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Ryan Lizza
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Ryan Lizza
The New Yorker
This interview with Ryan Lizza, a former Washington correspondent for The New Yorker and an on-air correspondent for CNN, was conducted for the FRONTLINE documentary Putin’s Revenge. After the film aired, The New Yorker announced that it had fired Lizza for what the magazine described as “improper sexual conduct,” a charge Lizza denied. CNN also announced that it had suspended Lizza pending an investigation. The network reinstated Lizza in January 2018, saying that based on the findings of the investigation, it "found no reason to continue to keep Mr. Lizza off the air.”
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore conducted on Aug. 9, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
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The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister
So when Obama comes in, you know, you’ve gone through this period of time that the Bush administration had given up on the relationship with the Russians and Putin.But Obama comes in, and they have this reset.It’s sort of this idea, very idealistic idea, possibly naïve, about moving forward, that Putin is no longer president.What's going on, and why does that go south quickly?
Well, I think there's some optimism with Obama that he can solve all of these tricky international problems in a way that Bush couldn’t, because Bush was this, you know, hawkish Texas bumpkin that alienated so many of our allies around the world, especially after the Iraq War, where there was obviously a big difference of opinion between Russia and the United States on that; that at the U.N. Security Council, you know, Russia had continued to play a very adversarial role, blocking Bush-era objectives.Obama came in and thought, well, this is another relationship that was probably a victim of the neoconservative foreign policy, so let’s take a look at it, and let’s repair it.
He overstated how much of the problem in the U.S.-Russia relationship was about Bush and Cheney and their aggressive foreign policy and how much of it was just structural, long-term differences between how Russia and the United States saw the post-Cold War world.But every new administration takes a look at adversarial relationships and thinks that they can fix them anew.
How quickly does it go south, leading up to [Russian Ambassador Sergey] Kislyak’s statements by 2015?
Well, what really makes it go south is Russia’s meddling in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, right.After Ukraine, after Crimea, the relationship falls apart.And by 2015, Kislyak has said this publicly.By 2015, the Russians were looking beyond the Obama administration.There was no chance for a rapprochement in the last two years of the Obama administration.And Kislyak, being a very smart and gifted ambassador in Washington, understanding American politics as an ambassador is supposed to do, he starts looking to the future, to the post-Obama, perhaps post-Clinton future, and trying to see who might be on the horizon.
The animosity to Clinton, just give us a little background on that.
Well, the animosity to Hillary Clinton is largely about the color revolutions in Eastern Europe, and it’s about when she was secretary of state, U.S. support for these pro-democracy movements that Putin opposed.To Putin, Hillary was trying to interfere in Russia’s space in Eastern Europe.It’s partly about that.It’s partly about NATO expansion in Europe.And he believes that Hillary was pushing and supporting—the United States was supporting movements that were a threat to Russian interests.And if you're Putin, an insecure autocrat who is looking at neighboring countries that are being swept up in these populist democratic revolutions, he has to always fear that something like that could sweep through Russia itself.So to him, Hillary was threatening his rule in Russia at the end of the day.
To the extent?
As you know, from the intelligence community’s reports, this was a core reason that Putin despised Hillary.The intelligence community’s report, at least the unclassified version, suggested it was personal with Hillary Clinton.It wasn’t just that American foreign policy was at odds with Russia on several issues; it was that this person in particular, Hillary Clinton, took actions that threatened Putin’s rule.
Putin and Trump
… Tell us a little bit about the early interest in Trump, to the fact that Kislyak ends up at the Republican convention, and then meetings that occurred and folks within the Trump campaign who had had close ties.Talk a little bit about why the interest and some of the details about what the proof is that there was connections of that sort.
So if you look at it from the Russian perspective, if you fill in some of the dots that we now can fill in from that period in 2015 and ’16 they see, one, a candidate like Trump who is talking about the U.S. pulling back from certain spots in the world, pulling back from Iraq, questioning, probably most important to Putin, the usefulness of NATO, right?So already you just have an ideological alignment between Putin and Trump, especially on two big issues, how overstretched America should be in the world and specifically its commitment to security in Europe through NATO.
Then, if you're Putin, you see him hiring and reaching out to a series of political advisers who have similar sympathies and/or links to Russia.So [you see] this relatively obscure national security adviser named Carter Page, who has visited Moscow, and his view of U.S.-Moscow relations is much more amenable to Moscow than some of the hawks in the U.S.national security circles.
You see the campaign manager later on, Paul Manafort, who worked for pro-Russia Ukrainian parties, and had spent years in Ukrainian politics, became close to Russian oligarchs.This is someone, again, if you're Putin, you're saying: “Huh, OK.This is a whole new team.This is not Hillary Clinton and her circle of anti-Putin hawks.This is a group of people that knows that region, is skeptical of NATO, and is probably willing to reach out to Moscow.”
You add into Michael Flynn, the national security adviser, who Putin had dinner with in Moscow.And then you add into that the Trump team’s own sort of interesting forays into Moscow, with the beauty pageant and the fact that, you know, as one of Trump’s kids once said, most of the—that the money coming into their the Trump Organization is Russian money.So it’s, you know, lots of Russians buying Trump real estate in the United States.1So even if there's nothing nefarious, just all of those links, from Moscow’s perspective, they had to be thinking, wow, this is someone, at the very least, we can do business with.
1
The fact of Kislyak being at the convention and all that, that leads to some later controversy over people rejecting the idea that they had ever met him.
Yeah.
Just talk a little bit about that.
If you look at Kislyak’s very aggressive diplomacy, I guess you would call it, during the election, he clearly—as least as far as we know—he’s clearly given up on the Clinton campaign.Doesn’t seem like he’s doing much outreach to the Clinton people, because he doesn’t think it will go anywhere.But he seems to believe that there's this opportunity with the Republican Party and with Trump, which is very unusual, because in recent history, the Republican Party has been much more hawkish on Russia than the Democratic Party.Famously, in the 2012 debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, Mitt Romney described Russia as the number one geostrategic threat.Obama mocked that idea.And you know, lo and behold, he was probably right.
Well, you fast-forward to 2016, at the Republican convention, and Trump has now overthrown the hawks in the Republican Party when it comes to Russia.And this actually plays out in the platform committee at the convention in Cleveland, where—look, on Capitol Hill, it is standard policy among Republicans that the United States should arm Ukraine in its war on its eastern border with Russia.Obama never did that.He didn’t think it was a wise strategy.But that was Republican policy.
At the Republican convention there's a debate about this, and language is offered just to support this policy, which all the Republicans in Congress support, that the United States should actually give lethal aid to the Ukrainians.And through some machinations of the Trump campaign, that language is stripped from the party platform.So again, if you're Moscow, you're seeing that, and you're saying: “Wow, this is a campaign with all of these advisers who are more open to having a relationship with us.This is a candidate who talks about NATO and talks about international affairs in a much more—in a similar way to Putin, where he doesn’t talk about democracy and human rights.He just talks about each country, each nation’s own interests.”And now, at the convention, the Republican Party, which were always such hawks on this issue, they're now overthrowing the idea of arming the Ukrainians.So from Moscow’s perspective, it’s getting better and better by the summer of 2016.
Intervention in the U.S. Election
[Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper by 2015 is looking at intrusions by the Russians and is starting to raise red flags.… What's the tenor of that period of time?[Are] there early warnings?What do we know about that?
We know from the intelligence community’s unclassified report that there was this early period of testing and that they actually were in the DNC servers for months.2They apparently were in some Republican Party equipment as well.And that’s not necessarily groundbreaking or unusual.The fact that Russia was testing, exploring, trying to conduct surveillance on our political parties is not exactly shocking or surprising.We’re doing the same thing in God knows how many countries around the world.
2
What has really changed everything, and what was really surprising and more problematic, is it went from an espionage campaign of stealing information to a campaign to disrupt, discredit and attack the election by dumping, leaking, the information.That’s what made it so different than things in the past, that it turned into a propaganda campaign, an active-measures campaign, by releasing all of this information on the Internet.Stealing is one thing; actively using the information for propaganda purposes is a whole different level.
So you're at the Democratic [convention] days before the dump, the WikiLeaks dump of the DNC emails was dumped.
Yeah.
What is the thinking about what is taking place?What is the Clinton campaign’s view toward it?
It had an impact at the convention, because some of these emails showed a pro-Clinton bias from some of the senior people at the DNC.And to the Sanders people who still—there were some holdouts at the convention, and to them, this was this great conspiracy against Bernie Sanders by the establishment.So it had the effect that Putin probably wanted; that is to say, it damaged Hillary Clinton at her most important moment.It stirred the pot of this Hillary versus Sanders drama in a pretty dramatic way.And the head of the DNC, in the middle of the convention, which she was running, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is forced to resign.
So it is the first moment in the campaign where the Russian operation really starts to damage Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.And I’ll never forget the one moment of being at that convention, and being in one of the halls with an enormous TV, and all of a sudden Donald Trump is talking, and he’s talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails, and he makes this bizarre public appeal for the Russians to hack and find the 33,000 missing Hillary Clinton emails.He seems to be asking America’s greatest adversary to hack into the computers of his opponent.People talk about collusion: Did Trump collude with Russia?Well, at the very least, he was open and willing to support Russian hacking of his opponent, and he did it publicly.
Putin and Trump
And maybe we should take it out of chronology.Before this happened even, I mean, you’ve got a meeting in New York, in June.
June or July?
June.
June 16?
Yeah, I think so, where you’ve got a connection in England with the Russians that’s saying the Russian government wants to pass you some damaging material—to Don Jr. about Hillary Clinton, and the agreement to go along and actually have that meeting, not only with Don Jr., but with Kushner and with Manafort.Talk about that.
... I mean, you have all these moments where the Trump campaign was basically putting a sign outside saying to the Russians, “We’re open for business.”Take the meeting in June 2016 at Trump Tower.3People say, again, was there collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia?Well, at the very least, they were open to collusion, right?They had an intermediary say, “Hey, the Russian government supports your dad’s campaign, and I want to set up a meeting with some people who have some dirt on Hillary Clinton.”And the immediate reaction from Don Trump Jr. is, “Yes, love it; let’s do it.”And they set up the meeting.
3
So we don’t know yet if that was a coincidence, that if those—that the Russians that the Trump campaign met with in June 2016 had any formal relationship with Russian intelligence services.But I’ll tell you this: Michael Hayden, who was the former head of both the CIA and NSA, told me that every counterintelligence officer that he has talked to believed that that was part of an intelligence operation, a so-called soft approach to the Trump people, to find out if they were willing to have some kind of relationship.4
4
... And what they learned from that meeting were two things: One, they were willing. They took the meeting.And two, they didn’t report it to any of our intelligence services or FBI.Those are the facts that, from an intelligence perspective, the Russians would have gained from that meeting, even if they gained nothing else.But it showed that they were able to get a foot in the door when they wanted to.
And what did not reporting it tell them?
It told them that these guys might be open to having some sort of relationship.Now, did it go beyond that?Did it become something more formal? We don’t know.That’s what the FBI is investigating.
Intervention in the U.S. Election
One last thing about the convention.Did you see demonstrations?Did it spur the—
The walkout?Yeah, I saw that.
Yeah, explain that.
One of the most dramatic moments at the convention, which was helped along by the WikiLeaks disclosures, was Sanders’ people getting up, walking out of the convention, going across the street to this media area, and basically occupying it for a while.Myself, other reporters, we left the convention to go cover that, right?That’s really unusual.No convention has had a serious walkout like that in a really long time.So this Russian campaign successfully affected Hillary Clinton’s convention.It helped pit the Sanders people against the Clinton people.
Now some people argue: “Well, it doesn’t matter where the information came from; it was true.And so this really happened.The Sanders people had a right to be pissed off.So what does it matter?” ...But the fact is, that this Russian propaganda effort damaged Hillary Clinton at her most important moment, when she was receiving the nomination to be the nominee of the Democratic Party.
Did any of Hillary’s people come to you and sort of say, “Hey, you know, we realize the email story is big, but do you guys understand the importance of the Russian story?”
No, not then, not then.
So in March of 2016, Podesta’s emails are hacked into.It doesn’t become known until way after that that the material is going to be dumped.But before that, in August, late August, Roger Stone comes out and sort of makes this statement about the fact that Podesta is next.What do you read into that story?
Roger Stone is a very complicated figure and sometimes takes credit for things that maybe he didn’t have anything to do with.Doesn’t always speak in the most factually accurate way.So you have to be careful about, you know, what is true here and what's not.But the fact is, he did seem—he publicly tweeted that Podesta was next, his “time in the barrel,” he called it.I've talked to him.He has denied any knowledge of what was coming.That’s his story now, but it sure is interesting that he publicly tweeted the fact that this seemed to be coming, and that he previously had bragged about having a link to WikiLeaks.So that’s one of the reasons that the FBI is so interested in Stone and his potential role in this story, because he’s a longtime Trump adviser, and he was suggesting, at a crucial time, that he knew WikiLeaks was about to release information about Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
And the strange aspect of it also is that he admitted connections to Guccifer 2.0, who the intelligence folks stated afterward was not an individual but was tied into the Russian government.What does that say?
Yeah, Stone was—he’s explained this as innocent, but he did have direct message conversations on Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, which the American intelligence says is a just made-up identity for a cutout that Moscow used to dump the Podesta emails.So was this Stone just finding out that there were these characters out there that might have interesting information and going to them on his own and trying to stir the pot, or was it something slightly more organized, where they had a prior relationship?And that’s something the FBI is looking at.
That summer, there's also … a propaganda campaign that’s going on, we later figured out, is through RT and Sputnik and social media.
Oh, with the bots?
Yeah, botnets and whatever.And it seems to be pretty aggressive.And there's these news articles that come up, and then are picked up by conservative radio hosts and then Fox, and become sort of important stories that have legs, about Hillary being ill.
One of the ways that Moscow hacked the election is—I mean, frankly, it’s similar to the way that Trump hacked the election.They both understood conservative media in American politics, and they were able, through their Sputnik channel and RT television and through a massive campaign that I still don’t think we quite understand, of Twitter accounts, social media, fake news—that’s where this phrase originally comes from—they were able to generate an enormous amount of anti-Clinton propaganda that fed into a lot of the biases of pro-Trump people, conservatives, people in American politics who just didn’t like Hillary Clinton.They learned how to use our polarization and the way that our parties fight and the way that our political actors fight online, they learned how to use that against us.
You know, in the old days of the Cold War, Russia would look for American weaknesses by exploiting our lack of full commitment to civil rights or our support for dictators around the world.This, in 2016, they learned to exploit a different weakness, the polarization of American politics and the hatred between the two warring parties.And their target was Republicans, activists who hated Hillary Clinton and loved Donald Trump.So they got right into the media bloodstream of the right in America and helped generate all of this content.
… The FBI was investigating from July on, into the 21 states, and the number of the states seems to move around—Oh, in the election systems?
Yeah, that the Russian government was also into the election systems.And [the Obama administration’s Secretary of Homeland Security] Jeh Johnson sees it and starts talking to states about, “Maybe we need some protections here,” and the worry seems to overtake the White House.This seems to be a point where it really picks up speed.What's going on? What's going on there?And so how important [does] the White House view it?
Well, the administration, which had more visibility into this than the campaigns or any of us in the press, and they know that the Russian actors are testing our voting systems, which would be a whole level beyond the stealing and dumping of emails, but actually messing with vote-tally machines would obviously throw the election into complete chaos if they were able to do that.That seems to get the administration’s attention, even more so than the hacking and dumping campaign.
There's a vigorous debate in the Obama administration about how public the administration should be about Russia’s intervention in the election.Coloring it, of course, is Obama and other officials’ belief that Hillary Clinton is going to win, and that’s in the background of these conversations.But the debate is, do they go public, and then, are they accused of meddling in the election, putting the thumb on the scales for Hillary, because they go public with this announcement that Russia is trying to elect Donald Trump, or do they privately push back private messages to Moscow to cut it out?
They do a mix of both.[Then-CIA Director John] Brennan talks to his counterpart in Moscow and warns him.5Obama uses the famous red phone to warn Putin.And then finally, they do put out a public statement in October, saying that they know that Russia, at the highest levels, has taken these actions.But the statement—frankly, at the time, there was so much else going on politically, that it didn’t have the impact maybe it should.… So you’ve got two things.You’ve got two dynamics for Obama making a decision about how public to go about the Russian campaign and interference campaign in the election.One is he thinks Hillary is going to win anyway, but two is, the administration goes to Capitol Hill and talks to the senior Republican leadership in the House and Senate on the intelligence committees, and they discuss taking a more forceful stance about Russia’s interference, and they're told by Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the Senate, that “If you do that, we are going to interpret that as you putting the thumb on the scales for Hillary Clinton.”
5
So again, one of the successes of Putin’s campaign in the United States is that he exploited the divisions between the part[ies], even to the point where the two parties could not get together and forcefully condemn the interference in a unified statement.
Putin and Trump
Then you’ve got a Trump statement, conveniently, sort of when it comes out or not, that this is going to be a rigged election. ...So what does that do to the conundrum that Obama faces about how to deal with this?
So this is all going according to plan for Putin, because suddenly you have Donald Trump, who also thinks he’s going to lose, and as a way either of justifying the loss or getting his voters motivated, he starts to argue that the election is going to be rigged.He did this going back to the primaries.Whenever he lost a primary or caucus, he alleged that there was cheating going on.So he starts making the same arguments that Russia’s propaganda outlets are making, that America’s democracy is fake and that it’s filled with fraud.This is something that Putin does in all sorts of Western democracies; he tries to discredit the system.And Trump, whether wittingly or not, starts parroting the same claims that our system is fraudulent.
Why is Russia doing this?What's in it for Putin?
If you look at the intelligence community’s assessment, it is, one, discredit a system of government that is a challenge to Putin, right?He’s done this in other countries.He wants to discredit our claim to be more morally superior in our system of government.So discredit the American democratic system.If you looked at RT and Sputnik during the campaign, it was just filled with stories about how ridiculous America’s system is, either ridiculous or fraudulent.And he’s hedging his bets.If Hillary Clinton wins, then claims that the election was rigged or stolen or fraudulent will discredit her administration.And if Donald Trump wins, he’s hit the jackpot.
The U.S. Response to Russian Measures
... Was there a disagreement between intelligence folks and the White House, where the White House was being very conservative, and Obama, whose motto was, “Don’t make things worse,” was there some antagonism?Or was there some sort of debate that was between the two sides?
There’s a big debate between the intelligence services, which are tearing their hair out over what they're witnessing the Russians doing, and the White House, which thinks, well, yes, they're affecting the information flow in this campaign; it looks like they’ve even tried to monkey around in the voting machines, but we can secure all that.Then I think, for Obama, the debate is, does it make it better or worse to go public in a big way about this?How important is it for the American people to know all the details that the intelligence community knew at that point?The White House’s decision is to be relatively silent about what it knew.And I think that was affected by two things.It was affected by Republicans, who said, “Don’t do it because we think that you’ll—we’ll accuse you of meddling in the election and trying to hurt Donald Trump,” and two, the fact that Obama thought, like everyone else did, Hillary Clinton was going to win.
And when Election Day happens and Trump wins, did you find, from some of your sources, that they were looking back at what had happened and realizing that they had made a dramatic mistake?
On Election Day, the White House, like every other place, believed that Trump was going to lose, and lose decisively; that Hillary Clinton was going to be the president.So that night, after the results from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan made it clear that Trump was going to win, a lot of Democrats, a lot of people at the White House started to reassess, had they made a mistake?Had Vladimir Putin just helped elect Donald Trump, and by sitting back and not taking more aggressive action against Russia’s meddling in the election, did they actually help Trump win?
As someone famously told <i>The</i> <i>Washington Post</i>, one of the Obama advisers in a famous anonymous quote, now, to <i>The Washington Post</i>, the person said, “We choked.”Now, you could ask, what could they have done?Could they have just made things worse?Could they have just given Trump an issue where he would have attacked the White House for rigging the election by ginning up what he would have called phony claims about Russian interference?So, you know, you can't play the counterfactual.But, as a lot of intelligence officials have said, who knows what Putin’s goals were originally when he started this campaign?But he could not have imagined a more successful outcome than getting Donald Trump elected president.
... OK, so let’s talk one day in October.So 3:30 on Oct. 7, 2016, the DNI statement comes out.It’s pretty forceful.They think it is, at least.It’s only three paragraphs long.They take Putin’s name out of it.At one point Putin’s name was in it.Why does that come out if the White House has been so careful up until this point?What are the expectations?What's the reception?
I think the administration thought this was going to be like dropping a bomb in the campaign, that everyone was going to stop paying attention to what they were paying attention to, and read this statement, and say, “Oh, my God, the administration is accusing Russia, at the highest levels—that means Putin—of launching an interference campaign in our election and messing with our democracy,” and that … finally sort of, you know, that actors on both sides, actors from both parties were going to come together and condemn this, and that it would blunt the effect of what Russia was trying to do, because the Russians would see that our democracy was stronger than they believed, and that the two parties could actually come together and forcefully reject any attempts at interference.And that is not what happened.
What do they say that is so forceful in how it’s the first time that they say it?
... It’s saying a few things that are incredibly important.6One is that this is not—these are not rogue actors.This is Russia, and not only just Russia, but it’s Putin; and two, that the intent is to help Donald Trump.And that’s a pretty explosive press release from the administration.But within minutes it gets overtaken by other news.
6
What's the news?Half an hour later.
... So 30 minutes later, the infamous Billy Bush-Donald Trump <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape comes out, and that pushes aside even the news of Vladimir Putin interfering in our election.And that tape becomes the dominant story of the day.A half hour after that, WikiLeaks releases John Podesta’s emails.There was so much to process that day, those three major stories, 3:30, 4:00 and 4:30, but the story that dominated, especially because it was a TV story, was the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape where Donald Trump is essentially bragging about sexually assaulting women.
But long term, or short term, is the election, but the Podesta emails actually, in some ways, supersede?
So the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape is like this supernova that explodes on that day.The Podesta emails, it’s like this fuse that’s lit on that day, and just slowly burns until it blows up as you get closer to the election.So what had more impact?Probably the Podesta emails, because there was so much in them that it just provided grist for stories on a daily basis.And it allowed Trump, in some ways, to seize on something, to overcome the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape, which was such a disaster for his campaign.You know, from that point forward, he starts talking about WikiLeaks and the emails and the revelations in the emails on a regular basis.
So if the administration thought that that 3:30 statement was going to lead to this bipartisan pushback against Russia, and everyone was going to come together and say, “We’re not going to tolerate Russian interference in this election,” if they thought that maybe even the journalistic community was not going to allow itself to be sucked in by all of the tempting information in that leak, if they thought that the whole country was going to come together and oppose what Putin was doing, they were obviously wrong.Putin, WikiLeaks, who knows how the timing was determined?But they released this information at Donald Trump’s lowest point, and it allowed him to come back and win the election.
Putin and Trump
And two days later, Trump is back defending Russia.And this is after this damning information comes out.How is he able to do that?Why is he doing it that way?What [does it say] about Donald’s tactics?
I mean, the curious thing about Trump is that he’s famously disloyal to people who have been close to him for long periods of time.He has no trouble attacking even his closest friends and allies.Think Jeff Sessions.Think any of the people who he’s been close to.But the one person that he’s never condemned, that he’s always defended in some way, has been Vladimir Putin.And that is very perplexing.It’s just the one world leader that he’s always, during the campaign and as president, he’s shown some admiration for and never been willing to use any of the famous Trumpian putdowns for.His closest advisers he mocks to their face, but he’s never done that with Putin.
And what’s your supposition about why that is?
I don’t know.His admiration for Putin is unusual, given his relationship with most other people who he has no compunction about attacking, belittling, changing his mind about.He’s never done that with Putin, though.
... So immediately after the election.
So now you have two tracks.You have the White House, which is aghast at what just happened and is now exploring a tougher response with sanctions against Russia for the meddling in the election, and you’ve got the incoming president, who is maintaining his pro-Putin disposition; and oh, by the way, his national security adviser, incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, has now built this relationship with the Russian ambassador, where they are discussing what would happen on any sanctions that the Obama administration institutes.So you’ve got two governments doing foreign policy with Russia simultaneously, the outgoing and the incoming.
Dec. 1 is Kushner’s attempt to set up a back channel.… What's going on there?
So this meeting with Kislyak and Kushner and Michael Flynn is either just pure naïveté, you know—Jared Kushner, who’s never served in government, is not a foreign policy expert, he suggests that Kislyak wants to get Trump some information about Syria from Russian generals.Now, Kislyak we now know has a line into the administration, and he’s exploiting it.So just, if you forget about the back-channel stuff, just the fact that Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, is one of the people who’s able to say: “Hey, Trump campaign, I've got some really great information on an important foreign policy issue from my Russian generals.I want to get that on your desk,” right?So you’ve got Kislyak as essentially a foreign policy adviser in this meeting, and you have Kushner and Michael Flynn being OK with that and saying, “OK, well, let’s try and find a secure channel to get that information from your generals,” because Kislyak explains that they can't come to the United States or use normal channels.
It’s either evidence of some kind of collusion that is extremely eyebrow-raising, or it’s just pure naivete.And with a lot of the links that have been reported, that’s sort of the “on the one hand”/ “on the other hand,” it’s naivete versus something more nefarious.
The U.S. Response to Russian Measures
Dec. 29, Obama’s in Hawaii, and he announces the sanctions.Finally, some people say.People say it had no teeth; it was lukewarm stuff, not even like the sanctions—as strong as the sanctions that came after the Ukraine involvement in Crimea.Talk a little bit about that, anything you know about it.
So Obama decides to kick out more than two dozen Russian ambassadors; he seizes two Russian compounds; and he institutes these economic sanctions against Russia that a lot of people think are kind of toothless.But, you know, we’ve already got sanctions on Russia at this point, so there's only so much you can do.So there's a debate about whether it was as forceful of a response as was required.But to the Trump people, it’s too forceful.And so you have this very unusual 24-hour period, where Obama announces the sanctions, and the entire Russian system responds, except for Putin.And you have tweets from Putin’s spokesperson and Russian embassy official accounts, all saying, “Russia will respond in kind,” and even saying precisely what they would do.
At the same time that the Russian system seems prepared to announce its retaliation, the Russian ambassador, Kislyak, and Michael Flynn, the incoming national security adviser, are talking.We don’t know exactly what they said in those conversations, but we do know that they discussed sanctions, and we do know that for some reason, Putin changed course and announced that Russia would not take any retaliatory measures for the United States’ sanctions.
What's the reaction at the White House?
So the White House, which knows a little bit more about what’s going on, because Kislyak is someone that’s routinely monitored and surveilled, is starting to think, wait a second: Are these links between the Trump campaign and the Russians, or at least some of the actors in the Trump campaign, is there something more nefarious going on?And then, of course, this later, when Flynn is the national security adviser, this episode, these conversations with the Russian ambassador become part of the reason he has to leave the White House.
Putin and Trump
It’s clear Kislyak has been around forever.He knows he’s being bugged.He makes the phone call to Flynn down in the Dominican Republic, when he’s on a beach vacationing with his wife, and this conversation takes place about sanctions.What's going on?
Look, it’s not necessarily unusual for an incoming national security adviser to talk to diplomats about major foreign policy issues, right?Most administrations are doing that, right, during the transition.The issue for Flynn becomes twofold.One, there is a law on the books, since like the 1700s, that you can't interfere with American foreign policy, the so-called Logan Act.So there's, one, a question of what did he say to Kislyak, and did he say anything that could be interpreted as interfering with the administration’s foreign policy?Now, a lot of prosecutors say, “Well, nobody’s going to prosecute him for that.”
The second issue becomes, later on, when he’s asked about his conversations, he lies.He tells the White House, his White House superiors, including the vice president and others, that he wasn’t talking about sanctions with Kislyak.That creates a circumstance where now the Russians know that Michael Flynn has lied to his superiors, and it creates a so-called kompramat situation, where Flynn could potentially be blackmailed by the Russians.7
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Because you’ve got Pence going on CBS on Jan. 15 saying that there was no conversations about sanctions.You’ve got Spicer on Jan. 23 denying it in front of the press.
Yeah.So you have Michael Flynn’s colleagues and superiors at the White House, including the vice president and the White House press secretary, saying sanctions weren’t discussed, and the Russians, and especially Kislyak, know that that’s not the case.And the other group that knows is the FBI, because the transcript of the conversation is part of an FBI investigation.So this catches the attention of senior people at the Justice Department in January, including the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, who calls the White House and says, “Hey, I have to come over there, because I have something important to discuss.”
And so what happens?
So Sally Yates goes to the White House, talks to Don McGahn, the White House counsel, and she explains that Michael Flynn lied, that a transcript of the conversation between Kislyak and Flynn shows that they did discuss sanctions, and that there are two issues.One is the potential Logan Act violation; but two, and much more important to the Justice Department, Flynn could be compromised.The Russians could blackmail him, because he sent out his superiors to lie, and the Russians know this.So, you know, the scenario would be Kislyak subtly telling Flynn, you know, “If you don’t do X, I'm going to go public with the fact that we did discuss sanctions and ruin your career.”That’s the scenario that the Justice Department is deeply concerned about.
They don’t go to the White House until they make sure that the FBI investigation of Flynn, which was ongoing, was preserved; that if they needed to prosecute a Logan Act violation, they could.Once they have that locked down, they essentially rush over to the White House and say, “We need you to know this.”Now, Yates, as she told me, did not recommend that they fire Flynn.8The Justice Department didn’t believe it was their right to make that decision, but they told Donald Trump’s senior adviser, specifically his White House counsel, in forceful terms, that “Your national security adviser is compromised by the Russians.”
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She feels she’s done her job.But lo and behold, the next day, she’s called back?
And McGahn asks her if Flynn might be prosecuted.And you sort of defined this conversation.She’s puzzled by this whole thing.Just tell us that part of the story.
Yeah, she’s puzzled, because she doesn’t quite think that they understand how serious the issue of the compromise is, right?McGahn is asking these questions about prosecution and the Logan Act, and she’s trying to get across that the real issue here, from our counterintelligence folks at the Justice Department, is the Russians have leverage over him.He’s the national security adviser.He’s the person that sits there when Trump is on a phone call with Putin.And again, she doesn’t say, “You should fire him,” but she tries to explain how serious it is that, when the Russians have this kind of compromising material about someone, they will use it. …
And if Justice Department and FBI knew weeks before that, because of the wiretapping, that indeed sanctions were talked about, wouldn’t the president of the United States have gotten a briefing on that by his intelligence services?
You would think.You would think that it would make sense that Trump would know, either at the time what those conversations were between Kislyak and Michael Flynn or after the fact, when he’s briefed by the intelligence community.But we don’t know that.
Let’s talk a little bit about Comey’s relationship with the president.A couple of hours after this meeting takes place with Yates talking to the president’s lawyer, he has dinner with Comey, where he’s asking for his loyalty.Talk a little bit about the relationship.Talk a little bit about Comey’s reaction to the president’s sort of attempts to get a closer relationship and sort of what he’s asking of him.
The same day that the acting attorney general informs the White House that Michael Flynn is a security risk, Trump has dinner with the FBI director who’s overseeing the FBI’s investigation of Michael Flynn.We don’t know if Trump was informed about Flynn being compromised, but we do know, according to James Comey, the head of the FBI, he was sort of lured into this dinner under slightly false pretenses.He was told it would be a dinner, at first, among a larger group, and then it turned out it was just him and the president.And this is the dinner at which Comey says Trump asked him several times, in a few different ways, for his loyalty.
Putting questions in his mind about, does the president understand the role of the FBI director and what his relationship with the president should be, I guess?
Yeah.There's nothing wrong with the FBI director dining with the president.But in a normal relationship, the president would respect the independence of the FBI and not even hint at the active investigations, which could touch on the president himself.Trump didn’t do that.Trump brought him over there and asked him for his loyalty, knowing that the FBI was already investigating Michael Flynn.And this happens on the same day that the Justice Department informed the White House that Flynn was compromised by the Russians.
Why does it take a couple of weeks before Flynn resigns or is fired?Why [did it take] so long?Was Trump seemingly trying to protect him?This is, indeed, way after the fact that Yates, in fact, was fired, for a different reason.
Yeah.So basically, after Sally Yates goes to the White House and tells them the, you know, “Your national security adviser is compromised by the Russians,” nothing happens.Nothing happens until <i>The Washington Post </i>discloses the nature of the Sally Yates meeting and lots of new details about the potential compromise.But still, Trump backs Flynn, tries to keep him as his national security adviser.The outcry after <i>The Washington Post </i>story gets too loud.It’s clear that Flynn even lied to <i>The Washington Post </i>when they first brought some of the information to him.And Trump finally asks Flynn to resign.
A day later, he asked Comey to back off on the investigation [of Flynn.]
… So what's even more unusual is Trump is not known for being loyal to people he discards.In fact, there was a whole TV show about how eager he was to fire people, right?And he gets rid of Flynn.And then the next day he has a conversation with Comey, where he asks him to back off the FBI’s investigation of Flynn.This is unusual behavior on the part of Donald Trump.He’s not someone that just goes out of his way to help aides who have left his circle.That’s not his MO.But for some reason, he felt like it was important to protect Flynn.He felt like it was important to actually go to the FBI director, break protocol in terms of the president’s relationship with the FBI director, and the kind of red lines that you don’t cross, and actually push him to back off the Flynn investigation.
Why?
I don’t know.There's some reason he felt that he needed to protect Michael Flynn.
… So then in March, in early March, you’ve got the president asking Comey to say that he’s not under investigation, the whole thing, and statements about the fact, eventually, that Comey three times had told him that he’s not under investigation.Then by the end of March, or by the 20th, you’ve got Comey saying that the FBI is investigating Trump campaign connections, that FBI has been investigating them since July.And then you’ve got eventually Comey being fired.So break off any piece of that, about how that relationship goes downhill to the point where the president actually fires the guy who is the head of the investigations into potential collusion, the background of the Russian hacking into the elections.
The Comey-Trump relationship, it just gets progressively worse, because Comey is not doing what Trump wants, right?He asks him for loyalty; that doesn’t go so well.He asks him to back off the Flynn investigation; there's no sign that he’s going to do that.But I think that what really, really angers Trump, and what leads him to fire Comey, is that Comey went before Congress, revealed that the FBI had this investigation going on, and that it was related to the Trump campaign and its associates.So that was a blockbuster day where Comey is telling the world that the FBI has a counterintelligence investigation of the president’s campaign.That’s big news.
When Comey is asked at that hearing if the president himself is under investigation, Comey refuses to say one way or another.This is what sets Trump off.9Trump—and this is corroborated by Comey—was told by Comey privately that the president was not under investigation.Trump asked him to go public with that.Comey didn’t do it, because, as he’s pointed out, if that changed, then he’d also have to go public with the fact that the president is under investigation.But this was the key.This is the thing that pissed off Trump more than anything else, is that Comey would not publicly say that the president wasn’t under investigation.And not only would he not say it when he was asked about it at this hearing, he would neither confirm nor deny it, leading a lot of people to say, “Well, maybe he is under investigation.”So I think that is the end of the line for Comey.
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And the day after he fires him, May 10, into the Oval Office walk Kislyak and [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov.… Take us into that moment and sort of your overview of what was going on.
You can't make it up.I mean, if this were a novel, it would be too absurd for the president of the United States to fire the guy who was investigating him.And oh, by the way, the reason he gave is because he didn’t like the way that Comey handled the Clinton email investigation, not because he didn’t prosecute Clinton, but because he was unfair to her by revealing details of the investigation during the campaign, details of which Donald Trump talked about every day during the campaign as a way of clobbering Hillary Clinton.
So the president now says that’s the reason he’s firing the FBI director, the same FBI director that is investigating his own links to Russia.And then the next day, he invites the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador, who is a part of the Comey investigation, into the Oval Office, brags essentially about getting rid of the FBI director, and basically says, “Now we can get this relationship back on track, because I got rid of that nutjob.”You can't make it up. …
The Comey firing eventually backfires with the selection of Mueller as a special prosecutor.
Yeah.
Special counsel.What does this say about the tactics that Trump is using?What does it say about the system’s reaction toward the White House’s attitude about this stuff?What's going on?
If he had thought a few moves ahead, maybe he wouldn’t have fired Comey.And I don’t think he realized what he was getting when he fired Comey, because it triggered a series of events that has arguably made things worse for Trump.Comey went public with a lot of their discussions in a way that was damaging to Trump and in a way that opened up questions about whether Trump obstructed justice.And it forced Sessions, the attorney general, to recuse himself from the investigation, which infuriated Trump, because he believed that Sessions was there to protect him.It made Rod Rosenstein now the overseer of the investigation, and Rosenstein very shortly—very quickly appointed Bob Mueller, a no-B.S. former FBI director, as the special counsel in charge of the whole investigation.
So the end result is Jeff Sessions, who was supposed to protect Trump in Trump’s mind, is out of the picture, and Rod Rosenstein and the other officials at the Justice Department who were supposed to oversee the investigation are at least somewhat removed from the investigation, because you have this much more independent-minded special counsel now, with a broad mandate to look into any crimes that are uncovered.And previous scandals, whether it’s Watergate or the Monica Lewinsky scandal, when you’ve had special counsels or independent counsels, you know, depending on the rules at the time, these investigations can widen, spin far out of control from the original mandate.And Trump has boxed himself in, essentially, without a clear way to do what he was trying to do, which is get rid of the investigation.
So you do see a little bit the system working, the president exceeding his authority, perhaps, arguably abusing his power in firing [Comey], if his intent was to stop this investigation.But the system of checks and balances kicking in and preserving the investigation, I think that’s one bright spot in all this.
But the response of the president, of course, is to denigrate Sessions and say he’s going to fire him, and then to go after Mueller and say, you know, “You stay within your lines of what your investigation is said to do.”I mean, the reaction is oblivious, to some extent, about the blowback.
Soon after, he attacks Sessions because he didn’t want Sessions to recuse himself.He attacks Mueller because, you know, Mueller is investigating him, alleges that Mueller is not allowed to look into financial transactions, which again, is a strange thing for someone being investigated to say.It’s like the cops are looking at your house; they're inside searching, and you tell them, “Whatever you do, don’t go in that closet.”Well, it’s the first door they're going to open.
So if Trump believes that getting rid of Sessions, or forcing Sessions to resign, is going to help make this investigation go away, he doesn’t understand the process very well, because he can get rid of Sessions; who are you going to find as your attorney general then?Who is, one, going to take the job, or two, be confirmed by the Senate?Hard to know who that person would be.But then it doesn’t do anything about the special counsel, because the special counsel is under the control of the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein.
So to really get rid of Mueller, Trump needs to tell Rosenstein to fire him.If Rosenstein won't agree, Rosenstein would have to resign.Then the next Justice Department official would take over, and we’d have to have the same conversation until, as in the Saturday night massacre and Watergate, Trump found someone who would actually fire Mueller. ...
If he did that, Congress, especially the Senate, I think would finally put its foot down, and especially Republicans, who have been very reluctant to criticize Trump’s moves on some of this stuff, would finally wake up and say: “Enough is enough.You’ve got to let Mueller do his investigation, especially now that a grand jury in D.C. is impaneled.”
… If you're a fly on the wall in the Kremlin, in the end, what must Putin be thinking about all this?What did he achieve with all this?If indeed the information the intelligence folks had is correct, what did they get?
Putin hit the jackpot.I mean, no matter what the outcome is here, Putin hit the jackpot.His goal was to make sure Hillary Clinton wasn’t elected.He accomplished that, or at least he helped to accomplish that.In the end, he has thrown the American system into turmoil.I mean, that’s probably the most important objective here.He probably never thought that Donald Trump would do everything he said, or that they’d suddenly agree on all of the issues that divide the United States around the world.
It is true that in some respects Trump’s over-the-top praise of Putin and the Russian investigation, it has hemmed him in a little bit, right?Congress has passed a sanctions bill.Trump was forced to sign it, right?He didn’t veto that, even though he didn’t approve of it.Trump has been forced to back NATO rhetorically in a way that he didn’t during the campaign.And in terms of the policies, you know, Putin hasn’t gotten everything he wanted.But he’s effectively cast doubts about the American electoral system, and that’s a huge victory for him.And he has a president that, you know, very frequently, on some big issues, is much closer to him than Hillary Clinton would have been, when it comes to Europe or Syria or fighting terrorism or just in general, condemning or having any problems with how Russia acts in the world.He now has an American president who sees the world the way Putin sees that world; that is, someone who downplays democracy and human rights, thinks of everything in terms of interests rather than values.That’s a big victory for Vladimir Putin.
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