Here's the relevant piece of transcript, from 2015: https://t.co/yVbzyziDHF pic.twitter.com/wXh3Hunx1I

— Ben Taub (@bentaub91) July 25, 2016

There's lots of talk in the news about whether Russian hackers broke into a Democratic computer, copied a lot of information and internal communications, and sent it to Wikileaks to disrupt the Presidential election in the United States. Wikileaks denies that is true, President Obama has said anything is possible, and Donald Trump on July 27 spoke about how a foreign country hacking and releasing emails to affect the outcome of an election was a good thing. Last year, The New York Times included a long story about how Russia employed trolls posting hoaxes and conspiracy theories, heavily-produced YouTube videos, fake Wikipedia entries, and using tens of thousands of bogus social media accounts to alter discourse on topics affecting Russia worldwide. The Times writer, Adrian Chen, said in a podcast released with the story that, "I created this list of the Russian trolls I was researching. And I check on it once in awhile, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don't know what is going on, but they're all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff." So you don't need to believe the Wikileaks story to think that the Russian government is attempting to influence this presidential election. Chen said, "I feel like maybe it's some kind of really opaque strategy of electing Donald Trump, to undermine the U.S., or something. Like a false flag kind-of thing. You know, that's how I started thinking about this stuff after being in Russia."