#jack bryan

Definitely, going to watch Active Measures. R.I.P. John McCain

McCain called out Russia, Putin, Trump and Rand Paul.

Active Measures, a new documentary from director Jack Bryan, would be timely even without the presence of John McCain. And yet the senator, who died of brain cancer less than a week before this film’s August 31st release, adds an additional dose of relevance and urgency to its central thesis: that President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are far more intertwined than you know.

“In 2004 when Putin tried to rig an election in Ukraine, John McCain stood with the Ukrainian people. In 2016 when Putin tried to do the same thing in America, he was one of the few voices in his party who refused to remain silent”

“He and Hillary Clinton were Vladimir Putin's greatest adversaries in the United States, and without their voices it would be impossible to understand how and why our country arrived at this point.”

“The fact that there was an attack on the fundamental—the absolute fundamental—a free and fair election, should alarm all of us,” McCain says in the exclusive clip below. He’s referring to the reports from August of 2016 that Russian hackers were targeting voter registration databases in states like Arizona.

“This really spooked officials in the White House,” Michael Isikoff, the chief investigative correspondent at Yahoo News, adds. “And that’s the moment, I think, that the enormity of the Russian influence campaign really started to hit home.”

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait recently made the case that Trump may have been a Russian “asset” since 1987, director Jack Bryan spends nearly two hours arguing that Russia had been cultivating Trump years before he became a realistic presidential candidate.

Variety Film Review: ‘Active Measures’

A follow-the-money documentary traces the corrupt connection between Donald Trump and Russia, which the movie fills in with timely acuity.

Active Measures trailers

Active Measures

3/5

The exact details of how it happened are interesting enough, although we felt overwhelmed by names. The conclusions it brings up are pretty disappointing. It’s more interested in ringing up fear about the Russians than the manipulations of power that’s built into the system. Feels a little hollow to entirely skirt over the American right’s role in things and just run it all over with “it’s Russia’s fault”. Watching in 2025, it’s mostly a grimace over how justice was never done and the slide further and further into fascism continues with no apparent Russian influence.

Active Measures    [trailer]

Documentary that chronicles the use of so-called "Active Measures", covert political warfare, devised by the Russian regime to influence world events, with a focus on the 2016 US election.

If you haven't kept track, the amount of information and persons involved is probably overwhelming. It nevertheless becomes clear how much the current US president is owned by Russia.

There are a few topics that I think too much emphasis is put on, that should be treated with some caution. Mainly the so-called Steele dossier (of which much content is questionable).

But overall it provides a very good overview of the story so far. Something that often gets lost in the daily revelations and guilty pleas by associates. Especially noteworthy are the similarities of things that happened in Georgia and Ukraine. The parallels of the orchestrated smear campaign by Manafort in Ukraine are eerie. And of course, the endless connections to organised crime and money laundering.

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