to infiltrate that computer system. there was no evidence to believe that the hack was successful and senator make haskill s office later confirmed that portion. again this is the first concrete evidence that we have that we were able to reveal here of russian interference in the 2018 midterms. and what tipped you off to this? so a couple weeks ago, or i guess last week at the aspen security forum, a top microsoft executive was talking about a few candidates that microsoft had picked up in terms of candidates that are standing for election this year that were targeted in these sort of what are called phishing operations. so we went to work to try to find out who exactly it was, and microsoft had identified that this was what s called a fancy bear operation within the russian gru, and we were able to identify it was senator make haskill s office. ken, is there any indication this will come up at that national security meeting? can you give us an update on where the federal gover
the way is a potential avenue for influencing an election via voter suppression. if you can mess with the voter registration rolls, you can affect outcome on election day. so we see that. we also know, by the way, this gru, russian military intelligence persona, was talking to americans, roger stone and a florida gop operative. this sets the predicate for being able to investigate exactly what the russians were after in terms of americans, who they were talking to, why they were talk to them, what they were trying to get from them. i think this is just the first shoe. i want to clarify, it was exactly a month later, july 27th, when the president said what he said about russia, if you re listening, and they already were doing their phishing operations. clearly there is a nexus between what was happening that summer and the comments of the president. nick, this is a critical moment.
these types of issues. case in point, how many times have you heard that people are hacked because they are subject to phishing operations. we re quite naive as a country. there s a whole lot of this stuff going on. as a country, as a population we need become more aware of these things. besides temp mail hacks and propaganda and trying to infiltrate that orbit as it s called, the trump orbit, what else might they have done or how much do you think they truly may have influenced this election? well, you know, now you re asking me to step out of my sand box and i can t do that. i can t speculate. okay. the only thing i can tell you, they tried as much as they could. at this point i believe there s no evidence that had they actually succeeded. as a matter of fact if, indead, they were after having better relationships and having the sanctions lifted backfired which