Active Measures

The documentary is about a Russian method spread over many years: what is called active measures, intelligence work aimed at breaking a country's politics from within. The film follows how this was carried from the Soviet period to the present and arrives at the 2016 American presidential election. Its claim is this: Russia interfered in that election, and there was a connection going back years between it and the Trump campaign. Among those who speak are Hillary Clinton and John McCain. The documented record for those two claims is not the same. That Russia interfered systematically in the 2016 election is the shared conclusion of the American intelligence agencies and of the Mueller investigation. Against that, the same investigation wrote that it did not establish that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government in a way that constituted a crime. Jack Bryan's film stands openly on one side and nobody from the opposing view speaks. A hundred and twelve minutes.