LEILA FADEL, HOST:
A former CIA official is defending the agency's work on the Russia investigation.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Susan Miller retired last year after almost 40 years at the agency. She was chief of counterintelligence at the CIA during the 2016 election, and that means that she led the team that produced a CIA report that found Russia interfered in the election to favor President Trump. That is one of the assessments now under attack by the administration. Susan Miller is with us here in Studio 31. Thanks for getting up early. Good morning.
SUSAN MILLER: Good morning, and happy to be here.
FADEL: I'm glad you're here. So Susan, if you could just start by walking us through, as succinctly as possible, what the CIA report concluded.
MILLER: So it's actually pretty simple. It was multiple pages long 'cause we had multiple sources and some really good intelligence that fed this, as well as some analysis. But the bottom line of the report was that, 100%, the Russians tried to influence the election on - in Trump's favor. And a hundred percent - we can't tell you if it works unless we pull every voter in the country and ask them what their - you know, why they voted for him, which is obviously not only unconstitutional but also impractical. And so we ended it with, and therefore, in our view, we see that Trump is our president.
FADEL: Now, a lot about what the Trump administration is alleging is that you and your team under the Obama administration just manufactured the intelligence in order to hurt Trump. What do you say to that accusation?
MILLER: I say that's absolutely incorrect, and that's a lie, and he knows it. And we had the information from it. It was from a well - a long-term asset. Actually, we had some from two. And they were very careful to say that it was an influence operation. You know, other people have, you know, called it other things, but they were very careful in what they said. And we went back to them more, a lot, you know, several times, just because we wanted to make sure that they weren't lying. And in our assessment, they were not.
FADEL: Now, you, at the time, said that you recognized that the president won the election. The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, in releasing documents - you said people have said other things - says, well, this report didn't show that votes were actually changed. Was that something this report ever claimed?
MILLER: No. We never claimed any votes were changed. All we said was that the Russians influenced the election, and they had multiple ways to do that.
FADEL: Did you ever encounter - you or anyone on your team encounter any pressure to change results or manufacture intelligence, as has been implied?
MILLER: Quite - you mean by our director or anything like that or anybody in...
FADEL: By anyone in the administration.
MILLER: No. They left us totally alone. And we actually worked in a cell, and we did not even provide interim updates on what we were finding 'cause we wanted to get to the very end of it and - before we produced anything.
FADEL: And so you're confident in the conclusions of the report.
MILLER: I'm confident in it.
INSKEEP: Let's follow up on that just a little bit. You said that the director, anybody else, did not ask you to change the conclusions of the report. Somebody is going to ask, well, did people kind of know what was expected of them? I mean, was there an indirect kind of pressure at any time?
MILLER: No. No. I really, really felt that we were alone. We were literally in a cell. We wouldn't talk to other people about what we were finding...
INSKEEP: Got it.
MILLER: ...Until we got to the end of it.
INSKEEP: There is some evidence around the - around Russia's interference in the 2016 election that's been discredited, like that famous dossier. You didn't rely on that, did you?
MILLER: Absolutely not. It ended up being put in at the end of our report as an addendum with a big cover sheet that said, we're putting this in the report because FBI director asked our director and said he felt it needed to be in the report. We - it is unevaluated. We have no idea if it's true, and we're putting this in under duress. I mean, we might not have said that last part, but that's kind of what we indicated in our little paragraph.
INSKEEP: You did not rely on that any...
MILLER: Not at all.
INSKEEP: ...Whatsoever. You're...
MILLER: No. You know, we just didn't evaluate it. It came to us at the very last minute, and we were getting ready to go to - you know, go to - go publish it and everything.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
MILLER: And it was unevaluated. I think a couple of analysts tried to look to see, did we have anything similar to this? And we did not. And so we just let it be.
INSKEEP: So what you did rely on...
MILLER: I'm not saying it was fake. I'm just saying we just didn't - we didn't look at it.
INSKEEP: You didn't rely on it either way. So what you did rely on was tracing, through the internet, Russian troll farms that were encouraging social division in the United States. Is that right?
MILLER: So I'm not going to get into all the sources that we had, but we did - there was a lot of research done in various sources, both in technical sources as well as in human.
INSKEEP: Did you confirm that Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton's campaign?
MILLER: So I personally did not, but I believe it was NSA that did...
INSKEEP: National Security Agency.
MILLER: ...The most of the work on that. And did they hack into it? Now, that's something that I don't remember.
INSKEEP: OK.
MILLER: But I do remember later people saying they hacked into it.
INSKEEP: OK. OK. A bipartisan U.S. Senate committee looked into this, the Senate Intelligence Committee.
MILLER: Yes.
INSKEEP: They produced a 1,000-page report of their own. It was unanimously approved by the committee and, as a matter of fact, the chairman of the committee at that moment was Marco Rubio, then a...
MILLER: It was.
INSKEEP: ...U.S. senator, now President Trump's secretary of state. He approved the report finding Russian interference in the 2016 election. Did you or your group talk with the senators as they assembled that report?
MILLER: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we had to - not as we assembled it, but we...
INSKEEP: As they assembled their report.
MILLER: No. What we did is, after our report was done, we obviously went to the committees and to Senate and Congress. I vaguely recall we - on one of them, we might've opened it up to other senators or other...
INSKEEP: OK.
MILLER: ...Congressmen. You know, they're all fine. And we did absolutely brief it. And they were very gracious, and they listened to us, and they said nothing against it. And they did ask a couple of questions. How do you know this? How do you know that? Which I could get into a little bit more information with them.
INSKEEP: Yeah. Let me just interrupt you...
MILLER: Yeah.
INSKEEP: ...For a second. We've got less than a minute left. We did ask the Office of the Director of National Intelligence about your comments. They didn't respond directly but pointed to a statement by the director, Tulsi Gabbard, on a podcast where she said the media is trotting out discredited individuals and reports.
MILLER: Right. So I'm discredited?
INSKEEP: That would be the implication.
MILLER: That was my implication when I read that. And I have not been discredited. I am simply telling you what really happened.
INSKEEP: Susan Miller served as a CIA officer for just short of 40 years and directed the team that produced a report finding that Russia interfered in the election in 2016 to favor President Trump. Thanks very much for coming by.
MILLER: Thanks for having me.
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