signed by anybody.
I saw his.
I read it very carefully.
They're voting for peace on planet earth
if they vote for Trump.
But if they vote for Hillary, it's war.
Now Hillary Clinton wants to confront nuclear?armed Russia
that could very well lead us into World War III.
Mr. McCain was taken prisoner in Vietnam
and was put not just in jail but in a pit.
He sat there for several years.
Anyone would go nuts after that.
He's a war hero 'cause he was captured.
I like people that weren't captured, okay,
I hate to tell you.
Donald Trump delivered a major foreign policy speech
at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on April 27.
The center for the national interest,
this American Think Tank,
which has very close ties to the Kremlin.
This Think Tank played a leading role
in drafting Donald Trump's speech
and that speech was full of Russian propaganda.
We can upgrade NATO's outdated mission
and structure grown out of the Cold War.
I am skeptical of international unions.
The U. S. must be prepared
to let these countries defend themselves.
Some say the Russians won't be reasonable.
I intend to find out.
When Paul Manafort became the actual head of the campaign
all of a sudden I had a pop up window
come on my computer saying that Yahoo believed
that I was part of an attempt of state sponsored actors.
So I was being targeted.
That was the first time.
There was a Russian campaign to interfere
in American elections through hacking.
That information appeared in the dossier
before it was publicly reported anywhere else, anywhere.
You saw active measures
in elections across eastern Europe.
No one really thought that that would happen
in the U. S. base until it did.
I was surprised as everyone was but looking back on it
with benefit of hindsight, obviously,
we should have probably known
that something like that was going to happen.
Russia is 1.6% of the world economy.
They're so small but they have, they're so centralized.
And when state concentrates these resources
on wanting something then it works.
Russia did a wide range of hacks.
Started I would guess around August, September of 2015,
extended all the way through the spring
and into the summer of 2016.
We're talking about thousands of Americans that were hit.
They were going after anybody and everybody they could.
Their targets include media personalities, politicians,
government officials, current and former.
Anybody that they could gain what is ultimately information
or compromat that they could use.
That is the nuclear fuel
that powers the influence operation in '16.
A couple of my co?workers who had access
to my personal email used to manage the volume.
One of them saw a phishing attempt
from a Google source through some mistake of communication.
One of our cyber security experts in the campaign suggested
to my assistant that they change their email account.
So she clicked on the link and my private email cache
was, you know, was exfiltrated.
People were seeing this dangerous troubling activity
coming from the Russians that was actually
in our electoral system.
Government officials learned that they're
actually going into state voter databases.
There may have been 26 different states
where there were efforts made to penetrate.
That's disturbing.
The key to flip an election without leaving a trace
is the voter rolls.
It would only take a small digital switch
to make that happen.
This really spooked officials in the White House
and that's the moment I think that the enormity
of the Russian influence campaign
really started to hit home.
The fact that there was that attack
on the fundamental, the absolute fundamental
free and fair election should have alarmed all of us.
The Russians didn't care if we found out.
This is pretty new.
They stole the data.
Let's be clear about it.
I don't like this word hacking.
This is theft.
If the Russians walked into my house and took something out,
this is exactly the same thing.
And I think the problem that a lot of Americans have with it
is they don't see it, they don't think of it that way.
The goal was plausible deniability.
And you hear that even in Vladimir Putin's statements.
If they are patriotic,
they contribute in a way they think is right.
To fight against those who say bad things about Russia.
If there were people in the Trump Campaign
who colluded in any of that,
those people are at serious criminal risk
because there were serious crimes people committed in 2016
to influence the U. S. elections.
Once it looked like Trump
was gonna be the clear nominee, the Agalarovs resurfaced
and they said we are obviously supportive
of the Trump Campaign but more importantly,
we are doing so with the blessing of the Russian government
and with the Russian government involved.
And they promised there would be the delivery
of information that would damage Hillary Clinton's campaign.
[Man] This is information
the Russian government has collected.
Donald Trump, Jr. emailed back, great, I love it.
Here we see what appears to be evidence of collusion.
[Michael] Donald Trump, Jr. forwarded the emails
to Paul Manafort, then the campaign manager,
and Jared Kushner.
They both sat in on the meeting.
Conspiracies are very easy to enter into.
If indeed there was just a tacit agreement
furthering that conspiracy, boy, they're in.
And they're on the wrong side of the law.
Trump being pressed early on in the campion
for a list of his foreign policy advisors.
The second name he mentions is Carter Page, PhD.
No one had heard of Carter Page.
He had worked for Merrill Lynch in Moscow.
[Michael] He had been an investor in Gazprom
and a quite vocal defender of the Putin government.
A critic of sanctions.
Carter Page traveled over to Moscow
with permission of the Trump campaign
as a senior advisor to Donald Trump.
Washington and other western capitals
have impeded potential progress
through their often hypocritical focus on ideas
such as democratization, inequality,
corruption, and regime change.
[Craig] The Steele Dossier alleges that Carter Page
met with Igor Sechin who is head of Rozneft,
the enormous Russian oil company.
Sechin happens to be very, very close to Vladimir Putin.
[Scott] Sechin was his closest friend
in the intelligence services.
They came up with a scheme
by which sanctions would be lifted on Russia.
In return, when parts of Rozneft were sold off,
a huge portion of it, I believe was 19% of it,
would be diverted.
This could have been another way
to funnel enormous cash resources
to Donald Trump or his family.
America's European allies were picking up things
involving interaction between the figures associated
with the Trump Campaign and Russian agents of influence
that they were very disturbed about.
When the administration asked for a bipartisan statement
saying that Russians were active
and they were trying to interfere with the election
they were blocked by Republican leadership.
When I was working in the House of Representatives,
especially as the Policy Director for the House Republicans,
I was part of many discussions.
One of them was on June 15.
One of the leaders speculated that Trump
had a compromising relationship with Putin,
a very serious allegation to make
but it was one that everyone was thinking.
The leaders were afraid to stand up to Donald Trump
for fear of being attacked by his Russian troll army.
[Michael] By the time of the convention,
it was beginning to look
like there was a really serious Russian effort.
She is above the law.
[Michael] Michael Flynn had become
a top national security advisor to Trump.
Lock her up.
What concerns me again
from a counter intelligence perspective
is the pattern that Flynn has established.
Flynn goes to Moscow and sits next to Vladimir Putin
in a lavish RT s ponsored event.
Just like in the United States,
you don't get to sit next to the president
of the United States without any planning.
He takes money from the Russians, from RT,
which is nothing more than a propaganda arm of the Kremlin.
Then says he didn't take any money.
[Reporter] Were you paid for that amount?
You have to ask my, the folks that went over there to??
I'm asking you.
You'd know if you were paid.
I didn't take any money from Russia
if that's what you're asking me.
Well then who paid you?
My Speaker's Bureau.
The Speakers Bureau is merely the pass through
for the organization that's paying for the speech.
Flynn had given the same answer
when he was trying to get his security clearance.
At that convention, the Republican party did something
that they almost have never done before
which was take out of their platform,
language that was standing up for Ukraine
and standing against Russia.
I was confident that was gonna be
a part of our party platform.
It was before.
All of a sudden somewhere it disappeared.
J. D. Gordon, his account is that it was
at the request of the Trump Campaign.
And I think that's part of this whole scandal
that needs to be resolved.
Why would the Republican party remove
a provision that would help people who had been invaded
and slaughtered defend themselves?
Interesting.
When we went into the convention,
we had to contend with that first drop of emails.
Just that the DNC employee?? It's Russia.
Adverse.
They were in communication or in touch
with Julian Assange at Wikileaks.
And then they published that data in a way
to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.
When Wikileaks was originally founded
I don't think it had the intention of influencing
the 2016 American election but was it the goal
after Assange announced that he wanted to harm Hillary.
You bet.
I mean, he said so.
From that standpoint, it was a match made in heaven.
[John] They were actively in the systems of Democratic
and as we now know Republicans as well.
We'll publish the embarrassing material
from the hack into the DNC.
We won't publish the embarrassing material in the RNC.
There were more damaging ones on Manafort
that they could have dropped.
They didn't.
It really exposed a lot of personal contact information.
So many staff were getting harassment calls for weeks.
As we learned more first about the DNC,
he basically invited them to try to, you know, hack into me.
He blurts things out that sound to me
as a prosecutor almost like an effort to confess.
Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able
to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.
If you were in fact conspiring with Russia
and encouraging them to help your campaign
and signaling them as to what you wanted them to do...
I think you will probably
be rewarded mightily by our press.
There's a pretty good suggestion right there
but in this case made in plain view in open daylight
at high noon, it's a little odd.
Campaign was over.
Bernie had lost.
I was assisting in helping with
a number of Facebook pages here in California.
I started to see strange people appearing.
Their posts were coming from American sounding websites
but when I peeled away the layers,
eastern Europe became a common theme.
They were propaganda pieces.
Not a single one of them true.
All viciously anti?Hillary.
This isn't just one Sanders page.
It's Latinos for Sanders, Pennsylvania,
Wisconsin, Michigan for Sanders.
It kept on going.
While we were focusing on the positive of social media
and information technology, Russia was looking at how
to use that as an instrument
and they have been incredibly effective.
Cyber with social media, with things like RT.
They can reach out to western publics in a way
that they couldn't do 35, 40 years ago.
Some of their predecessors would be really envious
of the techniques that they have now.
How the Russian state does influence operations online
is pretty complex.
On the one hand you have real people, trolls.
A bigger part is actually digital disinformation.
Making user accounts that are algorithms.
This is the evolution of artificial intelligence online.
Russians figured out how you game Google.
If you have enough bots to drive it
to the top of the Google suggestion list.
Any wedge that's there,
they're gonna test that audience out.
And when they find success then they exploit it.
They double down on it.
You might see them show up
around Black Lives Matter protests.
And in the counter protest movement.
Any anti?government or white supremacist group.
Nationalists, non?globalists.
Anti?EU, anti?NATO, anti?immigration.
Promoting the far right, promoting the far left,
so that our politics become more polarized,
then Putin can feed lies to either side
because they hate each other so much.
If we're divided as Americans
then it's harder for us to stand up to that influence.
They know that in the west there's a tendency
towards positivism, there's a tendency towards,
well, I don't know.
That's a story that's out there.
We just can't discredit it.
We have to.
Maybe the media is right.
The Russians know that we do this a s westerners.
They see it coming and they take it to the bank
every single time.
The westerners are lazy.
I mean, they don't do research.
Russians have already done everything for them
and they know how to pack it and how to feed it to them.
Russia wins the audience first
and then directs them somewhere.
It's very different from American approaches.
Americans are impatient.
You just create pictures, you create bios
that look like accounts that are from these locations
because people are more likely to take in information
from people that look like them and talk like them.
Follow everybody that's in that community.
You retweet what they say.
Lowering the guard of that audience
so they would accept Russian information or Russian views.
Over time you can insert in the content you want.
[Reporter] In this office building in St. Petersburg,
an army of trolls.
They were even caught on camera
secretly filmed by a former employee.
The U. S. elections are the key issue
for the Kremlin and of course Russia has invested
a lot of effort into them.
It's so sophisticated and adapted
for the tastes of internet users
that it's almost impossible to recognize.
You have serious quotas.
So in an hour you have to produce 20 tweets, 30 comments
on these websites.
So, it's actually like a work environment for these people.
[Reporter] 12 hours a day praising the Kremlin,
berating its enemies.
I myself have a number of Russian trolls.
I know whenever I refer to the illegal annexation of Crimea
I get, you know, quite a bit of criticism.
An interview like this,
once it goes out on the internet,
I'll receive some sort of trolling
very specifically around it.
The goal is essentially to get you to shut up.
And to not be a challenger.
They'll threaten lawsuits, for example,
because they know nothing effects an American
like the threat of a lawsuit.
If you're operating in Europe, the closer you get to Moscow,
the more your physical life is actually in danger.
(gun firing)
They can try and break into your bank accounts,
attack you financially,
and if they can't get to you personally
they'll target your family.
They create false stories,
seed it out there to try and destroy your reputation.
You plant an idea, a fake story, a lie.
It will take on a life of its own
and you don't have to do the propaganda.
The audience will do it for you.
Seth Rich was a campaign worker for Hillary Clinton.
He turned up dead.
The Seth Rich story was that he was the one
who stole the Democratic Committee emails.
There's no evidence to support that.
Today is, it's an unsolved murder
but it's propagated both by the alternative right
but also by groups like Wikileaks.
Even to the point where you have Russian ambassador
show up and say I think there might be something
into this Seth Rich story.
That doubt that's there really covers your hand
over the longer term.
And sometimes the most outrageous
are the ones that you think that you don't want to dignify
with a response to but that I've subsequently learned
that's a kind of dangerous proposition.
John Podesta says let's go over to the pizza place
and all of a sudden it's a story
about child trafficking ring in the basement
which doesn't exist in the pizza place.
Resulted in a person who had been reading this stuff
deciding that he would deputize himself to come up here
with a gun, firing that weapon in the pizza parlor.
But it just sort of never ends.
2013 they were starting to learn the power
of this influence.
In 2014 they were doing capability development.
'15 was winning audiences so that in 2016
you could actually go after the U. S. election.
The primary message would be one,
Hillary Clinton cannot become president.
Second one is Trump is the man to mend fences with Russia
and he's a great leader and a nationalist much like Putin.
The third one was Bernie Sanders got a raw deal
that you shouldn't even come out to the polls.
The Russians in line with right wing radical media
were creating false stories to generate fear
and in story after story after story.
[George] Secretary Clinton had a serious disease.
[Man] Multiple sclerosis.
[Woman] Hillary's gonna cause nuclear war.
[Man] Murderer of 30 people.
[Man] Funding Isis, smuggling drugs.
Untrustworthy. Pedophilia.
[Woman] Crooked.
Hillary Clinton is the she devil.
Totally creepy falsehood.
Sometimes we found in the United States
our greatest strength, free speech, open societies,
a democracy can also be one of our greatest vulnerabilities.
I don't think we were fully aware of the impact,
the effects that it was having.
So much of it seemed surreal, ridiculous.
By utilizing our openness, they exploited us.
If people that I knew personally
to be thinking thoughtful people,
if they were sharing the propaganda, who else was sharing?
Everyone falls for fake news.
I've fallen for fake news.
Over the last 75 days, the top 20
demonstrably fake stories,
got more Facebook likes and shares
than the top 20 campaign stories from mainstream media.
It laid the groundwork for Sanders supporters
to say I've had it.
They actually have won over a segment
of the U. S. audience like Russia's never won over before.
A white nationalists rally
in Charlottesville, Virginia, where they chanted.
Recent polling indicates that 49% of Republican voters,
I'm sad to say, believe that,
that Putin and that Russia are either
an ally or a friendly nation.
The question is who helped guide the decisions
that the Russians were making,
what ads they may have bought.
What kinds of fake news
they thought would be most effective.
If you know the personality
of the people you're targeting,
you can nuance your messaging to resonate more effectively
with those key audience groups.
This information is quite helpful to a campaign manager.
Cambridge Analytica popped up
growing out of an experiment, behavioral science experiment
at Cambridge University to see whether they could
analyze large numbers of people using Facebook
because people are spilling their feelings to their friends,
hundreds of millions of people in their pool.
We have somewhere close to
four or five thousand data points on every adult
in the United States.
We can see where these people are on the map.
They were able to take that to micro segment.
You belong to a group of 12 like?minded people
exactly like you who are interested
in the same things around the country.
These are people who are definitely going
to vote but they need moving from the center
a little bit more towards the right.
You're not supposed to go into Facebook
and harvest that kind of information.
Cambridge Analytica got its Facebook data
in a sort of quasi?legal way.
We can look at what issue they care about.
Gun rights I've selected.
That narrows the field slightly more and now we know
that we need a message on gun rights.
It needs to be a persuasion message
and it needs to be nuanced
according to the certain personality
that we're interested in.
They were very involved in the Brexit vote.
We saw the Russian bot armies, the trolls,
have a very pro Brexit message.
There have been allegations that Cambridge Analytica
supported it through a small office above a pizza shop,
which is not exactly the kind of place you think
would be the center for international intrigue
unless it was just a cutout
for somebody much more consequential behind it.
[Craig] Cambridge Analytics is owned by SCL.
A larger and much more sinister global election
tampering operation using big data and technology.
SCL is in turn owned by shell companies
that you can trace back to Dmitry Firtash
who again is tied to Mogilevich.
That would complete the entire string
and show crime boss and Mogilevich involved
starting out with pure and simple money laundering in 1984
with Trump properties going forward more than 32 years
to the election in which this data mining firm
Cambridge Analytica is playing a very, very big role
in the Trump campaign and helping him win.
Of the two candidates left in this election,
one of them is using these technologies
and it's gonna be very interesting to see
how they impact the next several weeks.
Thank you.
[Nina] One of the big investors in Cambridge Analytica
is Robert Mercer.
He's a hedge fund billionaire.
Cyber scientists on the outside noticed this server
that was configured in a very unusual way
that was a direct link essentially from a Russian bank,
Alfa bank, and Trump Tower.
[Man] That would obviously explain
a major path of communications.
Trump Tower.
They seemed to have premonitions of things
that were gonna happen that in fact did happen.
Roger Stone in August saying it would be my turn
at the barrel while he simultaneously
involved with Wikileaks.
I actually have communicated with Assange.
I believe the next crunch of documents
pertain to the Clinton Foundation
but there's no telling what the October surprise may be.
October 7, 2016, three major things happened.
The Department of Homeland Security
and the Director of National Intelligence
made a public statement and said the government hacking
during the 2016 election was none other
than the Russian Federation and that this decision
could have only been made by Vladimir Putin.
On the same day the Access Hollywood tapes were revealed.
Those two things.
A third thing happened.
John Podesta's emails were released.
Wikileaks posted more than 2,000 additional emails
from Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta.
I never heard from the FBI
until two days after my emails started getting released.
They said you may not be aware of this
but your emails have been hacked.
I said, yes, I've been watching it for 48 hours
on every cable story, you know, in the country.
That was actually the last time I talked to the FBI.
There was a lot more that was coming out
that we were aware of that we couldn't get the press
to pay any attention to.
I tried in my speeches and then culminating
in the third debate.
Look, from everything I see
has no respect for this person.
Well, that's because he'd rather
have a puppet as president. No puppet.
United States and it's pretty clear.
You're the puppet.
It's pretty clear you won't admit??
[Donald] No you won't??
? That the Russians have engaged
in cyber?attacks against the United States of America.
That you encouraged espionage against our people.
That you are willing to spout the Putin line,
sign up for his wish list, break up NATO,
do whatever he wants to do.
We went into election day believing that we had
a lead in the popular vote which proved to be true.
Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,
we felt like we had a lead in all those states
and that proved to be not true
so he won by a combined total in those three states
of 70,000 votes and gave him the presidency.
Sorry to keep you waiting.
Complicated business.
During the transition,
Jared Kushner met with a sanctioned Russian bank.
Gorkov, the head of that bank,
got his training not in the banker's academy.
He's a trained KGB agent.
And its offices all around the world
are always understood to be providing cover
for Russian intelligence operations.
What did you really speak to Jared Kushner about
in New York when you met him in December? http://worldmkv.com/
[Reporter] The Russian bank said they talked business.
White House says they talked future U. S./Russia relations.
If he was doing this for business purposes
it would be a violation of the law.
If he was doing this for political purposes
there are serious questions about whether he
or anyone on the campaign were working with Russians
during the interference campaign.
The crown jewel for any intelligence agency
is to recruit an asset inside
your adversary's intelligence agency
because that person can of course report
on intelligence operations against your own country.
For Donald Trump to put Michael Flynn
in the role of National Security Advisor
shows that they were extremely incompetent
in their vetting of an individual who was working
as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of Turkey.
Who had extensive ties to a foreign adversary in Russia
and wasn't disclosing those ties or that was one
of his highest qualifications and Donald Trump liked that.
I was invited to take my old job as CIA director back.
And I learned that I would have had to report
to the president through Mike Flynn.
They pressed me to go to a particular meeting
where there were several Turks present
and it was clear they were thinking seriously
about taking him into custody Gulan in Western Pennsylvania
which would have been completely illegal under American law.
I told them that and left.
I decided I did not want to report through Mike
and so I turned down the offer.
President?elect Donald Trump
sent out an email announcing his pick
for Secretary of State.
Exxon Mobil chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson,
despite concerns over his close ties to Russia.
I mean, this is a guy who was given
a friendship award by Vladimir Putin.
I have a very close relationship with him
which dates back almost 15 years now.
I believe that Rex Tillerson was chosen by Donald Trump
for primarily one reason.
He would not stand in the way of Donald Trump's
prevailing policy interests which is to align
the United States with Vladimir Putin's regime.
And I think that's exactly what he's done.
He's facilitated it.
Putin and Rex Tillerson had been trying to put together
a 500 billion dollar Arctic Exploration deal.
Exxon Mobil has won a highly coveted contract
with Russia's Rozneft.
You know, my philosophy is to make money.
And so if I can drill and make money
then that's what I want to do.
But it had been put on hold by the Obama Administration
when the sanctions were imposed.
One of the fascinating things in that dossier,
Steele sources told him that Rozneft,
big Russian oil company owned by the state,
that 19% of it was gonna be sold off.
And that there'd be money for people who were able to get.
U.S. sanctions removed.
Well, sure enough in December that percentage of Rozneft
was sold off in a method by which involved Shell companies
in the Grand Caymans which are nontransparent
so which you can't penetrate.
Only someone in the highest echelons
of Rozneft would have access to that information.
And obviously somebody talking to Chris Steele
knew a lot about it many months before it happened.
The Russian hand in these influence efforts,
ultimately they'll try and hide it
and they do it with two methods,
putting them in jail or killing people off.
(gun firing)
Arrests in which people were dragged out
had black bags put over their heads.
Charged for treason.
These people may have been Chris Steele sources
or Russian intelligence may have suspected that they were.
The day after Christmas, General Oleg Erovenkin,
who was the Chief of Staff of Rozneft was assassinated
in the back of a car in the center of Moscow.
[Clint] The head of RT English mysterious death
in Washington, D. C.
A Russian diplomat stationed here in New York City
had actually died on election day.
You've got obvious interests on the part of the Russians.
And of course on the other side of the equation
you have all of these contacts going back to Russia,
whether it's Roger Stone, whether it's Flynn.
Whether it's any of these folks,
there is simply way too much smoke
for there to be absolutely no fire whatsoever.
(light intense music)
That I forget how many tentacles this has. (laughs)
It's just sort of anyone of these is a massive story.
It's unrealistic to think it's limited to what we know now.
Rather than look at this as one isolated money laundering
after another or one criminal appearing after another.
I think it's much more than that
and what you have is probably
the biggest intelligence breach in the history of the world.
So to be clear Mr. Trump has no financial relationships
with any Russian oligarchs?
That that's what he said.
I didn't.
That's what I said.
That's obviously what our position is.
Do you solemnly swear.
The office of President of the United States.
(intense somber music)
The president is, I believe, a puppet of Vladimir Putin.
That is the mere challenge that we face as Americans.
He has tried to deliver for Russia.
He wanted to take off sanctions immediately.
I was in the administration for the first five weeks
of Trump where, among other things,
I was responsible for the Russia sanctions.
And I'm one of the people who was worried
that the Trump Administration would suddenly
lift the sanctions unilaterally.
And I stand by it now.
You don't have to have been a lawyer.
You don't have to have been in a cover?up
to see when somebody is acting like they're covering up.
This man is clearly inconspicuously doing so.
I don't know how a president can handle this situation
worse than President Trump is now.
His actions at the G20,
his talk of maybe getting a cyber partnership.
You don't go to somebody who just punched you in the face
and then offer them a favor.
Trump has to have known he was compromised.
He's got to know the eyes of the world are on him.
And suddenly all these forces will be out to expose him.
I cannot imagine living with that every day, you know.
The Trump campaign's biggest potential exposure
is gonna be in their financial dealings.
It's very hard to cover up money trails.
The other one is obstruction of justice.
Collusion is a media shorthand
for could be aiding and abetting.
Conspiracy.
It could be aid and comfort which is treason.
The Russia story is a total fabrication.
What the prosecutors should be looking at
are Hillary Clinton's 33,000 deleted emails.
Lock her up!
(crowd yelling)
Lock her up!
It is ongoing.
The Russians efforts here are continuing as we speak.
We've done zero.
Absolutely nothing to protect us
from a future cyber?attack with respect to any election.
Zero.
We haven't done anything.
As long as people can do things without penalty
they're going to continue to do them.
We all have a stake because it may have been
the Democrats and me this time.
It can be the Republicans and their candidate next time.
Every single national security official we've talked to
has said they're coming back.
We have to be ready for that.
And if the people don't demand that.
If they don't demand that our sovereignty
needs to be defended, our representatives in Congress
are gonna kind of look the other way and move on.
What's at stake is truth.
What's at stake is government that's accountable to us.
And the cause of liberty
at the most profound level possible.
We owe it to the people who have fought for
and sacrificed for this democracy
and to be guardians of it and make sure
that we always have free and fair elections.
(ominous music) http://worldmkv.com/
(upbeat electro music)