[CLIP] Jacob Siegel (Part 1): ‘Disinformation:’ A Weapon of Mass Destruction

this fraudulent war against disinformation. And the lead figure behind Hamilton 68 is a former Army officer and FBI analyst by the name of Clint Watts. Watts, during the 2016 election, wrote a very influential article in the Daily Beast making the claim that the Kremlin's propaganda efforts through troll accounts and domestic political speech by Donald Trump supporters had converged to a point where they were indistinguishable. Which is to say, if you followed that claim to its logical conclusion, there was a fifth column inside the United States made up of Trump supporters, who he, Watts, and his co-author for that piece referred to derisively as Trumpkins. So, essentially what he was saying is that they were the same as Kremlin agents. They were, perhaps unwittingly, but nevertheless, carrying out the actions of a foreign government hostile to the United States. They were committing, you know, at the very least, an act of gross disloyalty unto treason. And at the worst, were carrying out an active campaign, an active measure on behalf of Russia. This is before the kind of official war against disinformation is launched as President Obama is leaving office, but that establishes the foundations for it. As you're mentioning this, I think it's worth remembering, and you do this in the piece, of what came of this intelligence community assessment around this question of who the Russians wanted to win or what their political influence attempts were actually aimed at. Maybe it'll get you to remind us of that. So, an intelligence community assessment, often called an ICA, is supposed to represent the consensus view of the 17 different U.S. intelligence agencies. It's not directly a product of the CIA or of the NSA, and so therefore it is supposed to sort of equalize for the biases that might be present in any one intelligence agency by presenting only what they can all agree to. But the ICA that was published in, or released on January 7th, 2017, which was the ICA that concluded and presented to the American public the claim that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help get Donald Trump elected, so it was the seminal official document in spreading the idea of Russian collusion and spreading the idea as the official determination of the United States government that Putin had actively helped Donald Trump. That, which was declassified to release to the public by President Obama, that document was not, in fact, a dispassionate, objective assessment reached by the 17 different U.S. intelligence agencies. What we now know from a series of subsequent reports and from people like Mike Pompeo, who later took over the CIA, is that it was effectively single-handedly the work of the Obama-appointed CIA director, John Brennan, who not only made the determination to include the utterly fraudulent and debunked Steele dossier in the ICA, so this very important ICA, which sort of made it official that Putin had tried to help Trump, was based in part on the fraudulent Steele dossier, but it also was effectively the work of Brennan who handpicked certain analysts who would support his conclusions and, as Pompeo later said, disregarded the conclusions reached by longtime Russia hands who had come to very different determinations, some of whom, in fact, believed that Putin actually favored Hillary Clinton because she was the more predictable candidate, not because she was a Kremlin stooge, but simply because Trump was considered a wild man and a wild card, and Putin thought that Clinton would be easier to control. So Brennan writes this assessment through his kind of surrogates in the intelligence agencies or creates this assessment. Obama declassifies it, puts it out into the American public discourse, utterly deranging our political discourse for the next four years as we chase after these illusions, and this is what I mean by the ways in which disinformation is a disguise. We're chasing after shadows and conspiracies about the president being a Manchurian candidate instead of looking at the actual political reality. There's one other thing that's significant to point out, which is that the same day that the ICA is released, so the same day that the Russiagate conspiracy is injected into the bloodstream of the American body politic, another important thing happens, which is that the outgoing head of the Department of Homeland Security, Jed Johnson, makes a determination by fiat, essentially, to push through a measure which had encountered fierce resistance from local actors. As Johnson himself acknowledges, he pushes through a measure to place all electoral infrastructure in the United States, which includes something like 8,000 pieces of election machines spread across the country, to place all of that under the direct control, direct jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security. Johnson himself acknowledges that local electoral officials had fiercely opposed this measure, which they considered a usurpation of local sovereignty and regional control. And so he makes this determination over the objections of those local officials on the same day, January 7th, 2017, when the ICA is released. So it is a pivotal day. I think it's unlikely that that was by accident. Seems unlikely that was by accident. It would be a tremendous coincidence if it was. And, you know, the fact that Johnson acknowledges that this was an extremely unpopular measure and that he pushes it through as the claim about Trump-Russia collusion is being broadcast to the American public is significant. And what it also means, it also sort of foreshadows what is to come.