Is the President a Russian Asset?

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Hello, Radio Atlantic listeners.

This is Alex Wagner.

I have been on and off the mic for the last few months, but I'm here to tell you that I will be here in this podcasting booth for the foreseeable future.

I hope that's good news as far as you're concerned.

Let's get right to it.

On Friday, the New York Times published a startling story.

In 2017, days after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, the Bureau opened an inquiry into whether the president was secretly working on behalf of Russia.

It was an explosive development in an already pretty major story.

The idea that, as Atlantic contributing writer Ben Wittes put it, Trump's potential obstruction of justice was in fact part of the collusion itself.

A counterintelligence investigation into the president of the United States because he, not his allies or the Russians, because he was a national security threat.

Now, Trump claims he's been tougher on Russia than, quote, quote any other president, while also proposing that getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.

So, how do we make sense of the president's view of Russia?

Over the years, people have speculated and they've insinuated about Trump's ties to Russia, but this week's news raises the question very, very clearly: is the president of the United States a Russian asset?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset.

The FBI opened an inquiry into whether Trump was secretly working on behalf of Russia.

I have nothing to do with Russia, folks.

Okay.

Do you hold Russia at all accountable for anything in particular?

How many times do I have to say it?

Are you a smart man?

I have nothing to do with Russia.

Russia is a ruse.

Joining me now to unpack what is one of the most burning questions that maybe has been posed in American history, I'm going to say it, is the great, talented Franklin Forer, known to us in the Atlantic office as Frank Forer, staff writer extraordinaire.

Frank, it's great to see you.

Well, I don't see you.

Frank, it's great to have you on the podcast.

It's so good to be here.

We have a lot to unpack.

This fundamental question, is the President of the United States a Russian asset?

We're not going to be able to answer it in this podcast, but we wanted to go back and look through sort of critical moments in Donald Trump's public life, specifically his public political life.

And we wanted to go back to those moments and analyze whether

we should be looking at them differently now that we have the reporting that we have.

So, Frank, I wanted to start at the beginning with the money, the Russian interests in Trump's business dealings before he ever even announced that he wanted to run for the presidency.

Jonathan Chait Chait had an exhaustive piece in New York magazine that detailed many facts about Russian money and Donald Trump, but one of them stuck out, which is from 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases, maybe a sign of money laundering, of Trump properties, which totaled $109 million.

In 2010, the private wealth division of Deutsche Bank also loaned Trump hundreds of millions of dollars at the same time that it was laundering billions of dollars in Russian money.

How do you look at that now that we're talking about the question of asset incentivization, Frank?

So I don't know if you've watched The Manchurian candidate recently.

Have you heard of that thing?

Have you heard of that thing?

I'm talking about the Frank Sinatra Angela Lansbury version.

And you know,

one of the problems about being in the middle of a conspiracy movie is that you're constantly asking yourself, is this for real?

Am I being tricked?

Are my eyes deceiving me?

Am I putting together the pieces of the puzzle in the correct sort of way?

And so it's really all of this, what you're describing is kind of a mind-bending exercise.

Kind of as we work through these puzzle pieces, it's hard to know exactly what to make of any of them because they could all be sheer coincidences.

You know, just to go go back to the Manchurian candidate, you know, you end up feeling like you're the paranoid one by even raising the subject.

I mean, it's really, it's a very uncomfortable, weird discussion to be having.

And that's part of the reason why I think last week's revelations in the New York Times about the FBI conducting a counterintelligence operation is actually pretty significant because it means that for those of us who've been speculating about this and reporting on this, we're not crazy.

No, in fact, American law enforcement is right there or at least was right there along with you.

Yeah, exactly.

So, okay,

the money piece is a looming question, right?

I want to get to the campaign itself, though.

The Trump campaign made a really interesting decision in April of 2016, which was to hire Paul Manafort to be the chair of the campaign.

Paul Manafort was a known entity.

Sure, he had worked conventions, he had worked for previous Republican candidates, but he was known to be a kind of shady figure in Washington.

In fact, in April of 2016, Bloomberg ran a story with the headline, Trump just hired his next scandal.

And that was about his hiring of Paul Manafort.

Yeah.

When you think about, is the president a Russian asset?

Is he in cahoots with the Russians?

Have they been manipulating him this whole time, wittingly or unwittingly?

I always go back to the hire of Paul Manafort and his presence on the campaign.

Frank, you have written exhaustively about Manafort.

Given the news from the New York Times, do you think about the Manafort hire differently?

I mean, how do you place him in the context of this potential theory?

Well, I do think he was a red flag for the FBI and for everybody else who was looking at these questions, But I don't see evidence that there was anything other than

Manafort scheming to get back into the game in order to make money, in order to cover his debts.

He did have these organic connections to Trumpland, through Roger Stone,

through Tom Barrick, the real estate investor who's both close to Manafort and to Trump, and who was the vehicle through which Manafort pitched himself initially to Trump.

The moral universe in which Donald Trump inhabits somebody like Paul Manafort doesn't actually raise red flags because he's just par for the course.

When you're dealing with guys like Roger Stone or Corey Lewandowski,

Manafort doesn't stick out necessarily as any dodgier than the rest of them, even if, in fact, he may be dodgier than the rest of them.

But I guess

the question that you're asking, Alex, is that,

was he planted there by the Russians?

Or did he plant himself there on behalf of the Russians?

Aaron Ross Powell, well, I think what keeps coming up with a number of Trump's campaign staff, whether it's Rick Gates, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, probably most

glaringly, they all have ties to Russia.

Paul Manafort does extensive work in Ukraine to benefit pro-Russian forces.

And

it's, I guess, we're back to this Manchurian candidate question.

Is it just a coincidence that all of these guys, including and especially the campaign chair, have ties to Mother Russia?

And I guess in the context of the New York Times reporting, one sort of wants to go back to this hiring and say, wait,

is this coincidence or was this somehow orchestrated?

Did the Russians somehow encourage, I don't know that, you know, from your reporting, Frank, and from your assessment, it doesn't sound like the Russians hired Paul Manafort for the Trump campaign.

There were enough connections that existed already, but it does beg that question: like, are we crazy here or is there something?

Well, here's, I mean, the something is quite clear.

It's that Paul Manafort owed money to the aluminum magnate Oleg Daripaska, who

actually

had owed money at a certain point to Vladimir Putin.

And

so you see Manafort instantaneously trying to leverage his connections with Trump in order to

get back in with Oleg Derpaska to get whole, in his words that he emailed to Konstantin Kalemnik, his aide.

I mean, this is where, yes, you're right.

It does get crazy because, you know, Manafort's aide-de-camp, his translator, his alter ego, this guy he spends all his time with,

Robert Mueller keeps referring to as an asset of Russian intelligence.

Exactly.

And an active asset of Russian intelligence.

I always find that phrase one that I come back to, that Mueller says that Kalimnik was active through the 2016 campaign.

And, you know, it's something that I just keep coming back to is this Kalimnik relationship because Mueller keeps teasing it, keeps obviously probing it.

It's the, when Manafort keeps lying about it.

And so everything seems to suggest that there's something more there.

Okay.

Maybe it's just a coincidence.

Right.

Okay.

Let's go to what happens once Paul Manafort is on the campaign.

There's this moment during the Republican or ahead of the Republican National Convention in 2016 where the Trump campaign is editing the official Republican platform to make it more beneficial to Russia.

Effectively saying, we're going to make sure this new GOP platform does not call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, which contradicts the view of literally almost every single Republican inside the Beltway.

When that happened, Frank, because you were already reporting on the story, what did you think?

And what do you think of that move now?

You know, when it happened, I thought that it was seeing confirmation of kind of

the worst case scenario.

You know, Russia cares so much about Ukraine.

So much of its foreign policy and its kind of geostrategic thinking turns on questions about its backyard,

its old sphere of influence, the way in which the empire had been stripped away from it and it was just kind of hoping to claw parts of it back.

And then here.

Sort of make Russia great again.

If you will.

And here you had in the Obama administration, this ratcheting up of tensions, this application of sanctions.

You had during those years, Ukraine edging closer to joining the European Union at a certain moment, and it falls apart.

And Russia was fighting a civil war, essentially, a proxy war in eastern Ukraine and where it was sending arms.

And the platform, the Republican platform was being edited to take out promises of sending arms to the Ukrainians.

Is it a coincidence?

Well, clearly, Donald Trump's foreign policy

was one of retrenchment and one of disentangling the United States from the transatlantic alliance, from NATO.

And so you could say on ideological grounds, perhaps there was cause for rewriting the platform.

On the other hand,

Manafort's there, and he clearly knows these issues.

These are things that he clearly cares about.

As we know from the last round of reporting on Manafort, he was sharing polling data with Ukrainian oligarchs who cared about the outcome.

He was peddling a peace plan in Ukraine.

So the idea that he was meddling in the platform on behalf of other interests certainly seems incredibly plausible.

I feel like that's the phrase of this hour.

It certainly seems incredibly plausible.

Yeah, I got a lot of qualifiers there, though, right?

Well, at this point, that's where we are, right?

Because in an age of irresponsibility, we'd like to be responsible.

And, you know, and by the way, I mean, it's, it's, it's something, I don't know if you find this, but what

I,

in my head, I've got a fairly robust theory of what happened.

And yet when I sit down at the table to talk to people, or I watch TV, I watch MSNBC, and I hear some of the maximalist

conspiracies getting unfurled, it makes me uncomfortable because

we can't race out too far ahead of the evidence.

And I think that as a matter of expectations, as a matter of our quest for the truth, there's a real danger that we get we get.

And I think a lot of liberals have raced out too far ahead on the Russia questions.

And,

you know,

having a phrase filled with lots of qualifiers, I think is really the only responsible way to approach this.

Sure.

And I think, you know, one of the things we're trying to do here is outline.

the sort of data set we've been given.

Yeah, we got to keep revisiting these questions.

And try to make sense of it because we don't have any conclusive evidence at this point.

We're just looking back at the lab where shit has been boiling over.

Okay,

we're going to step out of our own lab for just a moment and take a short break.

But when we come back, we will use all sorts of qualifiers that responsible journalists use, and we will get back to this central question of the president as a potential asset of the Russian government.

Yes, you heard that correctly.

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Okay, we are back and we are talking to the inimitable Frank Forer about a subject he's reported so deeply on, which is the Trump campaign and Russia.

So there are these little smaller data points, indicators, if you will, in the last two years.

But this week, though, there is a focus on five or so meetings that President Trump arranged with President Putin, meetings about which we know very little.

The Washington Post reports that Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of these conversations with Putin, including on at least one occasion, taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired, which is pretty hardcore.

In the magnum opus on the Atlantic website, Unthinkable, which is a compendium of 50 norm-shattering moments of the Trump presidency, Frank, you contribute a fine piece of writing about one of these meetings in Hamburg.

Tell us, if you will, recap for us what happened at this meeting and why was it unusual?

So there are two meetings that happen.

The first is an official and planned one where Rex Tillerson was in attendance.

And this is the one where I think the notes, the interpreter's notes, he tried to

abscond with.

And then there was a second meeting that was unplanned that happened during a dinner after a concert where all the leaders of the world are arrayed at a long table.

And Trump has one translator with him who speaks.

Japanese because he's sitting next to the Japanese premier Shinzo Abe.

And

Putin is sitting next to Melania.

And so in the middle of dinner in front of all the leaders of the world,

who are all, by the way, for the most part, nervous about Trump's relationship with Vladimir Putin and can't understand why he's so obsequious to him, Trump gets up.

maneuvers around the room, sits down next to Putin, and engages in an extremely long conversation conversation with him.

Now, there are so many good reasons not to have the president of the United States engage in an unchaperoned, impromptu conversation with Vladimir Putin.

For starters,

Putin is

an incredibly cunning guy who

is able to

rewrite fact patterns and

has a very clear view of where he wants to maneuver things.

And there are all sorts of reasons why you wouldn't want Donald Trump talking to Vladimir Putin by himself, because at worst, a few weeks earlier, the FBI had opened an investigation into whether the president is a potential Russian asset.

You know, and at best,

he's somebody who has a man crush, an obvious man crush on Vladimir.

Putin.

And so they sit, and we have no earthly idea what they discuss over the course of this this conversation.

And it's am I correct in thinking that the way President Trump is able to understand what President Putin is saying is because they're using Putin's interpreter for this.

Aaron Ross Powell That is correct.

So the only information we might glue.

He can't even take away that guy's notes.

Right.

The Russians have the notes.

Yeah.

Now,

after

those two meetings in Germany, the day after those two meetings, the New York Times reports that as Trump was on Air Force One taking off, heading back to D.C., he telephones a New York Times reporter and argues that the Russians were falsely accused of election interference.

On the same flight, he huddles with aides to decide how to respond to an emerging story by other Times reporters about a Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign staff and Russian operatives.

That's where Trump dictates this misleading statement saying that meeting at Trump Tower was really just about Russian adoptions and doesn't admit that it was actually intended to accept Moscow's aid for his campaign.

Coincidentally or not, frankly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

These two things happen right after those conversations he has with Vladimir Putin.

What's the most generous explanation that we can come up with here?

I'm struggling for it.

Well,

the Magnitsky Act seems like that's the Russian adoptions piece that becomes central to the misleading memo that Trump writes.

That's a really interesting thing for him to pull out of a hat that moment after talking about with Vladimir Putin.

Yeah.

And, all right, so at this stage,

Donald Trump already knows that everybody is focused on his relationship to Vladimir Putin.

And so maybe,

just maybe, all of this has gotten inside of his head.

He feels like he's doing something illicit by having these conversations with Vladimir Putin.

He knows that if he talks about it, he'll get lashed for it.

And so he decides that he's going to do everything in his power to bury it.

That's the most generous explanation that I can come up with for this.

But I mean, it seems kind of implausible.

I mean, you know,

just knowing that you're

taking endless political flack for being this guy's puppet.

Like,

why would you engage in any of the

behaviors that you just described?

That moment, Frank, you know, you wrote about Hamburg, which was in 2017, and then we have this Putin bylaw in 2018.

What was your thinking in that moment when you witnessed those two men at the mic together?

Really, if we were to focus on one moment that's the most, I think one of the most incredible moments of the Trump presidency, the one that just seems to confirm everything,

it's that moment.

Just because here he is sitting in front of the world leader who he's said to be an asset of.

And instead of trying to find a way to distance himself from Vladimir Putin, instead of condemning Russian interference in the 2016 election, which is

not a speculative thing.

It's something that had been confirmed by the entirety of the U.S.

intelligence community, that had been well documented by journalists.

But instead of accusing Russia of interfering and asking them to stop, what does he do?

He turns against U.S.

law enforcement.

He turns against our own intelligence agents and he spreads this conspiracy about how the deep state is trying to undermine him.

Now,

the big thrust of Russian propaganda, Russian counterintelligence, Russian misinformation is to create a sense of suspicion and division in the West.

And so he's essentially doing Putin's bidding for him in front of Putin, in front of the cameras, on foreign soil.

It's one of those moments that I think when we look back on, we can just say, you know, that's the holy shit moment that really just seems beyond belief.

Okay, so what's interesting about the moments that we've discussed thus far is they don't, with the exception of the Republican platform at the RNC, it's not concrete policy changes, right?

And so I want to speed us up to the present day where...

Although I think it's important to say that

if you think about what the Russians were after at the very beginning of their attempt to interfere with the election, you know, they probably did have certain policy objectives in mind, but I think most of their goals were a lot softer than that.

I think it really does

it really does trace back to their desire to create division, to create

confusion.

Exactly.

Well,

with those objectives checked off the list

to a certain degree,

there are policy asks potentially, right?

There are goals that Putin would like to see accomplished.

And you need to look no further than recent reporting, beginning, I think, probably most explosively with New York Times reporting, saying that several times over the course of 2018, Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw the U.S.

from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Withdrawal from NATO would have been, it's hard to quantify how large a gift that would be to Vladimir Putin but that would be sort of the the the golden fleece is that the right metaphor to use the chalice atop the ark of the covenant I'm not quite sure I'm mixing metaphors here Frank but that's a big fucking deal yeah

it's a big fucking deal I mean really

you know the thing that's aggrieved Russia the most is the sense that after the end of the Cold War, instead of creating, you know, allowing for there to be some sort of neutral buffer in between the West and Russia, through the expansion of NATO, we've kind of

pressed our sphere of influence right up next to their borders.

And so the idea that Trump would unravel this, yes,

it's pouring vodka to the rim of the chalice.

And so it really is, it would be an incredible gift.

I mean, it's kind of beyond whatever reasonable expectation the Russians could have had for what they could have eek out of this presidency or any presidency.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: These moments keep popping up where the administration shows at least a favorable conciliatory attitude towards Russia and key Russian players in all of this for I'm not sure what political gain.

And then the sort of biggest gift under the Christmas tree of late 2018, we'll call it, the withdrawal from Syria.

This is something that there is no particular lobby for Syria-specific withdrawal in the United States or maybe even in the Republican Party, though to your earlier point, Frank, Trump

is

pursuing a sort of non-intervention strategy.

He wants to bring the troops home.

He says ISIS has been defeated.

We have news this week that that does not appear to be true at all.

Four Americans were killed in Syria this week when a suicide bomber attacked a patrol in the former ISIS stronghold of Manbij.

ISIS has claimed responsibility.

But nonetheless, the president has said we're done in Syria and a sort of

drawdown of equipment at least has begun.

That decision to do that appears to be unpopular basically everywhere but a city called Moscow.

Frank, I wonder, you know, in all of this, if the president is in fact acting on behalf of the Russians, if he's been turned, if he's an asset, whatever you want to call it, is this the most concrete benefit that Putin has gotten from the Trump presidency?

It's a pretty big one because

Russia

has

pretty heavily invested itself in the preservation of the Assad regime.

And the United States

pulling out really does give it the run of the field.

They can shape the battlefield.

They can shape the outcome after the war in whatever way

they want.

They become the big power broker there.

It relates to their relationship with the Iranians, who also have a major stake in the outcome of that war.

So, you know, if we talk about concrete things that he's delivered to Putin, I mean, we've said that maybe Putin's goals were kind of soft and co-aid and had to do with the political temperature in the United States and

sowing suspicion and conspiracy and the like.

But if you're going to talk about

an actual concrete policy outcome, this is the one, and it's not a trivial one.

But again, know, we're left here to, until we get the Mueller report, we're left just wildly speculating about his motives.

And it's really easy to speculate about them given the pattern that we've talked about in this show.

When you go through and you chart all the events, you got to say, aha, you know, this is, this is, there's something here.

There's some ulterior reason for Trump acting the way that he's acting.

But it could also just just be that he's Donald Trump, who's not a rational actor.

And

maybe

this crazy pattern of events just happened to fall in a certain crazy way where it aligns almost entirely with the things that Vladimir Putin wants.

Maybe it's just a man crush, as you said.

Before we end the show, I want to get to the ways in which Trump himself has defended

his behavior, if you will.

After the New York Times published that story at the end of last week, Trump called into his

news medium of choice, Fox, and

he spoke with the host, Janine Pirro.

And this is the exchange between the President of the United States and Fox host, Janine Pirro.

So I'm going to ask you, are you now or have you ever worked for Russia, Mr.

President?

I think it's the most insulting thing I've ever been asked.

I think it's the most insulting article I've ever had written.

And if you read the article, you'd see that they found absolutely nothing.

Okay, Frank.

So I didn't hear an answer there.

Okay.

However, to be a diligent journalist, on Monday, as he was boarding Marine 1, the president was asked by a reporter again, did you work for Russia?

And this is what he had to say.

I never worked for Russia.

And you know that answer better than anybody.

I never worked for Russia.

Not only did I never work for Russia, I think it's a disgrace that you even asked that question because it's a whole big fat hoax.

It's just a hoax.

Frank,

he seems to answer the question fairly definitively right there, right?

I never worked for Russia.

You know that answer.

It's a disgrace that you even asked it, et cetera, et cetera.

Does that settle it for you?

Well, let's roll back the tape.

I mean, it feels like if we go back to a lot of his answers as it relates to his history with Russia, Russian business, Russian interest.

He hasn't been forthcoming or comprehensive in describing his history.

And then you just have his own kind of general credibility or lack thereof.

And so,

of course, whatever denial he gives is not going to

close the case.

But I do think, you know, in this genre, I go back to the Manafort Manafort interview.

I think it's with Nora O'Donnell.

Yeah, Nora on CBS this morning.

Yeah.

She asks about his history of Russian entanglements.

And he can't answer the question looking straight into the camera.

His eyes gaze down

and he gives a totally unconvincing denial.

So to be clear, Mr.

Trump has no financial relationships with any Russian oligarchs.

That's what he said.

That's what I said.

That's That's obviously what our position is.

So

that's not a convincing denial.

And

I do think that, you know,

as we sit here on pins and needles waiting to see what Mueller turns up, you know, we're left having to

mind read and to psychologize.

And

when you listen to the answers, you listen to the inconsistencies, you look at the body language, and it just doesn't seem right.

And I know that as a journalist, that's obviously nothing to really go on, can't hang anything on that.

And yet that's what the denial hangs on, is a belief in a very

thin line of argument, which is just the word no,

with very little data to back up how, in fact, that's true, right?

I mean, the overwhelming evidence that we have is that there's some kind of relationship between the president and the Russians.

I mean, at best, right?

And the data that sort of strikes down that theory or those theories

is almost absent other than, no, that's wrong.

It's a hoax.

Right.

And

we have what we can see in the Mueller filings, which

seems to be going somewhere.

I mean,

there's been this sense over the last couple months that maybe Robert Mueller is wrapping up, that this whole thing is going to come to a close and we'll finally know what actually happened.

But the grand jury gets extended.

We see that

Rick Gates' sentencing hearing gets postponed because he's still cooperating.

It seems like there are a couple characters in the scandal who have said they're about to be indicted and they haven't been indicted.

It just doesn't,

it feels like we all yearn for clarity and we all yearn for closure here.

But

my gut is that we're just going to have to wait it out a little bit longer and get, we're stuck with these kind of elliptical conclusions that we draw from reading body language and listening to answers on Fox News and the like.

I think we've distilled all of it into this sort of fundamental question.

Is the president of the United States a Russian asset or does he just have a man crush on Vladimir Putin?

One of those things

seems so much more benign than the other.

You know, you strip the shirt off the guy.

He's got an admirable torso.

An admirable torso.

Maybe it's just that horseback riding riding photo.

Frank Forer, great reporter, excellent podcast guest, wealth of information and also journalistic responsibility.

Thank you for joining me on this crazy episode of Radio Atlantic.

So much fun.

Thank you.

That, my friends, will do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, to our fellow Patricia Jacob, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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