The FRONTLINE Interviews
Adam Schiff
D-Calif.
Adam Schiff is a Democratic Congressman from California currently serving as the Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee is one of two in Congress investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore conducted on Sept. 5, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
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Intervention in the U.S. Election
Let’s talk about when the information starts coming out about the Intelligence Community’s finding about the hacking of the DNC [Democratic National Committee].The Russians are trying to affect the election.When you hear about it, what is your impression?How important is this at the very beginning?
We start learning a lot about what the Russians are doing in the mid- to late summer of last year.At that point, I become increasingly alarmed.I know [it alarmed] Sen. Feinstein as well.We urged the administration to make attribution when the evidence becomes clear this is the Russians.They're intervening in a way that’s really unprecedented in terms of the level of interference in our affairs.
We were unsuccessful in persuading the administration to speak out at that time, so we took the extraordinary step of speaking out ourselves, of making our own attribution, which doesn’t carry the same weight, obviously, as if the president were doing it.But at the time, it was the best that we could do.Our feeling was that it was vitally important to level with the American people that a foreign power was meddling in our affairs.
There were, I think, a lot of reasons why the administration was reluctant to do so.1They certainly didn’t want to give the impression they were trying to affect the outcome of the election by putting the president’s hand on the scale.But at the same time, we thought that it was more important to level with the public, that it would be worse to wait until after the election to tell the public that the Russians had been interfering in a way designed to influence the outcome.
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We’ll talk more about that in one second.But just before the Democratic convention, the DNC emails are dumped onto WikiLeaks.… Talk about what Putin did in that situation and why it was so offensive, why it was so important to understand.
There are still unanswered questions that we’re trying to get to the bottom of in the investigation.Was this Russian effort always designed to be one to influence the outcome of the election, or did it begin as merely an intelligence-gathering operation?The Russians wouldn’t be the first, or this wouldn’t be the first time that they had sought to gather information about someone who might become president of the United States.But it was the first time, at least in our experience, that they had weaponized the data.2We’re trying to determine, was that the intention from the beginning, when they were gathering the information, or was there some critical turning point during the summer of last year where the Russians made the decision, “Now that we have this information, we’re going to put it to use”?
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That is still an unanswered question.Were there events that influenced that decision?Were there communications with people on the Trump campaign that influenced those decisions?This is still what we’re trying to get to the bottom of.
You’ve thought about this for quite a while now.What do you think the motivations of Putin [were] to take this pretty outrageous act?
… The view the president wants the country to take is that this is all a fake, that indeed we don’t even know if it was Russia. It could be China.The only one who seemed to be off the hook is the 400-pound fat guy.Nonetheless, there's no question that it was Russia behind these actions.Russia and Putin operated with a mixture of motivations.Even Democrats, I think, look at this through too narrow a prism.Yes, Putin had every reason to want Hillary Clinton to lose.3This is someone that he blamed in part for the 2011 mass protests that were so threatening to his regime, when Secretary Clinton spoke out as a champion of democracy and human rights.4
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Putin obviously was still concerned that Clinton, as president, would maintain sanctions on Russia, maybe even increase sanctions on Russia over its remaking the map of Europe by dint of military force.[There's] every reason to not want Clinton as president from Putin’s point of view, and of course every reason to want Donald Trump, someone who spoke disparagingly of NATO, someone who encouraged Brexit and further dissolution of Europe, someone who talked about potentially recognizing the illegal annexation of Crimea, or working with the Russians in Syria where interests were not at all aligned.
Even that is too narrow a prism, because the fundamental purpose of Russian involvement in our elections was to sow discord in the United States, to undermine our democracy.Of course we need to view this in the context that the Russians have been undermining democracies elsewhere for a long time.5This is really an assault on the whole idea of liberal democracy.If you can take down the leading democracy, if you can expose it to ridicule and infighting, then why should people gather by the hundreds of thousands to protest in Moscow?If there really is nothing better, nothing different anywhere, if it’s not a contest between autocrats and democrats, only autocrats and hypocrites, then there’s no need for protest.So this is part of Putin’s assault on the whole idea of liberal democracy.
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One other point I would make that I think is very important for us to consider: We have lived in a world that was ever increasing in its freedoms, more people living under democratic governance, more people living in free society, free to speak as they would, with the free press, and the freedom to exercise their religion.
But we’re at an inflection point right now where we cannot say with confidence that will be true of the next generation.It’s not just the rise of autocracy in Moscow we need to be concerned with, but the rise of autocracy in Turkey, in the Philippines, in Hungary and in Poland.Putin is very much at the vanguard of this autocratic movement.If we don’t understand the context in which the Russians intervened, we’re not going to prescribe the right remedy and the right response.
Talk a little bit about when you first heard Trump exploiting the emails that had been leaked, reading them from the podium and talking about how he loved WikiLeaks, and at some point the famous statement where he said, “To the Russian hackers out there, you know, I’d love it if you found the 30,000 missing Clinton emails.”What was your view of that?
What made the Russian interference so powerful and so effective is that it could play on these inherent and deep divisions in our country.6We also had the awful fortuity of one of the major party candidates willing not just to accept but to encourage further Russian involvement in our affairs by publicly calling for the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and saying that they would be richly rewarded.This was unprecedented.
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I'm often struck by the fortuity of events.I'm convinced that had [Sen.] John McCain or Mitt Romney been the GOP nominee in this cycle, they would have both had the strength of character to repudiate Russian involvement, to tell the Russians to butt the hell out.But because we had a major candidate who was willing to accept it and encourage it and play on those internal divisions, the partisanship had gotten so significant that foreign interference was OK as long as it helped one side and hurt the other.That’s what made this so powerful and destructive.
The single most important thing we can do to combat this in the future is not going to be a software patch. There is no cyber cure for this.Rather, it’s to form the consensus that we lacked last year; that regardless of who it helps or who it hurts, if a foreign power intervenes in our affairs, it will be roundly rejected.That's the single most important thing we can do to protect ourselves.
It’s also the single most difficult thing to do when the president of the United States continues to sow that division, continues to ridicule the whole idea that Russia has intervened at all.It is the president more than anyone else who prevents us from forming that kind of a bipartisan consensus.
In the summer of 2016, another thing that was going on that the Russians were involved with or creating was a propaganda, fake news endeavor through social media, through the release of fake news, through RT and Sputnik and such, focused on specific states, according to some reporting.How did that come across your radar screen?
We know the Russians use a spectrum of tools to try to destabilize or intervene in the affairs of others, what they would call their active measures or their playbook.… All of government hybrid warfare involves not only the hacking and dumping of information, as they had done elsewhere; it involves the financial entanglement of people that may be in a position to influence policy.
It also involves the use of paid social media trolls, troll armies as well as bots, to propagate false stories, what we would think of as “fake news” before the president bastardized that term for other purposes, as well as pushing up true stories, but negative stories, to the top of people’s social media feeds in an effort to influence public opinion.7
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We are looking at the whole range of Russian conduct.Some of those tactics we know were employed by the Russians.Others we suspect, and still others we want to investigate, to see whether we can prove or disprove they took place.But certainly we know the Russians used their paid media platform, RT, and other outlets like Sputnik.But they also used paid social media trolls armies.They used bots as a way of influencing public opinion.
When the president says that there's no evidence, and the Intelligence Community has found that there was no effect on the vote results, that is conflating two very different things in a misleading way.It’s true that we have found no evidence that the machines were tampered with in a way that affected the actual tally of the vote.It’s not true to say it had no effect on the outcome.It certainly affected the election.It forced Secretary Clinton to constantly defend herself against these daily dumps of information.It also influenced people by the stories that they would see as a result of the paid social media trolls operating out of Russia.
Whether it was determinative or not, we will never be able to say, and it’s not the Intelligence Community’s job to try to analyze.Nonetheless, it certainly was designed to influence the outcome, and in a very close election, no one can say that it didn’t.
The importance of the fact that there is also evidence that there were some intrusions into state election mechanisms, perhaps not the tallying, but perhaps the front end aspect of it, the logs of voters and the possibility of changing information that would prevent people from voting, how concerned is the government about that issue?
We should be very concerned about the Russian hacking of voter databases, whether they manipulated them in this last election, or not.Of course, we can't always be fighting the last war.We have to anticipate what the Russians might do the next time around.All the Russians need to do is sow uncertainty about the results.So they don’t even need necessarily to change voter registrations or the vote machines.
Even so, I think we have discovered certain vulnerabilities of our voting technology.In my view, any voting jurisdiction, any state’s secretary of state or voter registrar that doesn’t maintain a paper trail, is negligent in the execution of their responsibilities.This is something that we are very concerned about.I think we need some greater transparency by the government with the states as to what we have seen in the past.When we spot a Russian effort or foreign effort to probe elections infrastructure, we ought to let the states know immediately.We ought to let them know now, in a way we haven't, if they were the subject of that kind of effort in the past.
Putin and Trump
… How important is the issue of collusion?
It’s one thing when you have a foreign government that is affirmatively trying to interfere in our affairs.It’s another if it had the help of U.S. persons—if U.S. persons are complicit in that violation of our sovereignty in a way that threatens the very health of our democracy.It is very serious business that we need to get to the bottom of.
If we had said six months ago that our investigation would produce proof, that proof would emerge that the Russians, through intermediaries, were in contact with the highest levels of the Trump campaign, including the president’s own son, and offered dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of what they described as the Russian government’s effort to help elect Donald Trump, and the response from the highest levels of the campaign was, “We would welcome, we would indeed love, that kind of support—and by the way, the best time for us is in the late summer,” which of course is when the emails begin to be dumped, people would have said, “You’ll never find that; people don’t put that kind of evidence and intent to collude in writing.”Yet that has been now produced publicly.8
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This is obviously deeply concerning.We have a responsibility in Congress of doing a full public report.Here is what we found.Here is what we could prove.Here is what we could corroborate.Here is what we could not corroborate.[Special Counsel Robert] Mueller has an equally important responsibility, but a different one, to decide who should be prosecuted.
But the only complete public accounting will come from Congress.That's why all of this needs to be investigated.All of it ought to be done nonpartisan, in a dispassionate fashion, so that the public can understand just what happened, and most important, so we can take steps to prevent it from happening again.
A little bit more on that June meeting at Trump Tower.The campaign will say: “You know, Don Jr. is not a politician; he’s a novice. He’s naive to some extent.”Why is that meeting something that has been so focused on?
This is a very significant meeting at several levels.9It’s significant because a whole context of the meeting was set up under the premise, “We have some dirt to give you on Hillary Clinton as a part of our effort to help elect Donald Trump.”It was part of the Russian government’s effort to help Donald Trump.That suggests a prior relationship, prior work, prior communication about what the Russian government hopes an effort was designed to accomplish.
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It also is not just with the president’s son, but with someone of tremendous political experience in the campaign chair, Paul Manafort, as well as the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.You have the three top people on the Trump campaign meeting at a pivotal time in the campaign.They're not going to take that meeting unless it’s a very significant one.Then, of course, you have the most clear evidence of an intent to receive help from the Russians.That meeting took place in the same way the Russian tradecraft tells you that such an overture would be made.That is through cutouts, through oligarchs and through other intermediaries that would basically be sounding out the campaign.Would this kind of intervention be welcome?The answer they got back was unequivocally yes, we would love it.
Sebastian Gorka told us—we interviewed him—told us every campaign is looking for dirt on their opponent.10There's nothing unusual about this.There's nothing here.[What is] your attitude toward that point of view?
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Every campaign might be interested in learning what they can about their opponent.They're not going to be interested, we have to hope, in colluding with a foreign government’s intervention in our elections.That’s, of course, what was being offered here, was a state party offering to help a U.S. presidential campaign in violation of law.There's no way to normalize that.There's no way to legitimize that.Of course everyone in that room understood that.
The fact that there's been so much dissembling about the nature of the meeting, what was discussed, the premise in which it was set up, is also significant.You have the president himself reportedly crafting a dishonest account of what took place in that meeting, that it was about adoptions, when that was hardly what the meeting was about.
I find it interesting, too, that during that G-20 summit, when the president leaves the table, where he’s seated next to our ally, Prime Minister [Shinzo Abe] of Japan, and walks around that long table to sit next to Vladimir Putin, when he’s finally forced to discuss what took place in that unreported meeting, his answer is, “We talked about adoptions.”That was, of course, the same falsehood that he suggested to his son to account for that meeting at Trump Tower.All of the deception surrounding that meeting, I think, is only further evidence of an intent to collude with Russia during the campaign.
The U.S. Response to Russian Measures
… Why did the Obama administration seem to be unable to move forcefully, either to react to the Russians or to get the information out to the public earlier than the October release, when it finally came out?
I think the administration was concerned about a number of things.11They were concerned that they could prompt an escalating response from the Russians.They were concerned with appearing to be trying to affect the outcome of our election by coming out publicly about what the Russians were doing.There was also a sense that it would play into the narrative that the Trump campaign had that there was a rigged quality to the election.
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Now, I never understood that last point.But even the first two points I think were outweighed by the need to level with the American people about what was happening and trust the American people with knowing what to do with that information, that a foreign government was trying to interfere.I thought it was far better to act prophylactically than wait until after the election to explain what had happened.
I also think that in this area, where those on offense have all the advantages, they just need to find one open door, and there's always plausible deniability when it comes to cyber, that you have to establish a deterrent.You can't deter the Russians or the North Koreans or anyone else if you're unwilling in the first instance to call them out on it or take steps to make them pay a price for it.My conviction with the Russians through the course of the Obama administration was [that] the greater risk was in doing nothing at all, not just on cyber, but in other areas as well.The Russians respected vigorous pushback.In the absence of that, they consider it an open door.I thought the risk of Russian escalation was greater if we did nothing and said nothing than if we took steps to push back against them.
Eventually, the Oct. 7 release of the report that defined that the Russian government was involved in this and how serious it was, it got lost in the news of the day, including the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape that was released a half an hour later.But it didn’t seem to be followed through.The administration didn’t seem to have a rollout, a press rollout that would actually allow this to be sort of understood.It seemed to disappear.Then that was sort of the last big possibility before the election.Then the election takes place, and it takes two months before the sanctions come out.… What was your attitude about it as you were watching this proceed, as the information was not being understood by the public and sort of disappeared even after the election?It didn’t seem to take hold.
I was urging, both during the course of the election when we had discovered what the Russians were doing, was first that the administration make attribution, which they ultimately made, but it took too long in my view, but then that they began immediate discussions—this is, again, before the election—began immediate discussions with our European allies about a set of sanctions, because our European allies had also been the subject of other interference by the Russians.Those economic sanctions are what concerned the Russians the most.
I wasn’t calling for a cyber tit-for-tat.That does have an escalatory potential.What gets the Russians’ attention the most is something that impairs their economy.Putin, of course, is guided by one motivation above all, and that’s the preservation of his regime.The reason why getting rid of the sanctions is such a high priority for Putin is that, to the degree that it takes down the Russian economy, and people gather in the streets to protest the effect on their lives, that threatens the regime.Putin is never going to lose a democratic election in Russia, because if you're a viable opponent, you end up in jail or dead, but he still fears the power of people through mass protests to remove their autocratic rulers.
Anything that impairs the Russian economy is a great threat to Putin.I think the strongest deterrent the administration could have brought about, and should have done so before the election, was to begin immediate negotiations with our allies about sanctioning Russia for its interference, even if that couldn’t be fully consummated until after the election.… The steps the administration took after the election, I think, were too little, and were too late.But the administration put itself in that position by not acting sooner.
Putin and Trump
So Trump comes into office, of course.What was the Trump’s team approach on Russia coming in? …
The president has taken a unique view of Russia as an ally.[He] was, in the first instance, early [in his] administration, very critical of our true allies, like Germany and France, Australia, one of our closest allies and military partners, but was unable to critique anything or criticize anything that Putin did.The president, on a far broader scale, seems incapable of criticizing anyone who is the least bit supportive of him.Whether this is a part of that phenomenon or something more nefarious is at work, we still don’t know.But nonetheless, the early Trump administration seemed determined to have a positive relationship with Russia on Russia’s own terms.You have Russian interference in a very significant, unprecedented way in our election, and the first thing the Trump administration wants to do, apparently, is make terms with Russia in a way that caters to Russian interests, not American interests.
Inexplicable, I think, to those of us that work in the national security area.[President Trump] fundamentally doesn’t comprehend what Putin is about, what motivates him.For Putin, this has always been a zero-sum game between the U.S. and Russia.Anything that diminishes the U.S. is good for Russia and vice versa.Putin, I think, looks at the U.S. as an opportunity to aggrandize himself and Russia at the United States’ expense.So clearly a different view of Russia by President Trump and his early administration, at odds I think with history, with Putin’s own motivations.And of course why the president persisted along that path, and persists along it to this day, is something we’re trying to find out.
The cloud of the Russian story, as it’s called, on the Trump administration, is talked about a lot, about the way it affects him, the way it affects his program, how it led to the firing of [FBI Director] Jim Comey, which led then to allegations of obstruction of justice, and it led to the Mueller investigation.Talk a little bit about this sort of unraveling of some of what Trump has been trying to do, and leading to more investigations, more interest in what really took place.
I think early in the administration, there began a cascading of events that led us down this path.The first was when Jim Comey testified in open session before our Intelligence Committee in the House that there had been a counterintelligence investigation open on people involved in the Trump campaign going back to July of last year.12The president apparently watched that testimony, watched that whole hearing, was very upset about it.Ultimately, Director Comey’s public revelation of the investigation, as well as his unwillingness to do the president’s bidding in terms of downplaying the Russian investigation or commenting on the president’s own status, resulted in his firing.
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And of course [then came] all the dissembling about why he was fired by the president, the initial effort to disguise the true motivation for his firing, and then of course the public acknowledgement of why indeed Jim Comey was fired.
That led to the appointment of Bob Mueller.I've known Bob Mueller for a long time, as he served the country as FBI director.I think he enjoys a very strong reputation for professionalism and integrity from people in both parties.I think his appointment is probably the single most significant fact in the investigation since the investigation began.I now have confidence that the criminal investigation or counterintelligence investigation will be conducted with integrity and with thoroughness.We need to make sure that Congress does the same.
And what does Vladimir Putin get out of all of this?… Did he get what he wanted?Do we understand the full circumstances behind that?
Tragically, from the U.S. point of view, Putin’s efforts have been a phenomenal success from the Russian point of view.He didn’t get everything he wanted in the sense that the Congress stepped in and prevented the new president from doing away with the sanctions on Russia.That was among his top policy objectives.But in terms of diminishing the United States, tearing away at U.S. democracy and the example provided by the U.S. democracy to countries around the world, in helping to elect a leader that would cause new frictions and divisions between the U.S. and our strongest NATO allies, who would speak out against our German ally, against our Australian ally, who would effectively diminish the standing of the United States on the world stage and at the same time allow Putin to aggrandize himself and Russia as a world player back on the world stage, met just about every objective that Putin had.
I think people within the Kremlin were surprised to see just how brittle the U.S. system seems to be.That they could intervene in a fairly inexpensive way, and largely through cyber means, and reveal real weaknesses in the American democracy, must surprise the Russians and thrill the Russians.It ought to, for us, be a real warning shot, that we have a lot of mending to do, in terms of the health of our own democracy, that we need to get beyond the deep divide in this country if we’re going to protect ourselves.
This is a time when we need to be the leader of the free world, when democracy itself is under challenge around the globe, and there is no other champion that can step into the shoes of the United States.That is a still indispensable role of the United States.Until our president leads, it’s going to fall upon members of Congress and governors and others to step into his place.
Vladimir Putin must consider this operation to have been successful beyond his wildest imagination.
Just one real quick follow-up on that.Your thoughts on that meeting that took place in the White House with [Russian Ambassador Sergey] Kislyak and [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov the day after Comey is fired, and what the president said?
A picture is worth a thousand words.The images ironically revealed by TASS, the Russian news agency, of the president engaging and frolicking in laughter with two representatives of the Kremlin, says it all.13The president of the United States finds he now has very much common cause with Vladimir Putin.I don’t think it’s a surprise that, notwithstanding all the scrutiny of this relationship, that the president would nonetheless choose to sit next to him at the G-20 in the second meeting, because he finds now he has a lot in common with Vladimir Putin, the subject of universal condemnation around much of the world, increasingly isolated within their own circles, and finding common cause against free press and against democratic institutions, against independent judiciary.He finds he has now a lot in common with Vladimir Putin.This I think is a terrible turn of events.The story the Russians want to tell is that there's no difference between democracy in Russia and in the United States, that we are morally equivalent societies.And we have a president of the United States who goes on Fox, and when he’s asked why he can't criticize Putin because the man’s a killer, and his answer is, “Are we so different?,”is exactly what the Kremlin wants to hear.Great tragedy for us domestically, but a great tragedy for freedom-loving people around the world.
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Thank you.
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