To cancel his summit in helsinki with Vladimir Putin on monday in the face of this, new charges brought by the Department Of Justice. Whats your take on this . I agree, he never should have taken the meeting to begin with. I mean we have no idea what he would hope to gain from this. What we know quite clearly, these were not lowlevel operatives, ali, who were indicted. These are highlevel people who worked very closely with the Senior Leadership in russia. We know putin knew this. Donald trump is only enabling Vladimir Putin by coming to this meeting, by participating in this meeting. If he does do it, and, you know, it wouldnt surprise me if he did, what he ought to do is hand him over these indictments, demand the immediate prompt extradition of all the defendants involved, and thats what he should be doing. He is playing into the hands of putin right now. The world is turned upside down,
as your prior person said. Yeah. Putin wants to destabilize nato, he wants to sow discord among our allies, he wants to sow discord at home. With Trump Trashing nato, atracking germany, attacking our uk allies, this president is playing into putins hands. Hes not only undermining our democracy, hes making america less safe. I have to ask you, im kind of amazed by the response from the white house quite quickly after this came out. Obviously the president knew about this so they might have had a response ready. Todays charges include no allegations of knowing Involvement Pie Anyone on the campaign and no allegations that the alleged hacking affected the election result. Tom, does it strike you as strange that in the face of 12 indictments that the white houses response is, well, it wasnt us. Well, its long since time for donald trump to stop calling this a witch hunt. Attorney general rosenstein acknowledged that he briefed the president before he left for europe. So the president knew that these indictments were coming. And he still made witch hunt references. Putins righthand people were being charged by a federal grand jury. This isnt a witch hunt, its an attack on our democracy. And the failure to understand the difference between the attack on democracy and the suggestion that donald trump wouldnt have won the election otherwise, thats a separate discussion. It may be true that donald trump wouldnt have won the election without russian interference, but thats not actually at the heart of the issue here. The issue is that somebody was meddling with our elections. And the issue is, its not going to end. Why would you stop trying to do this when you had Great Success in 2016. You elected putins puppet as the president of the United States. Youre doing this elsewhere across the world. And so, again, this isnt simply an attack on United Statesdemocracy, there are attacks on democracies across the world. And that is why its so important for us to be together with our allies. And what do we see happening . We see attacks on our allies and we see him he has this fixation with strong men around the world, whether its in north korea, whether its in russia or elsewhere. And that is why it is so important for us to understand that this isnt about republicans or democrats or independents, this is about the essence of our democracy. And if people think this is going to stop, that they have learned their lesson, think again. Theyre going to redouble their efforts because they understand that they have a president whos compromised. Have you heard from or spoken to Hillary Clinton since this has come out . I have not. There were a lot of people at the dnc, obviously this is before your time there, who ended up being targeted. Whats the sense, is this there are people who expectedDepartment Of Justice for over a decade, there are many more chapters to be written in this investigation. As you correctly pointed out a few minutes ago, this indictment already made references to interactions between the russians and roger stone and wikileaks, et cetera. So this is an important chapter that was released today, but this is by no means the last chapter. All right, tom, good to talk to you as always. Thanks very much. Tom perez is the chairman of the Democratic National committee. As tom says, were going to get into some of the details about the references made to people, some of whom are not named in the indictment but basically anybody with google can figure out who they are. Joining me now is adrienne elrod. Good to see you. You too. There are more than 300 people in the dnc who were targeted. As we read the details of these
indictments, it was effective, it was targeted, it was specific, and it seemed to have a goal in mind. The goal of defeating Hillary Clinton and spreading disinformation, compromising the campaign and helping donald trump. And then there are even things in the indictment which well talk about where there seem to be outreach from the russian agents to people connected to the Trump Campaign to say is this helpful . What do you think of the information weve got . Yeah. I think its helpful to getting us one step closer to actually figuring out what happened. Was there collusion, was there not collusion. You know, look, when youre running a campaign, especially a president ial campaign of the magnitude that we faced in 2016, you always expect challenges. You expect challenges with the ground game, challenges with Opposition Research. You dont expect an adversarial government, i. E. Russia, come in and influence results of the election. That is what we saw, that our president has no desire to get to the bottom of this. Its a huge issue. Obviously hes meeting withVladimir Putin on monday, he should cancel that meeting. But look, these i almost think the white house probably knew that this indictment these indictments were coming down and thats why they set up the meeting. But again, i guess if theres a little vindication here for those of us who were victims of being hacked, for those of us who, you know, had to figure out how to still run a campaign while also dealing with, you know, an email dump every single day of John Podestas emails and other campaigns emails, but again this is getting us one step closer to figuring out what happened. The white house is obsessed with vote changing. By the way, weve gotten as close as we are going to get to the idea, at least for now, that they hacked into some state election boards. They stole information from a Software Vendor to the state election board, so they have information about voters. So i wouldnt draw any conclusions yet that there wasnt voter changing, but thats what the white house is all about. Yeah. Did it change any votes. It sort of misses a much larger
issue that tom just talked about. It doesnt matter whether democrats or hacked or republicans were hacked. Correct. Someone was hacked by a Foreign Government trying to influence the outcome of an election. Its hard to debate this with the white house when they wont acknowledge thats actually the problem. Correct. What did Vladimir Putin in 2020 decides i dont want donald trump to be president anymore. Im going to hack into his Campaign Emails and hack into the rnc. The fact that our president has no desire to get to the bottom of this and only seems to lean into his relationship with Vladimir Putin is deeply troubling. The other thing that i think is going to be worth looking at as this Investigation Continues is when the russians hacked into the dnc, how do they actually manipulate the voter file . Thats obviously something that Democrats Use across the board to target. So yes, perhaps on election day maybe votes were not actually changed, but the targeting that our campaign, that the dnc, that Down Ballot Races use to figure
out which voters to target was a byproduct of this hack. The New York Times has done some good reporting on that. Well speak to them later in the show to discuss the congressional candidates who were targeted by some of these hacks as well. But it is frustrating that we are not all exactly on the same page, that this is really serious. This isnt about you and it isnt about somebody else, its really serious that someone has gotten into our Election Systems to consider victory that a vote wasnt changed, which were not sure about yet, is a little premature and a little silly. All right, adrienne, thanks very much. She is the former director of Strategic Communications for Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign. To help me break down what all of this means, weve got ken dilanian, our National Security and justice reporter. Malcolm nance is our Terrorism Analyst and an expert on hacking. Ari melber is msnbcs chief Legal Correspondent and the host of the beat. Ken, let me start with you. The indictment was long and detailed, but if you had to tell it to somebody in short order, what would you say . Essentially, ali, the Russian MilitaryIntelligence Organization deployed sophisticated tactics to hack into the democrats, steal their email and disseminate it in a way that hurt them. You know, the russians its always been said that the russians are much better at cyber and hacking than the chinese. Im not an expert, but reading this indictment you can see evidence of that. You can see that they sought to cover their tracks and pose as third parties and erase evidence of the hacking and they used sophisticated tools to essentially capture the keystrokes of the machines that they infiltrated. And look, as other people have said, ali, we knew this had happened. Theres already been an Intelligence Assessment saying that this happened. But this indictment names senior russian officials. It doesnt say how the u. S. Government could prove that these officials did these acts, and thats a story of intelligence gathering and theNational Security agency capturing emails and listening to phone calls and potentially the cia infiltrating these places with human sources. But this was an extraordinary piece of Detective Work that has captured this information and laid it out for the public. Also extraordinary is the timing of this. Nbc news reported in march that this indictment was going to happen at some point. What i did not expect was for it to happen on the eve of a summit between donald trump and Vladimir Putin. For more president s this would be a good thing because he could go into putin armed with this evidence. Vladimir putin was personally involved in this operation and supervised it very closely. But for donald trump, he said today that this was the russia investigation was a rigged witch hunt that harmed our relations with russia. So it begs the question what his approach is going to be in this summit with Vladimir Putin. Another question i have is whether when Rod Rosenstein briefed donald trump last week that this was coming, what was the president s reaction . Did he try to delay it . Did he have any say as to
whether the United States of america was going to name foreign officials in the indictment . Because, ali, that is a big deal. Hes talked so much about the witch hunt in the last few days, i would have thought that would have influenced at least that discussion but again, its 2018, things are different than i remember. Ari, there are so many legal details i want to ask you about, but mostly i was fascinated by the response from the white house, that it wasnt us. You know, some version of nobody named us. They seem to be missing the Forest For The Trees here. Tell me how significant an indictment this is and perhaps what a serious response should look like. This is by far the most serious indictment by bob mueller since paul manafort, who was of Course Campaign chair and now is sitting in jail awaiting trial. Its much more significant than the social media indictment because this shows a felonious conspiracy to actually steal things and try to inject them into our politics. Watergate was a domestic breakin that ultimately brought down a presidency. Bob mueller here alleges the
same kind of breakin, but over a longer period of time with far more materials stolen and the international hook of a nucleararmed major foreign adversary of the United States leading the charge. It is impossible, i think, to overstate how important it is. We live in a world of hyperbole and there have been a loft expectations. But forget the expectations. Today is the day mueller is putting the Cards On The Table on that. He also names other conduct that we dont know if it will be charged but it looks suspicious and may be criminal. He says a u. S. Candidate, doesnt appear to be donald trump, requested and received stolen material from abroad. Thats very significant because mueller is giving us a preview into what he considers a line of potential prosecutorial action. If he wants to charge Anyone Around that u. S. Candidate with saying receiving stolen goods is more than one felony probably, Election Violation and theft, then that gives you a road to
what else he could do. I want to bring in ken to show our viewers how the sausage is made. We know there are various congressional candidates who were disadvantaged because information about them was leaked from their emails and were trying to hone in on who that is. We dont know who the candidate is. But the bottom line is this is a down ballot, a congressional candidate, who was the victim of information that was stolen by these same russian intelligence agents. Thats right. That is a little noticed part of this whole conspiracy, ali, the russians were also interfering in state, local and county races and deploying information in a sophisticated way that some Political Consultants said they had to have had american help. Ali, theres also this remarkable element of the July 27th Statement by the president , you know, by then candidate trump, russia, if youre listening and you can find Hillary Clintons 30,000 emails, go ahead and do it. Because were here and because you said it, lets actually play that for our viewers. Russia, if youre listening, i hope youre able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. Yeah. So that and then tell me what happened. So that got a lot of attention at the time. An extraordinary statement. Katy tur followed up questioning how he could have made that request. Now we know from this indictment that that very evening, according to the indictment, russian operatives started to try to hack into clinton email accounts. Not Democratic National committee email accounts, but actually Hillary Clinton personal office and staff email accounts. Now, obviously we cant prove, the indictment doesnt allege that they did that at the behest of donald trump, but reasonable people can make an inference here and thats going to loom, i think, large as ari was alluding to. That was an invitation essentially to a Foreign Government to pursue stolen property. And they did that. Malcolm, again, im sort of hung up on the fact that the white house doesnt seem to be grasping the importance of this or is deliberately being misleading about it. But the fact is youve written a book on this. The idea that they got, according to this indictment, as close as a Software Vendor to state election boards, that they were able to steal somewhere near half a million emails of voters with a lot of information, and the white house is carrying on about how no votes were changed. Look at this. They hacked the website of a state board of elections and stole information related to approximately 500,000 voters. This is in the indictment. Malcolm, its naive for us to think they just walked away. Well, it is naive of us to think that. Two years ago when i wrote my first book, Plot To Hack America on this, i had alleged that they were probably not going to play with the vote tallies. But there were other ways that the russians and remember, this is before the election. There were other ways that they could manipulate and suppress votes. They could change Voter Registration information. When the first News Media Report came out in late september, early october 2016 where evidence had been gained that russians had gone in and had been scanning and looking at the Voter Registration rolls, i had actually joked on air that junior Russian MilitaryIntelligence Officers need something to do too, right . And in this case, that is precisely what this indictment alleges. They show that these teams, Junior Officers