Latest / INSIGHT TODAY / WH official admitting no evidence for Trumps 2020 elex claims speaks volumes
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Donald Trump is bringing a whole of government approach to
- 0:03Speaker 1: sowing doubt about the US election system and has deployed
- 0:06Speaker 1: federal agencies the FBI, the CIA, the Office of the
- 0:09Speaker 1: Director of National Intelligence, as well as the Justice Department
- 0:12Speaker 1: to investigate what he calls a cover up of China's
- 0:16Speaker 1: influence in US elections. Voting rights activist Stacy Abrams warns,
- 0:20Speaker 1: these officials have been handed a weapon.
- 0:25Speaker 2: That is part of what authoritarianism does. It uses the
- 0:29Speaker 2: weapons of the democratic institutions to undermine democracy, and at
- 0:34Speaker 2: the core of that, the core of democracy is our
- 0:37Speaker 2: ability to cast the ballot and determine the direction of government.
- 0:42Speaker 1: Joining me now, Michael Feinberg, former Assistant Special Agent in
- 0:45Speaker 1: charge with the FBI, and former CIA officer Mark Pollingropliss,
- 0:49Speaker 1: is joining us again. Both our ms now national security
- 0:52Speaker 1: and intelligence analysts. So, Michael, use went the overwhelming majority
- 0:56Speaker 1: of your FBI career combating China's intelligence service. Donald Trump
- 1:01Speaker 1: claimed China illegally acquired two hundred and twenty million US
- 1:05Speaker 1: voter files on the run up to the twenty twenty election,
- 1:08Speaker 1: and the US voting system is compromised. You viewed Donald
- 1:11Speaker 1: Trump's speech as a work of fiction, So explain why
- 1:14Speaker 1: you think that is and is document dump why that
- 1:17Speaker 1: should be ignored.
- 1:20Speaker 3: So it's really important to note that the intelligence community
- 1:25Speaker 3: gathers hundreds of thousands of data points or pieces of
- 1:30Speaker 3: information on any given day. They hear things from human
- 1:34Speaker 3: sources who are witting or unwitting spies. They intercept emails
- 1:39Speaker 3: and telephone calls as signals intelligence. They look at environmental variables,
- 1:44Speaker 3: they look at changes in geography, and when something is
- 1:48Speaker 3: particularly interesting in that it can give an answer to
- 1:51Speaker 3: a US policy question, they vet that information and they
- 1:58Speaker 3: corroborate it with others. They look at whether the person
- 2:03Speaker 3: providing it has been reliable in the past. If it's
- 2:06Speaker 3: human reporting, is their signals intelligence to back it up.
- 2:09Speaker 3: If it's signals intelligence, is their human reporting to back
- 2:13Speaker 3: it up? And that's sort of how the community figures
- 2:15Speaker 3: out what's true and what's not. But everything it collects,
- 2:21Speaker 3: including the stuff that turns out not to be true,
- 2:25Speaker 3: is still in its holdings. It still has the imperimeter
- 2:29Speaker 3: of being documented by the CIA or the FBI or
- 2:32Speaker 3: the NSA. And what I suspect we saw with this
- 2:37Speaker 3: document dump is that a lot of that information was
- 2:42Speaker 3: provided out of context, and because of this selective declassification,
- 2:50Speaker 3: they're not providing the public any way to know whether
- 2:53Speaker 3: any of it's true. And some of the documents in
- 2:56Speaker 3: market can probably speak better to this as well. I'll
- 3:01Speaker 3: be blunt. They just don't look real. There's one memorandum
- 3:05Speaker 3: in there that claims to be a CIA note, but
- 3:08Speaker 3: it's undated. It contains no source information redacted or unredacted.
- 3:14Speaker 3: It states conclusions, but not any sort of analysis. It
- 3:19Speaker 3: looks almost like something that was created in haste by
- 3:25Speaker 3: somebody not familiar with the process. And I can't state
- 3:29Speaker 3: that with certainty. I'm not making a factual allegation. I'm
- 3:32Speaker 3: just saying that document looks like nothing I ever saw
- 3:36Speaker 3: in the intelligence community.
- 3:39Speaker 1: So to you mark your reaction to that, Yeah, I.
- 3:42Speaker 4: Think Michael's got it exactly right. Look, the US intelligence community,
- 3:46Speaker 4: al you know, kind of sucks up a great deal
- 3:48Speaker 4: of information, whether it's a human source. I was a
- 3:50Speaker 4: case officer for CIA, I met assets, I'm at our agents.
- 3:54Speaker 4: Often sometimes there's a walk in, and oftentimes the information
- 3:57Speaker 4: is not corroborated. Sometimes it's totally false. Someone's sometimes someone's
- 4:00Speaker 4: lying to you. Same thing with a signals intercept just
- 4:03Speaker 4: because you're intercepting communications. It could be based on third
- 4:06Speaker 4: or fourth hand information. And so it's very easy to
- 4:09Speaker 4: selectively take documents and kind of build a case like this.
- 4:12Speaker 4: And look, you know, one of the things that has
- 4:14Speaker 4: to be said very clearly is the president of the
- 4:16Speaker 4: United States is the number one consumer for the intelligence community.
- 4:20Speaker 4: You have to be very careful on what you brief them.
- 4:22Speaker 4: You don't brief him or her on uncorroborated information. Ever,
- 4:26Speaker 4: you have finished an analysis, which would be a piece that
- 4:29Speaker 4: actually contained you know, all sorts of both you know,
- 4:33Speaker 4: operational human intelligence pieces and signals intelligence, and then the
- 4:36Speaker 4: analyst would provide their kind of their ultimate conclusion on this.
- 4:41Speaker 4: And so you know, that's what's most important. What was
- 4:43Speaker 4: the intelligence community the analyst providing to the White House
- 4:47Speaker 4: and to others in the cabinet, not this raw information.
- 4:50Speaker 4: And so it's very easy to cherry pick this. And
- 4:52Speaker 4: I think, as Michael said, it's exactly what happened.
- 4:55Speaker 1: Let's hear what John Soloman, a former journalist and election
- 4:59Speaker 1: denier and member of Trump's election task force, told my
- 5:03Speaker 1: colleague Von Hilliard right after Trump's speech. Take a listen
- 5:06Speaker 1: to this. Oh that is so unfortunate. I was just
- 5:14Speaker 1: told we don't have it. Let me just give you
- 5:17Speaker 1: a little bit of the four one one on this.
- 5:19Speaker 1: Von Hilliard asks, the twenty twenty election was in fact
- 5:23Speaker 1: the results as we the Merian people have seen it,
- 5:25Speaker 1: and he says, I'm still researching. Let me say this
- 5:29Speaker 1: is the first and Vaughn says to him, but there's
- 5:31Speaker 1: no intelligence. Oh guess what they have it It's much
- 5:33Speaker 1: bet if you hear it from Vaughn. Take a listen, everybody,
- 5:37Speaker 1: do you acknowledge that there were no votes changed in
- 5:40Speaker 1: twenty twenty.
- 5:40Speaker 2: I've all I can acknowledge is what the intelligen show
- 5:42Speaker 2: is right. I only know the intelligence communee has zero.
- 5:44Speaker 4: Evidence that someone has flipped, that a foreign power flip
- 5:48Speaker 4: they vote in twenty twenty, twenty two or twenty four.
- 5:50Speaker 3: So my twenty twenty election was in fact the results
- 5:53Speaker 3: as we of the American bodyle researching. So let me
- 5:57Speaker 3: have this is the first one.
- 5:57Speaker 4: There's no intelligence. There is no intelligence at the election.
- 6:07Speaker 1: Michael jumpsund Election frag Guy says he's still searching for
- 6:11Speaker 1: proof and the documents don't back up the president's claims,
- 6:15Speaker 1: and yet is there something still somewhat nefarious about the
- 6:18Speaker 1: administration's election security performance over the past day or so?
- 6:25Speaker 3: Yeah, I just if we could go back for one second,
- 6:28Speaker 3: because I missed the part when you were reciting John
- 6:31Speaker 3: Solomon's resume where you mentioned his intelligence community experience that
- 6:36Speaker 3: gives him the credibility to administ to evaluate raw and
- 6:40Speaker 3: finished intelligence and products. But yeah, yeah, I mean, this
- 6:45Speaker 3: is not somebody who has the slightest bit of familiarity
- 6:48Speaker 3: with the world into which he is now entering. And
- 6:52Speaker 3: it's legitimate for the American people to ask, why is
- 6:57Speaker 3: a political journalist who has never, to my knowledge, published
- 7:02Speaker 3: a word critical of Trump, and who has been edged
- 7:09Speaker 3: out of a number of publications because of conspiratorial musings
- 7:16Speaker 3: somebody that the White House should be listening to. But
- 7:22Speaker 3: even if we take that into account, the very fact
- 7:25Speaker 3: that someone with that background and temperament is admitting to
- 7:30Speaker 3: a reporter that there's no evidence that the election was
- 7:36Speaker 3: somehow mishandled or thwarted or interfered with speaks volumes. I'll
- 7:43Speaker 3: be honest, I don't understand why anybody would take any
- 7:49Speaker 3: of the pronouncements that the nation heard Thursday night with
- 7:53Speaker 3: the slightest ounce of seriousness.
- 7:58Speaker 1: I'm going to leave it there for this conversation guy,
- 8:00Speaker 1: and also apologies, but we have had the breven. We
- 8:02Speaker 1: had to make it a little briefer than we anticipated,
- 8:05Speaker 1: just because of the breaking news out of Iran and
- 8:07Speaker 1: the death of those two US soldiers. But thank you
- 8:10Speaker 1: so much. It's always good to see both of you.
- 8:11Speaker 1: Thank you