Clint Watts, a former special agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, says that Moscow got its man in the White House in 2016.
“Russia if you’re listening”, Donald J Trump
“Trump asked Russia to find Clinton’s emails. Within 24 hours, Russians attacked her accounts.“
Asked point-blank if Russian hacking and disinformation helped elect Trump to the presidency, Clint Watts, who tracked the online activities of extremist groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State group for the FBI in the run-up to the 2016 election, was resolute.
“Yes. I think just alone the hacking, particularly of the DNC and the time to release by WikiLeaks and DCLeaks and others of hacked materials offset the media narrative,”
“If you go back to the infamous ‘Access Hollywood’ tape of Donald Trump, it was immediately followed by the release, within an hour I believe, of hacked emails to try and distract from that narrative, and to essentially inundate that media space with other coverage.”
“That was remarkable. They were essentially amplifying essentially indigenous American conspiracies in different ways, that the U.S. might declare martial law and take peoples’ weapons,” he said. “But what they were really doing was testing a new way to do warfare, information warfare, which was from their Soviet system called ‘active measures,’ which is winning through the force of politics rather than the politics of force by helping U.S. politicians who favor Russia get elected and rise to policy positions.”
This is what Malcolm Nance said
“I think Russia has won. If you look at what their goals were — degrading or defeating NATO, breaking up the European Union, finding an ally in counterterrorism for their Syria policy, and making gains against Ukraine — they’ve gotten all of those,” Watts
“I can think of no intelligence operation and influence operation that’s been more successful in world history in such a short period of time.”
Listen to the full “Bots & Ballots” interview with Watts here.