Topic: 1996 Election

Professor Stephen Cohen provides a historical account of U.S. interference in the 1996 Russian presidential election. He details how the Clinton administration used IMF loans and American political consultants to rescue Boris Yeltsin's failing campaign against the Communist Party. The hosts highlight the irony of current U.S. outrage over Russian meddling given the overt "Yanks to the Rescue" operations of the 1990s.

Former Trump transition member Robert Wasinger argued on CNN that the focus should be on the illegal leaking of Michael Flynn's private conversations rather than the conversations themselves. He compared the current "amorphous" allegations to the concrete evidence of Chinese illegal fundraising during the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign.