vote counts. the departments found those claims were not credible. not credible, as in, there was no foreign interference. the kind trump allies, rudy giuliani, sidney powell and others repeatedly touted on the campaign trail as evidence to fuel their dangerous lie on the legitimacy of the november result. of course, that was just a small part of the disinformation apparatus that trump and his supporters deployed in the weeks and months surrounding the election. there was also the lie that china -- not so much russia -- was involved in a massive election manipulation campaign. here's donald trump breaking with his own fbi director christopher wray on that point. >> we've certainly seen very active, very active efforts by the russians to influence our election in 2020 through maligned foreign influence side of things. social media, use of proxies, state media, online journals, et cetera. an effort to both sow divisiveness and discord and i think the intelligence community has assessed this publicly, to primarily denigrate vice president biden. >> i did not like his answers yesterday. and i'm not sure he liked them either. i'm sure that he probably would agree with me. the big problem is china. and we can have others also. i'm not excluding anybody. but the big problem is china. >> today that trump lie is being knocked down as well in another report from the new odni declassifying the extent of the russian effort to defeat joe biden. the report describes russia's efforts at denigrating president biden's candidacy fld the democratic party supporting former president trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating socio political divisions in the u.s. and concluding that on china, quote, they did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the u.s. presidential election. to be perfectly clear, two newly declassified reports reveal that trump's lies about the risk of foreign meddling in any way that could change the outcome of the 2020 election were a classically trumpian combination of lies, russian disinformation and grave mischaracterizations. "the washington post" puts it this way. quote, while foreign disinformation and interference was a major concern heading into the 2020 campaign, domestic efforts to disrupt the race, including by then-president donald trump and his allies, turned out to be a far greater significance. the post adds this reminder that trump, quote, fired the department of homeland security's top cybersecurity official, chris krebs who will join us later in this program, after krebs repeatedly assured the public last year that the country's voting systems were secure. that no votes were changed or data altered. conclusions that today's reports both uphold. the unwinding of donald trump's corruption of intelligence regarding election interference is where we start this hour. elizabeth newman is here. the former assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat prevention at the department of homeland security. she's now the director of the republican accountability project. also joining us, msnbc political analyst phil rucker, a "washington post" senior washington correspondent, and robert gibbs, former white house press secretary. phil rucker, i read one as i was trying to comb my hair. it's messy and i read the second as i sat down. these are stunning, stunning sort of efforts at transparency in an area where donald trump perhaps told his most brazen and as we all know after 1/6, dangerous lies. >> exactly right, nicolle. it's the beginning of a public accounting of what happened with regard to the november election last year. not only what happened in terms of the results and discounting the statements from then-president trump, but what happened in terms of actions by foreign countries. we learned in this report that russia did, in fact, wage campaigns to try to denigrate joe biden's candidacy in 2020. they did not, according to the intelligence report, alter the votes or tap into the election infrastructure in the united states but they certainly tried to shape public opinion and sow discord in this country. iran did the same to try to hurt trump and china considered it but didn't. this was all going on at a time when president trump was trying to tell americans not to worry about foreign interference because he was still haunted by what happened in the 2016 campaign when russia also acted to try to help him win that election. >> elizabeth newman, from your perch, it's clear that the security apparatus run by chris krebs, run by the department of homeland security worked. and these reports corroborate what he attested to. of course, donald trump fired him in a fit of rage, i guess, at the facts and the results of what the department achieved didn't fit the lie he was telling and using sidney powell and rudy giuliani to tell. but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube and that lie is now being operationalized and weaponized all across the country. what is the importance of making sure people understand what's in these reports today? >> well, i think it's important to go back and remember that there were multiple intelligence community representatives speaking to the public about what we were seeing in terms of foreign election interference during the course of the election. chris krebs was one of those. director wray was one of those. and multiple times, and i'm thinking as far back as february 2020, you had these officials coming out and suggesting that we were seeing a different type of interference. we were seeing russia amplify this information that was already happening here inside the united states. you heard right before the election that it's not china. it's iran. that was the big new thing in this election cycle that iran was getting in the game but china not so much. so the reason i point that out is because this was not speculative. this is stuff that, you know, this is not just discovered after the election. the intelligence community was seeing this and reporting as it goes. the president had access to this information. he either refused to get briefed, in which case it's a dereliction of duty or he was aware of this and actively lying. that's the first thing that republicans as they start to look and assess this information, you need to understand that the big lie started well before election day. the second thing is that you have members of the house and members of the senate that belong to the intelligence oversight committees. they will have access to a lot of the backup supporting evidence to show that these findings are conclusive. dig into it. make sure you convinced yourself and then please, for the sake of our security, go and inform your constituents that this election was not stolen. doing that will save lives. there's a direct connection between the big lie that the president laid groundwork for during the election season and carried out during the post-election period, and the violent extremism that is still a threat that we're facing today. they can actually help if they would tell the truth and now they have more evidence to back themselves up. >> it's such a good point. i don't want to move on from it. robert gibbs, if you can just pick up. what elizabeth is saying, we're learning this for the first time, but this is the product of the intelligence community, which donald trump was supposed to be their number one client. so let me show you what his lawyers were saying when, as elizabeth is saying, donald trump knew it was a lie. here's sidney powell talking about the intersection of china and venezuela. >> we know china also has a substantial presence in venezuela and substantial interest in making sure that president trump does not continue in office. this is the consummate foreign interference in our election in the most criminal way you can possibly imagine. >> you couldn't possibly believe that the company counting our vote with control over our vote is owned by two venezuelans who were allies of chavez, are present allies of maduro with a company whose chairman is a close associate and business partner of george soros. the biggest donor to the democrat party, the biggest donor to antifa and the biggest donor to black lives matter. my goodness. what do we have to do to get you to give our people the truth. >> so if the crazy and the hair dye distracted you, let me remind folks why we played that again. he's blaming foreign governments. donald trump knew what we learned today. there was no foreign interference that affected the outcome of the election. let me read again the findings from the reports released today. the department's investigated multiple public claims. i'm told it's those two chiefly that one or more foreign governments owned, directed or controlled election infrastructure used in the 2020 federal elexss, implemented a scheme to tally, change or otherwise manipulated vote counts. the departments found those claims were not credible. so donald trump had access to the intelligence at the moment that he was reveling in that weird performance from his own lawyers. >> no doubt about it. to see these clips, we believe they weren't true then. we now know, not only were they not true, but they were perpetuating a lie that, quite frankly, even the top of our government and president donald trump knew wasn't true. what we also underscored today that is true is that russia and putin continue to try to meddle in our information ecosystem by spreading disinformation in the 2020 campaign. we still see it now with reports just last week that the russians are trying to spread disinformation around certain covid vaccines. look, the only -- the response we kept seeing most clearly around russian disinformation and donald trump was how upset and angry he would get if somebody brought that up inside of the oval office, right? so he was cognizant when the truth was out there, except when he thought lying about what was happening would benefit him in this campaign. so it is pretty stark reports to lay out there. and it's going to require, quite frankly, i think, a fairly robust response from the current administration particularly as it relates to russia and continued disinformation. >> i want you to say more about that, robert gibbs. and we're going to dive into this more deeply because the odni report, the report that came out today from the intelligence agencies declassifies a very detailed operation with individuals, you know, we could get people that were carrying out the functions, peddling disinformation. and they name names. they name the name of individuals who met with ron johnson. and we know what the campaigns look like. what's interesting in the intel report that's declassified is that russia had its eyes on denigrating joe biden all the way back to 2014. donald trump picked up the baton and got himself impeached carrying on their efforts, and i wonder, not to look backward but to keep with your frame of looking forward, what does the recalibration of the u.s./russian relationship look like? >> well, i have no doubt, not having spent a lot of time with the report, but i have no doubt that one of the reasons why putin continued to do this. we know in 2016 what happened. but between 2016 and 2020, we know what didn't happen mean was never confronted with this. the commander in chief never called him to task. if anything, all the opposite. and so i think we shouldn't have expected, quite frankly, putin to have acted differently than he did four years ago, but it's going to take this president, joe biden, who has to confront putin with this directly. they'll have to be continued and stronger sanctions on what goes on because, again, now we're into this -- we're into the disinformation around the covid vaccine and the russians are trying to sow continued chaos around that. so this isn't something that we can compartmentalize as happening every two years or every four years during important elections. we now know and have known for a while that russian disinformation is part of their national security apparatus as it deals with relating to the united states. and it's going to have to be, at the very top of anything in which we deal with, with russia on. there's no doubt about the fact that joe biden and really the whole government is going to have to confront russia and its entire government if it's going to begin to act any differently. >> phil rucker, one of the results of these two reports, and i read through both of them, is that the figures in the trump administration, most of whom we learned about from reporters like yourself, reporting on sort of the struggles between ethics and patriotism and trump's corruption about men like john kelly and others. the reports reveal -- what's a good way to put it -- the men from the boys. chris krebs is someone who had a northstar and let it guide him. christopher wray was contradicted in the tape we just played. john ratcliffe is going to fall in whatever that other category is. someone silly and political. here's what he wrote in an op-ed in december. china is national security threat number one. he was the director of national intelligence. this was the line when he said this. as director of national intelligence, i'm entrusted with access to more intelligence than any member of the u.s. government other than the president. i oversee the intelligence agencies. my office produces the president's daily brief detailing the threats facing the country. if i could communicate one thing to the american people, this unique vantage point, it's this. the people's republic of china poses the greatest threat to america today and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom worldwide since world war ii. i mean, his office did not support those based on today's declassified report, phil rucker. >> yeah, nicolle. they found they did not engage in election interference as ratcliffe suggested in that op-ed, but let's keep in mind it wasn't just people in this administration perpetuaing the lie but it was the president exacting revenge and punishing those who told the truth. when chris krebs said publicly the 2020 election was the safest in memory, i am paraphrasing his words there, but it was something along those lines, he got fired for it. he was ousted from the government for standing up and saying the truth. when chris wray, the fbi director would testify in congress about the danger russia posed for election interference in the run up to the 2020 election it created rumor mills that trump was going to fire him, and trump talked to his aides about firing him. he obviously held off on doing so, but he wanted to retaliate against those who were willing to speak truth to power and to say in to the public what they knew based on the intelligence was going on. >> such a good reminder of what these national security agencies and officials had to contend with. one thing that's clear as the trump story, something we can evaluate in the rear-view mirror is the russian relationship, put conspiracy or anything mueller investigated for a moment aside, but the notion of mission is reinforced again that it was uniquely shared. donald trump joined the russian disinformation mission in ways that i can't imagine the russians thought possible. and his allies and aides became the vehicles for disseminating russian disinformation. what do we do about the fact that some of them are still running around? >> that's a great point. look, the intelligence community has assessed that russia's disinformation efforts going back five, six years now, is about sowing societal discord. it's about making us weak as a society so forward focused with our own navel gazing hatred for each other that we do not have the capability to stand up to them if and when they do something that is against our national interest or a violation of international norms. they totally succeeded without launching a missile, without raising an army. they have been so successful in helping us just crumble in terms of being more focused on whether the democrats are marxist or republicans are fascist. all we do is fight all the time about how we hate the other. and donald trump was instrumental. it was a factor that was happening before he came into the national spotlight. he absolutely capitalized on that. and it is now the common dynamic of our politics which is why last week when i was on your show, and i did get a lot of criticism for this, the idea of bipartisan compromise is so critical to counteracting what russia's game is. we have to come back to an idea -- to a place where we can have civil discourse and where we can disagree respectfully and the political opponent is not an enemy that we dehumanize but rather somebody else with a different perspective. and we listen and we learn from that other perspective and try to find a common ground where we can move forward and solve our challenges. that's important not just because of our domestic intelligences we need to address. it creates a unity of resolve and counteracting bad actors like russia. so when i called for that bipartisan compromise, i realize republicans don't deserve much, but there are a handful that are still trying to be the adults in the room. and i believe that there are a handful of democrats that recognize the importance of that compromise. president biden is one of them. so i think it's just important that we, the people, encourage moderation in our dialogue. we can still make progress without hating one another as we're talking about things. and maybe, maybe this intelligence report helps remind us that there's really a lot at stake here in being able to get back to a civil discourse with one another. not only to prevent violence here that's happening within our homeland but also so that we can maintain our strength in the international community and push back against bad actors like russia. >> i think, robert gibbs, something else it does is it will inform people who are working with russia and not interested in what elizabeth describes. here's what the intelligence community found. the key element of moscow's strategy this election cycle was its use of people linked to russian intelligence to launder influence narratives, including misleading or unsubstantiated narratives against mr. biden through u.s. media organizations, u.s. officials and prominent u.s. individuals. some of whom were close to former president trump and his administration. so i think that what elizabeth describes is probably close to what's in joe biden's heart, but if you've got people who are u.s. officials, prominent u.s. individuals, some close to former president trump and his administration, who are more loyal to putin than to this country, i think it's worth finding out who they are and understanding where their loyalties lie. >> wholeheartedly. i think i'm struck listening to this, that the party of ronald reagan has now descended into basically taking the talking points of a former kgb agent and spreading them throughout the popular networks of information in the united states. and i think it's hard not to call on those individuals to account for their actions. i think, look, i think we're all for unity and bipartisanship. we'd like to see more of it. but i think when you have individuals, both in the oval office, meeting in the oval office, that are taking known amounts of disinformation, again, peddled by a former kgb agent, into the atmosphere of this country and, quite frankly, sowing and fomenting that disconnection, that disunity, i think it's hard to move forward without calling it out. and i think there are people that we know both in these reports. i think there's some that we learn about in the next few hours when we start to put names to some of those personas in that reports that ought to be