David Shimer - Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference

President Barack Obama faced a momentous choice. By the summer of 2016, he knew that Russia was interfering in Americas upcoming election. He also knew that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, was directing this operation. Obama now had to decide whether to retaliate against Putin before or after Election Day.

That summer, Celeste Wallander, the top Russia expert inside the White House, submitted to her superiors a classified memorandum outlining ways to punish Putin immediately, in order to deter further interference in the election. Nuland, Wallander, and other officials proposed a range of options: sanctioning Russia, leaking damaging information about Putin, even suffocating Russias economy. James R. Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, recalled considering all kinds of nasty things we could have done to the Russians, such as cutting them off from the international financial system.

But, Clapper continued, the risks were too high: What would the retaliation have been?

The answer was unknown. Russian intelligence had already stolen and released emails damaging to the Democratic Party, in an effort to influence voters minds. But Russian hackers had also breached electoral systems, which Washington could not systematically defend. States and localities, not the federal government, purchase and manage Americas electoral infrastructure. In some states, voter registration databases were unencrypted and insecure.

Retaliating against Putin could provoke him into disrupting the voting process itself. With Hillary Clinton favored to win the presidency, and with Donald Trump alleging that the election would be rigged, Obama delayed punishing Russia. Restraint seemed prudent. Instead, at a summit in China in early September, he warned Putin, You fuck with us and well take you down, as one of his senior advisers put it.

By October, Russia was still targeting Americas electoral infrastructure. Obamas team considered efforts to manipulate these systems a redline of sorts, said Avril Haines, the deputy national security adviser, and formulated a series of very significant responses in the event that the Russians engaged in vote tampering. On Election Day, parts of the federal government secretly braced for such an assault. We did, in fact, have an entire crisis team set up in the White House, said Michael Daniel, Obamas cybersecurity coordinator. There were teams at all of the respective agencies, he continued, monitoring for a Russian cyberattack.

The worst-case scenario did not arrive: Voting unfolded without interruption. But Russias operation had by no means failed. Hacked emails had already dominated the news cycle for months, and Russian propaganda had reached tens of millions of Americans on social media. Obama had prioritized protecting the ballot box from direct manipulation, but at a cost: Russia had brazenly manipulated voters minds. Victoria Nuland lamented the White Houses redline mentality. That is what they were focused on, she said, regarding the threat of vote alterations. They were not focused at all on what we knew had been very effective elsewhere: the influence campaign, changing public opinion.

Obama, near the end of his presidency, retaliated against Russia with economic and diplomatic countermeasures. (President Obama, through a representative, declined to be interviewed for this book.)

By waiting to retaliate, Obama effectively permitted a degree of foreign interference in an American election to avoid making an already-bad situation worse. A previous generation of U.S. policy makerswho themselves interfered in many elections overseaswould have found such a scenario unimaginable: the United States, the worlds most powerful democracy, unable to secure its own elections. But Obama was operating in a new world, a digital one, that had left America vulnerable.

The story of Russias attack on the 2016 election is, in part, a story of difficult choices, made inside the Situation Room based on imperfect information and incomplete intelligence. In this environment, Obama had settled for a policy of managed interference, working to contain but not stop Russias operation. Rather than impose costs on Putin in real time, he had focused on preventing one form of electoral interferencechanging actual voteswhile neglecting another: changing minds.

In these critical months, Obama had tried but failed to preserve Americas sovereignty. The theorist Hans Morgenthau described sovereignty as the impenetrability of the nation; others have argued that sovereignty means being free from all foreign authority and is violated when external actors influence or determine domestic authority structures. Covert electoral interference targets a democracys process of succession and therefore targets the electoral sovereignty of that democracy. When such activity is discovered, the benefiting candidate is plagued with electoral insecurity, or a fear that citizens will consider him illegitimate and indebted to a foreign actor.

Can a democracy maintain its electoral sovereignty in the twenty-first century? Obamas intelligence chiefs are skeptical. It would have been impossible, given the nature of this world, for the Obama administration to do something that would have led to a complete cessation of Russian efforts, John Brennan insisted. Its not the way the world works. Its not the way the Russians work. Other officials disagree. Bullshit. Thats just bullshit, said one of Obamas senior advisers, who requested anonymity to speak freely, when presented with Brennans argument. There were things we could have done to protect U.S. national security that [Obama] chose not to do.

Since 2016, Russias operation has received ceaseless attention, but much of it remains misunderstood. Basic questions have been left unanswered: What is covert electoral interference? For how long have states executed such operations? When did Americas elections become so exposed? Just how exposed is America? And, in the digital age, what can democracies do to defend themselves?

This book seeks to answer these questions by analyzing not just interference in Americas 2016 election but also what came before. Politicians, policy makers, and commentators today often act as though Putin were the first leader to manipulate a foreign election. In this vacuum, covert electoral interference is Russian interference in the 2016 election, in favor of Donald Trump. This ignorance is dangerous. To understand what Russia achieved in 2016, and to prepare for whats ahead, this book looks beyond the daily news cycle. After Trump won, high-profile investigations into his campaign distracted from the issue that spawned them: a massive foreign operation to undermine a presidential election.