they re going to do in an investigation, but man, if the president has really sat on his senior staff, pushed a bunch of them out in humiliating ways, it s not going to help them be more loyal to them in a case like this. okay. you wrote a very interesting article. i want to get to it right now. it s about how russia harvested american rage to reshape u.s. politics. it s a departure from what we re used to hearing, in fact, because in this case, the russians didn t really need to create fake news as much as just kind of stir up some trouble. how did this influence operation work? it was amazing. i went back and reviewed hundreds of ads with the content, the text content that is still available of hundreds of the posts from the facebook ads controlled by russian intermediaries. what i found in many cases is they were cut and pasting or lightly editing content they found on american sites. videos on youtube of police beatings. hoaxes published by conservative websites.
station chief. given my background into the russian intelligence officer. and so i can imagine these guys saying can you imagine they re pulling together an influence operation. somebody said why not. let s give it a shot. goosefer took its first shot within days of the story breaking. releasing batches of materials not just from the democratic national committee, but from the hillary clinton campaign and the democratic congressional campaign committee. all had been infiltrated by russian hackers. it s the russian services taking the goal, making something out of it that in turn can be used against their adversaries and we continue to be their primary enemy. he would soon be joined by other rogue publishers. such as wikileaks.
chief. five months to election day. russian hackers managed to infiltrate and the world is getting the first hints of the deluge of the stolen e-mails and documents to come. it s a deep breach, no question about it. a mysterious blogger or bloggers nicknamed guccifer 20,0 in fact, a cover for a sophisticated russian hacking operation, began posting the first set of stolen documents. they love putting on these false personas and carrying out operations through them. so what was russia going to do with all the stolen information? they re looking to weaponize information. steven hall is the cia s former moscow nation chief. it s oftentimes interesting to put myself given my background into the position of the russian intelligence officer. so i can imagine these guys saying, would it be too crazy to think we could perhaps actually pull together an influence operation? and, you know, it probably got run up the chain, somebody said,
registration systems, even some election officials. we knew about some of this before the election in states you may remember, we reported this in arizona and illinois and florida. but this gives more details about that. the nsa has been looking into this and found more information, and they compiled a report to say here s where we saw attempts at penetration of these voting systems, registration systems, et cetera. it gives them more information, but it does not change their assessment that you remember from january, anderson, that said while they did steal e-mails, et cetera, they did an influence operation, the russians were not able and did not attempt it appears to change vote counts during the election. in terms of the person accused of leaking the document, what else do we know other than her name, which apparently is reality winner. reporter: that s right, and we re seeing the first photographs of her. cnn has spoken to her mother. she s a 20 something contractor, working f
spies spy and when they get caught they re asked to leave. that s what we have going on here. russia clear ly conducted an influence operation. the fact that we re talking about the influence operation to get engaged and influence the outcome of our presidential election by way of using the internet and conducting an operation that allowed voters to get certain types of information and disinformation. that s what spies do. we should not be surprised by this at all and my view of all of this is that this should be below the radar. this is the activity that we should be able to take, allow to occur as a matter of routine and dispel these folks and at some point other folks will come back in and the united states and russia am i hearing you right? you re saying this should be done quietly? it should. but the deportation or the dispelling, expelling of these people, these 35 operatives, the