REP. TERRI SEWELL (D-AL): So Director Brennan, can you talk about -- more about Russia's disinformation campaign and what tools the Russians use to do that?
JOHN BRENNAN (Former CIA director): They use all sorts of tools. As I said, they have been able to control various media outlets. Obviously they use RT TV here in the United States, which has a fairly significant audience. They use individuals who are writers or publishers, editorialists. Again, some of this is very obvious to those who are involved because they're on the payrolls -- I'm talking globally now -- they're on the payrolls of Russian intelligence and so they place pieces that advance Russia's interests.
SEWELL: I just wanted to really kind of go back to what I was trying to say before, which is about truth, getting to the truth. And I can't emphasize enough how damaging this disinformation campaign is, and it troubles me so much that there are those in this country that -- who are practicing similar tactics, I think, attacking truth, calling disagreeable facts “fake news,” and attacking the messenger rather than confronting the message that the Russians are trying to get us to believe. It's divert, it's dissemble, it's deny. And these are Putin's tactics that we're seeing and embracing in America. In other words, truth is being replaced by trust. People trust this person or this news source, even if it isn't objectively true.
So we can't all agree on a common set of facts, and that's a big problem, I believe, that really is leading to the divide that we see in this country. Our national security has never been as partisan as it is now, and I think that the truth is, that they interfered here in our elections and the truth is the American people want to get to the bottom of it. And the truth is, we as elected officials and on this committee should be doing all we can to make sure that we find out how they did it, we make sure we know who helped them do it, and that we also get to the bottom of making sure that it doesn't happen again. So my last question to you is, do you believe that -- one of the things you talked about was exploit. You said that even though the election is over, Putin is still and Russians are still exploiting us. What did you mean by that?
BRENNAN: I mean that -- again, this has been a pattern of Russian intelligence services, to try to take advantage of the openness of Western societies, free press and other things, and political parties and systems, to find opportunities and vulnerabilities that they can use to advance their interests. They will continue to do this. I think they're probably taking some lessons from this past experience. I don't believe that this is going to make them at all recoil and not engage in these types of things in the [future]. I think what they will do is to further refine their tactics so that they can be as successful as possible in the future.
