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AARON MATÃ"degrees: Where else?
LUKE HARDING: Sorry?
AARON MATÃ"degrees: Well else?
LUKE HARDING: Well Estonia. Have you heard of Estonia? It's a state in the Baltics which was crippled by a massive cyberattack in 2008 which certainly all kind of Western European and former Eastern European states think was carried out by Moscow. I mean I was in Moscow at the time where relations between the two countries were extremely bad. This is a kind of ongoing thing. Now you might say, quite legitimately, "Well the U.S. does the same thing. The UK does the same thing," and I think to a certain extent that is certainly right. I think what was different last year was the attempt to kind of dump this stuff up out into kind of U.S. public space and to try and influence public opinion there. That's unusual. Of course that's a matter of congressional inquiry and something Mueller is looking at too.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: Right. But again, my problem here is that the examples that are frequently presented to substantiate claims of this massive Russian hacking operation around the world prove out to be false. So France as I mentioned. You also mentioned Germany. There was a lot of worry about Russian hacking of the German elections, but it turned out -- and there's plenty of articles since then that have acknowledged this -- that there was no Russian hacking of Germany.
LUKE HARDING: I'm afraid there was hacking of the Bundestag, the German parliament, in 2015. I spent four years as a correspondent in Berlin. I do understand your skepticism, but I think maybe you might just go to Moscow for a couple of weeks, talk to human rights people. There's a fantastic organization there called Memorial. Meet Alexei Navalny who's the main kind of opposition candidate there who's an anti-corruption campaigner whose brother has been jailed for his activities and who's been disqualified by the Kremlin from standing in the election. Just talk to people, ask them about Kremlin hacking, ask them about whether they think ... I mean talk to Russians on this.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: The Russians ... The Russians I've spoken to ... And again, I obviously can't speak to everybody. The ones I've spoken to think all this is ridiculous. Again, no one's ... I'm not arguing that the Russian government is not a repressive right-wing state. It is, but that doesn't mean that it's managed to elect a president. Let me ask you-
LUKE HARDING: What was -- Sorry. What do you think Russian spy agencies do? You think they sit around having cups of tea or-
AARON MATÃ"degrees: I think they do ... Luke, come on. I think Russian spy agencies do what all spy agencies do: they carry out the government's interests abroad. Again, I don't see how you get from that to they pulled off a massive conspiracy to elect a president based on the fact that back when Donald Trump was hosting The Apprentice they had the foresight to see a future U.S. president who they were going to get elected.
LUKE HARDING: No, I mean that's a kind of caricatural sort of pre'cis of what's happening.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: But it's true. According to the Steele dossier, the cultivated Trump when he was hosting the Apprentice.
LUKE HARDING: Well I mean that they cultivated Trump, I've got no doubts about. By the way, talk to ... I mean I've talked to a lot of people about Steele. I mean he was a kind of British intelligence guy for 22 years. He spent three years in Soviet Moscow between 1990 and 1993 where he saw the kind of collapse of this kind of empire first hand and the end of communism. He is ... You may not like it, but he's actually regarded in London and Washington as being pretty credible. Before the Trump dossier, he produced a series of other reports including on the war in Ukraine in 2014 using the same sources that he used for his sort of Trump memos which actually were true and were read by the State Department, even read by John Kerry when he was U.S. Secretary of State. There is a kind of context to all this.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: Luke, Luke, why should we care if people who we haven't met, anonymous officials, say that this ex-British spy who was hired by Donald Trump's political opponents, first Republicans then the Clinton campaign, say that he's credible? What matters is the evidence, and whether there's evidence of, for example, Steele's claim that Donald Trump hired prostitutes and that Putin has a tape of that. I mean you I'm sure admit that these are pretty wild claims, and instead of just believing them based on the fact that some people say he's credible, we should have evidence.
LUKE HARDING: Did you read my book by the way?
AARON MATÃ"degrees: Well listen, I did what I usually do when I do a book-LUKE HARDING: So you didn't even read [crosstalk 00:18:23]-
AARON MATÃ"degrees: I skimmed through it, and actually I have some parts that I want to quote for you. Go ahead. Listen, yes. I did not read the full book. No, I did not, but I skimmed through it as I do when I do book interviews because it's hard to find time to read full books. Go ahead.
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