Active Measures | |
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![]() Film poster | |
Directed by | Jack Bryan |
Written by | Jack Bryan Marley Clements |
Produced by | Laura Dubois [1] Jack Bryan [1] Marley Clements [1] |
Narrated by | Juliet Stevenson |
Cinematography | Neil Barrett |
Edited by | Andrew Napier |
Music by | Doran Danoff [1] John Macallum [1] |
Production company | Shooting Films [1] |
Distributed by | Super LTD [1] |
Release date |
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Running time | 109 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $52,620 [1] |
Active Measures is a 2018 documentary film by director Jack Bryan. [2] The documentary centered on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, and looks at the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies. Additional topics covered included the life of Vladimir Putin, social media manipulation broadly, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. [3] [4]
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The film suggests that Vladimir Putin is behind a 30-year history of covert political warfare. [5] Soviet and Russian security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB) use the term "active measures" (Russian : активные мероприятия) for the actions of political warfare to influence the course of world events, in addition to collecting intelligence and producing "politically correct" assessment of it. [6]
Director Jack Bryan is the son of Shelby Bryan. Born in New York City, he spent his early childhood at an Upper East Side, Park Avenue townhouse, but the majority of his childhood moving around the United States and Europe. Bryan attended Eugene Lang College within The New School as an undergraduate. [5] Bryan was hired as a columnist for Quest , [7] and became an Editor at Large. Bryan directed the documentary Life After Dark: The Story of Siberia Bar, released in 2009. [8] Jack and Shelby Bryan lived in the same social circles of real-estate, Palm Beach, and the Upper East Side as Donald Trump. [5] [9]
Filming started 10 May 2017 and continued until September 2017. [10]
On August 6, 2018, on CNN, Bryan said that Trump had sold five Trump Tower condos to a Russian mobster named David Bogatin in 1984. [11] [12] BBC Newsnight reported on Donald Trump's business links to the mob in March 2016. [13]
On August 2, 2018, on MSNBC's Morning Joe , Bryan claimed that Trump resorted to Russian money, after bankruptcies at Trump properties in the 1990s made it hard to get loans from American banks. Trump's involvement with members of the Russian mob began in 2002. [14]
On May 8, 2018, CBC Radio's Day 6 episode 388 reports that, after the bankruptcies, Bayrock Group, a real estate firm with Russian backing moved into Trump Tower. Bayrock's manager was Felix Sater, a convicted felon and childhood friend of Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen. "They went on their first date together" Bryan says. "They did a lot of business together." [15]
The film includes interviews with people such as: Sheldon Whitehouse, Michael McFaul, John McCain, Evan McMullin, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, James Woolsey, Clint Watts, Mikheil Saakashvili, John Dean, Jeremy Bash, Eric Swalwell, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Daniel Fried, Stephen Holmes (CIA) aka "Steven Hall", Nina Burleigh, Michael Isikoff, Craig Unger, John Mattes, Steven Pifer, and Asha Rangappa.
Active Measures premiered in April 2018 at the Hot Docs festival, in Toronto, and was released by Super LTD, a film distribution company on August 31, 2018. [16] [17] [18] [19] It began showing at Landmark Theatres Washington D.C., for example. [20] It is also on iTunes, [21] [22] Hulu, [23] Vudu, [24] FandangoNOW, [25] Google Play, [26] and Amazon. [27]
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 81% based on 16 critics, with an average rating of 7.2/10. [28] On Metacritic, Active Measures holds a rank of 68 out of a 100 based on 9 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". [29]
Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter calls it "well researched and truly frightening ... One of the doc's strengths is the amazing number of 'gets' (onscreen interview subjects) procured by the filmmakers." [19]
Todd Gilchrist of TheWrap says, "Most damning, though, is the sophisticated way that Bryan and Clements lay flat the history of technological attacks launched against oppositional regimes, and how brutally impactful they were because of attackers' profound understanding of the psychologies of the sociocultural ecosystems into which they were released". [30]
Charles Bramesco of The Guardian writes, "this exhaustive documentary struggles to move past outrage ... Bryan synthesizes dozens upon dozens of articles for a more circumspect view of Russia's ongoing meddling in American politics, running the risk of overloading his viewers instead of, er, under-loading them". [31]
Bruce DeMara of the Toronto Star says, "For anyone trying to navigate the labyrinth of personalities and events behind the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the last U.S. presidential election, this film is a comprehensive and indispensable primer." [32]
Hillary Clinton tweeted, "...a fascinating summation of the Russia story". [33] [34]
Owen Gleiberman, chief film critic for Variety writes "...Active Measures names the names and fills in the flowchart of Trump's corruption with gripping authority". [35]
Alan Scherstuhl of the Village Voice felt that " 'Active Measures' Accidentally Makes Trump-Russia Collusion Sound Like Mad Propaganda[,]" and that "Bryan's case is less journalistic than propagandistic, his film assembled like an endless negative campaign ad[.]" [36]
Alfa-Bank JSC is the largest of the private banks in Russia. It was founded in 1990 by Russian businessman Mikhail Fridman, who remains the controlling owner. Headquartered in Moscow, it operates in seven countries, providing financial services to 22 million active corporate customers and over 1 million active retail clients as of 2021. On 1 March 2022, Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven left the bank's board of directors after coming under EU sanctions imposed in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. For the same reason, the bank has been sanctioned by US and EU authorities beginning in February 2022 and 2023, respectively.
Craig Unger is an American journalist and writer. He has served as deputy editor of The New York Observer and was editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine. He has written about George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush for The New Yorker, Esquire Magazine, and Vanity Fair. He has written about the Romney family and Hart InterCivic.
Russian espionage in the United States has occurred since at least the Cold War, and likely well before. According to the United States government, by 2007 it had reached Cold War levels.
Felix Henry Sater is a Russian-American mobster, convicted felon, real estate developer and former managing director of Bayrock Group LLC, a real estate conglomerate based out of New York City. He has been an advisor to corporations such as The Trump Organization, and the Mirax Group.
Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party is a 2016 American political documentary film about 2016 American presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and a critique of the Democratic Party. The film is written and directed by conservative political commentator Dinesh D'Souza and Bruce Schooley. The film had a limited release on July 15, 2016, before a wide release on July 22, 2016, and accompanies a book by D'Souza by the same name.
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The Russian government interfered in the 2016 United States elections with the goals of sabotaging the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States. According to the U.S. intelligence community, the operation—code named Project Lakhta—was ordered directly by Russian president Vladimir Putin. The "hacking and disinformation campaign" to damage Clinton and help Trump became the "core of the scandal known as Russiagate". The 448-page Mueller Report, made public in April 2019, examined over 200 contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.
Tevfik Arif, also known as Tofik Arifov, is a Russian/Turkish real estate developer and investor. He is the founder of the Bayrock Group, an international real estate development and investment company based in New York. He resides in the United States.
The Steele dossier, also known as the Trump–Russia dossier, is a controversial political opposition research report compiled by Christopher Steele that was published without permission as an unfinished 35-page compilation of "unverified, and potentially unverifiable" raw intelligence reports—"not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation". It was written from June to December 2016 and contains allegations of misconduct, conspiracy, and cooperation between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia prior to and during the 2016 election campaign. Several key allegations made in June 2016 about the Russian government's efforts to get Trump elected were later described as "prescient" because they were corroborated six months later in the January 2017 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Mueller Report, namely that Vladimir Putin favored Trump over Hillary Clinton; that he personally ordered an "influence campaign" to harm Clinton's campaign and to "undermine public faith in the US democratic process"; that he ordered cyberattacks on both parties; and that many Trump campaign officials and associates had numerous secretive contacts with Russian officials and agents.
This is a timeline of events related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
Since Donald Trump was a 2016 candidate for the office of President of the United States, myriad suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials have been discovered by the FBI, Special counsel, and several United States congressional committees, as part of their investigations into the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Following intelligence reports about the Russian interference, Trump and some of his campaign members, business partners, administration nominees, and family members were subjected to intense scrutiny to determine whether they had improper dealings during their contacts with Russian officials. Several people connected to the Trump campaign made false statements about those links and obstructed investigations. These investigations resulted in many criminal charges and indictments.
The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election is a non-fiction book by Malcolm Nance about the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It was published in paperback, audiobook, and e-book formats in 2016 by Skyhorse Publishing. A second edition was also published the same year, and a third edition in 2017. Nance researched Russian intelligence, working as a Russian interpreter and studying KGB history.
Trump: The Kremlin Candidate? is a documentary film first broadcast by the program Panorama on BBC One, and first aired in the United Kingdom on 16 January 2017, four days before the Inauguration of Donald Trump. It examined links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies and the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. It features investigative journalist John Sweeney, who journeyed to Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, and the United States during the course of his research. Sweeney had prior experience on the subject matter, having interviewed Trump in 2013, and Putin in 2014. The film was directed by Matthew Hill, Tomiko Newson, and Nick Sturdee.
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George Demetrios Papadopoulos is an author and former member of the foreign policy advisory panel to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to a felony charge of making false statements to FBI agents about the timing and the possible significance of his contacts in 2016 relating to U.S.–Russia relations and the Trump presidential campaign. In 2018, he served twelve days in federal prison, then was placed on a 12-month supervised release.
Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections is a report issued by the United States Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that assessed the extent and basis of Russia's interference in United States' elections in 2016. Published on January 6, 2017, the report includes an assessment by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the type and breadth of actions undertaken by Russia and affiliated elements during the elections. The report examines Russia's utilization of cyberspace such as hacking and the use of internet trolls and bots, and an intensive media campaign to influence public opinion in the United States. Additionally, it analyzes Russia's intentions and motivations in regards to their influence campaign. Issued in two forms, a classified version and a declassified version, the report drew its conclusions based on highly classified intelligence, an understanding of past Russian actions, and sensitive sources and methods.
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This is a timeline of events related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, sorted by topics. It also includes events described in investigations into the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies. Those investigations continued in 2017, the first and second halves of 2018, and 2019, largely as parts of the Crossfire Hurricane FBI investigation, the Special Counsel investigation, multiple ongoing criminal investigations by several State Attorneys General, and the investigation resulting in the Inspector General report on FBI and DOJ actions in the 2016 election.
This is a timeline of events related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
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Bryan: We started the day after James Comey was fired in May 2017 until September 2017
Vladimir Putin has waged a 30-year campaign to disrupt world events, including our last election. I talked about it in @ActMeasuresDoc, a fascinating summation of the Russia story that premieres today