Robert Mueller Will Not Save You (The Remix)
There aren’t really words to describe the feeling of your worst suspicions being ceaselessly confirmed as your country crumbles around you, but we try to find them nonetheless on this week’s Gaslit Nation. In October 2018, we did an episode called Robert Mueller Will Not Save You in which we warned that the probe was far too lenient toward dangerous criminals. Now thanks to a FOIA-prompted document release from the intrepid reporters of Buzzfeed, we give you “Robert Mueller Will Not Save You (The Remix)”.
Nick Offerman: Hello, I'm Nick Offerman. White male translator for Gaslit Nation. To sum up this week's episode, kleptocracy anywhere is kleptocracy everywhere, and this is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. Thanks for listening.
Sarah Kendzior: I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling essay collection The View from Flyover Country and the upcoming book Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa: And I am Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the upcoming journalistic thriller Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior: And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump Administration and rising autocracy around the world. And so we have joked in a sad and horrified way that every week is a rerun at Gaslit Nation, and this has happened yet again with the release of a trove of documents from BuzzFeed proving what we've been saying here since the launch of our show, which is that Mueller failed his country. He ran a deeply flawed probe, and he let our country become hijacked by a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government with a Kremlin asset at the helm. In the end, Mueller's legacy is that he protected traitors. That will be the way that this weak-willed institutionalist is remembered. We've gone over this so many times, and we recommend that you listen to basically all of our past episodes, but in particular, the October 2018 episode called “Robert Mueller Will Not Save You”. The March 2019 episodes called “Lisa Page” and “The Barr Report” and the 2-part episode called “Roy Cohn, The White House”, “The Mueller Report” from April 2019. This will give you a comprehensive guide to the ways that Mueller failed his country. Accompanied by his buddy, Bill Barr, the Iran Contra Cleanup Guy. But don't worry, Andrea and I are going to discuss this all again. Before we get into that, I'm just gonna give you some basic facts about what just happened. So Jason Leopold is a BuzzFeed reporter who issued a Freedom of Information Act request to get a trove of federal documents showing information about the Mueller probe that had been previously omitted from the public record. And so on this show, we have discussed Leopold and his writing partner from BuzzFeed, Anthony Cormier, before for a couple of reasons, besides that they're just seriously great reporters. This is rare praise from us. First, Mueller remained notoriously silent throughout the duration of his probe. This is a silence that was mistaken for wisdom. He broke his silence in January 2019 to attack Leopold and Cormier and to contest their reporting about Michael Cohen, which at the time many were using to push impeachment because it had appeared that Trump had ordered Cohen to commit crimes on his behalf. And the new documents that were released show that Leopold and Cormier were completely right the entire time, that Trump did, in fact, direct Cohen to carry out his dirty deeds. We basically knew this already from Cohen's testimony in other places, but it's good to see these reporters vindicated. Basically, you should note that Mueller would not correct Bill Barr's four-page memo of lies about his own probe and report, but he was fine coming out and attacking to BuzzFeed journalists and then the mainstream media at that time back in January. In particular, CNN piled on Leopold and Cormier and BuzzFeed as well. One of the reasons this is very interesting to us is because Leopold and Cormier also broke what I consider to be the most important, under-covered story of Trump and Russia, which is that the U.S. Treasury was hijacked by Russia in 2015. So during the Obama Administration, the Treasury is, to our knowledge, still hijacked by Russia, with nobody arrested except for the whistleblower who informed the public of this operation. And nothing has been done about that. There still hasn't been any explanation. Leopold and Cormier broke this story on BuzzFeed back in late December 2018, and within weeks was attacked by Mueller to try to discredit their reporting. And so at the time—and still now—I wondered if this was related, and the Mueller probe saw them as a threat, which is a shame, because they were just trying to inform the public of activity in their government. Andrea, what are your thoughts?
Andrea Chalupa: My thoughts [laughter]. Well, welcome to Gaslit Nation Greatest Hits, Volume 2. So it's basically everything we've been saying always and forever. Long story short, Paul Manafort, Kremlin-linked operative, he, for years, since at least we know 2006, was on a 10-million-dollar-a-year contract on the leash of Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch that he would later be in debt to. He owed money to Deripaska for some media deal in Ukraine gone wrong. But that 10-million-dollar-a-year contract, beginning in 2006 when Manafort bought an apartment in Trump Tower—Trump Tower in New York City being a Russian mafia dorm, as we're always saying, and there's a lot of mobbed-up people, including a Russian mafia gambling den in the floor right beneath Donald Trump's own floor. This whole contract with Deripaska was to further the interests of Putin's government in Ukraine and the West through media and business. So all this big document that Jason and Anthony got for BuzzFeed, as well as they were byline credits on that excellent, must-read piece, [including] a ton of people—Zoe Tillman, Ellie Hall, Emma Loop—because it takes a village to do a deep-dive investigation like this, and the BuzzFeed article even says that they have eight years of articles that they're going to do in releasing this information.
Sarah Kendzior: One billion documents, I think, that they've managed to procure, which is insane. But go on.
Andrea Chalupa: Right. So basically, while Manafort’s serving his prison term, he's going to be staying in the news, which is a wonderful thing, so I'm very happy about that, because this man is absolutely dangerous. Dangerous. Let's not forget: at the heart of this, it's just the mafia in the 21st century, so they need these unethical players to be freed from prison so they can go on committing more crimes on their behalf. That's all we're dealing with, which is not to minimize it, but that's at the heart of it. So what's important to understand is what this big document dump reminds us of— because Manafort, of course, is once again in the center of all this, and he is Putin's guy running Trump's campaign—Manafort owed money to Putin's oligarch Deripaska. Deripaska, of course, as we're always saying, won the bloody aluminum wars in the car bomb ‘90s in Russia. If you owe money to any guy like Deripaska and he keeps you alive, that's because you're valuable to him alive.
Let me just give you a story: I asked a friend of mine who was sanctioned by the Russian government whether it's safe for me to go to Ukraine. This was before Trump. This was before Trump. I was going to Ukraine to try to work on my film, and I was nervous about it, because my film, Mr. Jones, exposes the Kremlin genocide that the Kremlin has long denied. And so I was nervous about going to Ukraine with this story at one point. And I asked a friend who's sanctioned by Russia, I said, "Do you think it's safe to go there?" And my friend said, "What do you think? Of course. I mean, you're not messing with anyone's money. If you messed with someone's money, yeah. They would kill you." So if Manafort messed with Deripaska's money and was allowed to live, that is because he was valuable to Deripaska by managing Donald Trump's campaign to work with the Kremlin, to work with the Kremlin's cutouts like WikiLeaks and others, to steal the election in 2016. And we even have that in writing, where Manafort wrote, saying, "Are we going to get straight with Deripaska if we do this?" And Manafort worked in that campaign for free. So this is just atrocious that Robert Mueller would allow the Kremlin to get away with bringing Donald Trump to power, and why he did not really reel in the big fish of not just Trump, but the Trump kids, like Jared Kushner and Ivanka, who audaciously spent August 2016—as we were reminded in this big dump, and we already knew this; it was already in the press—but Ivanka and Jared, vacationed at—
Sarah Kendzior: Mmhm.
Andrea Chalupa: Right? The election was just a few months away, and they even care about the optics of how this would look, that they're going off and vacationing with a Russian oligarch, a guy who is a major polluter in Russia, who doesn't care about the environment, doesn't care about human life. He made his fortune essentially polluting the Russian people, literally, with his big company, and he was exposed in the Panama Papers. I'm talking about the Russian oligarch Rybolovlev, who made his fortune as Russia's Fertilizer King. He is somebody who is notorious for having purchased a giant Versaille McMansion in Florida that Donald Trump owned. And he purchased this in 2008 for a staggering 95 million dollars. Why would he do that? I mean, why would he funnel all that money to Donald Trump? Because, if you've been listening to a show for a while now, especially our summer series or pretty much any episode, I'd say this point: Donald Trump has had decades-long connections to the Mafia and Kremlin-linked operatives. And even his own idiot sons, Eric Trump and Don Junior, have said that the Trump family, like their businesses, they rely heavily on Russian money. And Putin's Russia is a mafia state. This is just an atrocious reminder that Mueller did not do enough to protect our nation's sovereignty by bringing the Trump Crime Family to justice. He didn't, for whatever reason.
Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, and it's an extension of what we discussed last week and in many other shows of the broader problem of the FBI not tracking the Trump crime family for decades, and not tracking the Russian mafia, and not doing anything to stop this, despite the fact that they literally had Russian mobster FBI informants telling them of these operations going all the way back into the ‘90s. They did nothing. And you know, these crimes were not hard to solve. I was thinking of Ivanka and Jared's trip to Croatia. Like, how did I know about that? From US Weekly! Like it was in US Weekly. It was in Vanity Fair. They also met with Wendi Deng, who U.S. intelligence has said is a Chinese spy. Like this was all out in the tabloids.
Andrea Chalupa: Who dated Putin, by the way.
Sarah Kendzior: Who dated Putin! Allegedly. That's what the US Weekly article was about. It's like, Ivanka is on a Croatian vacation with Putin's new paramour, Wendi Deng, the Chinese spy. I mean, if fucking US Weekly can break this shit, maybe Mueller should get a subscription. Like, this is absolutely ridiculous. And the amount of things that we have found and others have found have just been in the public domain, and the mystery has always been, well, why the hell did Mueller not act on this? Why did he not, for example, profile his suspects, like Manafort, who if you know the most basic shit about him, you know that if he's going to take a deal with Mueller, it's going to be a fake bullshit deal. And as we've gone over on the show, he took that deal right after Papadopoulos got let off the hook with no intention to cooperate. I warned about it on Twitter. Maybe that's another place the Mueller probe should start looking for information, like US Weekly and Twitter.
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Sarah Kendzior: The judge in his case was threatened. The jury was threatened. The judge had to have armed security. The media barely talked about that. Then he was declared a person who'd led an otherwise blameless life by that same judge who had been threatened before. Like, everything about this is horrifying. And like you said, they want to keep him alive. They see him as useful. He should get out in about six to seven years, despite the fact that he's an incredible threat to national security, to public safety. He was convicted, or charged and I guess pled, at this point, to conspiracy against the United States, which barely scratches the surface of the extent of his crimes. You see parallels with him and with Michael Flynn, who another revelation that the BuzzFeed documents brought forward is that Flynn had more Russian contacts than initially known, was considered a grave security threat, which we already knew. And of course, you have, again, Mueller insisting to a judge that Flynn just walk free, that he not be incarcerated and prevented from carrying out further crimes, despite the judge saying, "This guy committed treason. This guy did seriously awful stuff. He's very dangerous. You know, you need to do something about that." I think that judge was Emmet Sullivan, and I'm definitely paraphrasing here, but you can go read about that. He was horrified by Mueller's actions.
So this is just basically another debunking of the Mueller Myth, of the Mueller Personality Cult. And so I kind of want to get into that a little, because this is a serious problem, and the problem is not just how people are reacting to Mueller, just the spread of cults and of groupthink and of just incredible, fearful conformity, not just in our media and political system, but it's kind of spreading in the population in general, which is depressing. You may wonder, why were Andrea and I relatively alone in insisting that Mueller did not, in fact, have it, that we should not, in fact, just trust Mueller, which we were always told to do? And that's basically because we are right now, in the U.S., living in a transition from a democracy to authoritarianism, and so that means we are living in a time of intense confusion and fear. And when people become that frightened, conformist groupthink begins to dominate. When there are no stable institutions, when you're seeing these institutions fail, when you're seeing reality and truth crumble before your eyes, people tend to revert to blind faith in whatever and whomever they can find, and so you end up with these kind of movements that are a combination of genuine sentiment and a propaganda apparatus, which included everyone from freaks like Louise Mensch and bot farms, but also so-called legal experts who pacified the population during Mueller's probe. It's possible that some of these people didn't recognize the damage they were doing, didn't intend to hurt the country by telling everyone to just trust Mueller and give these false prognoses of where the Mueller probe was going. They might have been sincere believers going with the institutionalist flow, but when the institutionalists themselves are deeply corrupt and you're enabling them, you have corruption. So what you ended up with during this time was this incredible personality cult surrounding Mueller. They were selling, like, Mueller votive candles. People were literally praying to Mueller, and that to me is deeply disturbing, because you see it not just with him, but with others. You see it with Comey. You see it with Pelosi. Of course, you see it with Trump. Trump is the greatest example of this. You see it in fringe groups like QAnon, in which people are putting their entire faith in an anonymous entity called Q that leaves them vague tips on Internet message boards. But most disturbingly, you are seeing this in crime cults and mafia networks. The Mafia functions like a kind of cult. Autocracy functions like a cult. The GOP is increasingly a cult. The GOP is a crime cult, complete with omerta and fealty to a literal, you know, named Don. People will increasingly accept mafia and autocratic tactics as normal if they see cults sprouting up everywhere else instead of independent and critical thinking. And that, to me, is one of the greatest tragedies of this time, one of the greatest dangers of this time, and something that we should all be adamantly fighting against.
Andrea Chalupa: I watched Godfather 1 this weekend, because I needed to release some aggression by watching that baptism scene. It's such a reminder of the way they talk in The Godfather. They're talking about which journalists they have on their payroll, which politicians they have on their payroll. And that brings us to Ken Vogel, yet again, because what this reminds me of—so in the heart of this BuzzFeed big document drop, they point out that Paul Manafort—which we already know; we already know this if you’ve followed my sister's story especially, because my sister, being Ukrainian-American, was trying to warn everybody about the obvious fact that Putin's Darth Vader was running Donald Trump's campaign and stood a chance of taking over the White House, and therefore our nation's sovereignty. So my sister was screaming about this to anyone who would listen because she's Ukrainian-American, and Paul Manafort brought to power one of the most corrupt, if not the most corrupt presidents in Ukraine's history, who stole an estimated 100 billion dollars from the Ukrainian people and enriched his family with it.
And his little crew was called The Family. It was his cronies and his actual family. His son was a dentist who became worth several millions of dollars. So of course, Paul Manafort was going to blame Ukraine for his own crime. Really, this document dump that BuzzFeed did, we could just read the memo my sister wrote at 3:00 a.m. on election night on November 8th, 2016, that we put online and made go viral as part of the Audit the Vote movement. This was all so obvious back in 2016. And what the BuzzFeed report points out is saying that Paul Manafort was pushing the unfounded conspiracy theory, now part of the impeachment inquiry that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the DNC and stole their e-mails in 2016. Well, Paul Manafort likely got that idea, for one thing, because my sister went public. Michael Isikoff was one of the few journalists who finally took my sister seriously and published her warnings about Trump and Russia in 2016. So of course, Paul Manafort saw that and said, "Let's get back at her." That's one thing; that's one component of it. But even before that, even far before that, the fundamental component here is that the Kremlin has a very long history of blaming Ukraine for its own aggression. For instance, the Kremlin shot down the commercial jet MH17, which was filled with people, many of them going off to vacation, including a family of children returning home. And this plane, MH17, was flying over Ukraine, and it was a Russian missile from Putin's invasion of Ukraine that shot it down. And who did the Kremlin blame? Of course, Ukraine. That is what they do. They have a long history of putting the blame on Ukraine for its own aggression, including its aggression against Ukraine. The saying goes, "Don't believe something until Russia denies it." It just, it's sickening. It's gaslighting human rights abuses. They blamed Ukrainians for [Russia’s] invasion of Crimea and the human rights abuses that followed by calling it a referendum when it was not. It was a stealth invasion, plain and simple. People died as a result of it and were tortured and kidnapped. So Paul Manafort pushing this whole conspiracy theory to blame his crime on Ukraine, that is very much part of the Kremlin playbook, and that is very much what my sister pointed out in her 3:00 a.m. memo that she published on Facebook in the very early hours right after Trump was announced the winner of the 2016 election. What's really crazy about this is what this BuzzFeed report made me think of was Ken Vogel of Politico, who took this bait and wrote the story in Politico and later got rewarded for it for his really destructive articles that he published at Politico with a New York Times job. He is now at The New York Times. Ken Vogel published a piece basically pushing Manafort's own narrative, trying to blame my sister and Ukraine. Nothing could be further from the truth. So Ken Vogel was, as we've been saying for a very long time now, Ken Vogel was clearly Paul Manafort's easy mark in the American media to further his conspiracy theory and to support that. The second person in 2016 who went after Manafort and exposed him was the Ukrainian investigative journalist, Serhiy Leshchenko, whose friend had just died in a car bomb—that's still unsolved—in the heart of Kyiv in the summer 2016. When that was going on, Serhiy Leshchenko stood up and said, "Here is a black ledger showing millions of dollars in cash payments from Yanukovych to Paul Manafort." And that got published in The New York Times, and that's what finally pushed Manafort to the sidelines of Trump's campaign, even though Manafort never really left. And who published the hit piece on Serhiy Leshchenko? Ken Vogel in Politico. So, yeah. Keep in mind that Western corruption is complicit in this as well. Ken Vogel's moral corruption is complicit in this as well. It's like this whole idea where he, you know, if it's not a situation where Ken Vogel is financially directly benefiting from this by taking a big envelope of cash—I'm not saying that—he is benefiting from this financially by winning the day, as they say in journalism, with a big scoop. S-C-O-O-P, all cap letters, exclamation point, that he can put on Twitter and say, "Scoop! My big story!" So he can get attention for himself that day, make a name for himself, and then ultimately go on to get hired at The New York Times, the so-called newspaper of record. That is how Ken Vogel is financially benefiting, where his greed, his greed is betraying our country and damaging lives, because my sister has been a target of the Kremlin's aggression and Trump's aggression because of this bullshit scoop by Ken Vogel and Politico. So as Ken Vogel got promoted to the New York Times, my sister is suffering because of this propaganda nightmare that she's the target of.
Sarah Kendzior: And I think it's notable that any aspect of this story would be a ratings bonanza. You have the Mafia, you have spies, you have sex crimes, you have treason. You have all these things that are good for ratings, good for clicks, good for traffic. And they cover that up. They cover that up on behalf of Trump and on behalf of the Russian Mafia and on behalf of the Kremlin and on behalf of the GOP and all these other dirty actors.
They could be building their careers by telling the truth, by writing exposés, by exposing these people. Instead, they know that the way journalism is structured, corporate big company media journalism, you know, places like The New York Times, is to bury this. Like, I think it's very interesting that the career incentive of these kind of New York, D.C. elite institutions, is to cover up for these extremely corrupt individuals, and to basically play into the kind of narrative that The New York Times had been creating already by partnering up with people like Steve Bannon and printing Clinton Cash, just smearing Hillary Clinton by covering up for Trump, I mean just notoriously, for years, playing down his racism, playing down his financial crimes, playing down everything. When they chose Vogel, they chose somebody who they knew would continue to go along with that narrative. And that's true of other reporters that they hired during the same period as well, like Maggie Haberman, who basically writes court intrigue tales, covers up crime with scandal—or sexual predator Glenn Thrush, you know, her partner in crime. They want a certain type of personality. It's sad to think about it when you look at the Ken Vogels, and, you know, John Solomon from The Hill, or Sean Hannity, who is also mentioned in this Mueller BuzzFeed document dump, just how bereft of morality and bereft of sort of, I don't know, baseline adherence to truth, baseline adherence to exposing corruption, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, which is such a basic tenet of journalism that's completely out the window in this new environment. And at some later point in time, we should talk about sites like Deadspin and all these, like Think Progress, all these independent media sites that have just been completely gutted, in part because they don't really honor the same mindset. They weren't adhering to the party line in journalism. It's just in so much trouble right now. But yeah, Vogel is a key exemplar of this problem.
Andrea Chalupa: More interesting tidbits of this to point out from BuzzFeed. Manafort instructed Gates to periodically call someone whose name is redacted from documents to check in on where the information was and when it would be coming. Gates told the FBI that information, of course, the weaponized WikiLeaks drops, which did make a difference in that campaign as we saw, like the Access Hollywood tape, "grab them by the pussy" came out, and then right away you have a massive WikiLeaks dump going after John Podesta, Hillary's campaign manager. So this whole weaponization, this whole use of WikiLeaks, it brings to mind Luke Harding's piece in The Guardian showing how video footage showed that Paul Manafort was visiting Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London as early as 2013, 2015, and in the spring of 2016, when he was coming in to manage Donald Trump's campaign. Given his long career at this point by furthering the Kremlin's interest in the West, it wouldn't be a surprise at all that Manafort is coming around seeing Assange. And central to Mueller’s report, to Mueller's great credit of course, the report is damning. It's just not enough to put these criminals in prison. His investigation didn't do its duty to our country of really bringing these clowns to justice.
Sarah Kendzior: Right. He refused to act on his own findings, I think is the takeaway. Because he did produce evidence of obstruction of justice, to say the very least. You produced enough for 10 counts of that. He has refused to indict anybody, and we still don't know what role exactly Barr played in that, but I don't think that Mueller was really fighting at the bit to indict these people. He was cool with letting them walk, and his little lifelong buddy Barr basically structuring the narrative around it. But go on.
Andrea Chalupa: What these documents remind us, and what the Mueller report focuses on heavily, is that in the 21st century, they had this weapon of propaganda in this wide-reaching social media campaign, militarized propaganda campaign through not just WikiLeaks dumping out these emails. WikiLeaks needed help and editorializing them. How do you know which ones are the most damaging? How do you time the drops? Roger Stone, knowing it would be John Podesta's time in the barrel. You had the British-based militarized propaganda from Cambridge Analytica founded by Steve Bannon and the American oligarch Mercer. Those guys were brought in to not only help Trump—Jared Kushner brought them in to Trump—but also the RNC in spreading disinformation and so forth, and using stolen Facebook data. It's just this whole massive cesspool of social media propaganda being blasted out, and targeting people, and trying to create division among Trump's opposition and really furthering hate against dehumanizing Hillary Clinton and furthering the support for Trump through lies, through absolute lies, and driving out the vote of authoritarian leaning voters. So this whole thing is very scary, and it can still continue to go on in 2020. That's what happens when you have a lack of accountability.
Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, one of the findings that was revealed, I believe, was that the RNC was aware of the timing of WikiLeaks and their releases, according to Gates. We don't know the full details of this. I have to say, this entire situation is maddening, that it took BuzzFeed journalists to get this information, that they are now as one organization overwhelmed with like a billion documents that they're passing through and trying to find the most relevant parts, looking through things that are redacted. All of this is information that Americans have the right to know. And I feel like that's another thing in this kind of cult mentality that's been developed that people have forgotten. They are so grateful for little bread crumbs of information, for little grasps at accountability that come and go, that they will accept just the absolute shittiest situations. I mean, situations that we don't deserve. Like, we deserve full accountability. We deserve the entire story. We deserved Mueller, when he was testifying, to be forthright and direct and patriotic, and to advocate for his country. People act, they give so much leeway to all of these GOP, Kremlin-affiliated, just generally corrupt actors. They're like, "Oh, how kind of you to answer our subpoena. Oh, how nice of you to show up in court when a dozen others of you wouldn't even bother to come." I mean, the standards have been lowered just such an incredible extent. It's just revolting. So I encourage people to demand the highest of their officials, and to stop supplicating them. Stop looking at people who are paid to work for the federal government, to work for the DOJ or to represent you in Congress or whatever it is, stop settling for less. Demand more of these people. Demand that they actually do their jobs, and don't be shocked into gratitude and they actually do it. I don't know. It's a terrible mindset to encourage, generally speaking. Even beyond the immediate action, it just puts you into a place of passivity and acceptance of things that you should never accept, and that is the road that is the normalization that breeds an authoritarian society.
Andrea Chalupa: Yes, and if you're frustrated and angry or even scared listening to this, go to GaslitNationPod.com and check out our action guide and just choose one little bit, one little step on our action guide and just dedicate yourself to it, because right now it's up to us to save ourselves. All of us have to keep showing up and showing up for each other, and refuse to abandon each other no matter how dark it gets. One funny little thing I think we could end on with this wonderful BuzzFeed breakdown of this treasure trove of documents on the Mueller investigation—you know things are bad when Steve Bannon’s in a power struggle with Trump's spoiled kids, Ivanka and Jared. Steve Bannon and his power struggle with Ivanka and Jared full-on has to say to Jared Kushner, "Get back here. Stop vacationing with Russian oligarchs. And by the way, fire the Kremlin operative that's running your dad's campaign. Thanks." Like, when Steve Bannon is trying to save you, even though he can't stand your guts and he's in a power struggle with you, that's how you know that you're out there breaking a law and you're flaunting it.
Sarah Kendzior: And I think that they feel comfortable breaking the law because they're assured that they won't be caught. I think that Kushner had assurance of that. I mean, some of it is just his ego. Some of it is just the fact that he's had this coddled elite lifestyle where he's never had to take responsibility for any kind of criminal endeavor in his life. Same with Ivanka, who should have been prosecuted in 2012 for her own dealings. I mean, we've gone into that before. But I think they felt very confident they wouldn't get caught. I think, Bannon entered the campaign a little later and maybe you wanted to show some caution. I mean, they were using each other. Bannon had his own objectives, which overlap in many ways with those of the Russian-oriented side of the Trump camp, with the theocratic side of the Trump camp, with the kleptocrat side of the Trump camp, which is basically everyone. And we can go on and lift all these various groups, but to kind of bring this home, this kind of group of accomplices that I've just laid out was the subject—not by name, but in description—of Mueller's speech on the threat of transnational organized crime in 2011. He warned that people who traditionally would be in warring factions for various reasons, you know, differences in religion, differences in traditional ways of pursuing a goal, were now working together, and they were working under the broader umbrella of the Russian Mafia.
So Mueller was completely aware that all of this not just could occur, but was already beginning to grow all the way back in 2011, which, by the way, is also when WikiLeaks was coming into public view. He had full knowledge of this. He was the head of the FBI at that time. He left in 2013, [and] was replaced by Comey. So we were initially encouraged by him, because he had shown knowledge of this complex nexus of corporate crime, organized crime, and political corruption. But this makes it even worse that he didn't act on it, because there's no way to claim ignorance or naivete. He's just weak, cowardly. There is the possibility he was threatened, but it's like, well, join the club. You know, Andrea's sister, is threatened, too. We've been threatened, too. Innocent people with far less wealth or resources or power have been threatened, too, and they're threatened right now.
And we also have people who are the products of this administration's crimes, who are the targets of this administration's crimes. Children held captive at the border, separated from their parents. People who have lost their rights. They've lost their health care. They've been targeted by fringe movements. I mean, all of this is a result of the refusal to hold this corrupt government accountable. There are human casualties across the board, so my sympathy in that regard is limited, and my disappointment is profound.
Andrea Chalupa: I would say so. [laughter] I mean, I think that's what this show exists for, right, is to try to compensate for Mueller letting us down.
Sarah Kendzior: And it's ridiculous that we're even in this position, and that our great wealth of resources get to include, like, US Weekly articles from summer 2016 about Ivanka Trump. [laughter] It's surreal. Everything about this is surreal.
Andrea Chalupa: Well, that's because the Rapture happened and you and I got left behind, alright?
Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, apparently so. They took George Michael and Prince and left us with, like, Henry Kissinger at age 96. But such is life.
Andrea Chalupa: I want to shine a bright light on a wonderful listener of the show that I had the honor of meeting, Nick Offerman. Nick Offerman, the manliest of men, who we are tremendously grateful for, his hilarious show All Rise, which is touring now around the country through mid-December, go look up a show near you. Nick Offerman may be coming to your town soon. Basically, if you love Gaslit Nation, you will love All Rise. It's a really funny, joyful, spirited rendition of Gaslit Nation. [laughter] He takes on everything from toxic masculinity to serial attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, and he does it all through the gift of music, and it's great. You absolutely have to listen to it. I feel completely recharged after the show, and I think you will, too, if you get a chance.
And let's introduce also on this episode a very special guest. We're going to sample some of our interview, an incredible, gripping discussion with Andy Greenberg, a senior reporter at Wired. Andy just came out with an essential book that everyone must, must read. I know I'm typically enthusiastic on this show, but if every single person read Andy's book, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyber War and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers, you will understand the threats that we face in the 21st century and how to confront them, and you will have x-ray vision to read through the newspeak coming out of our media, and you'll understand where events are headed and sort of be able to sort of see the tremors coming from miles away. It's such an essential read, and if I had the resources, I would show up at every single doorstep across America, sit down with you in your living room and read the book out loud together with your family. I think that'd be really fun. I wish I did have those resources. But this book, I'm obsessed with it, and everyone must read it. And I'm telling you, he did such a brilliant job with it. It's such a deep dive. And I was sitting on the couch gasping as I was reading Sandworm. You must, must get your hands on this book.
Sarah Kendzior: And so our plan is to air a little bit of it now, since it's very pertinent to ongoing events, and the full interview will air next month.
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Andrea Chalupa: Welcome to the show.
Andy Greenberg: Thanks for having me.
Andrea Chalupa: I am freaking out right now inside, because I have been digging into Sandworm, and I have to tell every single listener of the show that Sandworm is required reading. If you want to understand how we got here in the world today and where we're headed, if you want to read through the headlines, if you want to sort of see the next steps that are coming in this chaotic news cycle, you need to read Andy's book Sandworm just to have a central framework on some of the most dangerous issues that the world is facing today. This is something that Sarah and I talk about a lot privately. We don't have the expertise and cybersecurity, of course, to do a lot of this coverage on the show, which is why we're thrilled to have you on and to pick your immense brain and knowledge about this critical issue.
Andy Greenberg: Well, that is super kind. I have admired this show because you guys have had this really admirable focus on Ukraine, among other things, and that happens to be the subject of this book. This is a story about a cyber war that unfolded in Ukraine that the world kind of watched unfold without reacting, without coming to the defense of this country in the shadow of Russia, as a few Cassandras warned that this cyber war was going to spill out to the rest of the world, and it did. That is the kind of arc of the book. You know, by the time that we felt the effects of this cyber war in the West, it was too late. So I think that you guys have told the story of Ukraine as something of like a canary in the coal mine for the West, and this story kind of mirrors that as well.
Andrea Chalupa: Absolutely. When I was reading it, I was reminded of what my favorite books that I read as a kid, and that was Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. You essentially wrote, like, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat’s Cradle here with Sandworm.
Andy Greenberg: I would not claim to have written any kind of Kurt Vonnegut anything, because he's amazing.
Andrea Chalupa: It's that gripping, and the irony is there.
Andy Greenberg: It's funny that you say that, because in the climactic moment of this story, these military hackers, these Russian hackers release a worm called NotPetya in Ukraine that is designed to devastate the country, that spreads to the rest of the world, becomes the worst cyber-attack in history, and causes 10 billion dollars in damage, shuts down hospitals across the U.S. This largely untold story, it's so analogous to the Ice 9 part of Cat's Cradle, this kind of military blindness that you can just create this thing that spreads virulently, turns water into ice, and of course, it causes an apocalypse. So anyway, I would never care anything I write the Cat's Cradle, but you did it, so I'm allowed to say that.
Andrea Chalupa: Well, I'm just saying, it's an engaging book. I was reading Sandworm on my couch. My husband was nearby watching TV, and I just kept gasping, gasping as I was turning the pages of your book. And I'm not normally that vocal when I read, and my husband's like, "What is it? What is it? What's going on?" I'm like, "This book is incredible." I'm not just being—I know I'm known for my enthusiasm on this show, but I am genuinely, I'm obsessed with this book. And I think it's absolutely required reading, because you also go into the essential history of Ukraine. And as we're always saying on this show, you must understand history, because we're not just living in these events that happened overnight. It's a continuation of conditions that have been going on, persisting in some cases for many centuries. And as I've always said, it's a miracle that Ukraine as a country even exists, and you give us an essential overview on Ukraine's history and why it matters today.
Andy Greenberg: Well, I was trying to kind of write it as a detective story almost. But I do try to go into that Ukrainian history, because the story of Ukraine is so important. It has always been caught between east and west. It is the borderlands. And as a result, among other things, it has become this place where Russia does what it wants to do, where it shows its intentions. And in the 21st century, the way that that's expressed itself is in that these acts of cyber war experimentation. That was how I kind of got brought into this story. I became aware that Russian hackers—I didn't know yet who they were, were carrying out acts of cyber war in Ukraine that they were not doing anywhere else in the world. First of all, Russian hackers try to spoof the results of the Ukrainian election in 2014, two years before they would meddle in the U.S. election.
And then, as I was reading about that, a linked group of hackers, in fact, were carrying out the first ever blackout attacks in Ukraine, turning off the power to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, first in December of 2015 and then again in December of 2016. So I kind of assembled in my head this syllogism: we just watched Russia hack the Ukrainian election, and then they hacked the U.S. election. Now we're seeing them hack the Ukrainian power grid. Are we going to see them hack power grids in the West? Are we watching a kind of experimentation and building of capabilities that Russian hackers will use on the rest of the world? And that was the first big story I wrote in the kind of series of stories for Wired that first inspired the book that were excerpted from it, and that first piece was basically about this idea that what happened to Ukraine should not be ignored, because it will sooner or later hit the rest of us. And bizarrely, the day that that cover story for Wired about the Ukrainian cyber war hit newsstands was when NotPetya hits, this cyber-attack that very literally hit Ukraine and spread to the rest of the world. So it was a prediction that came true almost too fast. I don't think people even had a moment to recognize what we had predicted before it came true.
Andrea Chalupa: That's what we see on the show, is that the bad guys are faster than the good guys. And also, Ukraine is a laboratory, a testing ground for Russia's aggression. We've seen that again and again. I mean, Ukrainian soldiers right now are going up against heavy machinery in Putin's invasion that no U.S. soldiers had to fight against. So it's the heavy machinery as well as the cyber warfare that are both tools that are being tested on Ukrainians, which is why knowing the country, using it, depending on it as a framework to understand Putin and Putinism, whatever comes after Putin, because it's going to be very difficult to get rid of what he's built up. And Ukraine is central to understanding Kremlin aggression generally. So I'm going to ask you to read from your riveting book, Sandworm.
Andy Greenberg: Yeah, sure. This is the introduction: "On June 27, 2017, something strange and terrible began to ripple out across the infrastructure of the world. A group of hospitals in Pennsylvania began delaying surgeries and turning away patients. A Cadbury factory in Tasmania stopped churning out chocolates. The pharmaceutical giant Merck ceased manufacturing vaccines for human papilloma virus. Soon, 17 terminals at ports across the globe, all owned by the world's largest shipping firm, Maersk, found themselves paralyzed. Tens of thousands of 18-wheeler trucks carrying shipping containers began to line up outside those ports' gates. Massive ships arrived from journeys across oceans, each carrying hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo, only to find that no one could unload them. Like victims of a global outbreak of some brain-eating bacteria, major components in the intertwined automated systems of the world seem to have spontaneously forgotten how to function. At the attack's epicenter in Ukraine, the effects of the technological doomsday were more concentrated. ATMs and credit card payment systems inexplicably dropped offline. Mass transit in the country's capital of Kyiv was crippled. Government agencies, airports, hospitals, and the postal service, even scientists monitoring radioactivity levels at the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant all watched helplessly as practically every computer in their networks was infected and wiped out by a mysterious piece of malicious code.
This is what cyber war looks like: an invisible force capable of striking out from an unknown origin to sabotage on a massive scale the technologies that underpin civilization."
Andrea Chalupa: Cat's Cradle, Ice 9.
Andy Greenberg: What I was trying to capture in that intro was you read these hypotheticals at the beginnings of stories and books all the time that say, "What if we shut down dozens of banks, or what if we turned off the power grids? What if hackers carried out these kind of attacks on that fundamental infrastructure of civilian life?" But in this case, it actually happened, and the world almost didn't take notice. And so that's what I've been trying to bring to light in this story, that there was, in fact, the closest thing we've seen yet to a cyber apocalypse, if you want to call it that, that cost ten billion dollars to shut down hospitals and power grids and transportation and the private sector and the media and government agencies. And the world's barely noticed, because it largely hit Ukraine, and then because there was almost a kind of sweeping under the rug of this that happened in the West, that this hit Maersk and Merck and FedEx and all these other massive companies, but they didn't want to talk about it, and it took a lot of reporting to bring to light the full scale of those facts.
Andrea Chalupa: Right. So it's one of those—hacking generally, whether it's hacking our election systems or hacking our infrastructure, it's one of those shrouded issues that the authorities don't want to share with the public, and so the public is left reeling, saying, "Look, our votes are at stake. Our livelihood is at stake. Our security is at stake. Please tell us what's really going on." So with all of your many years reporting on this, tell us what's really going on.
Andy Greenberg: Part of the story, as you say, is that two administrations—the Obama Administration is complicit here, too—
Andrea Chalupa: Yes.
Andy Greenberg: —ignored an unfolding cyber war in Ukraine and treated it as Ukraine's problem. But that story is, you know, it starts, in fact, in 2014, when a small company, iSIGHT Partners in D.C., discovers that there's a campaign of what they thought was espionage by this group called Sandworm. They called them Sandworm because these little references in their code that they used to track their victims are taken from the sci fi novel Dune. So this group, Sandworm, seemed to be infecting NATO targets, Eastern Europe. That, you know, was kind of typical Russian espionage. But then they see that these apparently Russian hackers—because they even found Russian language documents on a server these hackers used—were also targeting the American electric grid. When I learned about that, I could see that this was a story that was not some sort of foreign case study about Ukraine. The same hackers that would later in 2015 and 2016 turn off the power to hundreds of thousands of civilians had planted the same seeds of those cyber-attacks in the U.S. Grid.
So that was my introduction to this story, that I could see that Sandworm was going to be a group that should matter to an American audience in 2015, after Putin's invasion of Ukraine began this escalating cyber war that first started with these data destructive attacks on Ukrainian media companies and transportation and government agencies, and then culminated in the first ever blackout caused by hackers, then hit again in 2016 with this second wave of attacks that led to a blackout in the capital of Kyiv, and then finally climaxed in this NotPetya attack that hit in the summer of 2017. And each one of these steps was a kind of crossing of a red line where first the Obama Administration and then the Trump administration failed to call out these hackers who were visibly for any cybersecurity analyst doing acts of hyper-aggressive cyber sabotage that we had not seeing anywhere else in the world. And that deserved recognition, that deserved rebuke and punishment, and yet we're just kind of treated with impunity because it was not our problem, it was Ukraine. They're not even in NATO. That is the story that I heard, in fact, when I interviewed officials in the Obama and Trump White House who for years failed to act on this escalating cyber war, until it cost us in the West untold billions of dollars, and maybe even a kind of difficult to measure toll on Americans' health, because hospitals were affected by NotPetya as well, in a way that's hard to exactly quantify.
Andrea Chalupa: What your book makes so clear is that even the authorities in charge have a difficult time wrapping their heads around this, including the dollar sign of the damages, potential damages and so forth. Because it's like our election systems, which is like a hodgepodge, like a big random quilt of systems. So too is our grid, essentially. You have these governing agencies, but to get them to do any action, there's so much bureaucracy and hierarchy, and so forth. And your book shows through these incredible characters these cyber security experts—or turned cybersecurity experts—either in the private sector or in the government that were on the frontlines of a watching Sandworm emerge and trying to do something about it, and they were met with government bureaucracy and so forth at every turn. And so what we always say on this show is that Donald Trump being president, that's a story of institutional failure that went on for several years, and especially under the Obama administration, which like you said, you know, Ukraine was not a NATO partner, so Ukraine was just poor country over there, and we've got our other priorities. And so if Donald Trump is President of the United States with the help of the Kremlin, something was wrong with your foreign policy. So could you talk a little bit more on the specifics of the opportunities that the Obama Administration had, and how they sort of failed those opportunities to confront this issue?
Andy Greenberg: Well, the Obama Administration, to its credit, it did call out hackers who were crossing red lines in general. Michael Daniel, the cyber coordinator for Obama, his kind of top cyber security official, who I spoke to, he takes pride in the fact that his administration called out North Korea for attacking Sony. They called out Iranians for hacking U.S. banks. They eventually called out Russia for hacking the U.S. election, although a bit hesitantly. It took a little longer than I think anybody would have liked. But they never called out Russia for attacking Ukraine. That was an implicit signal to Russia that you can do what you like digitally, at least in Ukraine. There was, if I understand—you are a better historian of Ukrainian politics than I am—but there were serious sanctions against Russia for its physical invasion of Ukraine, but everything after that was a kind of freebie. And I think Putin and the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, knew that they could get away with everything else on top of that, because they'd already paid the price for their invasion. So that allowed them to turn Ukraine into this punching bag and guinea pig for all manner of cyber-attacks, and the Obama Administration I think failed to see that clearly, failed to respond kind of in a typically, maybe overly restrained, overly contemplative way, just never acted, whereas as that cyber war escalated and the Trump Administration took over, you know, it's harder to say why the Trump Administration failed for so long to act. One thing I heard from Rob Lee, who is this central character of the story and a former NSA kind of hacker hunter who tracked threats to American critical infrastructure, he described going into the White House and giving a briefing on one of these unprecedented pieces of malware that caused the blackout in 2016 in Kyiv, thinking that that would result in some sort of public statement from the Trump White House, but then hearing back that, "Oh, we're just not interested in doing that right now." And I think that you can imagine that it's very difficult to walk into the Oval Office with Trump as president and talk about Russian hackers. We've seen reports that is just a nonstarter of an issue with him. He is allergic to this topic, and the result is that he has a massive blind spot to this incredibly important issue, to an actual danger to not just Ukraine, but the global order.
Andrea Chalupa: Lives are literally at stake right now because the president's ego can't handle adult conversations around the threat of Russian hackers.
Andy Greenberg: I have to imagine that that is what prevented, in part, the Trump Administration from acting after the Obama Administration's failure to act.
I have to say that the Trump administration, or maybe some adults in the White House, did manage to call out Russia in February of 2018 after this 10-billion-dollar cyber-attack, after it was too late, to say that NotPetya, this cataclysmic cyber-attack, was the work of the Russian military. A month later, the White House did impose new sanctions on Russia. That came nine months after NotPetya. That was the kind of inertia of this White House. That's how long it took to recognize and act on the worst cyber-attack in history, and that came, in fact, years after the beginning of this cyber war that should have from the very beginning raised a red alert in the White House, first for Obama and then Trump, that something was happening that needed to be stopped, needed to be called out, needed a kind of reaction like sanctions or indictments from the very beginning. [MUSIC]
Andrea Chalupa: Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior: We want to encourage our listeners to donate to RAICES, a Texas-based nonprofit agency that provides free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families and refugees. They're helping with the crisis facing migrant families at the Texas border and need your support.
Andrea Chalupa: We also encourage you to donate to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry. Donate to the Orangutan Project at TheOrangutanProject.org.