The International Studies Leadership Council held its first event of the 2020 Election Speaker Series with Scott Shane, a journalist and author who spent 15 years covering national security and other subjects for The New York Times, where he won Pulitzer Prizes in 2017 and 2018 with colleagues for stories on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Shane reported for 21 years for The Baltimore Sun and is a former Moscow correspondent whose first book, Dismantling Utopia, is a firsthand account of the Soviet collapse. He is currently a visiting scholar at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Professor Shane spoke about how Vladimir Putin’s Russia used hacking, leaking, Facebook and Twitter to boost Trump’s chances, as well as the impact of this intervention on the upcoming 2020 election. Given that it was National Voter Registration Day, a representative from Hopkins Votes joined the conversation at the end of the event to provide voting statistics for Johns Hopkins affiliates, and information about registering to vote.