Quote, reprieve, my interview with the students who are fighting back. If all our government and president can do is send thoughts and prayers, then its time for victims to be the change that we need to see. And the New York Times reports another story of another extramarital affair with donald trump, and another elaborate attempt to cover it all up. All in starts right now. Good evening from new york. Im chris hayes. Three days since special Counsel Robert Mueller unveiled an indictment, 13 counts of russian nationals for waging what they called Information Warfare against the u. S. The president of the United States has yet to announce any new steps to punish russia for those activities. He has not directed his administration to prevent interference in future elections, including the one this year. He has not even gone so far as to condemn russias efforts to subvert american democracy. Instead, the president apparently spent much of the weekend parked in front of the tv at one of his
Thoughts and prayers, then its time for victims to be the change that we need to see. And the New York Times reports another story of another extramarital affair with donald trump, and another elaborate attempt to cover it all up. All in starts right now. Good evening from new york. Im chris hayes. Three days since special Counsel Robert Mueller unveiled an indictment, 13 counts of russian nationals for waging what they called Information Warfare against the u. S. The president of the United States has yet to announce any new steps to punish russia for those activities. He has not directed his administration to prevent interference in future elections, including the one this year. He has not even gone so far as to condemn russias efforts to subvert american democracy. Instead, the president apparently spent much of the weekend parked in front of the tv at one of his properties in florida, tweeting furiously and lashing out at a number of targets, from oprah to the fbi to his own Nation
volume, right? that s part of the thing here. it s a fair amount of labor power and a lot of volume, right? yeah. it s a kind of amazing how many it was 90 people in the american department. and so they were tasked with doing posts all day, every day. so they could turn out thousands of comments doing that. and it would be interesting to see where did they target them exactly and how much could they actually overwhelm legitimate comments on a news site or something. rosalyn, it was interesting to me this individual spoke on the record with his name. because you think about putin s russia, you think about the fear that people have about dissent there and the criminalization we ve seen of it. what do you take away about the relationship of this place to the government and people and how open a secret it is? well, there has been a tremendous amount of news coverage of the internet research agency in russia, as well as here. more obviously in russia there has been some lawsuits fil
this rather staggering and prescient information. i created this list of the russian trolls when i was researching. and i d check in once and a while. and a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. i don t know what s going on, but they re all tweeting about donald trump and stuff. i feel like maybe it s some kind of really opaque strategy of, like, electing donald trump to undermine the u.s. or something, like false flag kind of thing. that s how i started thinking about all this stuff after being in russia. with me now is the reporter you just heard there, adrian chen, staff writer from the new yorker and rosalyn heldman from the washington post. and adrian, let me start with you. i listened to that interview and i read your piece in time. in that one sentence, you stumble upon what appears to basically have been the plot, which appears to you in the moment as a joke almost. what do you think about it now?
i mean, i think it is wild that that seems so prescient because it was really just a joke at the time, you know. trump s campaign seemed like a joke, and also just the idea that that would somehow be a strategy that anyone would think would work was also just ridiculous. rosalyn, i thought it was interesting that you talked to that your reporters talked to people that worked there. and talk a little bit about the conditions they describe. yeah, i mean, they very much describe sort of a factory of disinformation, much as adrian found in his really excellent piece. they talk about 12-hour history ises, 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., and then overnight. they work in rooms with banks of computers, 20 computers in a room with the shades drawn on the windows, having to hit sort of quotas of how many posts they get per hour, per day. one thing i thought was really interesting is they would talk about how sometimes they would purposefully fight in the comment sections of articles. two people