Defending Democracy – Inside the Senate Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election

The 2016 presidential election was a milestone in modern American politics, not only for the surprising victory of a candidate whom many pundits and observers had considered unlikely to win, but also for the degree to which foreign powers attempted to influence the electoral process and outcome. In this week’s Horns of a Dilemma, we hear from Emily Harding, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and formerly the deputy staff director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Harding details the committee’s broad-reaching bipartisan investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. She discusses interactions with the concurrent FBI investigation, as well as the ways in which the outcomes of the Senate investigation helped to make the 2018 midterm elections and 2020 presidential election more secure against the types of interference that occurred in 2016. This talk was jointly sponsored by the Clements Center for National Security and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas, Austin. The talk was delivered outdoors due to COVID mitigation policies, so listeners will notice some wind noise, which we have done our best to minimize in post-production.