JIM GILMORE - Let’s start with the reset
moment. You're actually over there for that actual
event? JAKE SULLIVAN - Right. JIM GILMORE - Tell us a little bit of the
story of what took place, why it was done in that way, what the thought behind the reset
was. JAKE SULLIVAN - Secretary Clinton met with
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia in Geneva, on neutral ground in Switzerland,
in early 2009. The goal of that meeting was actually to establish
this thing called the reset. It was actually Vice President Biden who first
used the word "reset" in his speech at the Munich Security Conference a few weeks earlier,
but it was left to Secretary Clinton and Foreign Minister Lavrov to work out what exactly that
meant. The fundamental idea behind it was that the
United States and Russia should look for areas where they could cooperate together to advance
shared interests in nuclear disarmament, in sanctions on Iran and North Korea, and help
Russia could give us in the war in Afghanistan, etc. The concept was where we have common interests,
we should work together, and where we don’t, where our interests diverge, we would continue
to stand up for our principles and values. Secretary Clinton showed up in Geneva, and
one of her staff members had the idea to actually memorialize the reset with physical handing
over of a reset button, the idea being that this would be somewhat humorous, but also
would indicate to people that we were taking a different kind of approach and making a
real effort to figure out whether there was a common agenda we could work with the Russians
on. JIM GILMORE - And the whole misspelling thing? Just tell the rest of that story. What happens? JAKE SULLIVAN - In order for this reset button
to really end up having an impact, of course, it's got to say "reset" in Russian, not in
English. So our staffer, who was working on trying
to both procure the actual physical red reset button and get it labeled appropriately, went
to one of the people traveling with us to ask, “How do you actually say "reset" in
Russian?” They came up with a word; they put it on there. Secretary Clinton presented the button to
Foreign Minister Lavrov, and he looked at it and said, “That doesn't say "reset";
that says "overcharge," at which point everybody sort of chuckled, but of course this was not
an optimal outcome for this moment, which wasn’t ever meant to be deadly serious. It was meant to be a bit of a humorous frame
around a sober effort, a sober policy effort, but to give it a little bit of lightheartedness
to show that we were making a genuine effort with the Russians to figure out how we could
move forward together. JIM GILMORE - …What's the thinking, and
what are the hopes? Is there some naivete, or is there just a
feeling that there's a potential here that might not have been available during the Bush
years? JAKE SULLIVAN - Since the end of the Cold
War, the U.S.-Russia relationship has always involved a mix of three things: cooperation
on shared interests; tension and push and pull on divergent interests; and then the
United States standing up for the Russian people in their effort to pursue a stronger
civil society and a stronger democracy. The issue is, depending on different points
in time and different administrations, what is the balance among those three elements? The idea behind the reset was to put more
emphasis on the first, on the cooperation part, because we felt, first, there was low-hanging
fruit. There [were] a number of areas where we could
actually extract Russian cooperation on issues that mattered to the American national interests. Second, you had a president in Russia, Dmitry
Medvedev, who was more willing to be engaged with the United States than his predecessor
and successor, Vladimir Putin, who during this time was the prime minister. When you put those factors together, we felt
that this was an appropriate moment to pursue and enhance the level of cooperation with
the Russians. I believe, actually, that the results speak
for themselves. JIM GILMORE - Did we have a good understanding
of the relationship between Putin and Medvedev? JAKE SULLIVAN - It was difficult for us to
know exactly what the dynamic was between Medvedev and Putin. We knew that Putin was the ultimate shot caller
in the Russian Federation. [He] had been since he had assumed the presidency
after Boris Yeltsin. But we also knew that he was giving Medvedev
a lot of latitude to pursue a more constructive relationship with the United States; that
he was not going to stand in the way of that. The real question was, how much of that was
passive permission, and how much of it was active encouragement? I don't think to this day we know the answer
to that question. But the bottom line was Medvedev had scope
to pursue a more cooperative relationship with the United States. JIM GILMORE - … What was the first meeting
with Clinton and Putin that you were involved with? JAKE SULLIVAN - … The first time that I
was in a meeting with Secretary Clinton and then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was in
2010 in the run-up to the effort to get a U.N. Security Council resolution on Iran to
impose further sanctions on them for their nuclear program. Secretary Clinton met with Prime Minister
Putin at his dacha outside of Moscow, and not only did they have a substantive engagement,
but during that meeting, Putin took Hillary down along the corridor and into a back office
to show her a big map that included the location of a variety of different endangered animals
inside Russia, which is something that he was passionate about that she also cared deeply
about and continued to work on throughout her time in government. They ended up having a tough meeting on the
issue of Iran sanctions, but then also this much more personal moment where they swapped
stories about things like endangered tigers and what the United States and Russia could
do together to work on that. JIM GILMORE - … But at this point, was there
a tenseness between the two? Did they seem not to mesh well, or was that
not obvious at this point? JAKE SULLIVAN - The first meeting that I saw
between the two of them in 2010 involved a lot of wariness on both sides, but also you
could see beneath that a certain level of respect for the other’s, I guess I would
say, skill and steel as representatives of their respective countries. The meeting had real weight to it because
they were jousting over important issues like Iran sanctions, like Russia's potential accession
to the World Trade Organization. But it wasn’t negative or nasty. It was generally constructive without being
warm. JIM GILMORE - Describe Putin for us, your
impressions of him at that point. JAKE SULLIVAN - Putin conveys a huge amount
through body language. He tries to show you that he’s the alpha
male in the room through the way he spreads his legs, through the way he slouches a bit
in his chair, through the way that he will look at people and kind of give them a dismissive
hand wave. That's the first thing that really strikes
you when you're in the room with him. He also is somebody who’s got a debater’s
mindset. He likes scoring points, even if it’s not
particularly relevant to the conversation. You raise something that you think Russia
should be doing or that Russia is doing that you think is wrong, and he’ll come up with
two or three examples of how America's done just the same thing, or hasn’t done the
thing that you're asking them to do. A lot of it is not particularly useful, but
it has a certain counterpuncher’s quality to it that is definitely a core part of Putin's
rhetoric. Once you push through all of that, though,
he’s not an impractical guy. He’s someone you can have a real conversation
with without a whole lot of theater and histrionics. But it takes work to get past the debater
of Vladimir Putin to the guy who’s actually trying to make a deal. JIM GILMORE - … What was your impression
of the Munich speech? Was that something that guided you guys in
how you dealt with him? JAKE SULLIVAN - We knew that there was never
going to be a point at which the United States and Russia were going to have a completely
common strategic picture for Europe or for the world. The reset was never about arriving at some
larger U.S.-Russia condominium for the management of the globe. It was about increasing the degree to which
we could cooperate on certain issues and reducing and cabining to the maximum extent possible
the areas where we disagreed. We were sober about how Putin saw the United
States and how he saw Russia's role in the world, but we also believed that there [were]
areas on which he was prepared to work with the United States to advance common interests. We didn't think that the speech he gave in
Munich in 2007 closed the door on that. JIM GILMORE - How did he see America? What were his motivations, seemingly, and
how much of it was real, and how much of it was debating demeanor? JAKE SULLIVAN - I think that Putin has had
varying degrees of intensity over time in his core view that the United States needs
to be stopped in terms of its global hegemony, but that strand has always been there in his
thinking. In 2009, it was not the dominant mode for
him. He wasn't thinking everything Russia should
do is just to block and check the United States. He felt Russia could actually be a useful
partner to the United States on certain issues. But it never entirely disappeared, even at
the height of the cooperative period of the reset in 2009, 2010, and we were aware of
that. We knew that there was a shelf life on how
much cooperation we could extract from the Russians, and there was the looming possibility,
especially if he came back into the presidency, that we would end up in a more competitive
or adversarial posture. JIM GILMORE - So in 2011, Arab Spring happens. … What did you guys see in how he reacted
to Arab Spring, Libya and the U.S. at this point? JAKE SULLIVAN - The reporting that we were
getting from our embassy in Moscow and the engagements we had with senior Russian officials
like Sergey Lavrov, who Hillary was seeing all of the time at that point, was that Putin
was personalizing the Arab Spring; that he was seeing it through the prism of what could
possibly happen to him in Russia. And this had a distorting effect on Putin's
perception about what the United States was up to. That was true across the board. It was true in Egypt; it was true in Syria
and some of the other countries in the Levant; and it was true in Libya. And it came home to roost in the most extreme
way in Libya, because Putin came to believe that the United States had taken Russia for
a ride in the U.N. Security Council resolution that authorized the use of force in Libya. JIM GILMORE - Why? JAKE SULLIVAN - He thought what he was authorizing,
or he came to believe, I think, post hoc what he was authorizing, was a purely defensive
mission, essentially to protect the eastern part of Libya from Qaddafi’s advance. And that mission ultimately turned into a
nationwide effort that led to Qaddafi’s fall and led to the rebels taking over the
capital of Tripoli. Putin felt that was going far beyond what
the Security Council resolution approved. Now, on the actual language of the resolution,
it’s plain as day that Putin was wrong about that. Whether it was sincere or he constructed a
narrative about what he had agreed to, he came to believe that he had been misled or
potentially manipulated by the United States in terms of Russia's acquiescence in the U.N.
Security Council action in Libya. JIM GILMORE - Were there attempts to talk
to him at some point by either the president or secretary of state or others, the ambassador,
about his attitudes toward what our goals were? … I mean, he had a very paranoid point of
view about us. How did we deal with it? JAKE SULLIVAN - Both Secretary Clinton and
President Obama spent time with Putin talking to him about the U.S. attitude toward NATO,
toward Russia, toward the rules-based international order in which they saw Russia playing an
important role over time, all in an effort to dispel Putin's paranoia. This was done privately in their meetings;
it was done in public speeches that both Secretary Clinton and President Obama gave. It was clear to us that an effort at reassurance
was needed because of this aspect of Putin's worldview and his deep belief that the United
States was up to something. But over time, it also became clear that those
efforts at reassurance weren't particularly fruitful. JIM GILMORE - Because? JAKE SULLIVAN - … I guess the best way to
put it is the very effort of reassuring Putin that the United States was not up to something
nefarious vis-à-vis Russia merely reinforced his view, because he saw it as a form of subterfuge
to cover actions that he viewed as antithetical to Russian interests. So we were caught in a catch-22. Trying to reassure Putin in a way became to
Putin its own form of an operation to mislead or misguide Russia in this broader effort
by the United States to gain dominance over Russia, and that left us throwing up our hands
to a certain extent without real tools to be able to reshape his thinking on these issues. JIM GILMORE - How relevant is his background
as a KGB agent and such to a better understanding of how he saw the United States, how he saw
the world? JAKE SULLIVAN - Putin's position as a KGB
agent in the waning days of the Cold War is relevant in two important respects. The first is that it has completely shaped
his view about history and his conclusion that the fall of the Soviet Union was a great
historical catastrophe. That has lingering effects to this day. The second is to do with mentality and specifically
his zero-sum view about the United States and Russia, [the view] that increasing American
influence in a way necessarily detracts from Russian influence and Russian security. That zero-sum mindset and mentality at times
was overcome by a post-Cold War view that maybe there was a cooperative arrangement
to be had, but it was always there. And today I would say it’s there in spades. Both in terms of how he views history and
his mentality about the relationship between the U.S. and Russia stems, in my view, directly
from his experience as a KGB officer. JIM GILMORE - So 2011, the parliamentary elections
take place and demonstrations break out in Moscow and in many other cities across Russia. … Just take us to those demonstrations and
how it changed the dynamics between the United States and Russia. JAKE SULLIVAN - The Russian parliamentary
elections unfolded in late 2011. It was clear on the evidence available to
the international community that there was funny business going on in those elections,
and it was clear to the Russian people as well, which is why tens of thousands of them
poured into the streets for demonstrations, not just in Moscow but in many cities across
Russia. During this time, Hillary Clinton was actually
in Lithuania for a meeting of what's called the Organization of Security and Cooperation
in Europe, the OSCE. That was an organization that was created
in part to advance the idea of human security of democracy and human rights across Europe. So there she is in Lithuania as this is unfolding,
at a meeting involving democracy and human rights in Europe. She had little choice but to respond to these
events in Russia by saying the United States stands for certain core principles. We support transparency and fairness and clean
democracy, and we are concerned about what we're seeing in Russia. That was the bare minimum of what a U.S. secretary
of state could say in that setting at that time given those circumstances. And Putin took that as some kind of conspiracy
where Hillary Clinton was in league with the demonstrators in Russia and was, in fact,
the cause of them being out in the streets. On any reasonable calculus, on any objective
evidence, that is just simply nonsense, but that's what Putin told himself. Whether he actually believed it or not, I'm
skeptical. But it’s what he told himself, and it’s
what he told his broader security establishment. So that became the defining narrative from
Putin's perspective as to what happened with those elections. JIM GILMORE - When you say you question whether
he believed it or not, how might it have worked for him domestically? … JAKE SULLIVAN - Putin was under enormous pressure
at home at this point. People were unhappy. They wanted to express their displeasure at
the ballot box. That forced him to manipulate aspects of those
elections. That turned people out into the streets once
they saw that their democracy was being undermined. Putin was feeling the heat in a big way. What do you do when you're feeling the heat? You've got to find some tool to be able to
manage public opinion in a way to de-escalate the situation and solidify your hold on power. Hillary Clinton became that tool for Vladimir
Putin. Being able to blame her, an outside interference,
not only worked to be able to tell Russians, “We all have to rally against an outside
adversary”; it also allowed him to discredit the protest movement as being effectively
a functionary of the United States and of Hillary Clinton and not a dynamic homegrown
movement. JIM GILMORE - Putin then wins his election
in 2012, so he now comes back into the presidency. Who is this Putin at this point? How has he evolved? How does he seem to reorganize and take on
more power? And what are our thoughts and fears about
what he is representing at that point? JAKE SULLIVAN - Those of us at the State Department
who were working for Hillary Clinton when Putin came back into office feared that it
essentially meant the end of the reset. The reset was running on fumes at that point
anyway because we had plucked the low-hanging fruit, to mix metaphors, and we had essentially
done the major cooperative initiatives that were available to us in the first term. But when Putin came back into power, it was
clear to us, it was clear to Hillary Clinton and those around her, that we were going to
be in for a much rougher ride. That is because Putin naturally was going
to be reasserting his own personal influence over Russia's national security policy. But two factors were going to push him even
further: one, his own domestic insecurity coming out of the election processes, both
the parliamentary election and the presidential election, which had exposed a level of discontent
at home; and two, the Arab Spring, which had increased his paranoia about America's role
in fomenting revolution abroad. Those factors combined to make Putin far more
skeptical and suspicious of the United States and a much more difficult partner for us. JIM GILMORE - And then it goes back also to
the 2003, 2004 color revolutions. Everybody always talks about how we understood
even back then that that paranoia had started more at that point. JAKE SULLIVAN - From early on in the Bush
administration, but particularly advancing in the period where you saw revolutions in
Ukraine, revolutions in Georgia, the Freedom Agenda of the Bush administration in its second
term, Putin started to worry increasingly that the entire design and focus of U.S. foreign
policy was at the end of the day about unseating him in Russia and about undermining Russian
security more broadly in the region. This view, Putin's view about America's role
in fomenting revolution abroad, ebbed and flowed in terms of how prominent it was in
his thinking about U.S. foreign policy. It was always there, but it became much more
acute after the Arab Spring and after his own election and the parliamentary elections
in Russia that left him feeling weaker and less stable at home. JIM GILMORE - Let's jump to Ukraine: 2014,
the demonstrations break out. What's our policy toward Ukraine? … JAKE SULLIVAN - The United States’ policy
toward the Ukraine during this period was to essentially say it’s up to Ukraine. If Ukraine wants to pursue an association
agreement with the European Union and get on the path to Euro-Atlantic integration,
that's their right. If Ukraine decides they don't want to do that,
that’s their right, too. Our view was that the U.S. shouldn’t be
at the center of that negotiation. That really should be a negotiation, first
of all, among the Ukrainian people and their government, and then secondly between Ukraine
and Europe, not between Ukraine and the United States. Throughout 2013, it was really the Europeans
and the Ukrainians who were sitting down and wrangling over whether or not Ukraine would
actually pursue this EU path, and it was Ukraine and Russia who, at the same time, were discussing
what the implications of that would be. By late 2013, it became clear that [Ukrainian
President Viktor] Yanukovych was going to turn away from the EU path and pursue an economic
deal with the Russians. Now, the United States obviously was concerned
to the extent that that just meant essentially Russian blackmail that was defying the wishes
of the Ukrainian people, but it wasn’t up to the United States ultimately to drive decision
making as far as that was concerned. So really, the next thing that happened was
thousands, tens of thousands of people, poured out into the street in the movement that became
known as the Maidan movement to protest Yanukovych’s decision not to pursue a path that would lead
to Ukraine's integration into the European Union. The United States took the view people have
a right to peaceful protest; they have a right to assert their view about Ukraine's future,
and the government's going to have to work it out with this protest movement. JIM GILMORE - … And then this very strange
hybrid sort of warfare is taking place in Crimea, “little green men” and everything
else, that we don’t quite understand what's going on. What are we doing at that point? How are we viewing that? What can we do? And do we understand what's taking place? JAKE SULLIVAN - We had strong suspicion from
the moment that masked men with guns and uniforms, even if they didn't have the insignia on them
showed up in Crimea, that they were Russian. But this was not something that we’d ever
seen before, an invasion out in the open that was, in effect, being conducted by stealth,
by subterfuge, so it took us some time to really figure out, how do you effectively
respond to that? How do you call it out? How do you push back against it? … We weren't falling for the notion that
this was some kind of homegrown movement or that these guys just spontaneously showed
up there without any direction from the government of Russia. We didn't know for sure what you do in a circumstance
like this because we’d never seen anything quite like it. Ultimately, our response was to begin to impose
a series of sanctions on individuals and entities linked to Crimea and to begin to open a dialogue
with the Russian government that basically said we're going to have to increase the pressure
and increase the amount of sanctions if you're not prepared, essentially, to find an exit
ramp from this situation and de-escalate and ultimately pull your forces back. JIM GILMORE - … Is there a conversation
in the White House about what we're seeing over time, conversations with diplomats from
other administrations in the past about what they saw in Estonia, or are we caught really
unawares about what he’s doing and why he’s doing it? JAKE SULLIVAN - We came to understand pretty
early on that this set of asymmetric tools, this hybrid warfare, was going to be an important
factor in Russia's effort to exert influence and expand its dominion in its near abroad
in Eastern Europe. However, understanding that that was going
to happen did not give us the answer about how to respond to it. The biggest challenge that we had was, we
didn't have a clear answer to the question of how do you deter behavior when the other
side is basically denying that it’s even taking place? And then how do you de-escalate or use diplomacy
to try to resolve a situation when the other side is saying, “I don’t even know what
you're talking about; we're not involved”? President Obama would speak regularly with
President Putin about the situation in Ukraine and say, “Look, we've got to figure out
a way for you to pull your forces back.” And Putin would say, “We don't have any
forces there.” And President Obama would say, “Look, let's
just cut the nonsense and figure out a solution here.” And Putin would say, “I don't know what
you're talking about.” How do you actually arrive at either a strategy
of deterrence or a strategy of diplomacy in the face of that kind of problem? So that was one big challenge. The second big challenge, from my perspective,
with dealing with hybrid warfare was in their near abroad, the Russians believed that they
had the escalation advantage, which is to say they were prepared to go further in destabilizing
the situation than any other country, including the United States, was prepared to go to raise
over the top of them. They felt that operating in this gray zone,
in this hybrid warfare zone, allowed them to control escalation. I don't think to this day the United States
has fully worked out a strategy for responding to that. JIM GILMORE - The question of use of armaments
and this debate that was going on in the White House and elsewhere in Washington about some
voices saying that it’s important that we provide the Ukraine with better weapons to
defend themselves, and President Obama's attitude that this would just cause more problems and
that sanctions were the route, can you take us into that debate a little bit? JAKE SULLIVAN - The debate over the use of
defensive weapons, primarily anti-tank weapons, the deployment of those to Ukrainian forces
essentially came down to a basic question: If we do that, are we more likely to deter
further Russian escalation or more likely to invite further Russian escalation by doing
that? Those of us who argued deter basically said
what the Russians need to feel is some resolve on the other side that will lead them to de-escalate. What the invite side said was if we pour more
weapons in, the Russians are simply going to raise us. They're not just going to call us; they're
going to raise us, and they're going to pour even more men, money and material into Ukraine. That was President Obama's view ultimately,
and it was the reason that we didn’t proceed. I think it's a close call. I ultimately supported the provision of defensive
weapons to Ukraine, but I understood the counterargument. I think this debate over whether the United
States should or should not have provided lethal weapons to the Ukrainians crystallizes
this core challenge about escalation. Is the United States ultimately prepared to
go as far as the Russians are prepared to go in a country like Ukraine? And if the answer to that question is no,
then that has a big impact on our policy. JIM GILMORE - … The argument that some people
make that we weren't harsh enough in how we showed there was a line that he couldn’t
cross eventually led to him hacking into our elections. What's your take on that argument? JAKE SULLIVAN - I do subscribe to the view
that Putin will keep probing and pushing until he feels he’s hitting a hard wall and that
he did not feel that hard wall from the United States. On the other hand, I don’t agree that American
behavior and policy in one theater totally shapes Putin's decision making in another
theater. I'm not sure that a different strategy in
Ukraine would have stopped President Putin from deciding to intervene in the American
election. I think he is able to compartmentalize and
to decide that he can proceed further in one space than he does in another space. So I don’t buy into this unified theory
that says if we had just stood up to him in Syria or if we had just stood up to him in
Ukraine then his whole strategy of destabilizing democracy in Europe and the United States
would have shifted. [It] could have easily intensified. He could have decided, “That's really where
I want to put all of my money.” So I think the right way to look at the issue
of deterring Putin from intervening in the U.S. election was how we directly responded
to that issue, not how we responded on other issues. JIM GILMORE - And that's what we’ll talk
about next. Let me ask you one small question before we
talk about the elections. The [Assistant Secretary of State for European
and Eurasian Affairs] Victoria Nuland telephone hacking and the fact that the Russians released
that, which is fascinating in itself, and then used it as propaganda to define the fact
that we were finagling with Ukrainian elections and also her statement about Europe, which
was embarrassing: What was the [thinking] about the Nuland hacking and how that went
down? JAKE SULLIVAN - It was a new step in this
method of hybrid warfare. This was an information operation. This was fundamentally about shaping the information
and political landscape in Europe and in Russia and in Ukraine. Instead of just eavesdropping on a call, gaining
some intelligence from it, the Russians actually released the audio of that call in order to
basically make the case that it was the United States that was pulling the strings in Ukraine,
and that the United States was denigrating Europe and we don’t like Europe. Now, I don't think that it was a highly successful
undertaking at the end of the day, but it was a precursor of things to come. JIM GILMORE - … When you hear of the DNC
hacking and the belief at that point that Russians are involved, how do you hear, and
what are you guys thinking? JAKE SULLIVAN - We first heard about the hacking
of the DNC, and potentially of the Clinton campaign as well, in the late spring of 2016. At that point, we felt this was pretty standard
fare. Foreign powers had hacked the Obama campaign,
the McCain campaign, other campaigns over time, and the normal tradecraft was to try
to learn about potential future presidents and their policies. So it didn't come as a huge surprise to us
that foreign powers, including hostile foreign powers, would be hacking into political parties
and political campaigns in the United States. At that point, the game hadn't shifted to
public dissemination. At that point, it was simply they were inside
the system and probing around. So that was our initial reaction. …JIM GILMORE - OK. So then days before the convention, WikiLeaks
releases all this information. What are you thinking then? JAKE SULLIVAN - As soon as the DNC material
landed on WikiLeaks, we were convinced inside the campaign that this was the Russians taking
the game to a whole new level. They had gone into the DNC, gotten this material,
and now were disseminating it with the express purpose of harming Hillary Clinton and by
doing so helping Donald Trump. JIM GILMORE - How freaked are you? How serious do you consider this? JAKE SULLIVAN - This was a game changer. This was a moment where we realized that the
Russians had decided that they were going to actively interfere in the U.S. election;
they were going to intensively work to undermine the pillars of U.S. democracy; and that they
were going to try to defeat Hillary Clinton. So I would say freaked out would be the technical
term for how the campaign felt at that point about what was going on. And we immediately sounded the alarm. JIM GILMORE - So you sound the alarm, and
there's a story on how you and Jen Palmieri try to get into a golf cart, and you're going
from site to site at the convention to talk to the press. Take me to that moment and how the message
that you're giving and how it’s being received and what the thoughts of the campaign are
at that point. JAKE SULLIVAN - … After the Russian leak
on WikiLeaks, the documents from the DNC splashed across the front pages of newspapers everywhere,
we arrived at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and Jennifer Palmieri, who
was the campaign’s communications director, and I went to each of the major networks,
all five of them, and went from network to network who each had tents around the center
where the convention was taking place. We rode in a golf cart from tent to tent,
and we spent an hour with each of the networks laying out in a sober and systematic way our
view that this was a Russian intelligence operation and that our democracy was under
attack and that this was not a political issue but a national security issue and should be
treated as such. JIM GILMORE - And how were you received? What was the reception? JAKE SULLIVAN - The networks all looked at
Jen and I as serious, credible people who might just have gone a little far in peddling
conspiracy theories. I think they were skeptical at that point
of what we were saying and listened to us politely but fundamentally did not buy into
the gravity, the scope or the impact of what the Russians were up to. JIM GILMORE - And how do you guys react to
that, the fact that you understand what will be proven later to be a very serious situation,
but you can't get the message through? JAKE SULLIVAN - It was a very frustrating
period, both during the Democratic National Convention, when we were first trying to explain
what we believed was happening, and then in the weeks that followed, when we continued
to sound the alarm through statements, through public speeches, through organized press telephone
calls. Some members of the press began to come around,
but there was general skepticism of the campaign’s line on what was happening here with the Russians
throughout most of the summer and fall. We just tried to shout louder and marshal
more evidence and push the story any which way we could, but we were having a really
hard time getting traction. JIM GILMORE - Are you getting to see the depth
of what was going on? It's the hacking; it’s the release of information. There's also these fake news stories taking
place. I mean, there's stories that all of a sudden
take flight of Hillary being seriously ill, and then they come from somewhere, and then
they end up on conservative radio shows, and then they end up on Fox, and then they become
believed by a huge amount of people. Are you seeing all of the depth of what is
going on? JAKE SULLIVAN - We were watching material
and arguments and stories about Hillary Clinton appearing on Russian propaganda websites like
Russia Today and Sputnik and then somehow ending up in very similar form, ending up
in the right-wing media ecosystem of the United States, Breitbart and Infowars, even Fox News. And watching this swirl, where Russian propaganda
and right-wing media in the United States were essentially driving similar storylines,
and then social media was elevating these storylines on both Twitter and Facebook, we
didn't know exactly what the extent of it was or the mechanism for how this was happening,
but we were watching it unfold in real time, and it was a source of huge concern to us. One of the things we were trying to explain
to the press was this isn't just about hacking and leaking emails; this is about a larger
information effort by the Russians, which is a playbook that they had developed over
the course of years in Europe in elections closer to home, but that they were now using
in the United States of America. JIM GILMORE - Are you worried that this could
affect the election at that point? JAKE SULLIVAN - You know, it's hard to say
in hindsight now, knowing all that we know, how we felt exactly about its impact on the
election at the time. What we knew was that the cumulative effect
of WikiLeaks and all of these stories, particularly the fake news stories and the stories that
might have had a kernel of truth but then were completely twisted around, was that this
was helping dominate the political discourse in the closing days of the campaign. We knew it was going to have an impact, and
we were worried about what that impact would be. JIM GILMORE - Take us to one fake news story
that you thought was very important and how it took flight, whether it's the illness or
the pizza parlor thing. JAKE SULLIVAN - … One story was that the
Clinton Foundation had used donors’ money to pay for Chelsea Clinton's wedding. This story took flight on right-wing media
and on social media and was swirling around in this Russian propaganda network as well. We couldn’t figure out the genesis of it
or why it was gaining the traction that it could, but it was utter nonsense. A positive story about Donald Trump was that
the pope had endorsed him, that Donald Trump had been endorsed by Pope Francis, which to
anyone who has followed the dynamic between Pope Francis and Donald Trump would know that's
completely crazy. But it was a story that also took flight and
that generated a huge amount of traction online, particularly in social media. JIM GILMORE - … What's the feeling within
the campaign? JAKE SULLIVAN - It felt at various points
like we had entered the twilight zone. The intelligence community of the United States
was telling Donald Trump that the Russians were interfering in our election, and he was
going out publicly and saying: “We have no idea who’s doing this. Maybe it’s not Russia. Maybe it’s a 400-pound hacker sitting on
his bed.” He was also at this point touting policy positions
that were beyond what Vladimir Putin could have dreamed an American presidential candidate
would tell: NATO is obsolete. We should think about lifting sanctions on
Russia. We should think about letting Russia have
Ukraine. We shouldn’t care that Russia kills journalists. The list went on and on. It involved changing the Republican national
platform to take out what they believed to be anti-Russian material. It involved Donald Trump saying Vladimir Putin
deserves an A for leadership and is just a great and fabulous guy. We were watching all of this unfold, Donald
Trump reading from Vladimir Putin's wish list of policy positions at the same time that
he was encouraging Russia to continue to interfere in our election, that he was making common
cause with this Russian effort, and, perhaps most importantly, that he was trying to take
maximum advantage of it. Donald Trump mentioned WikiLeaks more than
150 times in the closing weeks of the election knowing full well that the entire WikiLeaks
dump was a Russian intelligence operation. JIM GILMORE - Why do you think—what was
going on? What did Putin see in Trump? … JAKE SULLIVAN - Vladimir Putin saw in Donald
Trump somebody who had an affinity for Russia and Russian dictators, somebody who thought
that the core principles of American foreign policy, allies and values and a rules-based
international order, just weren't that important. So he liked what he heard from Donald Trump
in terms of his worldview. He also didn't like Hillary Clinton. I think in part he didn't like Hillary Clinton
because of their personal history, but also in part because he felt that she was going
to exert American power and influence in the world in a way that was against Russian interests,
and he didn't think that Donald Trump would do that. JIM GILMORE - And Trump's view toward Putin? Do we have any understanding of what was motivating
that? JAKE SULLIVAN - What we know is that Donald
Trump has a bizarre fascination with strongmen and dictators. And we've seen this play out over and over
again. He’s even said nice things about Kim Jong-un,
the North Korean dictator, and Saddam Hussein, not to mention the president of Egypt, the
king of Saudi Arabia, the president of Turkey and Vladimir Putin. So it’s all of a piece with that. But beyond that, I think that Trump has had
an affinity for Russia and Russian oligarchs and Russian leaders for quite some time that
relates to his business interests, that relates to his general attitude toward values and
democracy. And all of that came together in this unholy
alliance. Whether it was witting or unwitting, whether
there was active collusion or passive collusion, it all came together during this campaign. JIM GILMORE - … What's the campaign’s
point of view toward the White House's inaction in dealing with what's taking place? JAKE SULLIVAN - We were hoping that the White
House and the administration in general would come out earlier and stronger in asserting
this is what the Russians were up to and then taking steps to deter them from any further
action. But of course we weren't inside, and it wouldn’t
have been appropriate, of course, for a political campaign to be engaged in intensive discussions
with the national security establishment of the government on this. So it was hard for us to know what the considerations
were or the trade-offs were in thinking about how to come out publicly and what they were
doing behind the scenes. But we were hoping to see more and stronger
from the administration over the weeks and months leading up to Nov. 8. JIM GILMORE - Is there an understanding at
this point that there's an investigation into the Trump campaign at all? … JAKE SULLIVAN - We heard very late in the
day, very late in the process, with just days to go before the election, that there might
be some kind of investigation into the Trump campaign involving the FBI, and we flagged
what we were hearing from a variety of reporters who were all told no, that's not true; it’s
not happening. We know now in fact it was true, and it was
happening, but nobody was able to establish it in the closing days of the campaign. JIM GILMORE - And the frustrations over that
due to the fact that the investigations into Hillary Clinton's emails were such an important
aspect of the campaign? JAKE SULLIVAN - Jim Comey has gone out publicly
and said that it was not appropriate to identify the fact that there was an ongoing investigation,
FBI investigation, into Donald Trump because it might have an impact on the election. That was the opposite of the logic that he
applied when it came to notifying the public about an investigation into Hillary Clinton. That was not something that we could wrap
our heads around, I guess would be the polite way of putting it. JIM GILMORE - Oct. 7, WikiLeaks releases the
[John] Podesta emails, and from that point on, it’s a drip, drip, drip, daily information
coming out. … How is the campaign dealing with it all? JAKE SULLIVAN - The day the Access Hollywood
tape came out, that it was first reported, was the same day that the first WikiLeaks
dump of John Podesta’s emails also came out. So the tape drops, and a few hours later,
the WikiLeaks Podesta emails drop. That is pretty crazy timing. From that point forward, the way that the
Russians and, frankly, the Trump campaign as well wanted to play the Podesta leaks was,
as Trump was dealing with this difficult Access Hollywood story and the allegations of sexual
assault by a number of women, there would have to also be a story on the evening news
or in the newspaper about Hillary Clinton and emails and the John Podesta leaks. So they saw this effectively as their primary
means of combating the storyline about the Access Hollywood tape and how the Russians
thought that through working with WikiLeaks and how the Trump campaign took advantage
of that, we have to get to the bottom of that. But that was the dynamic for the closing three
weeks of the campaign. JIM GILMORE - Do you feel in your heart of
hearts that the Russians delivered this election to Trump? JAKE SULLIVAN - I believe there were a lot
of factors that ultimately determined the outcome, but when you lose by 70,000 votes
across three states, and you look at the scale and scope of the Russian intelligence operation,
I don't think it’s reasonable to say that it did not have at least that big an impact
on the election. JIM GILMORE - … Did you think any of the
stuff that the White House was doing would have any effect whatsoever in slowing down
their use of these tactics? JAKE SULLIVAN - I was hoping that the White
House, the intelligence community, other aspects of our national security establishment were
doing things we didn't know about to slow down or stop what the Russians were doing. I was just hoping that they were using all
means available, and most of the things that would be effective would be stuff I wouldn’t
know about on the outside. I was hoping that was happening. It turns out in the end not much of that was
happening. But no, I did not believe that simply saying
to Vladimir Putin, “Please stop,” was going to be effective. JIM GILMORE - … The lifting of sanctions. What's your overview of that story? JAKE SULLIVAN - What became apparent once
Trump won was that he intended in the early period to actually make good on all these
things he said in the campaign about Russia, including lifting sanctions on Russia for
its behavior in Ukraine. In fact, the White House directed the State
Department to essentially draw up a game plan for the lifting of sanctions. State Department pushed back hard because
that was completely antithetical to American national security interests, but it was a
good example of how this wasn’t just empty talk from Trump. He actually intended to carry forward a set
of policies that were consistent with this pro-Russia view. … JIM GILMORE - And your impressions of those
photographs of him meeting in the Oval Office with Lavrov and [Sergey] Kislyak? JAKE SULLIVAN - It was an utterly bizarre
turn of events that, first of all, they brought essentially the state arm of Russian media
into the White House to take pictures of Trump yakking it up with Ambassador Kislyak and
Foreign Minister Lavrov; second, that Trump would use that meeting to call Jim Comey names
and to tell these guys, “Don’t worry, we're trying to get rid of this investigation”;
and then third, of course, that he would reveal for them the type of intelligence information
that he did, putting one of our partners at risk. That constellation of things all happening
within one short Oval Office meeting maybe is the best summation of Trump's approach
to the Russia issue and to this FBI investigation that we have yet seen, and all of it is deeply
disturbing. JIM GILMORE - And lastly—we're going back
here; I forgot to ask it before—the Crimea speech that he gives on March 18 where he
lays out, number one, that Crimea is theirs, that it was Russian troops, but beyond that,
it’s like a boosted speech about how he views the United States. When you guys, you were still in the White
House at that point, how did you view that speech? JAKE SULLIVAN - That was peak Putin, and anyone
who wants to deal with Vladimir Putin in policy, in academia, just reading the newspaper, you've
got to read that speech, because that speech essentially encapsulates Vladimir Putin's
worldview about how the United States mistreats the rest of the world and how it’s up to
him, Vladimir Putin, to reassert a multipolar world against the hegemonic American superpower. He weaves a whole series of arguments that
cannot be immediately dismissed; that need to be contended with and pushed back on. So I don't think that there's a more important
statement that he has made to reveal and reflect his worldview. JIM GILMORE - … What lessons should this
new administration understand, learn from what has taken place with previous administrations? JAKE SULLIVAN - The Trump administration has
to come to understand that on some fundamental levels, the United States and Russia, under
Vladimir Putin, have divergent interests, and we've got to be clear-eyed about that. Believing that somehow Russia and the United
States can be great partners in a global project and see eye-to-eye on some of the major issues
of the day is only going to end up in disappointment. Or, to the extent we're acquiescing in the
Russian point of view on these issues, it’s going to result in a weaker United States,
less capable of protecting our own national interests. Trump is either going to learn that the easier
way because he’s constrained from doing what he wants to do on Russia, or he’s going
to end up learning it the hard way. JIM GILMORE - Thank you. Is there anything we've missed that you feel
is important to say? JAKE SULLIVAN - I think you hit the big ones.
