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