Over the course of my career as an undercover officer in the C.I.A., I saw Russian intelligence manipulate many people. I never thought I would see the day when an American president would be one of them.
I think what we're learning with the Trump Jr. meeting is when you meet with any Russians, you're meeting with Russian intelligence. And, therefore, President Putin.
There is no such thing as a former KGB man.
Fancy Bear actually went after opposition research and, specifically, research related to the Trump candidacy.
WikiLeaks is a lot of things. This past year, WikiLeaks was a tool of Russian intelligence and the Russian government and their interference operation against the American presidential election to benefit Donald Trump.
The fact that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid intelligence officials in Russia for salacious and false information on President Trump is suspicious enough.
Putin did not head the KGB, never has. Putin was a mid-level nobody there. Putin was one of those guys in the KGB who was a climber. He was forever hoping, climbing that ladder, trying to get to the head spot.
Putin, I believe, was actually born to be a KGB agent. And I say born because I think that his father was also an agent of the secret police in Russia.
When I see something like Russian intelligence services interfering with our electoral process, I find that incredibly offensive.
We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical.
With Fancy Bear, we have medium-level confidence it's GRU, which is Russia's military intelligence agency, and with Cozy Bear, we have low-level confidence it's FSB, the Russian federal security service.
Putin knows how to run the KGB playbook. I mean, he knows how to work people.
Julian Assange is very clearly a tool of Russian intelligence. And ah, he has done their bidding. You don't see damaging negative information coming out about the Kremlin on WikiLeaks. You didn't see any of that published. So I think Assange has become a kind of nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator.
One of my books, called 'Moscow Station,' revealed that a KGB archivist had defected from Russia to the FBI. And I knew that he was safe, and revealing this would not jeopardize him. But nevertheless, the FBI started a leak investigation.
Everybody has always underrated the Russians. They keep their own secrets alike from foe and friends.
Obviously, you have the DNC engaged in communication with lots of different parties, and anything you can use to gain intelligence about what's going on in the U.S. political system and what the candidates are thinking is of high interest to Russian intelligence.
CrowdStrike stands fully by its analysis and findings identifying two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network in May 2016.
I do not believe that Russians changed the outcome of the election. I want to be clear about that. But I do think that it is very - some of the things we saw are very reminiscent of the active measures that Russian intelligence and before that Soviet intelligence agencies used to try to undermine the government or individual politicians in foreign countries.
Trump doesn't understand the counterintelligence process. Take, for example, Carter Page. He's been appearing on television and acting as though the U.S. intelligence community monitoring his activities in Russia and suspicions that he may have been in league with Russian intelligence is an affront.
