MICHAEL KIRK - OK, so take yourself back to
2011, Arab Spring. Putin sees the Arab Spring in a completely
different way than the White House saw it and than a lot of in the press saw it. How does Putin see it? JON FINER - Well, I think, like most autocratic
leaders, Putin saw the Arab Spring as a threat, as sort of a harbinger of potential things
to come, both closer to home and then potentially in his own country. You know, popular uprisings tend to be things
that autocrats don’t have a lot of sympathy for, I think in large part because they worry
about their own backyard, and I'm sure that was very much on his mind at the time. MICHAEL KIRK - Inside the State Department
and inside the White House, what was the sense, looking over at Tahrir Square and all the
other places that are popping up? JON FINER - I was at the White House at the
time, and I think, you know, there were some mixed feelings, depending on who you might
have spoken to. On the one hand, I think there was a lot of
inspiration and empathy and support, frankly, for people who were out in the streets taking
great risks to demand basic rights that they had been denied. On the other hand, this was happening in countries
that, in some cases at least, were close American partners, and governments with whom we worked
very closely on some pretty sensitive issues. I think there was some concern about what
might happen to those governments and what might follow those governments in the event
that they were replaced by something else. MICHAEL KIRK - Were there meetings you can
place us in, where people were concerned about, on the one level, their own attitudes about
it, and were factoring in Putin’s response and what Putin would be thinking? JON FINER - I think pretty early on, the realization
that we had was that this was not something that was fundamentally about us, about the
United States, nor was it something that fundamentally we could shape in any meaningful way. This really was about the particular context
in which it was occurring, you know. This was modern Middle East. Our policy response, therefore, was really
reduced to what we would want to say about what was happening. That was very much the main topic of the discussion. How were we going to respond when asked: “Do
you support what's happening? Are you concerned about what's happening?” Most of the meetings that took place really
were about messaging, which is a big component of policy. But often policy discussions are about what
you're going to do. Here it was much more about what we—and
even the president would say about the events that were transpiring. MICHAEL KIRK - Was there an eye on Putin? JON FINER - I'm not sure that Russia really
entered into the discussion in a significant way. Obviously, later in that year there were demonstrations
in Russia itself, and I think we paid close attention, obviously, to what was happening
there. But I don’t think, just like the Arab Spring
events were not really about us, they weren't really about Russia either. While that was maybe a second/third order
of concern, we were pretty laser-focused on what was happening in the immediate period
in those countries themselves. MICHAEL KIRK - In general, how would you describe,
around that time, the Obama White House’s view of then-Prime Minister but soon-to-be-again
President Putin? JON FINER - I think we were still in the period
where the reset was paying dividends. We had gotten some work done with the Russians
on Afghanistan, setting up this Northern Distribution Network for us to be able to get some equipment
into Afghanistan, which was very important as an alternative to going through Pakistan. We’d obviously historically, and then would
again in the future, have some problems sometimes with moving supplies into and out of Pakistan,
so the importance of having another way into the country was essential. Russia was very involved in the Iran nuclear
talks. They were one of the P5+1 countries [China,
France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, plus Germany], and a critically important
one, because they also probably had the closest relationship with Iran among the P5+1. We really needed Russia for those conversations
as well. I think the general view at that time was,
you know, Putin was not someone who shared our values, and he’s not someone who shared
many of our interests, but he is someone who shared some of our interests. So to the extent that we could compartmentalize
the relationship, you know, oppose things he was doing when they were opposed to our
interests and work with him when it was in our interest to do that, we were going to
try to make that work. MICHAEL KIRK - I could imagine when Putin
steps back and becomes prime minister that there was a sort of sigh of relief, and I
could understand the reset impulse. But when the word comes that that’s not
going to be the case, and that Putin is going back into the presidency, what was the reaction? JON FINER - Well, I don’t think that took
people tremendously by surprise. You should obviously go back and ask the people
that were more focused on Russia at the time. I was broadly focused and more on the Middle
East than other things. But my sense was, even when [Dmitry] Medvedev
was really in the driver’s seat, people knew that behind the scenes President Putin
was calling most of the shots and that Medvedev was, in many ways, a more palatable public
face, but not exactly the decision maker on the big topics that we were most concerned
with. I don’t think there was a lot of people
that thought that Putin was going to sort of go away quietly and gently when his term
ended. MICHAEL KIRK - Take me to an understanding
of what was happening on the streets of Moscow once those protests broke out and in all the
many, many other cities around Russia. What was the view from Washington of what
that was and what that meant? JON FINER - In part, because of the Arab Spring
context, we were really in a place where we did not know what the full limits of the kind
of contagion effect of some of what had been happening in the Middle East might be. Would this spread throughout every country
in the Middle East? Would it spread beyond the Middle East to
new places inspired, maybe, by some of the events that were happening in Egypt and elsewhere? I think it’s a fundamentally different phenomenon
in Russia than it is in other places, or at least a separate phenomenon. I'm not sure it was driven as much by what
was happening in the Middle East, although, you know, I do think seeing the effect of
some of these demonstrations probably did lead people to believe that things were possible
that they might not have realized or believed were possible before that. In terms of what was actually happening on
the ground, I think the Russians have this view that we were somehow involved in organizing
this, fomenting this, encouraging this. This was something that we hear, to this day,
at least until the conversations I had until I left government in January, that we would
hear in almost every lengthy conversation with Russian interlocutors, that this was
an American transgression against Russia somehow. That’s fundamentally not true, but it is
very much their view. I think we were much more observing this and
trying to monitor where it might go and calculate what the implications might be for us and
for the relationship as opposed to us fundamentally driving this in some way. MICHAEL KIRK - He gets it in his mind that
Hillary really sparked this, that yes, the democracy movement had a lot to do with it. Yes, the Web and the West had a lot to do
with it. But she somehow becomes the object of his
lack of affection. What's that about? JON FINER - Well, I mean, I'm speculating. Getting into Putin’s mind and psyche is
not something I feel particularly well qualified to do, and I'm not sure anyone is particularly
well qualified to do that. But I guess what I’d say is, she’s the
face of the United States to the world. She’s the secretary of state, the most prominent
public figure in our administration after President Obama. And you know, the State Department promotes
democracy. It is a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy
and has been for quite some time, until recently, when the new administration sort of disclaimed
that view to some extent. But this has been something that we’d do,
not just in Russia but in the Middle East, in places all over the world, with varying
degrees of success and with varying tactics and ways of trying to go about promoting democratic
change. I think because the State Department was so
involved in those activities, funding training for democratic activists, for political parties—and,
by the way, not in a discriminatory way. When we operate in these countries, one of
the first things we do is make clear that our programs and our trainings and these sorts
of things are available to any of the political parties that want to take advantage of them. Now, it tends to be democratically oriented,
certain types of parties and activists that want to take advantage of these programs,
but they're not fundamentally discriminatory in some way. That is a basic tenet of the way we operate. But I think that President Putin saw the way
in which we were doing these democracy promotions activities in Russia like we did elsewhere
and felt like they were a threat to his ongoing rule, and so put—associated Secretary Clinton
with that. … MICHAEL KIRK - Let’s go to 2014. The Sochi Olympics have happened, but there's
been lots of action in Ukraine. Take me to the problems in Ukraine, the way
that the secretary, the way that the State Department, the way that the president is
perceiving what's happening over there, and start that ball rolling that’s going to
eventually, in February, turn into the invasion of Crimea. JON FINER - So I think there are a few things
that are happening. ... One, Ukraine was moving further in the direction
of completing an association agreement with European Union, essentially moving toward
Europe in this geopolitical context. I think fundamentally the Russians and Vladimir
Putin saw that as a threat. They see Ukraine as fundamentally in their
sphere of influence. We don’t really recognize, we in the United
States, the countries have these spheres of influence. It’s a tug-of-war that we have with Russia
in any number of places, with China, with some of these other large countries, but we
deny spheres of influence. We think countries should be able to make
their own determinations about their foreign relations. So Ukraine was moving in this direction. I think there was probably more of a zero-sum
approach to this association agreement on the part of the Europeans than, in retrospect,
may have been necessary or wise. I think there was this sense of with us or
against us. “With us” meant, to some extent, “not
with Russia.” I think Russia very much had that same zero-sum
mindset to its relations with Ukraine, offered incentives to the Ukrainian government to
not complete that association agreement. And in the end, [President Viktor] Yanukovych
and the Ukrainian government decided to go the direction of the Russians and sort of
terminate that process somewhat unexpectedly. That provoked a response in the Ukrainian
populace, in the Ukrainian streets. There was a strong sense that Ukraine’s
future lay more with Europe than it did with Russia, at least among a significant percentage
of the Ukrainian population, so people came out, and they demonstrated. Now again, this was not about the United States. This was not inspired by the United States. I think this was very much an authentic response
by a population to its own government’s policy decisions. What I just described, though, I think is
fundamentally incompatible with the way the Russians saw what transpired. MICHAEL KIRK - What did they see? JON FINER - I think what they saw, and they
have said this to us in no uncertain terms, is a U.S.- and European-backed coup fundamentally
against Yanukovych, or an attempted coup at that time against Yanukovych. Again, I can't stress strongly enough that
was not our policy, and there's a lot of evidence for the fact that that was not our policy. Vice President Biden was repeatedly, frequently
on the phone with Yanukovych, not to tell him to go away, but to try to give him advice
about what he could do to calm this down, to essentially get ahead of the demonstrations,
what reforms, what steps he might be able to take to get this under control, because
we were worried about instability in Ukraine. Those pieces of advice were not followed,
not adhered to. In the end, Yanukovych ended up fleeing Kiev,
and then everything sort of started to come apart. But again, that was not at our urging. We were very much, at least as an initial
matter, in a posture of trying to keep this under control. MICHAEL KIRK - Can you give me a sense of
who Yanukovych was? What's the short description of who he was? JON FINER - Again, this is something better
left to the Russia experts than to me. But he is fundamentally an old-style, almost
Soviet-style, Russian-influenced and sort of close to Putin autocratic-style leader. I think that is the way we saw him. That said, this was not a government that
we didn’t think we could work with, not a government that we had any policy desire
to change. What happened happened, and we reacted to
it. MICHAEL KIRK - Did you know, could you feel,
could Vice President Biden feel, and ultimately Secretary Kerry feel, that there was a kind
of march to arms that was beginning back then? JON FINER - I think we were worried about
that. I think we were worried when, you know, there
started to be security forces deployed to try to put down this uprising. There were snipers out in the square. We were worried, based on some of the things
that we had seen in the context, again, of the Arab Spring, that this could spiral out
of control and end up in conflict if it wasn’t adeptly and carefully managed. That’s what we were most worried about. MICHAEL KIRK - Can I ask you to describe any
situations you saw or heard about with Secretary Kerry and Putin? What were they like together? JON FINER - Secretary Kerry spent a lot of
time with President Putin over a number of years. We had two main issues that we were dealing
with with the Russians during the four years that Secretary Kerry was secretary of state. One was Ukraine, and the other was Syria. There was also the bilateral relationship
with Russia, which is hugely important, and there are any number of issues that come up
in that context. I guess that would be a third category of
topics on our agenda. But Ukraine and Syria were really first and
foremost, the topics that were on both sides’ minds, so we spent a lot of time engaged in
conversation to see if we might be able to find a common way forward on either of those
two big topics. MICHAEL KIRK - What was Putin like? JON FINER - He’s sort of more soft-spoken
than you might imagine if you hadn’t spent time with him. He is not brash in the context of these meetings,
although often this soft-spoken tone and manner is belied by some of the things that come
out of his mouth, which tend to be highly critical of the United States, highly critical
of our policy going back years and even decades, highly critical of our worldview. But they're sort of uttered matter-of-factly
as if he is a sort of dispassionate analyst, just providing insights on the situation. MICHAEL KIRK - This is what I hear, that he
just—he starts up, and he’s got a litany of past wrongs and evils that he wants to
say that you kind of have to let him say. JON FINER - Yes. You end up having to deal with what we used
to call “the airing of grievances” in the beginning of every meeting. You knew that the meat of the conversation
was going to be about what I just described, Syria and Ukraine, but to get there, you had
to endure a bit of a history lecture. And Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov, Secretary
Kerry’s actual counterpart on the Russian side, who was another longtime figure in,
first, Soviet, and then Russian foreign affairs, is another person who would subject us occasionally
to these sort of lecture-style conversations. I think Secretary Kerry had a good way of
dealing with this. He would not concede the points. He would note where he disagreed, but he tried
not to get overly caught up on debating the history, because that’s not a debate that
either side is going to win. And every minute that is spent talking about
those topics is a minute you're not spending talking about the things that you're actually
there to discuss. So our sense was to try to just get through
that storm as much as possible and get onto the things that we were actually there to
talk about. MICHAEL KIRK - What was the grievance list? JON FINER - It’s a number of things. Most of it is around the end of the Cold War
and the immediate aftermath. I think, interestingly, on the end of the
Cold War, his grievances are much more directed at Soviet leadership than they are at the
United States. I think he fundamentally understands the United
States was trying to, quote-unquote, “win the Cold War” and that it was the Soviet
leaders who may have kind of conceded that victory too early. Famously he has described the end of the Cold
War as one of the great tragedies of the modern era. I forget the exact words, but that’s the
thrust of it. With us, I think it starts really in the way
we handled the aftermath of the Cold War. I think he fundamentally believes that the
United States sought to humiliate Russia in any number of ways. But principally, or at least one primary way,
is through the expansion of NATO, which is something he comes back to time and time again,
and the expansion of NATO particularly right up to the Russian border and Russia’s doorstep,
to the Baltics and other places. That he believes—and again, people who know
the history better can tell you this, but this was not always the way this was seen
in Russia at that period. There was talk at one point of even Russia
potentially being part of NATO. That conversation I think even continued into
the early years of Putin’s tenure. You can get this from people with a better
sense of the history. But the way he sees this now, clearly, is
that this was essentially an assault on Russia’s sovereignty, on its security, by the United
States at a time when Russia was weak and could not resist what the United States was
doing. I think he blames us for that. Then, in the more modern period, post-major
NATO expansion, I think he sees the United States support for and, in his view, this
goes beyond rhetorical support, but actual sort of fomenting of color revolutions and
other examples of regime change. Here he’s talking about everything from
the invasion of Iraq, which he sees as a fundamentally—and not incorrectly, by the way—a fundamentally
destabilizing act perpetrated by the United States government, through the color revolutions
that took place in some of the former Soviet states, which he sees very much, again, as
linked to U.S. policy driven by the United States. Now, moving forward to the Arab Spring, he
sees the United States having used a Security Council resolution in Libya that he does not
believe authorized, fundamentally, the use of force to justify the use of force by the
U.S. and Europe against the [Muammar al-]Qaddafi government and eventually pushing aside Qaddafi,
and replacing him with people that we, in his view again, saw as more palatable. He sees a pattern of these regime change-type
actions and policies. But the sort of coup de grace, the thing that
really was, I think in his view, the ultimate sin on our part, was what transpired in Ukraine,
which, again, we were not behind. But that is fundamentally not the way he sees
it. MICHAEL KIRK - Take me into a meeting or something
where Sen.—or Secretary Kerry would try to discuss these things. How did that go back and forth between the
two of them? They're sitting across the table; Lavrov and
others are all lined up. It’s formal, I gather? Describe it, as a former journalist, describe
it for me. JON FINER - With Putin it would be the large
room, small table, very few people, kind of grand setting but not a huge audience for
these conversations. They tended to prefer small groups. And that was fine with us as well. Just a few people on the United States side,
a few people on the Russian side. During this kind of history-lesson period
of the conversation, it would be mostly the Russian side and mostly the president who
was doing the talking. Secretary Kerry would primarily be in listening
mode, noting particularly egregious claims on the Russian side. He, I think, would feel obligated to say,
“That’s just not the way we see it.” Things that fell below the threshold of terribly
egregious were probably not worth contesting, because then you get into a back-and-forth,
and it eats up time. One thing about these meetings is they tend
not to start on time. You get summoned to the Kremlin when the president
is ready to see you. Sometimes we were an hour or two or more behind
schedule when we started. And you never knew exactly when he was going
to say: “OK, that’s it. The conversation is over.” The big challenge in these conversations is
to see how much of it you can focus on the things that you actually want to talk about
and again, dispense with some of the nonsense that you have to deal with at the start. MICHAEL KIRK - There's a real battle in Washington
and a real battle in Ukraine about lethal force and how much we deliver and what should
we do. Could you articulate the sides in that in
Washington? JON FINER - What I don’t really particularly
want to go through—I’ll let other people speak for themselves on this—is sort of
who lined up where. But the arguments are not hard to describe. On the one hand, you had a Ukrainian army
that was being pushed aside by, quote-unquote, “separatists” who were really proxies
of the Russian military, and even members of the Russian military themselves, obviously
infused into those ranks in Crimea and eventually in the Donbas as well. They were outgunned, the Ukrainians, and we
knew that. On the one hand, the argument for providing
them more training and equipment was that otherwise they might be overrun. And frankly, this was a total mismatch in
terms of the ability to project power, even inside Ukraine. So that’s the argument for providing the
support. The argument on the other side is that, you
know, you provide them with lethal assistance and with this training, and they're going
to kill more Russians and Russian proxies, and then how is Russia going to respond to
that? Some people believed that if you, quote-unquote,
“bloodied the nose” of the Russian-backed side that they would be more inclined to back
down. I think others believed that, fundamentally,
if the Ukrainian side escalated the conflict and made it more painful for the Russian side,
the Russian side would escalate in turn. Then you're caught in this escalatory cycle,
because if you back down then, then you’ve rewarded, essentially, Russia’s escalation. If you don’t, it’s not clear where this
ends. So I think there were some people that were
worried about escalating this conflict, increasing the death toll, even beyond the devastating
level it had already reached. MICHAEL KIRK - I'm sure the choices are anguishing
for everybody involved. I know where [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel
was. I know where Obama was. I don’t know at all where Kerry was. Where was Kerry on this? JON FINER - I think Secretary Kerry was hesitant
about providing lethal assistance to the Ukrainian side, at least in the early stages of the
conflict. As the conflict went on, and as it grew more
brutal, I think there were forms of lethal assistance that he would have supported and
did support in the policy conversations. But beyond that level of detail, I would prefer
he characterize his position for you. MICHAEL KIRK - Sure. Your personal opinion about the idea that
we will have—by the time this is in the film, we will have made 45 minutes of connecting
dots that show Putin—who was slowly but surely building a force, building a cyber
force, upgrading his military, having the Gerasimov idea alive and well. Many people say we should have punched him
in the nose right now, to stop him. Otherwise, ’15 and ’16, the incursion
in our electoral process might not have happened. JON FINER - Sorry. You're asking is the incursion to our electoral
process linked to our lack of a more robust response in the Ukraine context? MICHAEL KIRK - Yeah. JON FINER - I don’t believe that at all. I think what happened in our electoral process
is the logical, more futuristic, more technologically enhanced continuation of what has been a longstanding
Russian effort to influence affairs in the United States. But here, they were, on the one hand, more
angry with us because of things that were happening in Ukraine and in Syria, and more
capable of influencing what was happening because of technologies that were at their
disposal in this election that hadn’t been previously. I don’t think this was because we didn’t
respond aggressively enough on Ukraine. There may be some people who think that. That doesn’t make sense to me. MICHAEL KIRK - … Once they're hacking, they're
fake-newsing, they're trolling, they're doing whatever they're doing, and certainly by ’16
[then-Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper and others know what’s happening. JON FINER - By the summer of 2016. MICHAEL KIRK - Yeah, summer of ’16. There are still some questions at the White
House. There are still some questions with the State
Department. What are they really doing? How far are they really going? Talk to me about your perspective, from where
you were, about what was happening. And did you know? Did you believe it was the Russians? JON FINER - ... My sense was that by the summer
of 2016, we knew that Russia had exfiltrated information from the DNC [Democratic National
Committee] and from certain high-level Democratic political figures. I'm not sure I knew the names of who they
had taken this information from. I'm not sure if that was the kind of thing
that was provided in intelligence reports or not, but we knew that they had gotten some
of this information. We didn’t know what it was, and assumed
it could very well be sensitive. At that point, we didn’t know what they
were going to do with it. It obviously was not the first time that Russia
had attempted and succeeded in getting into sensitive systems, including U.S. government
systems, including the State Department’s email system, including the White House’s
email system. All this has been reported on, so it didn’t
seem, at that point, fundamentally different from some of these things that we had already
observed. At that point I don’t remember knowing,
by the way, if this had been only the Democratic Party side, if this had been both sides. But the real thing that I think changed this
from more of the same to something sort of new and more pernicious was the disclosure
of this information, because that was a new step that we had not seen. Then that led to all kinds of questions about
what was behind this, what they were attempting to do. MICHAEL KIRK - You mean disclosure by WikiLeaks
or how it— JON FINER - Yeah, I mean whatever you want
to call it. Fundamentally, Russia took the information,
provided it to people who could provide it very directly to WikiLeaks. I don’t really differentiate in a meaningful
way between WikiLeaks disclosing this and the Russian government disclosing it directly
itself. MICHAEL KIRK - Now with the State Department,
you're with the State Department. JON FINER - Yes. MICHAEL KIRK - So at the State Department,
it’s Russia. When do you know it’s Russia? Almost right away? JON FINER - Again, this is not something I
can say with certainty, just because it was a while ago. But I remember, I think, it being indicated
to us that this was Russia almost immediately after the DNC servers were hacked. I think that was like June, July, whatever
it was, of 2016. There's always degrees of certainty with intelligence
reporting, so it’s possible that the delay was because they had to be, you know, ironclad
sure of the attribution before they were willing to come out and say so publicly. But there was this very uncomfortable period
between the summer and October of 2016 during which we were really not answering basic questions
to the public at the State Department briefing and the White House press briefings about
who had done this, even though there was a lot of reporting in open source that Russia
had been behind this, a lot of press reporting that Russia had been behind this. But we were not fingering them directly at
that time. MICHAEL KIRK - Why not? JON FINER - Again, this is I think really
a question for the Intelligence Community, because— MICHAEL KIRK - Well, we’ll ask them for
sure. JON FINER - Yeah. I mean, in October, they came out with a report. I guess it was Homeland Security and— MICHAEL KIRK - Were you pushing? Was there pushing from the secretary? Was there an imperative at the White House? Were you at meetings with the White House? JON FINER - One thing you're not supposed
to do as a policymaker is tell the intelligence people what conclusions to draw. You know, political interference with intelligence
gathering, intelligence analysis is, I think, rightly frowned upon, so it’s not like we
were calling them up and saying, “Hey, you know, why are you not telling people what
happened here?” But I do think there was some confusion, and
it definitely made our job more difficult, because Secretary Kerry, our spokespeople,
we had to be—again, one distinction with this administration is they don’t put themselves
out there in front of the cameras and in front of the press to answer basic questions very
often. We did that all the time. We did that almost every day. And to not be able to answer these questions
really, I think, did not serve us well. MICHAEL KIRK - Well, especially in light of
the fact that candidate Trump says, “Hey, I don’t know if it was Russia or not, but
if it is, go get Hillary’s emails,” right, that kind of stuff. What was your reaction to that, and how did
that affect what you guys wanted to do? JON FINER - To be honest, I think we tried
to the greatest extent possible to not let what was truly a wacky campaign influence
the way we conducted our business on national security issues. I can't tell you that that was 100 percent
possible, but that was certainly the goal. And I think it was the right goal. So I don’t know that Trump’s pronouncements
about this really influenced, at least the way we at the State Department saw, what was
the right thing to do or not. MICHAEL KIRK - There is, of course, the argument
that we should have, as soon as possible—certainly, the White House should have insisted, as soon
as possible, to get out there and say to people, “This is a big problem; these guys are in
our process,” and maybe get Hillary and maybe get Trump to stand there with him and
say, “Hey, everybody, this is really, really important.” JON FINER - Yeah, so that latter piece, to
get Hillary and get Trump to stand there, I think, is in the category of nice to wish
for, but probably fantasy, because I don’t think you would have had at least one side
of that equation present and endorsing that view. Again, in a more normal time and in a more
normal election, maybe that’s the kind of thing that’s possible, but just given everything
that’s transpired since, there's nothing that leads me to believe they would have gone
for that. MICHAEL KIRK - So why didn’t the president,
by himself, push hard early? Do you have a sense? JON FINER - Look, I think it’s a good and
legitimate question. And I think, on balance, the administration
certainly, and I think the country, would have been better served by making a clear
declaration earlier. I don’t think it necessarily needed to be
the president. In some ways, separating it from political
figures inside the administration and putting it in the voice of career professionals whose
job it is, essentially, to protect the country from these sorts of threats gives it more
credibility. I'm also now in the context of an election
in which candidate Donald Trump was already saying: “The system is rigged. Everybody’s kind of out to prevent me from
getting elected, using all sorts of illegitimate tactics. The fix is in.” For the president himself to have made a pronouncement
like that, I think there was the risk that it would be used for political purposes in
the context of the campaign. MICHAEL KIRK - As to Secretary Kerry, who’s
doing business—you guys are still doing business with the Russians, with Putin, fingering
him, saying: “You know this is happening, Mr. President. What are you going to do about it?” Would that get in the way of any business
you had hanging fire? JON FINER - I have read people quoted, usually
anonymously, alleging that we at the State Department were against attributing this to
the Russians, or against consequences for the Russians, for exactly the reason that
you described, because it would impact negatively our diplomatic efforts on Syria or Iran. I can tell you, I do not remember a single
conversation in which anyone at senior levels in the State Department argued that view. You know, there were sometimes questions of,
if we were going to do something, should it be right before we see the Russians at a very
high level or right after? Our general view was doing it right before
would mean that we were not going to get anything done in the context of those meetings, so
better to do it right after. But these were tactical questions about small
delays. These were not sort of big, strategic questions
about, should we respond. Everybody that I knew who was read into this
and who was involved in these conversations at high levels, high levels of the State Department,
supported both attributing it to the Russians as early as possible and responding in a robust
way. MICHAEL KIRK - Is that right? Good, interesting. The president, of course, pulls him aside,
Putin aside— JON FINER - Yeah, in Hangzhou. … MICHAEL KIRK - Well, what we know is that
he said, essentially, “Knock it off.” JON FINER - Yeah. I mean, probably a variation on that theme,
with more detail. But yeah, that I think was the thrust of the
message. MICHAEL KIRK - And the likely effectiveness
of that? JON FINER - Well, I mean, we all saw what
happened. On the one hand, again, check the record on
this. I'm not sure Russia continued to steal more
information after that time, but they had already stolen quite a bit. They certainly did not stop disseminating
the information that they had already taken. Then I think what these investigations are
going to have to really dig into—the investigation that the Special Counsel is doing, the investigation—again,
investigations that are taking place on the Hill is, how did Russia use that information? Because it was not as simple as putting it
up on WikiLeaks for the world to see. There was a degree of targeting that went
on on social media. There was clear interface between Russian
social media actors, both bots and people, trolls, whatever you want to call them, who
were typing this stuff up into Facebook and into Twitter, and then crossover into American
media outlets, usually starting in the right-wing media ecosystem. How did that happen? Was that just pure randomness? Some of these right-wing outlets saw some
of the commentary by the trolls and decided, “Oh, that’s interesting stuff; we’re
going to pick that up and use it”? Or was there much more sort of direct interaction
and direct conversation? I think that’s one of the things that these
investigations are going to really have to ferret out. … MICHAEL KIRK - Any calls from Kerry? JON FINER - Kerry and Lavrov would talk. The way this works is, you don’t talk on
the phone to somebody who’s not your direct counterpart, so I don’t think—I don’t
remember a single instance—I don’t think it happened ever where Secretary Kerry spoke
with President Putin on the phone. But he would call Lavrov, his— MICHAEL KIRK - He’d speak with Lavrov about
this? JON FINER - Yeah, he spoke to him about it
in person. He spoke to him about it on the phone. But they were also talking a lot about both
Ukraine, and even more than Ukraine, in 2016, about Syria, because Lavrov was more involved
in the Syria policy for Russia than he was in the Ukraine policy. MICHAEL KIRK - When he talked to Lavrov, did
he say, “Knock it off”? JON FINER - Every time we talked to Lavrov,
and every time we talked to Putin about this, and Secretary Kerry spoke with Putin about
this as well when we met with him, they did not betray a quarter inch of acknowledgement
that they were involved in any way. I mean, they just denied it straight up. MICHAEL KIRK - They lied to the secretary. JON FINER - That’s certainly the way I see
it. MICHAEL KIRK - Interesting. He wins. Trump wins. JON FINER - I recall. … MICHAEL KIRK - ... So let me take us to the
transition. The State Department. Usual handoff of stuff? Usual “Come on in, guys. Congratulations. We voted for the other side, but here we go.” JON FINER - Look, I've never been through
a transition before, so I don’t have authority to speak to what is usual and not usual. I will say, though, that based on what I've
heard and what I expected, it was not usual in the sense that there was no real meaningful
transition to speak of. We left, and they arrived. But in terms of any sort of handoff on the
way out the door, there was not much. Secretary Kerry spoke once with incoming Secretary
[of State Rex] Tillerson right after he was named as the nominee, probably talked for,
certainly under 10 minutes, not substantive. They talked about the possibility of maybe
meeting up in Washington when Secretary Tillerson, incoming Secretary Tillerson, arrived in Washington. That never happened. The Tillerson side declined to schedule a
meeting. You know, fair enough. That’s their prerogative. But they did not meet face to face before
Secretary Tillerson came onboard, before we left. I was Secretary Kerry’s chief of staff. I never met my incoming counterpart chief
of staff. I was also, at the end, director of policy
planning. I never met the incoming director of policy
planning. On the one hand, it’s not the end of the
world. On the other hand, these were not intended
to be conversations where we tried to sort of persuade them on policy grounds, you know,
sell them on the Paris climate agreement or the Iran nuclear deal. These were intended to be conversations in
which we tried to pass on advice about what might make their jobs easier: You know, here
are some mistakes I made when I first got here that you might be able to avoid if you
know in advance that they’ll be coming. I certainly had these conversations with people
when I got to the department, and was starting in my job, I found them useful. I know Secretary Kerry spoke with, I think,
just about every living secretary of state, former secretary of state, before he came
on as secretary, and found those conversations useful as well. But, you know, they made a different decision. MICHAEL KIRK - Here is an administration—here
is you guys dealing with a president of Russia, clearly an enemy in lots of ways, maybe waging
a certain kind of war that could last and last and last in the United States of America. Here is an incoming administration that a,
doesn’t want to talk to you about your perceptions and your deals and your worries and the things
that might have worked with this foreign leader, but actually are talking about loosening sanctions. … Your reaction to that? JON FINER - Yeah, I'm not sure I linked these
two things at the time. I'm not sure we had a detailed understanding
of whatever it was that they were conversing about during that period. At least I didn’t. But you know, I think we saw this much more
in the context of a very contentious, deeply polarizing campaign, and a highly charged
partisan atmosphere in Washington. I think that was the sense that we had as
to why they frankly didn’t want to have much to do with us. Now in retrospect, looking back on what we
now know, at least based on media reporting, there may have been more going on there. But at the time, I think we just saw this
as a function of our really broken politics. MICHAEL KIRK - OK, so I’ll ask you what
they didn’t ask you, which is, what do you know about Putin, from what you know, Ukraine,
and all the things you know? Their new policy of rapprochement, whatever
it is, their idea of not taking this very seriously, this cyber invasion of the American
election, electoral process, what would you say, if you could say it to them, about how
they should approach this problem? JON FINER - Well, look, I think that this
is something—this problem is something that—you know, we say this a lot, but this is an area
where it’s just fundamentally true: This transcends politics. In some ways, this to me is not even really
about partisan politics. This is about a new threat to the country,
and really to our core sovereignty and our democracy, things that, whether you're a Republican
or Democrat, you should consider vitally important to the United States and should seek to protect
and to defend. One of the things that I think a lot of us
who have come out of the administration have been saying since we got out is that this
is not a tool that the Russians used once and are going to put back in the toolbox. Nor, by the way, is it a tool that they are
only going to use against one American political party going forward. They have clearly identified a way to cause
us harm and to influence our system. They have honed this to both in the United
States and in many other countries, primarily in democratic contexts in Eastern and Western
Europe. They have continued to use it since our election
in France and in Italy and [are] continuing to use it in Germany and Scandinavia and other
places today. They are continuing to use it here, and will
continue to use it here, in our 2018 elections and 2020 elections. The question really is, do you consider this
important and dangerous? I don’t see how you wouldn’t. And if you do, you know, then we really need
to get to the bottom of what actually happened, not to revisit the outcome of the last election,
which is the way the president always caricatures the investigation. “They want to undermine my Electoral College
victory.” It’s not about that. It’s about protecting the country going
forward, and we can't do that unless we know how we were damaged in the past. MICHAEL KIRK - Given what you know about Putin,
the schoolyard bully, whatever you want to call him, the guy with a lot of grievances
about the United States of America, is it time to push back? JON FINER - I mean, look, I think we should
have done more, frankly, to push back while we were still there. There were probably some good reasons, good
intentions behind the decision not to take more assertive steps, but absolutely now,
given what we know—and again, remember that the Intelligence Community came out with an
opinion in early October that basically said Russia did this, but didn’t really say a
whole lot about why. Then in January, you know, there was another
Intelligence Community release [that] all of the agencies signed onto that suggested
they were trying to influence the outcome of our election. At that point, I think, starting early January,
it was almost too late for the outgoing administration to take significant action. At that point, the ball was sort of being
handed off in real time to the new administration. They have not shown—it’s an understatement—a
lot of interest in responding to this. I think what’s interesting now is you're
seeing Congress start to finally, I think, realize that this administration is dropping
the ball a bit in terms of its response, and maybe starting to impose a response on those. Just today we’re talking about this, because
this is obviously going to be a project that doesn’t see the light of day for some time. But today Congress passed a sanctions legislation
on Iran and on Russia. And some of the most aggressive sanctions
that we've seen in the context of Russia in quite some time. We’ll see if the House passes this and it
ends up going to the president. Then we’ll see if he signs it. It’s a good thing that Congress is starting
to get fed up with inaction here, and maybe start forcing the administration’s hand. MIKE WISER -> Want to go back to this question
about [when] everybody at the State Department was saying, “We need to do something strong.” This is in the summer and fall. What happened? What were the options? Why didn’t anything happen until late December? JON FINER - I think a few things. I think until the Intelligence Community was
willing to put its imprimatur behind the opinion—not the opinion, behind the fact that Russia had
taken this step—it was very hard for anybody else to make that claim, because if the White
House and the State Department went out and said, “We believe Russia did this,” you
know, question two, three or four would have been, does the Intelligence Community endorse
and support this view? Is there intelligence behind what you're saying? Until the opinion was buttressed by intelligency,
it was very hard for us to talk about publicly. In terms of—and again, you really—you’ve
got to ask these guys why it took, I think, as much time between June and October, because
they will probably say, “Attribution in these situations is complicated; we wanted
to make sure we got it right, given the high stakes.” I don’t want to speak for them, but that’s
probably what you’ll hear. In terms of our response, it was interesting. Our thinking was, there were a number of ways
in which we could respond to what Russia did. The most obvious, in some ways, would have
been a sort of proportional response in kind, in the cyber domain. So you know, they took information from us. They disseminated that information. It’s influenced our system in ways that
we didn’t like. So what—you know, what we could have done
is done something comparable, something similar to them. We are certainly a very capable and adept
country on cyber issues. I think the downside of that response is that
we did not believe that this was the kind of behavior that we wanted to endorse, and
if we responded to them in exactly that same way, at least implicitly it would have implied,
all right, this is now a new way of doing business. You're going to do it, and we’re going to
do it, and we have now established a sort of a new guideline for behavior that this
stuff is acceptable. We wanted to establish the opposite guideline,
that frankly, this was unacceptable. So that’s one reason not to respond with
cyber. Another is that, you know, unfortunately,
our comparative advantage over Russia in this space is pretty limited. Arguably, Russia has a huge advantage, not
that they're better at cyber than we are, but that we’re an open society. We don’t control all of the info—you know,
for the better, we don’t control all the information that is provided to the American
people. Russia is not an open society. The Russian government has the ability to
really control its own information space. Our ability to do to them what they did to
us, frankly, is pretty limited, even if we are more capable than they are. So I think we thought a cyber response maybe
was not the best way to go. We obviously were not, at that time—and
I think again, for very good and obvious reasons—ready to go to war, physical kinetic war with Russia
over this issue. So that really left what we say, messaging
and then economic steps, economic sanctions. Now, I think one of the things that we at
the State Department thought would have been wise was steps where we really had a comparative
advantage on economic sanctions. I think we had shown, in the context of Ukraine,
that we could take economic steps that hurt the Russian government and that hurt individuals
close to President Putin without upsetting the global economy, without hurting too much
our partners in Europe who do a lot of business and a lot of trade with Russia. Here was an area where we had an undeniable
comparative advantage. We are almost immeasurably a stronger economic
actor than Russia is. Russia is an economy that is hurting in the
best of times, and we showed an ability to hurt them more through the sanctions that
we put in place in the context of the Ukraine. I think it was a long way of getting to this,
but I think what we thought would have been appropriate was making stronger statements
and taking stronger steps in the economic space. MIKE WISER -> But it didn’t happen. JON FINER - But it didn’t happen. MIKE WISER -> Why didn’t sanctions happen
until late December? JON FINER - There were a lot of policy conversations
about what we were going to do to respond. All I can say is these ideas were presented;
they were not decided upon. We got to a point, I think, in early December
where it seemed like we might not respond at all to what Russia had done other than
sort of what the Intelligence Community said in early October, saying what we knew. Eventually mid-December, and then culminating
in the actions that we took in late December, we finally did decide to take at least some
action—some action on sanctions, some action in terms of expelling Russian diplomats, some
action in terms of closing their two diplomatic facilities, retreat facilities in the United
States, in Maryland and New York. Pretty limited response, actually. But was it better than doing nothing? Absolutely it was better than doing nothing. MICHAEL KIRK - But pretty limited. JON FINER - Pretty limited. MIKE WISER -> When Trump becomes president-elect,
and he’s talking about Russia not being that bad, questioning the intelligence agencies’
assessment from October, what was the feeling inside the administration? There's reports of concern that intelligence
may be destroyed and that Russia may not be held responsible for it. What was the feeling in that transition period
about the president-elect and his approach toward Russia and toward the hacking? JON FINER - I know this has been reported,
so there probably are elements of truth there. I do not remember, at least, again, at the
State Department, us being worried that somehow all this information that we had gathered
would, like, go away, and people wouldn’t see it, either in Congress or in the administration
that came in. That doesn’t mean there weren't people that
thought that way. That was not something that I think was on
our radar of things to be concerned about. MIKE WISER -> But his attitude toward Russia? Was there a concern about— MICHAEL KIRK - He wasn’t going to hold the
feet to the fire? MIKE WISER -> —what the new administration’s
approach was going to be, of feeling like we needed to get to them? JON FINER - Yeah, I think absolutely. I think we were worried about a lot of things. I think we were worried about the prospect
that they would immediately lift the sanctions upon coming in. I think we were also, from a very early stage,
concerned about NATO. I think we were concerned because of some
of the things that the president-elect had said during the campaign—you know, NATO
is obsolete. It would be hard to imagine more pleasing
music to President Putin’s ears than disparaging comments by an American president-elect about
NATO, and yet he had—he, President Trump, President-elect Trump, had said these things. I think we were concerned about NATO being
undermined at exactly the wrong time, at exactly the time in which Russia was behaving more
aggressively, not less aggressively, when our NATO allies, particularly in countries
like Ukraine that were on the sort of Russian border, and in this area that Russia considered
its sphere of influence, were increasingly on edge about whether the United States and
the alliance would sort of be there for them if things really went down. At exactly at that moment, you had the top
leader of the United States calling this further into question. I think we were very concerned about that.
…
