SUMMARY: On Night 2 of the Democratic National Convention, delegates will officially nominate former Vice President Joe Biden as their 2020 presidential candidate. Meanwhile, new developments in the ongoing saga over the U.S. Postal Service, with the Postmaster General delaying some policy moves and President Trump saying he wants to add funding. Judy Woodruff talks to Lisa Desjardins and Yamiche Alcindor.
SUMMARY: Donna Brazile, a veteran political consultant who became the DNC's interim chair during the 2016 campaign, had a front-row seat to what happened and offers her take in a new book, "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House." Brazile joins Judy Woodruff for a conversation about Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama, and more.
SUMMARY: U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded Russia was behind the hack of the DNC and others, but haven't made the evidence public. The private cyber security company that uncovered the hack has unveiled new details it says confirms Russian military intelligence service was behind the breach. Judy Woodruff speaks with Dmitri Alperovitch of CrowdStrike and Thomas Rid of King's College, London.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government was behind the email hack into the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations, but have yet to produce their evidence publicly. President-elect Trump has questioned that conclusion.
Today, the private cyber security company that first uncovered the DNC hack unveiled new details they claim confirm Russian military intelligence service was behind the computer breach.
Here to explain all of this is Dmitri Alperovitch. He's the co- founder of CrowdStrike, the company that did the investigating. And Thomas Rid, he's a professor at King's College London. His latest book is “Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History.”
And we welcome both of you to the NewsHour.
Dmitri Alperovitch, let me start with you. What is this new information?
DMITRI ALPEROVITCH, CrowdStrike: Well, this is an interesting case we've uncovered actually all the way in Ukraine where Ukraine artillerymen were targeted by the same hackers who were called Fancy Bear, that targeted the DNC, but this time, they were targeting their cell phones to understand their location so that the Russian military and Russian artillery forces can actually target them in the open battle.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, this is Russian military intelligence who got hold of information about the weapons, in essence, that the Ukrainian military was using, and was able to change it through malware?
DMITRI ALPEROVITCH: Yes, essentially, one Ukraine officer built this app for his Android phone that he gave out to his fellow officers to control the settings for the artillery pieces that they were using, and the Russians actually hacked that application, put their malware in it and that malware reported back the location of the person using the phone.
SUMMARY: Reports emerged this week that the CIA is confident Russia attempted to sway election results through cyberattacks. Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Ramesh Ponnuru of the The National Review join Judy Woodruff to discuss what Russia's interference suggests about the future of our democracy, the president-elect's Cabinet picks of Rex Tillerson and Rick Perry and President Obama's legacy on Syria.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): And now to the analysis of Shields and Ponnuru. That's syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Ramesh Ponnuru of The National Review. David Brooks is away.
Welcome to both of you.
Let's start out, Mark, by talking about this back and forth. Every day, there's a new piece of information about it did between what Donald Trump is saying about whether the Russians were involved in this hacking of the Democratic National Committee and what the CIA and now the FBI, President Obama weighed in today on this. What are we to make of all this?
MARK SHIELDS, syndicated columnist: I think what we're to make of it is, to me what's fascinating is not what Donald Trump is in no particular position to know, but what's most alarming to me is Donald Trump will become President of the United States, he won the election. This is not about who won the election. He will become the 45th President the 20th of January.
It is about whether the sovereignty and self-determination of the United States was compromised by an organized at the highest Russian levels, which means the imprimatur of Mr. Putin, espionage, sabotage of the American democratic system. And there is an office in this country that's higher than that of President and it's [a] 'patriot,' and John McCain is filling that right now, and John McCain is saying, these are questions that must be answered, that these are questions that demand an answer.
And the idea, as Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate Majority Leader, says, sending it to the Intelligence Committee is a way of sending it to limbo because we had — we spent $40 million in five years in the Intelligence Committee investigating torture at Abu Ghraib, we have yet to get a report about it. That's a nice way of saying, oh, it's national security, we can' t talk about it. We will not get a 9/11 Commission. But I think John McCain and the Armed Services Committee with Jack Reed, the Democrat, with Lindsey Graham and others, and Tim Kaine in a pretty damn good committee, I think you will get an honest hearing and we need it.
The idea people are so concerned about a $500,000 contribution to the Clinton Foundation changing and influencing American policy somehow indirectly, and incurious about Russia's involvement and sabotaging an American election is unforgivable to me and irrational.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Ramesh, do you think this will be investigated thoroughly?
RAMESH PONNURU, The National Review: I think this controversy is expanding in all directions. You're going to have an investigation. You're going to have a report from the administration.
During the a press conference, President Obama said there would be a report tying loose ends, tying it all together before he leaves office. And then you're going to have the hearings over the configuration of Trump Secretary of State nominee, Rex Tillerson, where I believe the number one topic and probably number two topic as well is going to be the administration's intentions toward Russia.
Trump is going to be our third President in a row coming into office wanting friendly relations with Russia. But, of course, this incredible backdrop now is going to color everything.
SUMMARY: Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, has been living in exile in London's Ecuadorian embassy for four years. Now Ecuador says it's shut off Assange's internet access, months after WikiLeaks began to release documents and emails stolen from the DNC and the Clinton campaign. Hari Sreenivasan learns more from Raphael Satter of the Associated Press.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): For the last four years, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group, has been staying in self-imposed exile in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
He's taking refuge from a sexual assault investigation in Sweden that Assange claims is an American plot to have him extradited. Over the summer, WikiLeaks began divulging thousands of pages of documents and e-mails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, and, most recently, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, all in an effort, said Assange himself, to damage her presidential candidacy.
Now a new twist in this saga. In a statement issued yesterday, Ecuador said it had cut off Assange's Internet access, saying in part: “The government of Ecuador respects the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states. It doesn't interfere in external electoral processes, nor does it favor any particular candidate.”
For more on this, I'm joined now from London by Raphael Satter of the Associated Press. He's covered WikiLeaks extensively.
Is there anything more to it than that statement by the Ecuadorian government?
RAPHAEL SATTER, Associated Press: You know, it's not much more — not much more official.
There is an enormous amount of speculation about what's going on behind the scenes. WikiLeaks alleges that, despite what the Ecuadorian government has said, they are, in fact, bound to pressure from the U.S. State Department, and, in particular, John Kerry, the secretary of state. Now, the State Department has denied all this.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The batches of e-mails have been trickling out for months, Hillary Clinton's e-mails, John Podesta's e-mails for weeks now. So, why now? Why intervene now to try to cut off his Internet access?
RAPHAEL SATTER: It's quite puzzling, actually.
The timing is a bit of a mystery. And the best people to speak about this are the parties concerned themselves. But neither WikiLeaks nor the Ecuadorian — nor various Ecuadorian officials that we have tried have returned our calls or even deigned to comment. They have communicated via Twitter or through their Web sites in a series of terse statements, which leave a lot to the imagination, frankly.
SUMMARY: For nearly a year, Russian hackers have been penetrating Democratic National Committee computers and stealing, among other things, research compiled on presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. Gwen Ifill talks to Dmitri Alperovitch of CrowdStrike and Sasha Issenberg of Bloomberg Politics for more on the stunning sophistication of these breaches and the reasons behind them.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The Democratic National Committee said today Russian government hackers have penetrated its computer network. Breaches by two separate groups allowed hackers to access e-mails, internal chats, and opposition research Democrats have compiled on presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Hackers may have had access for a year. The Washington Post reported that computer networks for Hillary Clinton and Trump were also targeted.
We get some insight on how this happened and why from Dmitri Alperovitch. He is the co- founder of CrowdStrike, the intelligence company that investigated the breach for the DNC. And Sasha Issenberg, a contributor for Bloomberg Politics and author of the book “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.”
Dmitri Alperovitch, how significant an intrusion was this into the Democratic Party's file?
DMITRI ALPEROVITCH, Crowdstrike: This was a pretty scary intrusion.
And, in fact, there were two intrusions in place here. Two separate Russian government-affiliated actors, we believe, that are part of the intelligence services of Russia infiltrated the network first in the summer of last year and were able to get access of the communications service at the DNC, essentially giving them the ability to monitor the e-mail traffic that was going through their servers, and a completely separate actor that penetrated that network in April of this year and went straight for the research department of the Democratic National Committee, specifically looking for the opposition files on the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump.
GWEN IFILL: How did the DNC find out? How were they alerted to this intrusion, and how were you?
DMITRI ALPEROVITCH: Well, in early May, they discovered that there was something off on the network that was highly suspicious. And they called us in.
GWEN IFILL: Their internal IT people?
DMITRI ALPEROVITCH: Their internal IT people determined that something may be off. They didn't yet know if it was a breach. They asked us (Crowdstrike) to come in and evaluate.
And, within 24 hours, we were able to ascertain with our software deployed on all their machines there was in fact two breaches from two separate Russian intelligence services that were inside that network.
GWEN IFILL: Sasha Issenberg, you wrote a book about how dependent campaigns have become on data and the things needed to support that amount of data, specifically about the 2008 Obama campaign. So, in this case, what kinds of things exist in this — in these records?
SASHA ISSENBERG, Contributor, Bloomberg Politics: Yes, you know, parties at this point are largely hubs of information.
They gather intelligence on the electorate, on — data on individual voters that they use the make tactical decisions, and then they're kind of a permanent research operation, especially at times like this, where there are open primaries within a party, and you don't know who the nominee is going to be.
And the DNC basically says to the Clinton campaign or Sanders or O'Malley campaigns, we will spend the year building resources for you that we can hand to you when you're the nominee. In this case, a dossier on Donald Trump, probably the DNC has more information in its files on its servers than any other organization that has been researching Donald Trump for an hour — for a year — pardon me — and not just Trump, but his circle, his advisers, his staffers.
And so a foreign intelligence organization that wants to understand who those people are, the relationships they have, potential points of leverage or influence would probably find that the DNC has more of it sitting around than anyone else.
