Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Agents Of Chaos’ On HBO, Where Alex Gibney Investigates Russian Interference In The 2016 Election

In the two-part, four-hour documentary Agents of Chaos, legendary documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney and a team of investigators try to make sense of just how Russian interference affected the 2016 election. As the 2020 election cycle reaches its homestretch, made almost as chaotic as the 2016 election was, this series should be a warning about what is possible when it comes to influencing your vote, whether it’s via social media trolling, leaking of documents, or both.

AGENTS OF CHAOS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: People walking through downtown Moscow, then we see Russian news footage of the 2016 US presidential election.

The Gist: In the first part, Gibney and crew examine two related but distinct aspects of interference that came from Russia: Internet trolls and hacking of the DNC’s servers and emails and other documents from Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff. In the hour about trolls, we learn about how the main source of Russian social media trolling, the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA). We see footage of the loose atmosphere inside the agency’s office. We also see just how, despite being an organization that more than one person who was interviewed called “unprofessional”, managed to produce complex and realistic social media posts and websites that hit all of the hot-button issues affecting the U.S. Yes, all of them; there were right-wing and left-wing posts, sites in support of equal rights and decrying police brutality against Black people just as much as there were sites for people who thought Hillary Clinton should go to prison.

The hour about hacking shows just how two Russian intelligence agencies, the more military-based GRU and the civilian-based SVR, managed to grab thousands of DNC emails and documents, leaking them to Julian Assange of Wikileaks or posting it on sites they created. One of the emails that got phished was, of all people, Clinton campaign chief (and former chief of staff for Bill Clinton) John Podesta. He readily admits that his assistant clicked on the link in the phishing email that they got, a big no-no for anyone, not just a former Chief of Staff.

The leaks had real information about how the DNC tried to squelch the rising influence of Bernie Sanders, and it led to the resignation of chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz. But Gibney and the people he interviewed also discuss how the leaks got conflated with the private email server issue that dogged Clinton’s campaign right up until Election Day.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? There was a film about the 2016 election called American Chaos, but Agents of Chaos goes way more in depth.

Our Take: One of the goals of Agents of Chaos is to try to figure out if the various types of Russian interference actually had a significant effect on the election, which of course led to Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Interspersed within its narratives about trolling and hacking, Gibney talks about just how Trump fed into the chaos that was going on during the election season, how he lied repeatedly about never meeting Vladimir Putin, and other ways that Trump himself was an agent of chaos.

The trolling section had more of a long-view perspective, showing how the IRA honed its skills by fomenting disruption in Ukraine, leading to Putin’s invasion of Crimea. On the other hand, the hacking section seemed to demonstrate more hard evidence that there was a state-sponsored effort to influence the election towards Trump’s election. For instance, the DNC and the Clinton campaign were hacked but the RNC and the Trump campaign weren’t. At the very end of the episode, Gibney’s eye turns towards the possible involvement of the Trump campaign with the Russian officials who were authorizing the hacking, which we suspect will be examined more in depth in part 2.

While the footage inside the IRA and the extensive interviews with people like then-CIA director John Brennan and then-FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe sheds some new light on a concept that seemed a bit nebulous to Americans four years ago, we’re not sure if it’s going to come to any hard and fast conclusions. But that’s not what Gibney set out to do, as he tells us in voice over at the beginning of the movie. “I am interested in figuring out that whole Trump-Russia thing. What was it all about? I’ve been trying for years to answer that question…”

So maybe we should just be happy — and scared — at the details that Gibney and his investigators dug up, especially some of the information that came from the Russian “dark web.” But also it’s interesting to see just how thorough the IRA was in its trolling activities, getting hundreds of thousands of followers to some of their social media accounts on both sides of the political spectrum and even arranging marches and protests, and their corresponding opposition marches and protests, in order to further divide the country.

Parting Shot: When talking about whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians, Gibney says “Doesn’t matter how you play, who you play with. As long as you end up on top, who cares if the whole motherfucking system burns to the ground?” Then we see cartoons of Trump and Clinton facing off like they’re Godzilla and Mothra.

Sleeper Star: Camille François, contracted by Robert Mueller to investigate Russian trolling, is a key interview in the first hour, giving the scope of just what the trolls do, from making realistic social media accounts to making pages that represent groups, to creating websites to disseminate the misinformation that they’re trying to link to. It’s far more sophisticated than people realize, and the idea is that four years later, things have just gotten more sophisticated.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing we can think of.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While Agents of Chaos may not come to any concrete conclusions about Russian interference in the 2016 election, it makes a pretty damning case that the Russians definitely had some influence, and that US intelligence officials were slow on the uptake in fighting it.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Agents of Chaos On HBO Max