AGENTS OF CHAOS, a revealing look at Russia’s interference into the 2016 election, premieres September 29, only on HBO
The two-part HBO original documentary, directed by Emmy® and Academy Award winner Alex Gibney, features revelations confirmed by the recently released Intelligence Report by the United States Senate.
Miami, FL., September 23, 2020 – HBO’s AGENTS OF CHAOS, a two-part documentary directed by Emmy® and Academy Award Winner Alex Gibney (GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE PRISON OF BELIEF and THE INVENTOR: OUT FOR BLOOD IN SILICON VALLEY) premieres on Tuesday, September 29 at XXhs, with part two airing the following evening at the same time, ahead of the November elections in the United States. The film is a product of years of reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election with never-before-seen footage inside the Russian troll farms, and videos unearthed from the Russian deep web.
AGENTS OF CHAOS digs deep into sophisticated plans to undermine democracy, raising the alarm for the American public, but also proving that these “agents of chaos” weren’t Russians alone; they were also key players in the United States who, through venality, corruption or circumstance, furthered Putin’s goals, with a vulnerable and unsuspecting American public as their target. By reviewing conspiracy theories from all sides of the political spectrum, the film offers a much more nuanced interpretation of what happened in 2016. Gibney delves into the complex labyrinth of internet warfare, clearly and thoroughly mapping an intricate web of deceptions and interventions during the last election. The documentary takes a hard, clear-eyed look at the United States’ vulnerabilities as a nation and at the uncertainties surrounding its electoral processes, drawing a frightening conclusion about the very real possibility of it all happening again.
Featuring subjects who have never before gone on-the-record, as well as some who have now agreed to speak at length, AGENTS OF CHAOS includes interviews with lead prosecutor for the Mueller Investigation Andrew Weissmann; former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe; former CIA Director John Brennan; Trump campaign advisor Carter Page; Trump business associate Felix Sater; Margarita Simonyan, Editor-In-Chief of Russian State News Agency; NSC Senior Director Celeste Wallander, and cyber conflict researcher Camille François, who explains how the IRA, Russia’s online influence agency, intended to weaken democratic institutions in the U.S. and create chaos by exploiting existing divisions, using Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Instagram.
AGENTS OF CHAOS is directed by Alex Gibney; Part Two directed by Alex Gibney and Javier Alberto Botero; written by Alex Gibney, Michael J. Palmer; produced by Alex Gibney, Javier Alberto Botero, Kara Elverson; edited by Michael J. Palmer, Aleks Gezentsvey (Part One); executive produced by Lowell Bergman, Stacey Offman, Richard Perello; co-produced by Jennifer Jo Janisch, Clare Sloane Vance; co-edited by Ben Sozanski (Part Two). For HBO: executive producers Nancy Abraham and Lisa Heller; supervising producer, Sara Rodriguez.
AGENTS OF CHAOS features the following ground-breaking accounts, many of which have been confirmed by the recent bipartisan report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on August 18, 2020:
- An in-depth cinematic account of Paul Manafort’s secret communications with Russia during the campaign from the man who brought him down – Robert Mueller’s lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann. Manafort’s actions were, in the words of the recent Senate report, “a grave counterintelligence threat [that] created opportunities for the Russian intelligence to exert influence over…the Trump Campaign.”
Posted on 2020/09/25 on hbomaxlapress.com AGENTS OF CHAOS, a revealing look at Russia’s interference into the 2016 election, premieres September 29, only on HBO
- Revealing insight into how the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump campaign officials really started – not as a partisan scheme to attack Trump, but rather as a reaction to reports that the Trump campaign knew about Russian hacking of the Democrats at a time when only the FBI was aware that the hacks had occurred. As former acting director of the FBI Andrew McCabe recounts, the irony of the “witch hunt” narrative is that “there’s no organization in DC that had more of an impact on helping Donald Trump get elected than the FBI.”
- The revelation that the FBI investigation did not start with the Russian military hack of the Democratic organizations in March 2016, but that the FBI had been watching the attackers hack people around the globe since December 2014.
- An illuminating account of the inability of the Obama administration to blunt the attack, despite the best efforts of many national security officials to respond to what was happening.
- An in-depth portrait of the troll factory and its owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a.k.a. “Putin’s Chef.” The trolls were not just kids playing pranks on Facebook, but rather a professionally staged campaign to pit Americans against each other using tools the trolls had developed while helping to start a war in Ukraine.
- A dramatic and detailed account of the creation of the Steele dossier, the memos claiming a well-developed conspiracy between Trump and Russia, featuring interviews with the man who commissioned the dossier, the FBI leader who oversaw an investigation that relied on it, and the alleged spy on the Trump campaign staff that it targeted. Rather than a Democratic plot against Trump, we find out that the investigation that led to the dossier started with Republican funders and was overseen by an ex-journalist, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, who had spent years investigating the Clintons for the Wall Street Journal.
- The behind-the-scenes story of the negotiations during the 2016 election campaign to build Trump Tower in Moscow as told by Felix Sater, the man Trump entrusted with getting the deal done in Russia.
Posted on 2020/09/25 on hbomaxlapress.com AGENTS OF CHAOS, a revealing look at Russia’s interference into the 2016 election, premieres September 29, only on HBO
Posted on 2020/09/25 on hbomaxlapress.com