My name is Bill Burns, and I'm the President of the Carnegie Endowment. I'm very pleased to welcome all of you today to our launch of our new Global Russia project. Our objective is to bring together Carnegie's global network to take a fresh, sober look at the why and the how of Russia's increasingly assertive foreign policy and the implications for us here in Washington and around the world. As all of you know very well, this is not an academic issue. Every single day, with every new indictment, hearing, and news headline, we're reminded of the ongoing brazen Russian meddling in our democracy and the domestic divisions the Kremlin seeks to highlight and exploit. And every single day, from Kyiv to Caracas, we see Russia playing its hand in ways few of us could have imagined even a decade ago. Like many things in Washington, the reaction to Putin's Russia can be erratic, with some people sharply but episodically focused, and others retreating behind glib denial of inconvenient truths. We will not cure that particular syndrome, nor will we weigh in on the political drama unfolding in Washington. What we will do, and what we think is really important to do, is to help policymakers here and in capitals around the world develop a more sophisticated understanding of Russia's aims and objectives and in turn, a more nuanced and effective policy response. That is far easier said than done. I learned that the hard way. I served twice over the course of my own checkered career as a diplomat in Russia. That was a long exercise in humility, not only about what's possible in the bilateral relationship, but also about my powers of prediction about Russian behavior. But I think it's a pretty safe bet that Vladimir Putin will be re-elected President of Russia in a couple of weeks. As Putin's speech earlier today makes clear, I think it's a pretty safe bet that Russia's foreign policy will continue to be a combustible combination of grievance and insecurity and ambition. And I think it's a pretty safe bet that our challenge will be to manage a largely adversarial relationship. It's not that Russia is 10 feet tall. In many ways it is handicapped by a one-dimensional economy over dependence on hydrocarbons and demographic realities. But in Vladimir Putin, you see a leader who has been agile tactically, who's been willing to play rough, and who tends to see a target-rich environment around him. By trying to fill geopolitical vacuums, whether in the Middle East, in parts of Asia and Africa and even Latin America, the Kremlin is asserting itself as a player that cannot be ignored in an expanding array of regions and countries. And by exploiting Western divisions in the process, it threatens the rules-based international system we've worked hard to cultivate for over 70 years. So the stakes are real, and they demand the very best from all of us. That is why we're so fortunate to have Senator Mark Warner here this morning. Senator Warner has called the Russia investigation he is leading the most serious undertaking of his public life. An extraordinary career from the governor's mansion in Richmond to the U.S. Senate. Indeed, no one knows more about Russia's meddling in the 2016 elections. No one has worked harder to study the strategy and tactics behind that operation and the broader implications at home and abroad. No one has demonstrated greater sense of purpose, greater political courage, or greater commitment to sustaining the bipartisan foundations of our foreign policy in these hyperpartisan times. And all of us owe him and Senator Burr, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a debt of gratitude for their leadership at this moment of testing. Following the senators from Mark's, we'll move directly to our terrific panel, so please do remain seated. But for now, I just want to congratulate my colleagues for putting together this timely and important endeavor to thank all of you for joining us and to ask that you join me in giving Senator Warner a very warm welcome. Thank you all. Well, thank you, Bill. Thank you for that very kind introduction. It is great to see everyone here this morning. We'll call a number of times in the last few weeks or few months that people have been kind enough to come up and say, you know, to either me or to Richard Burr, gosh, you guys, it's so... We're so happy that you're the adults in the room. I think what a low bar we've struck to. Again, thank you, Bill, for that introduction. And boy, oh boy, while we could use your steady hand at the State Department these days more than ever, I'm so glad that you're still engaged in the fight here and through this great platform you have at Carnegie. You've always been a clear and strategic thinker, and on behalf of all of us who continue to serve in the day job, thank you for what you're doing. And as Bill mentioned, timely time to have this kind of presentation and the good work that Carnegie's doing. I'm going to acknowledge my age and you can put on my glasses, but the speech that Mr. Putin made yesterday or earlier today indicates that his current status quo approach of being extremely aggressive and bellicose on a series of fronts is not going to disappear. So again, my initial kudos to Carnegie for their informative work on trying to decipher this extraordinarily complex U.S.-Russia relationship. Because again, this is not a news flash. Too often, those of us who are caught up in the day-to-day who's up, who's down in Washington, we're all caught up in the latest news cycle. And I'm concerned that we can miss, by this failure to step back, how all these events actually form a context and are basically presenting themselves. And what I believe is an alarming picture of the cut, in a sense, the new Russia and how it's emerging as a threat to both the United States and our allies. So the chance for me to come here today and take a step back and to try to sort through some of the strategic and policy implications for our national security is very important. So again, I thank you for that opportunity. If we just think about, for a moment, even the terminology, let me go down some of the litany, bots, paid trolls, cook farms, little green men, distributed denial of service. In the last couple of years, national security leaders have been forced to learn a whole new language in terms of dealing with 21st century threats. Our long-standing rival Russia has clearly reimagined in the world and with a new playbook to exploit our very openness in our society to divide us from within and cut us off from our allies. Since some commentaries, commentators, have tried to define this as a new phase of the Cold War. But what we're experiencing now, to me, doesn't resemble the Cold War that I recall growing up with. Back then, we had a clear sense of who our adversary was. And I think Americans clearly across the board understood that threat. It even had a physical form, the Berlin Wall, which divided East from West, capitalism from communism, freedom from oppression. We all know who the bad guys were, where they stood. And our national security, because of those clear divisions, strategically emanated from that. Today's conflict, I believe, is much more amorphous. In addition to the traditional tools of the Cold War, Mr. Putin has at his disposal a wide array of non-conventional weapons and tools, tools like cyber attacks, energy deals, hacking, selective leaking, and a bot army to sow and spread this disinformation. These tools are all designed to help Russia undermine its enemies in the West. But they're often deployed, and this is, again, one of the distinctions between the phase of conflict we are in now versus the traditional Cold War. Many of these tools are actually deployed by non-state surrogates, thereby giving Russia the ability to claim deniability when their hand or their agents are caught taking some of these actions. The bottom line, I believe, rather than a framework of an old Cold War, I believe we're now engaged in a fight in the shadows. And I'm not sure that's a fight that we're currently winning. So, again, let me take a moment to at least give my perspective on how we got here and what we need to do on a going forward basis. After the Berlin Wall fell, the United States reached out to the so-called New Russia under then President Yeltsin and attempted to bring it in to the Western community of nations. We perhaps, and perhaps naively, assumed that Russia's eventual integration into institutions like the G7 and the EU was both natural and inevitable. Many of us imagined that after the failure of communism, the allure and success of Western free market democracy would almost automatically spread eastward. At the same time, we watched Russia's conventional military atrophy and its economy stagnate. And, frankly, I think across most of the foreign policy establishment, we assumed that the Russia threat had was greatly reduced. Basing these changed times, we in effect declared the Cold War was over and that we had won. We turned our focus from superpower rivalry to counter terrorism. Obviously the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the challenges emanating from failed states.  This was a logical and understandable transformation given the 9-11 attack and other threats to our security emanating from the increasing number of failed states around the world. However, there was a cost to these decisions and we took our eyes off the re-emerging threat posed by Russia. What we did not imagine at the time, and perhaps we should have, was the resentment that many Russians felt at the economic uncertainties of the new free market. The chaos and inflation that wiped out many Russians' permanent savings. We failed to recognize and I think adequately predict the corruption of a small growing clique of oligarchs. And I think we failed to understand the kind of psychic hit that most Russians felt with the loss of the superpower status that the Soviet Union had. These feelings led directly into ordinary Russians' desire for stability. And frankly, their disenchantment with that very short-term Russian experiment with real democracy. All this ultimately led to a further enhancement and entrenchment of President Putin's power. Meanwhile, as we saw in yesterday's speech and as we've seen throughout his comments over the last few years, Putin continued to nurse a grudge against the West. He called the demise of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. He used his growing control of television, film, and other organs of propaganda as a way to stoke popular discontent and to further encourage ordinary Russians' disillusionment. Putin relied on these powers to boost his standing with the Russian public in a sense to replace the old notion of a Russian-led communism-based philosophy with a whole new sense of 21st century Russian nationalism. And with that backing of the vast majority of his public, he began an ambitious program of rearmament, all with the aim, I believe, of challenging the United States and our allies. So while our days shifted away from Russia, which we began to kind of write off and at a certain level dismiss as simply a regional power, Russia really never lost its focus on us. Its geostrategic aim remains squarely targeted on the Western liberal order and more specifically on what its KGB-trained leadership views as the main enemy of the United States. So Russia diligently honed and updated its toolkit for a different kind of great power rivalry. They couldn't match us in the old Cold War paradigm. So Russia needed a strategy that would allow them to compete with us on a new emerging battlefield. Russia's Chief General Staff, General Valerie Garamazov, gave Putin exactly what he needed. General Garamazov outlined a new strategy doctrine that the Kremlin was more suited to fight and in this strategy doctrine a strategy that they believed they could win and bring Russia back on par as a superpower with the West. He recognized, in a way that I think very few within our government did, a blurring of the lines between war and peace between direct conflict and indirect conflict in the 21st century. He emphasized non-military means to basically advance this doctrine for informational conflict and using the measures of what he would call concealed character. General Garamazov outlined a vision for Russia's military doctrine that relies not just on conventional weaponry, but on a whole system of asymmetric means. His vision of hacking cyberattacks, information warfare, and propaganda would be the weapons of choice. He painted a picture of the fight of a fight really in the shadows, a type of hybrid warfare. It's a fight, but I think from all of the comments made by Putin and his allies, that the Kremlin is actually intent not only on bringing parity, but actually intent on winning. Now, Putin quickly put to work implementing this new doctrine. First, across the border in the Ukraine, employing the so-called little green men and information warfare to create a state of perpetual chaos and instability. He also targeted Estonia and Georgia and other countries within the former sphere of the Soviet Union. He continued to invest in this type of deniable asymmetric tools that would help him overcome the West's more traditional advantages. He's now turned those weapons directly on the United States. And I believe at this moment in time at least, we are inadequately prepared to take on this new challenge. Now, in recent months, Senator Cardin and the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee delivered an extremely well researched report on Russia's asymmetric assault on European democracies. They outlined a comprehensive array of weapons in the Kremlin toolkit, including the use of organized crime, corruption, energy security, and even using the Russian Orthodox Church to increase Russia's influence throughout the region. Now, we don't have time to get into all of those today, but I recommend everyone take a review of Senator Cardin's valuable work. What I do want to address today are the three major avenues of attack that Russia used during the 2016 campaign. First, the targeting of our election infrastructure. Second, the hacking and weaponizing of information and use of those leaks. And third, the whole new realm of information warfare, particularly as it affects social media. The Senate Intelligence Committee, and again, Bill, I appreciate your comments on a bipartisan basis, is intensely focused on each of these three items. First, truth is our election system has enormous strengths. The beauty and curse of our system in many ways is that it is fragmented and decentralized. But that thought is less comforting than it might seem when we actually step back and think how an outside power can use this decentralized system of elections in ways to attack us. We know in nonnational elections, they're often decided by a few thousand votes. And while it would be very difficult for any foreign power Russia included to attack each and every system in a national election in a presidential year, what we need to understand is that a presidential election can actually be swung by a few thousand votes in a single jurisdiction, in a single state. So the ability for the Russians to target that to a level of specificity is remarkable. And even the threat of potential Russian incursion undermines our public's confidence in our election processes and that undermining of confidence can have devastating effects. The Russians have tremendous cyber capabilities and we have much work to do to ensure that our election infrastructure can withstand anything the Russians will try. And the truth is where we stand here in the beginning of March, we are not prepared across the nation for the 2018 election cycle, which begins literally in a few days in terms of the primaries. We have two sets of primaries in Illinois and Texas even this month and we are not fully prepared. Second, the Kremlin has gone to great lengths to foster one of the most permissive environments in the whole world for malicious cyber activity, including both hacking and weaponizing information. While Putin maintains some of the most prolific state-sponsored cyber capabilities, much of his active measures have actually not been state-led. The Kremlin has been able to employ and co-opt at times a compel assistance from a detached core of non-governmental hackers that Russia has nurtured and harbors from international law enforcement. Rather than always being government-led and top-down, these hackers are generally free to engage in criminal activity and money-making endeavors around the globe as long as they keep their activities away from any of the Russian oligarchs. When it suits them, Putin and his allies are able to utilize these capabilities to further their own active measure campaigns while allowing the Kremlin to deny involvement. Putin himself has in many ways trolled the U.S. by denying meddling in U.S. elections, but allowing for the possibilities of, quote, Russian patriotic hackers that he says, well, I can't control them. Well, I think there's a little more control than he's been willing to acknowledge. Hacking is obviously not unique to the Kremlin. However, weaponizing that hacked information is a growing part of the Russian playbook. The truth is, we should have seen this coming. Even if we didn't look at all the activities that Russia had taken place in Estonia and other nations in the east, if we simply recall back in 2014 when a bugged conversation between then Assistant Secretary of State Toria Nuland and the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine made its way onto YouTube where it caused a diplomatic uproar. In retrospect, we should have seen this incident as a test run for the type of attacks and leaks that we saw during the 2016 presidential campaign. This was an area that we should have predicted better. And again, frankly, we're not fully prepared for today. Third, the President, the Kremlin is also making unprecedented investments in 21st century information warfare. During the Cold War, we all recall that the Soviets tried to spread fake news before that term was even popular. They assumed that the U.S. government and spread theories that the U.S. government was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Or that the military, American military, had in effect created and bred the AIDS disease. Much like today, these efforts were geared at trying to undermine basic Americans' faith in our democratic government. But the widespread use of social media has allowed Russia to supercharge its disinformation efforts. Before the KGB would often have to go through setting up a newspaper in a neutral country or using a series of tools to create a dubious forgery that at its best, whether through the newspaper or the forgery, would only hit a very small targeted group of individuals. Now, with social media, they have instantaneous access to hundreds of millions of social media accounts where propaganda and fake news can spread like wildfire. And while we all recognize the power and value of these social media platforms, if we step back and think about this from my day job on the Intel Committee, in many ways, if an intelligence organization was trying to create a network where they could do the most damage spreading false information and undermining people's confidence, and they could sit back and imagine what that network might look like, chances are it would look like some of the social media platforms that exist today in terms of how we gain our news and information. The rise of these new platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, have reshaped our entire culture in the ways we communicate and access information. But while we've marveled at the new opportunities offered by this technology, I believe our government and the technology companies themselves have not fully understood the ramifications of these giant new communities that they've created and how these communities on social media, in effect the dark underbelly, can be abused and misused in terms of its interactions with our Americans. Tracking the impact of the Russian disinformation is obviously inherently difficult. But if we look back to 2011, there was a Russian operations manual that suggested that disinformation, quote, acts like an invisible radiation, silently and covertly pushing you in the direction the Kremlin wants. The truth is, for most, you don't even know you're being attacked. That's how Russia, where it was able to target and co-opt unwitting Americans into spreading their content outline. They even succeeded in transferring these efforts, this is one of the things that was most described in some of our hearings, from Facebook into the real world. The example we liked to cite was back in the fall of 2016, where two Russian-created sites both created out of St. Petersburg, one that catered to a more far-right group in Texas called Succeed Texas, the other which catered to a group that was about a series of the Muslim community within Texas. And from a half a world away, they created an event where these two groups came into near conflict at a mosque in Houston. Think about that, the ability to manipulate Americans onto the street and thank goodness for the police presence, or we could have had an event similar to the tragedy that took place in my state in Charlottesville, all this being manipulated and driven from half a world away. The truth is, this threat continues and expands. These active measures have two things in common. First, they're effective, and second, they're cheap. We're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on national security. And at least in this area in terms of misinformation and disinformation, our country is often being rocked back on our heels. The Kremlin is spending pennies on the dollar and candidly wreaking havoc. Worse yet, they haven't stopped. This threat did not go away on election day in 2016. Russian operatives remain active today, stoking hate and discord online. We have seen Russian linked accounts pushing hashtags on both sides of the NFL national anthem debate. We've seen Russian organized hashtags and bots attack the president's national security advisor. We've seen them push in many ways where it trended to the top of the list, hashtag release the memo. And more recently, we've even seen evidence of stoking anger on both sides of the gun debate after the recent tragedy in the Parkland shooting. And now this playbook is actually out in the open, and we have to worry about more than just Russia. These tools can be used by other actors, China, non-state actors, terrorists, and others to try to influence and sow discord within our nation. So what can we do? Unfortunately, there's no simple answer in this space. No single countermeasure that will stop the wave of attacks from Russia. So the premise of what Carnegie's Global Russian Project means is that we have to take advantage and look at where Russia seats to take advantage and amplify these internal divisions in our country. It's focused on boosting cynicism and tearing down Western institutions from the inside. In response, I believe we need to start right here at home. We need to recognize the threat, expose Putin's game plan, and inoculate our society against these efforts. In order to do that, we need to understand the Russian playbook and deliver a thorough accounting of what they did in 2016. This is why I believe our committee's investigation is so important. It's why I believe the Mueller inquiry is so critical. We need to get to the bottom of what happened, and we need to do it in a bipartisan fashion. The politicization of this effort will only undermine our countryman's understanding of the threat, and truly the fact that this is not a threat against Republicans versus Democrats, but it is against a threat to our nation as a whole. The question about whether any Americans knew or assisted Russian's efforts in 2016 is vital. But more important and more critical is making sure that we make clear that this threat did not end on Election Day, and that what Mr. Putin's games and aims are is not to favor one political party over another, but it is to simply sow discord and distrust within our country. And the truth is that what we experienced was an attack from a foreign nation. Next, we have to recognize that we have much to do to strengthen our security and systems against these asymmetric threats. Our strategies and our resources, I believe, have not shifted aggressively enough to address these new threats in cyberspace and in social media. The truth is, if you step back and look at how we spend, Russia spends I think the last year's budget national level defense-wise was about $68 billion. The United States of America spends 10 times that much. Yet, I believe, we're spending oftentimes on weapons that were well suited for a 21st century conflict. We buy arms and materials to fight war on the land, in the air, and on the sea. I do not believe that we've shifted near enough resources to take on where oftentimes the 21st century conflicts will take place in cyberspace or in terms of misinformation and disinformation. Because until we do that, I believe the Russians are going to continue to get a lot more bang for their security buck. No one questions America's superior technological advantages. But ironically, that technological advantage and the technological dependence that comes with that advantage actually makes us more vulnerable in the asymmetric battlefield in terms of cyber and technology dependence that Russia has chosen to attack us in. We must spell out a deterrence doctrine so that our adversaries don't see cyber attacks or misinformation and disinformation attacks against us as a free lunch. The United States, I believe, has often done too little to respond to cyber attacks against us and our allies. And when we do respond, it's often been done extraordinarily quietly and on a one-off basis. That has clearly not been enough to deter our adversaries. We may need to make clear to Russia and for that matter to other nations that if you go about using cyber warfare or disinformation against us, we're going to call you out and we're going to punch back. We need to more quickly attribute cyber attacks. We need to increase the cost of these cyber attacks against our nation. We need to use robust sanctions and other tools. And that should include the sanctions against Russia passed overwhelmingly by the Congress but which the President has still refused to implement. The sad truth is that we are handicapped in our response by a lack of presidential leadership. We need a President who recognizes this problem and not one who sees that any discussion of Russian election interference as a personal affront. We need a President who will lead not just a whole of government effort, but in a sense a whole of society effort to try to take on these challenges. We need someone that will actually unify our nation against this growing asymmetric threat. We can't let Putin and his allies succeed. We have to as a nation learn how to fight back and shine a light on this shadow conflict. We have to get our act together here at home. Otherwise we'll still be shooting blindly into the shadows. Thank you all very much. And now I've got to go back to my day job and save democracy. Thank you all very much. That was fascinating to hear from the Senator. My name is Bianna Golodriga. I'm with CBS News. We're going to spend the next portion of our time having a conversation with the panel and we're going to open it up to Q&A. But I want to thank Carnegie for having us here on a very timely day. It seems like every day is a timely day on the subject. And this is live streamed, so if anybody's blogging this on Twitter, Snapchat, please use hashtag global Russia. And with that, let me introduce my panel. To the far left is Andrew Weiss. He's the James Family Chair and Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment where he oversees research in Washington and Moscow on Russia and Eurasia. To his right is John McLaughlin, the former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and former Acting Director of Central Intelligence. To my left is Lisa Ossentinskaya. She's a Russian Journalist and Media Manager. She's notable as a former Editor-in-Chief of the Russian edition of Forbes and of RBC. And I want to thank you all for joining us. And I want to delve deeper into what the Senator mentioned and that was President Putin's State of the Nation today, the two-hour speech that he gave where he really bragged about their investment in nuclear technology, saying that he has invincible nukes. And my question to you is, what do you make of what he said, just 17 days ahead of the election where he is most likely going to win? And was that a direct message to Donald Trump? I think it's a direct message to the Russian voters. So we're, as you say, just a few days away from what has been a very pro-forma re-election of Putin for what is expected to be his fourth and final term. So he has very little to run on except for this image that Russia is back and that Russia is a major force in the world again and that it is better as famous Russian leaders just have in the past to be feared than loved. So for him to kind of play to a kind of Joe Sixpack view in Russia that life may be tough right now, we've been going through some difficult economic times, but at least we're strong. And I think that message resonates, whether it will be enough to kind of create excitement on March 18th is another story. Basically the election has unfolded without a serious competition. His self-selected opponents in the race are pretty lackluster and not serious. So what he's ended up doing is presiding over a political system which is being asphyxiated whether he can engage with the Russian people during this fourth term is really unclear. And Lisa, while he dedicated the large portion of his speech to revamping Russia's nuclear program and military, I'm curious to get your take as a Russian national, your reaction to a speech because, blanketed in there, he did talk about investing in Russian infrastructure and cutting poverty by half in his next term. What is your take away though as a Russian to his message today? Well, first of all, thank you for having me here and I also admire Andrew's deep understanding of Russian, let's say, information policy regarding the elections because they 100% agree on what Andrew was saying about a major focus of this information efforts. I think for Russians it's extremely important to feel that Russia is superpower and also as a leader you could be judged by the strength of your opponents and giving that wouldn't address his speech to opponents, basically United States as I'm guessing. That's important to have strong opponents and that means that for most of the population he's not strong enough to fight with the strong counterpart and that was very specific and strong message. Also what he delivered that Russia has a weapon that nobody else in the whole world has and that means that Russia is technically so advanced and this is so important you guys need to be patient that we need to invest in that but that means that all Russians are stronger than the rest of the world despite Olympic Games and other things. So I think that message was completely, totally 100% addressed to the national audience before elections. It was also hard to revive the audience for these elections because the result is very predictable. That result is more than 100% predictable. So that's very hard to engage people to come to the places to vote that increase the turnout. Because they do want a significant turnout, right? Yes, of course, because it's a value to be elected by, let's say, more than 50% of the voting population, not but just the voters that came to the election places. Which is why you hear people like Navalny and opposition leaders urging people not to vote, right, because that could send a message to Vladimir Putin and embarrass him and something that Lisa just picked up on stood out to me too. When Vladimir Putin is bragging about a weapon that no one else has, I in my mind think of how our president will react to that news specifically since he's been pushing for greater investment in nuclear technology and called for more nukes. So in my initial question saying obviously he's speaking to an audience of Russian citizens about to go to the election polls but election booths, but is he also speaking to the U.S. as well and waiting for a reaction from President Trump? Oh, I'm sure he is. I kind of expect a tweet tomorrow morning that says, my missile's bigger than yours or something like that. But in truth, I mean, I think having just the United States issued a nuclear posture review, we will have to look, and I've only taken a cursory look at what he said about the weaponry, but we'll have to look at the characteristics of the weapons he's talking about here because one of the things going on in the world of nuclear weaponry is that technology is changing in ways and doctrine is changing in ways that begin to erode some of the ways we typically have thought about deterrence and the way we've typically thought about arms control and the way we've typically thought about the potential use of nuclear weapons, which I oppose on any grounds but people are beginning to think in parts of the world and Russia too, I'm sure, that there are circumstances in which it might be permissible to sort of break the nuclear taboo and use these weapons in some circumstance where you can control their impact. I think that's a grave mistake, but that thought is out there and when Putin starts talking about new kinds of weaponry, it's bound to play into that debate. And does it give, does it support President Trump's call to spend more money specifically on our nuclear technology? Well, I think he will interpret it that way for sure. I mean, I'd be astonished if that wasn't the reaction we have out of the White House. Some of your peers in the intelligence community have recently likened what Russia did in the 2016 elections to a political 9-11. Would you go as far as saying that? Well, yes. I mean, it's always dangerous to use 9-11 comparisons because I don't, you know, that's an extraordinarily event in our history that hopefully would never be repeated. But yeah, it's in the sense of it being a surprise, in the sense of it being a novel, in the sense of it being something that we typically have not done very well. In all of those respects, I believe it is. And it also underlines, for me, at least something the senator said, which is that this isn't, I think I heard him say it this way, we shouldn't think of this as a new Cold War. I think Cold War metaphor gives us too much comfort in the sense that we understood that. And also it could be seen as something that could have an end. And it did have an end. There were two sides and one had to lose and they lost. That's how we've seen it. That is not the circumstance we're in with Russia now. Russia will not go away like the Soviet Union did. And so we have to figure out how to deal with it and I'm sure we'll talk about that. But to me that's the real significance of what they did in 2016, that it has an echo of the techniques we saw during the Cold War, but it advances so far into the modern era that it moves us into a different strategic realm, I think. And Andrew, we haven't been right thus far in figuring out how to deal with Russia in Vladimir Putin. President Obama famously called Russia a regional power. Lindsey Graham called Russia an oil and gas company, masquerading as a country. It has an aging demographic, shrinking population and economy the size of Italy. Yet Mitt Romney is now getting praised for what he said back in 2012 calling Vladimir Putin the greatest geopolitical foe that the U.S. faced. You could say both sides are right. What's the approach to addressing that conundrum, then? Well, I think first of all we need to sort of assess what's real and what's inflated. And today's speech is nothing else. It's a great way of Putin showing that he'd just like to be talked about and so all of the kind of fixation on Putin. We've been doing that. Right, the portrayal of Russia is ten feet tall. That is all kind of political gravy for him at home for the reasons that Lisa and I talked about a second ago. What we need to do is step back and think, as John said, about this is not a cold war, but it is a different level of Russian risk-taking, it's a different set of tactics, and it's a far bigger target set. And for my mind, we had assumptions for the last 25 years that have turned out to be wrong. We assumed that Russia was going to focus on its internal rebirth and it would want a benign external environment. That turned out to not be true. We assumed that traditional elements of caution would be very important for how Russia's foreign policy evolved. We've seen that the opposite is true. Risk is now seen as a way to sort of double down on issues and put your opponent on the spot. So risk and surprise, covert action, those are key parts of the Russian playbook. And then the other assumption was that they would focus largely on their neighborhood and that Russia's priorities would be in countries like Ukraine, Georgia, and Estonia. And we're seeing now that Russia wants to mess with the United States and push back asymmetrically. And this has to do with the events of 2011-2012 when we had big street demonstrations in Moscow after a very kind of murky set of shenanigans in the Russian parliamentary elections. But since then, and then going forward into the Ukraine Revolution of 2014, the Russian government, I don't think it's insincere, believes that the stated goal of the United States is to overthrow them and to basically pose an existential threat to their regime. So the way to deal with that is to punch back, and they punch back very hard. And Lisa, you, as a journalist, have seen firsthand this evolution in Russia, in Vladimir Putin's Russia. You've uncovered and exposed many stories there. Most recently, Putin's so-called chef, right? Yvgeny Prygoshin and his affiliation with Russia's involvement in Syria. So none of this is a surprise to you. When you and I were talking backstage, you said you were surprised by what you saw in Mueller's indictments. Can you explain that? Yes, of course. I was not surprised by the actions described that happened in 2016, but I was really surprised that all those actions were planned in 2014, when, for example, as a journalist, I had no clue working at RBC doing reforms in this media company, what's going on in some people's mind.  I still believe that the whole threat is in some way overestimated and in some way underestimated. I mean, what for me is clear exaggeration as the effect that Putin actions, I mean, the trolls actions had for elections outcome. I think that was just one of the minor factors that affected the whole result, but I don't believe that was the only factor. And the way how it is presented now in media, in some way it scares me because I can't believe that Russians completely changed the storyline of American elections. But in another way, from another point of view, I see underestimation of, let's say, smartness of people in Russia, I mean, in power. And determination. And determination who planned certain things very on the very early stage and they planned their punch back soon after Russian elections of 2011 that were considered by many in Kremlin as American involvement in Russian elections. And frankly speaking, when you were saying that hopefully you will not face the same situation with elections in the future, I just don't believe in that. I think you will. And I think now it's important to try to understand what is in Putin had now, not what happened previously. Because I think Russia has, like, Kremlin certainly has certain agenda now planning something for future. But how emboldened was this so-called victory or success for Vladimir Putin given that he most likely, like everyone else, had assumed that Hillary Clinton would win the election. And he most likely assumed that in some way shape or form the U.S. would retaliate. But that investment for him was still worth it. We have not yet seen much of a retaliation. Has that now emboldened Putin to go on to bigger and even more bolder initiatives? Well, I understand that you want me to answer a question. What is in Putin's mind? But I don't know. That's the problem. I think that the goal was, of course, to weaken Democrats and Hillary Clinton if she wins. How they turned the situation that actually another side won. They were very lucky with that, but they didn't expect this outcome, I think, for at least 100% or, I don't know, even 70%. So I think they found that techniques they used could be very efficient. And frankly speaking, it's very hard to fight with these techniques. And to defend from using social networks because social media is something in our psychology. It's injection of propaganda into humans' brains and psychology. That's the way how people think in this social media or in other social media. You cannot easily ban this or just say, you know, we are going to stop or regulate that. That's very hard. And so John, then, this begs the question of what, if anything, the U.S. is going to do going forward, as the senator said, were weeks, months away from elections here in the U.S. We heard from intelligence chiefs a few weeks ago testifying that they had not been directed by the president to do anything in retaliation for the 2016 meddling. NSA chiefs said that Trump hadn't told him, Mike Rogers said that the president hadn't told him to confront Russia's cyber activities. In his mind, he said they have not paid a price sufficient to changing their behavior. So how important is it for the president to speak out and give that, that order? Actually, I think it's extraordinarily important. My time in government left me with a lot of impressions, but one of them is that the U.S. government on something like this doesn't really mobilize fully until the president of the United States says mobilize, until there's that signal from the top. That's just our system. Until the executive branch hears that clearly from the leader of the executive branch. People may do what they think they're supposed to do. I know a lot of people in the Department of Homeland Security who are actually working on this and doing some important things. But the forceful application of all of our intelligence and capabilities doesn't come about unless the president gives that push. And that's one aspect of this, I think. I've thought about this recently and I think there are really a couple of aspects of our failures so far to respond aggressively. That's one. And the other is, I suspect that we do not yet have a cyber strategy that we can all unite on. In part because, when I say we all, I mean all of the agencies and the whole of government to use that expression. In part because I don't think we have an accurate understanding of what happens when you engage in a cyber exchange. For example, Rodgers was pressed to do more aggressive counter activity against Russian cyber. And he said something to the effect that he's doing what his authorities permit him to do. Now without knowing what that means, we can't really judge the extent to which he's acting. I suspect he's doing more than we know. That said, you know, those who think this should just turn into an all out pitched battle, I think one of the problems is that we haven't yet gamed out. How does escalation work in cyber? As with any conflict when you're inflicting, let's say violence in this sense, a different kind of violence, you always have to have some thought about where is it going? Where are we? Two or three moves down the chessboard. And I think this is a frontier for us. I don't think we've thought that through very carefully. So that combined with a lack of push from the president, I think, leaves us pretty much floating in the water here and quite vulnerable to what the Russians will attempt to do, as Lisa so persuasively says they will continue to do. And, Andrew, I want to get to what Russia's doing, not just in the U.S. but around the world. You've just written a piece on Russia's involvement in Mexico's upcoming election too. But, John, if we could just stick on this topic for one more minute or two or three. I was listening to General Michael Hayden earlier this week, former director of the CIA, and he sort of took the blame from the intelligence side saying, listen, we dropped the ball in the sense that our intelligence community was focused on counter-terrorism, post-911, al-Qaeda, and he should have picked up on the warning signs even when Russia invaded Georgia. And by that he gave an example of getting a phone call from Stephen Hadley asking about that, the national security advisor at the time for President Bush. And Michael Hayden said, who are our Georgia guys? Give me our Georgia guys. And maybe there were three. He didn't have any idea who they were. And they were good guys, he said, but he had no idea who these people were. And he said in hindsight, you know, we should have picked up. Our intelligence community should have picked up on what Putin was thinking and doing even as early as a decade or so, if not longer ago. How important, first of all, do you agree with him? And how important was that missed opportunity as far as what you're saying now, playing catch-up with cyber warfare? Well, I have agree with General Hayden, who's a good friend of mine, but at least half agree with him in the sense that clearly, I don't think anyone in our national security establishment saw this coming, intelligence, policy side, in the magnitude in which it's hit us. That said, people were quite aware that there had been a serious cyber operation in Georgia. People were aware of the Gerasimov doctrine and were talking in the intelligence world for quite a while about the danger of hybrid warfare and so forth. But, you know, I find a phenomenon here. I don't know whether Mike Hayden would agree, but a phenomenon I've noticed is that even though the intelligence community may be talking about something and writing about it and testifying on it, people do not become seized with the threat until there is a very crystallized demonstration of that threat. This was true on terrorism. I mean, in the months before, the years before 9-11, the committees in Congress held only one hearing on counterterrorism. So it is at the moment when people see clearly that something has happened that everyone becomes seized with it. And I think that could have been the Georgia event had we tried to imagine where that could go and linked it up with the Gerasimov doctrine. So I sort of half agree with him. In other words, we could have sounded that alarm more forcefully, but I'm not sure that people would have mobilized in response to that threat without the demonstration we've had. Yeah. Andrew, so going back to your piece about Russia's involvement in Mexico and not just Mexico, Latin America, we have other elections coming up this year as well. You really break down Russia's involvement throughout the world, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, what have you, but focus specifically on Mexico. And while we have had administration figures allude to it and actually talk about the significance of what Russia's doing, why aren't we hearing more about it? Well, it's sort of one of those great ironies where you have a whispering campaign that seems to have initiated with the Trump White House. We've had National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, we've had Secretary Tillerson starting to drop these broad hints that we're seeing the beginnings or the initial signs of a campaign of fake news, of what we call information operations or cyber operations, and then run up to the July 1 Mexican presidential election. There is a very fraught political environment in Mexico, both as a result of all the failures in the fight against corruption, dealing with the drug war, and all the anger that's brewing toward the United States and the Trump era. So it is a very dynamic political environment and there is a populist leader who speaks in a sort of traditional fiery nationalist phrase for Mexicans, which is the person known as Amlo Lopez Obrador, the former populist mayor of Mexico City. And we're seeing on social media and also just through sort of outreach efforts by the Russian government to embrace both Lopez Obrador and to embrace his message. Whether that tips a political environment in one direction or the other is very unclear, but on social media where Mexicans are increasingly active, we're seeing a disproportionate number of the discussion and sort of Twitter or Facebook discussions coming from abroad. So upwards of about 30% in the last month of activities in the sort of social media discussion about the Mexican election is coming from abroad, and of that 38% of the traffic is coming from Russia. That's very odd. You're seeing similarities to what we saw in the buildup to our election here. RT has a heavy presence in Mexico as well. What about Russia's role in Venezuela and Russia's role in the Middle East? And I talk about Venezuela, but then I want to get to Syria and touch on Syria and maybe some of the news that you were able to break as well. So the situation in Venezuela is obviously a terrible human tragedy. We're seeing a country basically that is imploding. And at various stages, going back to the earliest days that Putin was in office, there was this embrace, this kind of bromance between him and Hugo Chavez. A lot of that revolved around weapons sales, and the Venezuelans who had a ton of money in the early 2000s were buying very expensive and significant weapons systems from Russia. At some point when the Venezuelans had trouble paying for those, it switched to more of a relationship focused on energy. And you had the Russian state energy champion Rosnath, which is led by a Portuguese-speaking former intelligence officer, Igor Sechin, who's probably the most powerful person in Russia other than Putin, basically launched a pet project to embrace the government of Venezuela and to expand Russia's commercial activity there. In recent years, as the government has started to kind of go through this terrible domestic-critical and economic crisis, the Russians have been a key source of ballast. They've provided financing, they've provided food. Right now, the government is in a desperate battle for survival, and so the Russians are kind of helping keep them afloat. Where this is interesting is when Trump came into office, he basically started talking about a military option for the United States to overthrow the Maduro government and impose new sanctions against Maduro. And the Russian reaction to this has been to sort of say, you now have to talk about that with us, and they've sort of inserted themselves. And that sort of follows on what we've seen in Syria, what we're seeing in Libya, where basically Russia's not looking to fix problems. It's not looking to sort of own Venezuela or own the reconstruction of Syria, but it's basically saying we're at the table, and the United States can't just sort of rally or boss other countries around anymore. And that goes back, you know, decades in terms of what Russia has been striving for. They wanted to create what they've called, since the prima copera, a multipolar world where the United States no longer kind of sits at the top of the global pyramid. And they want voice in how the world's key decisions are made. We're hearing that in North Korea as well. And that's the world we have. You talked about Syria, and there had been concern from day one about a potential proxy war from the U.S. and Syria there. Your piece that we talked about earlier about Yvgeny Prygoshin and his role with Russian forces there in Syria, can you talk about the significance of that when it comes to U.S.-Russia relations? Well, first of all, let me disagree with you about Russian role in Syria. I think Russia has, it's just my guesses and fantasies because I don't have facts, but I believe I have just few facts about Prygoshin's role in oil industry, recovery of the country that we reported recently. That just before the recent bombing of his private army, they signed the roadmap for restoring the oil sector and participation in this restoration. But I think Russia has clear Russian companies, maybe state-owned companies, have clear intention to participate in Syrian restoration and reconstruction after at least that part of Syria. That is controlled by Assad. I think it's the same, it could be. Again, I don't have facts, but I think it's very plausible and it's very possible that they will imply the same strategy as in Chechnya that using certain resources to rebuild the infrastructure there. And this is a way how to gain something from basically from this operation. I was surprised, it's a kind of a joke that you didn't mention Argentinian story with cocaine. Oh, the cocaine, yes. Well, there are so many, like the jewels that's here. Do you want to give us a bit of a brief? Well, yeah. Counts 800 million dollars worth? Yeah, it's about 400 kilograms of cocaine that somehow interfered in Russian embassy. That was reported from the Russian ambassador in Argentina that supposedly came with the airplane that belongs to a state air company that transfers all and organizes flights for senior officials in Russia. So that's an interesting story that's developing and we still don't know. It says a lot that that's like the last story we're talking about. I want to spend the last few minutes opening it up to questions, but before we do that, Lisa, I want to ask you about what life is like as a journalist in Russia. It is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. You're now spending the majority of your time in the U.S. We spend a lot of time talking about journalists here in the U.S. We're fortunate at the end of the day to be able to have our civil liberties here as journalists in America. It's not the same in Russia. Talk about the ins and outs of covering Vladimir Putin's Kremlin. So the paradox of being journalist in Russia is that finally you'll land in the United States and stop working as Russian journalists. So that's that's that's a joke because but yeah, but just yeah, but just few I'm very self sarcastic. So but few explanatory words about my story that I'm currently a fellow at Berkeley UC Berkeley journalism school. But I founded the news organization. This is a newsletter and website called the Bell. We have team in Russia working in Moscow. So we have a little bureau that investigates and produce news mixed with our own scoops and our focus is following the money approach. We have also English language newsletter that appears on by Fridays. And we translate some of our stories, the most significant stories in English so we can find it on our website. So I think it's again it's like talking about trolls in some ways that dangers are highly exaggerated. So journalists free journalists and liberal journalists are still able to work in Russia freely. The only thing is that let's let defines it as a percentage of risk. Anytime you work in emerging countries developing world in any places you have certain amount of risk. Let's say working in Russia being a journalist in 2005 working as a business journalist as I used to do. It was very low risk. Let's say it was less than 5%. Now this risk is increasing because like the government puts more attention on independent journalists. And there are very few of us, I would say fewer than we had before. But still there are some people who appear on state-owned, semi-state-owned radio station EHA Moscow EHA. And those people speak very openly about problems. Then we have let's say journalists have a position leader, Xenia Sapchak, who comes on state TV and then promotes their liberal values. So it's a kind of hybrid regime for journalists as well. But at some point you definitely can face significant problems and even threats and harassment and whatever any type of harassment. That's a risk that increasingly comes with this profession nowadays in Russia. It says a lot that these independent journalists are really primarily based outside of Russia too. Some of the bigger known names like Meduza and obviously you as well. Okay, well thank you for everything that you do and helping us dissect what happens in Russia as a Russian yourself. And I want to thank you both for helping us guide us through the next chapter in our U.S.-Russia relations. So we have about 10 minutes left so let's open them. I'll take one here. Alekh Nurkul, a business multimedia group from Ariga, Latvia. So Latvia is the country with the biggest proportion of Russian-speaking population in the whole European Union, about 40%. What advice would you give to Latvian authorities, to current Latvian government? How to deal with the local Russian population, whether to stay on the confrontational line as it is now? Or to take into consideration concerns of Russian-speaking populations such as closing down existing Russian language schools and also language issues. What advice would you give to Latvian government? Thank you. Who wants to take that? Will it be Andrew? I mean, this is a situation which I think most people spend a lot of time looking at. I think that the governments in the Baltic region have very carefully tried to manage competing situations, whether it's, as you say, making sure that there are people who are prosperous, that they feel a connection to Europe and that they feel the embrace of the United States and our NATO allies, which have basically guaranteed their security through Article 5 of the NATO Spounding Charter. But so for me, the challenge will be resisting the temptation to overreact in case of provocation. There were instances in the last couple of years where groups inside Latvia tried to stir up trouble, and it's a balancing act for the government to make sure that it's firm, but also doesn't invite the kind of trouble that we've seen in other parts of the former Soviet Union. I think the situation in the Baltics is probably, by comparison, far more manageable than what we've seen in a place like Ukraine, where Russia has been engaged in a covert war now for four years and a tremendous cost in terms of loss of life and in terms of basically keeping Ukraine dysfunctional. And the question will be, can, through diplomacy, through presidential involvement, as John alluded to, are there things that Western governments can do to make the situation along Russia's periphery more stable? There is, and I think Ambassador Burns alluded to this at the beginning, a target-rich environment along Russia's periphery, and that's not going to go away. So much of the focus has to be on societal resilience, on exposing this Russian toolkit, and in providing support diplomatically, politically, militarily to countries in that neighborhood without overextending and without sort of sticking our hand in the propeller. That is a really constant and, I think, challenging set of policy issues. This administration is in a sort of difficult spot, in part, given the rhetoric that President Trump used on the campaign trail, where he basically disparaged NATO. We've seen senior members of his team try to reestablish credibility around the U.S. defense commitment. We hope that their voice continues to be what's persuasive at the end of the day. But we're only at the beginning of this drama with a more audacious risk-taking Russia, and these are issues that are not going to go away by any stretch. We go here in the second row. Thank you. Mary Louise Kelly, NPR. I am headed to Russia next week to cover the election, which is already proving a challenging assignment because it is awfully difficult to drum up excitement in the newsroom about an election with which there is zero suspense for the outcome. But my mind turns to what another six years of Putin will look like, and that's the question I want to put to the panel. What are you watching for? Both internally for Russians who will be living through another six years of Putin that appears and externally as Russia exerts power on the world stage. I was thinking about this earlier when we were discussing things. I think looking six years ahead, it isn't that hard to figure out, actually, what his basic emphasis is going to be. We were also talking backstage a bit about whether we have a danger of overestimating Putin as seeing him more than 10 feet tall. Yes, that's always a danger, but I think really he's rather good at strategy, and it's not that hard to be good at strategy when you have absolute power. When we put together a strategy document in our country, it's weeks and weeks of bureaucratic discussion, and then everyone's exhausted before you implement the strategy. We were told during a visit to Moscow that basically four or five people get together once a week with Putin and they decide what to do. So you're looking ahead to the next six years, I would say his goals are going to be first to further consolidate his power at home, second to increase his strength in the neighborhood, that is, near abroad, the areas of the former Soviet Union, third to weaken Western institutions, primarily NATO and the EU, and fourth to increase Russia's role broadly in the world, and Andrews talked about that. So whether it's Latin America, Africa, Middle East, I think that's what we're going to... I would take those three or four ideas and just wait for him to fill them in or think about how he might fill them in, and that's how I'd see the next few years unfolding. So let me add this. As a journalist, I feel more comfortable to ask questions than answer questions, so let me figure this out in a shape, in a form of questions. So the things I would follow for the next six years, first fear of my interest, will YouTube be blocked in Russia or will operate free? Let's say YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. YouTube now concentrates about 50 million users with some video blogs having like about 5 million subscribers for it. That means Russia has in some way a free speech on YouTube using Western media organizations. That's the first thing I would look at. The second thing I would look at is, will the Kremlin follow Chinese example of changing their power and the system of re-elections? And the third thing that is extremely important for all Russian population, Russian people, that's a key factor of success of my previous company. I worked at RBC. Russian people follow the dollar rubble rate, currency rate. So look at the predictions. That gives you certain thoughts about Russian economy predictability. As I remember from today, the most recent prediction was about 60 rubles for dollars. That is about the current situation. It says something about the economy, that the economy could be on approximately the same level. Of course it can be changed, but we'll see. I was going to ask you that. What's the likelihood that you'd be inspired or somehow jealous even over the next six years? Personally, it's very likely. That he saw what President Xi did. Follow some big examples. President for life. Let's go to the back. The gentleman on the right. I'm looking, yes, right there. You. Thank you very much. I'm James Klass from Gilead Sciences. I wanted to ask about soft power. I don't know where this falls in the continuum, but in the Soviet Union, we had doctors from Cuba. Of course, the Soviet Union and smallpox eradication did a lot of good work. So as Russia is back on the global stage, is there a soft power component to this, particularly interested in global health, if that's relevant? Thank you. Well, there's two aspects of this that I think are relevant. One is Russia didn't invent Donald Trump. There was a populist germ that has been unleashed in Western societies. And so they are pushing on every available door to amplify and expand that. Italy is having elections this weekend. There's a report. I've only seen fragments of it. It just came out to talk about the ways Russia is amplifying anti-immigrant sentiment in Italy and sort of playing on the stirring of nationalism, which is going to make a complicated, political environment much more complicated. That sort of soft power, we can call it hard. We can call it active measures, whatever it is, is real. And that tool is being used on a global scale. In pop culture, where I think Russia really excels right now, particularly in its neighborhood, the use of videos, of movies, of TV to sell narratives to Russia's neighbors is very, very potent. And you see this including in places like Ukraine and eastern Ukraine. So we're dealing with a Russia which has gotten very adept at kind of spinning the world and spinning perceptions around the world in ways that are favorable to its interests. As far as things that cost money, Russia is not carrying a giant checkbook. And most of the money is going for things like what Vladimir Putin talked about today, which are rearmament and expensive weapons systems. The available resources to do things like deliver hospital ships or things like that, even in a crisis situation in Venezuela remain really circumscribed. But when they do stuff, even if it's small, it's the collection of those small things that amplifies this image that Russia is back and that Russia really matters. And they've played that, I think, in a fantastic way in Syria, where what is by all measures a relatively modest footprint for their military operation has had a disproportionately large impact on the fate of that country, both in sort of steering the Civil War in Assad's favor, but also showing the world that Russia can mount a meaningful expeditionary force far from its borders. I think we have time for one more. Alan, let's go to the woman here on the left. Yes, you. We haven't gamed out how the warfare escalates in cyberspace. Is that you, Andrew, who said that? Ah, yes. Can you not hear me? Yes. Okay, my question is, do we have the skill sets to accomplish that? And if so, how are they deployed? Well, everyone who works on cyber in the U.S. government says, we don't have enough people working on that, nor do we have enough people who are technically qualified to do it. We have a lot of good people, but we don't have bought farms to give you one example. So I would say we are at the point of needing to acquire those skills and build them, that's the first thing. And then in terms of what I said earlier about understanding an escalatory ladder in something like cyber, my real analogy there is looking back to the nuclear era, and the only way we came to understand that was through arms control discussions and through a lot of work on strategy and through a concentration on capabilities of those weapons and so forth. And yet this world is more complicated, the cyber world, because we're not talking about just a world in which we're dealing with nation states, we're also dealing with non-state actors, as Senator Warner pointed out. So my answer to your question would be on a scale from one to ten, if ten is perfect preparation and perfect resources, I would say we're maybe at a six. We're at about a six in terms of strategy for the problem and because I know back during my time in government people were working on strategy and yes, it's moved along somewhat but we're not at the point where we have, I think, a highly confident understanding of how this all works. Of course the U.S. and Russia don't have a monopoly on cyber tactics as you've got China, you've got other players as well. Exactly, and we have nothing comparable for example to the record we built over many, many years in arms control with nuclear weapons. This is a weapon that isn't nuclear in that sense, but it is certainly nuclear in terms of its capacity to influence things, change things, and inflict pain on populations, short of physical pain. Just imagine for example, we haven't had, I referred earlier to the need always for something that crystalizes a problem. You would think that the interference in our election has done that. I'm not sure it amounts to yet the cyber pearl harbor or the cyber 9-11 because we're very sensitive to it here in Washington inside the Beltway. This is all we talk about. I travel around the country a lot. People out there aren't as focused on this as we are here in Washington. There is not a national consensus yet to my knowledge on first an appreciation of the problem and its seriousness, and then an infrastructure of support to create pressure to do something about it. I'll land on my first question to you. Then how much of that rides with the President and the administration to act on? I mean if FDR or George Bush had not responded the way they did following Pearl Harbor, obviously the environment lasted from the light. I'm actually reading the latest biography of FDR now. One of the striking things that comes out, I wasn't there to observe this, but in the 1930s, particularly from 1935 on, 1936, 1937, FDR was very focused on and aware that trouble was coming for the United States. He had a very deliberate strategy of moving the United States toward an understanding of that against a backdrop of very serious opposition that had broad public support. And yet he managed to get us there eventually, but it did take Pearl Harbor to move everyone over to that side of the spectrum. And so, a long way to answer your question, but I think until a president speaks to the country in a convincing way about the nature and seriousness of this problem and what we need to do about it, people will not take that seriously. And then you have to ask the question of whether this particular president has the moral standing and persuasive powers to actually do that if he decided to do it. So, Houston, we have a problem. I hate to say we're going to end on that. I want to thank my panel and I want to thank all of you for coming today. This has been, I guess, enlightening and we've learned a lot and hopefully the conversation will continue. Thank you.


I've covered many cults. Some end with a bang, others with a whimper, but they invariably end. The question is how much damage they leave in their lives. Is Mitch McConnell part of the Trump cult? Yes. Truth still matters. We have an incredible panel here in New York with me to talk about right wing media's reaction and so much more. Nicole Hemmer, Dan Rather, Abigail Tracy. Is that Dan Rather with Brian Stelter on a show called Reliable Sources to discuss why truth matters?   And why is this show called Reliable Sources? I'm sorry. I'm sorry, folks. My brain just had an overload and I think it had to do a hard reboot. Can you blame it? This is some Twilight Zone level schizophrenia going on here. We'll get right back to this Democrat Party propaganda, but let me just take a quick moment to thank this video's sponsor, patrioticlegacy.com. Patrioticlegacy.com was nice enough to send me over one of these units so I could give you an honest review. I love this tactical flashlight. It's got everything you would ever need. Six overall lighting functions, escape features like the window hammer and the seatbelt cutter, solar charging so you don't need batteries, a power bank for charging your phone and other devices, and a removable compass with access to a personal safety alarm. Patrioticlegacy supports veterans and YouTubers like yours truly. So head on over there and make sure to use the promo code DRONE20 to get 20% off your purchase. Thank you. In case you're sitting there in disbelief like I am, let me reiterate that right there is a guy who actually tried to influence an election by presenting fraudulent documents just days before an election. He was trying to hurt Bush, the Republican, and help John Kerry, the Democrat. He's on a show called Reliable Sources to discuss truth and facts. You are our senior correspondent today. You've been watching history along with the rest of us. Do you feel that anything changed after these first two days of televised hearings? Yeah, let's talk a little bit about history and the truth. Like I mentioned earlier, Dan Rather is most known for meddling in an election. He tried to take out the Democrat's political opposition George Bush and get John Kerry elected. The failure of CVS News to do just that to properly, fully scrutinize the documents and their source led to our airing the documents when we should not have done so. It was a mistake. You know what's more insane? They actually made a movie about this incident and guess what it's called? Truth. There are growing concerns about how much actual truth will be presented to viewers in this movie. They do not get to do this. They do not get to smack us just for asking a question. Somebody has got to confirm those memos. Gee, fake news media lying to help Democrats? It's almost like that's a pattern we've noticed before. Also, take notice that they're accusing their opposition of what they're actively engaged in. Another pattern we talk about a lot on this channel. They claim to be so concerned about election meddling and then they bring on a guy who's known for trying to meddle in an election. Unreal. It's become increasingly apparent that truth is closing in. Truth does matter. Which is exactly why you had to step down from your anchor position at CVS News because you put out a lie in hopes it would sway the election for Democrats. White House with this alternate narrative, a false narrative, and with his allies in primetime on Fox was at least in a standoff with truth.  How does he know what the truth is? It appears that Dan rather didn't learn anything from his alleged mistake. He's doing the same thing now that he did then. He wants Trump to be guilty so bad that he's just willing to lie like he is right now. There's been no trial so we don't actually know what the established facts are. You would need to have an investigation to find the facts. All we've done up to this point is have an inquiry where a bunch of people gave their opinions on Trump, not facts. You said the other day, I have covered many cults. Some end with a bang, others with a whimper, but they invariably end. The question is how much damage they leave in their wake. I'm not the only one making this observation that increasingly, President Trump's support seems cultish. It's all about him. It's not about the policy. Is it just me or is Dan rather slurring his words and sounding kind of drunk? Now, of course, because the right constantly accused the media in Hollywood of being an Obama cult, they now have to turn around and accuse us of the exact same thing. And I'm not the only one making this observation that increasingly, President Trump's support seems cultish. It's all about him. Wrong. It's not about Trump. You could replace Trump with any human being who stands up against the establishment and you'd have the exact same dedicated support. It's about standing up to the Democrats and their media. It has nothing to do with personality.  And instead of acquiescing, we're fighting back in the exact same you all would if the roles were reversed. These cults, it, cults generally don't end well. No, Dan, they don't. That's why the left, the Democrats and their media have been losing their minds ever since November 15th, 2015. Your side is part of an ideological cult that can't handle the fact that there are many Americans around half who completely disagree with your beliefs and policies. That's exactly why you've been manufacturing conspiracy theories to explain it ever since. I have no doubt that a Trump victory in 2020 will send you all over the edge and I can't wait to see it. Well, that about wraps up this episode. If you enjoy my content and you want to support this channel, please consider supporting me on Subscribestar, Patreon or PayPal. I'm also going to have channel memberships available here very soon, so keep an eye open for that. Thanks to all of you, especially those who continue to support me and keep coming back.