Russia! Live with Julia Ioffe and Eliot A. Cohen

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U.S.

intelligence agencies agree that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

But President Trump says the hand-wringing over Russian influence on U.S.

politics gets in the way of useful cooperation between the two countries.

Has Russia's relationship with America grown more adversarial?

Has Vladimir Putin grown more influential?

This is Radio Atlantic.

This week, we bring you a special Radio Atlantic.

Our first live show taped at the historic Sixth Thenai Synagogue in Washington, D.C., part of the Washington Ideas Festival enjoy the discussion

thank you and thank you once again for coming I'm Matt Thompson the executive editor of the Atlantic to my left is Julia Yaffe the Atlantic staff writer

covers politics, international intrigue, and foreign policy.

To Julia's left is Elliot Cohen,

Atlantic contributing editor, Johns Hopkins University professor, and author of The Big Stick, The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force.

And of course, to Elliot's left is my esteemed co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Thank you.

The Atlantic's editor-in-chief.

Jeff, what are we talking about again today?

Canada?

The NFL.

Are we doing the NFL today?

NFL?

Take it.

I don't want to do anything controversial, so we're just going to stick to Russia.

Yeah, we're going to talk about Russia today, and we're going to talk about Donald Trump's relationship to Russia, and we're going to talk about what Russia wants, and we're going to talk about the world and America's place in the world, and we're going to do it in like eight minutes.

It's going to be fantastic.

Sound good?

So I'm going to jump right in because there's no point in waiting.

And I want to go to Elliot.

Elliot, could you set the stage for us?

Could you talk for a minute or two about

what Russia is to us, adversary, enemy, competitor?

And take us back a few years.

Take us back to the Obama administration and walk us forward before we get into

the crises of the moment.

Well, I think in some ways you have to go back even a little bit further than that to the Bush administration and to a sense that emerged in Russia that this was going to be a conflictual relationship.

I would describe Russia as adversaries.

It got deeper and deeper for a number of reasons.

Part of it, Putin's reaction to the Obama administration, to Libya.

Part of it to a misreading, I think, of Western policy.

The Russians have been quite convinced that we've been trying to instigate the so-called color revolutions in Eastern Europe.

And that, of course, is a threat to the Russian regime.

But I also think part of this is this is Putin, great Russian nationalist, reasserting Russian power.

There's a whole bunch of mixed motives.

But I would say fundamentally this.

This is

fundamentally an adversarial relationship with some elements of cooperation here and there, and it's not going to get any better.

Well, we can just go home now.

That's great.

All right.

Thanks for bringing it way down.

Julia, just

do something for us that's actually very important in a fact-driven discourse.

Tell us what we know for sure about the relationship between Donald Trump, the Trump administration, and Russia, and what we don't actually know?

Well, there's a lot we don't actually know, and I think that's important to keep in mind as we often wax hysterical at the latest breaking news that

this or that has been uncovered and proving collusion or not.

We actually have not proven that, and there's a lot we don't know.

So,

what do we know?

We know that the Russian government interfered in our elections, that they bought ads on Facebook.

We know that

they hacked the DNC servers, actually that they hacked them twice, but didn't know about the other, that one hacking party didn't know about the other hacking party.

We know they also hacked the servers of the DCCC, the Committee to Elect Democrats to the House of Representatives.

We know that they then weaponized that information through

friendly intermediaries like Wikileaks, which has, we learned in 2016, going went from essentially a radical pro-transparency organization as controversial as it was to essentially a wing of Russian intelligence.

We also know that a lot of that the Russians employed armies of bots and trolls and commenters to kind of

colonize and make hostile

the conversation around some very touchy issues.

They were kind of the bellows of the 2016 election.

What we don't know, though, is actually how it was done.

We don't know a lot of the mechanics.

We don't know how closely coordinated it was, how looped in Vladimir Putin was, for example, to all the details.

We don't know how, to what extent, if at all, it was coordinated with the Trump campaign.

So we know, for example, that Roger Stone, who was a kind of

on and off, on again, off-again advisor to Trump, was bragging about his connections to WikiLeaks and predicting email dumps in the fall.

But to what extent was it, you know, did Trump know about it, right?

So we're getting down to who knew what when, right?

What is Donald Trump's seeming inability or unwillingness to criticize Vladimir Putin?

What does it mean?

And maybe, Elliot, you can jump in on that too.

I think we don't know what it is.

We'd risk overinterpreting it in a kind of way.

I actually think it's not.

I think we often do over-interpreted it.

I think, for example, okay, so we don't know, for example, there was a dossier compiled by a former British intelligence officer for essentially paying clients, and there were a lot of salacious allegations in it, including the existence of blackmail of a tape that would could make the President of the United States blackmailable.

But I don't think you need that to explain his relationship,

Trump's posture toward Putin, the fact that he won't say anything anything critical about him.

I think that the president has a very adolescent idea of masculinity and power, and Putin embodies that.

No, we don't agree with that.

That's just analysis.

That's just analysis.

That's all it is.

You know,

it's the reason, for example, that Vladimir Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Chechnya, like Mike Tyson or Stephen Seagal.

It's again, it's that same idea of what masculinity and power.

Those are stuck in the early 90s.

yeah

right and the track hands and also and um and I think that Trump I think to this day believes that Putin

called him a genius which he did not but you know you try telling Donald Trump that he Putin didn't call you a genius he called him yadke which means like

kind of bright in the sense of like colorful

it could cut it's kind of it was kind of a backhanded compliment actually but Trump said he called me a genius and he said very nice things about me I think he likes him and he likes that somebody who is that powerful flatters him.

And he's also stubborn.

And I mean, look at how

he responded when he was asked over and over again to criticize his supporters, the kind of alt-right at Charlottesville.

He just will not do it.

He's stubborn.

I'd add a couple of things to that.

First, in terms of some of the circumstantial things we know, we do know that there are a lot of people who are associated with Trump quite closely who have had

shady relations with Russia.

We know that his son said that there was Russian money in the Trump organization, particularly after 2008.

We know that he goes really crazy when people talk about a Russian connection.

So there's all that that's circumstantial.

I think there's, in addition to all the things that Julia said, which I agree with, there's another aspect to this.

Donald Trump does not have a foreign policy doctrine, but he does have a certain approach.

And I think

his view, and you hear this a bit from Steve Bannon, is, okay, with the Chinese, it's trade war.

With North Korea, it may be war war.

With Iran, it'll be another kind of conflict.

We're going to go kill jihadis all over the place.

And, you know,

he doesn't particularly care about human rights or anything like that in Russia.

And he figures, why not do a deal there?

Because, you know, I've got all these other people I'm going to be taking on.

So

there is a kind of crude foreign policy logic to it as well.

I do want to just jump in and add one more thing.

I think Donald Trump's admiration for Vladimir Putin is not singular.

He has expressed similar admiration for President Xi of China, Erdogan of Turkey, Duterte of the Philippines.

I mean, he has a type.

Well, and it's not just overseas.

You know, it's, I've always been struck that he has referred to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis as Mad Dog Mattis.

I've spent a lot of time with the American military, including visiting with General Mattis in Iraq when he had 1st Marine Division.

I have never heard anybody in uniform call him Mad Dog.

And if you know Matt.

That's from a Steven Seagal film.

What?

If you know Mattis,

he is a very tough guy.

He is not a Mad Dog.

He's the furthest thing from it.

This is an extremely well-read, thoughtful, deliberate kind of guy.

And the fact that that,

you know, Trump would be excited by that.

It is the juvenile side.

And he loves generals, and he loves getting in trucks, and he loves, you know, and going on ships and uniforms.

Well, I love getting in trucks, too, but that doesn't make me authoritarian.

I'm not sure if he's a lot of ships, too.

Hey, maybe it's a guy thing.

It's often widely assumed that the president's praise for Putin

indicates some sort of tighter relationship between the two of them.

But is that true?

I mean,

wouldn't it be that if the president were, if the leader of Russia did have untoward influence with the president, that he would be, they would be warning him against signaling.

Donald Trump would be it would be too obvious his behavior.

Right.

I mean, you would want to play this in a more sophisticated way.

Is that fair?

I mean, this goes to the question of are we over-reading and over-interpreting stuff that might be very simple to understand?

This kind of affection for authoritarianism.

Yeah, well, he also,

you know, he's also been told repeatedly, including on the news and by

his intelligence community that the Russians tried to help him win the election.

I mean, if I were him, I'd like that too.

So I don't know.

But that's one of the things we don't know.

We don't know if there's a tape.

We don't know if there's a tighter relationship.

I actually just did a piece about how he was not able to build anything in Russia despite 30 years of trying to build something in Russia when everybody and their mother built something in Russia in terms of like hotel chains.

But he wasn't able to because he didn't have the right connections in Russia.

I, for the record, have never built anything in Russia.

I think the other point to bear in mind here is American-Russian policy is actually not made simply by Donald Trump.

One of the things that's so striking about watching this administration is how extraordinarily incoherent it is.

You know, if you talk to the National Security Advisor, Adrian McMaster, Russia is a kind of a malevolent actor.

We've got to beef up our forces

in Europe.

Mattis, I think, certainly feels that way.

You know, we've got a special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volcker, who is pretty hard on Russia.

So

the institutions are pursuing one policy, and Trump, in his kind of erratic, blustering way, is pursuing a different policy.

But that also speaks to Putin and the Russians and the extent to which they don't understand how the American political system worked.

What don't they get?

That Donald Trump doesn't just make the policy in the U.S.

Are they mirror imaging?

Putin is in charge of everything, therefore Donald Trump is not a problem.

Exactly.

I think Russians and Americans are more similar than we'd like to admit.

And because we all come from large countries with

imperial pasts and this idea of a kind of divine mission,

we tend to think that everything in the rest of the world works just like it works in America.

You know, that

democracies function the same way.

Russians think that we bribe traffic cops the same way they bribe traffic cops.

They don't, they just, it,

and it's at every level.

So

I think, for example, Vladimir Putin and the guys around him who came out of the KGB and the FSB, they're conspiracy theorists par excellence.

So they did not think Trump was going to win.

They thought that it was all sewn up for Hillary Clinton because of the cabal of the establishment and George Soros.

We have a very ineffective establishment, obviously.

So, for example,

when the second STAR Treaty was negotiated during the Obama administration, the Kremlin was very angry when Obama said, okay, now we have to take it to Congress.

And they were like, what?

I mean, we just did this, and we also have a Congress, you know, get it done.

So

they just, they don't, they think it's very similar.

And so.

I wish you could see the scare quotes in a podcast.

That's going to be hard.

Quote-unquote Congress, yeah.

I guess we now have a quote-unquote Congress.

Somewhat different angle on this.

I think Putin, I think to some extent they're baffled by this, as we are baffled by them.

I also think there is an element of personal contempt for Trump.

And you can tell me, Julia, if I'm reading too much into this.

I was very struck by Putin at one point says, he's not my bride, and I'm not his husband.

Okay, sexist, I get it.

Yeah, but the gender assignment was not accidental.

The gender assignment was not accidental

for a guy who goes around hunting with crossbows and riding on Siberian tigers and stuff like that.

And I think also the other thing about Putin as a former KGB officer,

he has, I think, quite keenly what Trump sort of has, which is a feral instinct for weakness.

And I think they can judge Trump's weaknesses.

They know his vanity.

Well, if you come out of an intelligence agency, that's what you're trained to do.

You're trained to look for the spot, the weak spot, right?

Yeah, certain kinds of case case officers do all kinds of things.

But a certain kind of case officer goes right for the weak points.

And Putin's a case officer.

And more than just being a case officer, before he was an intelligence officer and a pretty middling one at that, he also came from the mean streets of Leningrad, post-war Leningrad, which was wrecked by the war.

He didn't really have a father.

He was a street urchin.

And street urchins have a good sense for weakness and power dynamics.

And he basically grew up on the

streets.

I think they do have a, at this point they're very displeased with Trump and with how things have turned out.

This makes me think of when Mike Hayden formed.

What do they want him to do?

Well, they wanted to reset everything.

There was a great report in BuzzFeed actually about how the Russians delivered this memo to the State Department and were like, okay, let's fix everything.

Let's be friends.

Let's just have an immediate reset right now, right away.

And of course it went nowhere because the very establishment, the foreign policy national security establishment that's so suspicious of and loathes Russia so much that the Russians were trying to circumvent has now tied his hands.

So what you're seeing on Russian state media, which is this kind of reflection of what's coming out of the Kremlin, is Trump is weak.

His hands are tied.

He is Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians.

I think they would also at this point, I'm not, I don't know that they ever thought that there was a grand deal to be done, because I suspect that their contempt for Trump is of long standing.

But I think they would like to screw us up.

And it seems to me there's plenty of evidence for that.

And to the extent that you can turn Americans on one another

and get them fighting each other over stupid stuff

and call into question the legitimacy of their elections, and you can expose the sham that is American democracy in their eyes, all good.

All good.

Even if there isn't a a deal to be had with Trump.

One of the things that I've been wondering a lot about is how sophisticated was the interference in the election?

I feel like I hear two stories, each of which could be, either of which could be plausible.

One, that this was a bunch of black hat kiddies throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and lucking into a really effective cyber attack on the U.S.

election.

And the other, that this was an ingeniously masterminded scheme puppeteered by Putin himself that

laser-targeted several American precincts and had an impact on the election of unprecedented scope.

And which of those stories is true?

Probably neither, I would think.

I mean

I would say first,

an operation of this scale and significance going right at American political processes had to have been approved by Putin.

So they would not, you know, the king didn't know.

He for sure knew.

Part of the Russian intelligence style, as with some other intelligence agencies, is you try lots of stuff.

And you try lots of people.

You use, the meeting that they had with

Jared and was it Don Jr.

was very typical.

Use a cutout to a cutout to a cutout.

And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

That's classic sort of KGB style.

Try lots of stuff.

And if something works, it works.

If it doesn't work and they shout, so they shout.

And who cares?

And there's also the problem with figuring out

where on the spectrum this actually lay is the fact that the Russians always build plausible deniability into these kinds of operations, like they did, for example, with the annexation of Crimea or the invasion of eastern Ukraine.

You had a bunch of guys there who were all just

on vacation, you know, and just fighting during their vacation time, right?

And of course, and of course, then it turned out with some digging that they were active duty military officers who actually were technically on vacation but were forced to sign off, that they were going on leave, da-da-da.

So you have, for example, here, you have hackers who

probably were not, again, we don't know this 100%.

Somebody knows this, but it's probably highly classified.

Most likely what happened is that a lot of these hackers were

not, you know, GRU officers with epaulettes sitting in a basement somewhere and clacking away at a keyboard.

It's probably mercenaries who will hack for the highest bidder, people who have run afoul of the law, which in Russia is pretty much everybody, and that you can blackmail into working for you and then you can say, well, I don't know who that guy is.

And a lot of times you don't know who that guy is.

Like I mentioned, there were Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear went into the DNC servers and Fancy Bear didn't know that Cozy Bear was there and Cozy Bear didn't know that Fancy Bear was there.

Like Elliot said, you're trying lots of different things.

As for whether Vladimir Putin closely coordinated this, that's unlikely given his management style and the kind of Russian management style.

The way he operates is he kind of gives a signal.

It could have even been as slight as

that Hillary

really don't like her, wouldn't like to see her be president.

You know, it could have been very vague.

And then everybody below him starts scurrying and interpreting that signal and trying to please his or her immediate boss, and it kind of trickles down this giant bureaucratic

pyramid that's also an octopus, if you can imagine.

Doesn't a version of that happen when the president tweets here in the U.S.

The pyramid octopus?

By the way.

But because it's a pyramid, one tentacle doesn't know what the other tentacle is doing because it's not a head, it's a pyramid.

Okay, I'll say that.

All right.

Yeah.

This is harder on a podcast, obviously, than in a magnet.

So let me switch a little bit here and talk about what hasn't happened yet.

Because one of the remarkable aspects, and you've written about this in the Atlantic, a lot of people have talked about this.

One of the remarkable things about the first 252 days or whatever it is of the Trump administration that we've just experienced is that

nothing

cataclysmic has happened in the world.

We're getting closer and closer to North Korea.

We're getting below bar, don't you?

Well, no, no, no, but wait, let me explain what I mean.

In other words, we're getting closer and closer to North Korea, and I want to come to that in a minute.

But the wounds and the dramas and the catastrophes of the Trump administration so far are mainly self-inflicted, Twitter-inflicted, et cetera, personnel.

So the question is,

so the question is, if

Vladimir Putin decides that

he really wants all of Moldova, which is not in NATO, wants all of Moldova back in his reconstituted Russian Empire and makes the same sort of moves that he made in Ukraine,

How does this administration, this administration you described as incoherent in its foreign policymaking and defense policy making, how does it respond?

And then let's take it up one further level to a threat against a NATO ally, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia.

What if he, as we know that they have designs on these countries, they belong back in the fold?

So what do you think the, I'm asking you to speculate a little bit, what would the reaction be within this administration?

Trump's instincts, you're suggesting, would be totally diametrically opposite the instincts of some of the generals

who we see around him.

Well, first thing to say, you just can't tell because Trump is Trump.

And it's a mistake to think that any of his personal relationships are anything other than completely transactional.

If Putin does something to harm him, tomorrow morning,

Putin will be a monster.

But that's the question.

Does Trump consider that an affront to America?

If it somehow becomes an affront to his dignity or to his sense of who he is,

then yeah, I mean he'll lash out.

I mean, look, he'll lash out at disabled people, he'll lash out at war heroes, he'll lash out at all kinds of people you wouldn't expect him to.

On what could happen, I mean, I'll tell you what my worry is.

I think for the Russians,

for Putin in particular, but not just Putin, the big issue is this.

They can live with the end of the Cold War for sure.

They can live with the end of the Warsaw Pact.

They can even, to some extent, live with the end of the Soviet Union, although I haven't met many Russians who don't think the Ukraine is

part of Russia.

What they have a lot of trouble living with is the legitimacy of a North Atlantic treaty organization that continues to exist.

And it seems to me that the, I mean, yes, there'll be stuff in places like Moldova, but the big issue will be is if there is some sort of attack of a somewhat ambiguous kind,

Say on one of the Baltic states.

That state invokes Article 5.

An attack against one is an attack against all.

And there isn't a decisive response of some sort.

That's it for NATO, and that's it for the pillar of post-World War II American foreign policy.

By the way, the issue is not just us.

The last poll that I saw of German public opinion on this was, you know, 70% of the German population saying they didn't think Germany should be willing to use force to support one of the Baltic states in the event of a Russian attack.

That's a big problem.

What would actually happen?

I don't know for sure.

How does the president not trigger Article, but respond to an automatic triggering of Article 5?

When he went to Brussels to dedicate this monument, the 9-11 monument, which, by the way, that's the one time Article V has been invoked.

It was invoked by the Europeans to support us after 9-11.

He very deliberately, apparently,

deleted from his speech a reference to Article 5, which had been put in there by the folks on the NSC staff.

And that's very troubling.

So things like that kind of obviate the need for Putin to go into the Baltics or into Moldova.

I think the other factor here is that

just like in the election interference that we saw, they're very flexible and they don't need everything.

You know, this is they,

apparently the term for this is escalate to de-escalate, right?

They start with a maximalist position and then they're happy to take 15% if that's what they can get.

So they don't need to take Moldova.

Incorporating Moldova or even the eastern two provinces in eastern Ukraine is very expensive, as they learned with Crimea.

They're better off having frozen conflicts there, which therefore make them technically ineligible to join NATO, because you cannot join NATO if you have a territorial dispute within your borders.

So now Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova cannot join NATO.

Mission accomplished.

You don't need to actually invade them.

The Baltics,

because of all the public hemming and hawing that we've done,

including reporting that has shown that, you know,

people in the Pentagon are like, well, you know, we don't need to fight to win.

You know, what is Article 5 stipulate anyway?

It doesn't mean that we have to defend them.

It doesn't mean we have to win.

So we can just send in some troops eventually into the Baltics and bog the Russians down, and there will be a frozen conflict in the Baltics.

But we will have fulfilled, technically, our Article V

obligations.

So you don't, you know, if you hear that, if you're Moscow, you don't need to invade them anymore.

One thing

that has to be borne in mind is the context of Russian military reform and increased Russian defense spending since 2008.

When, yes, they defeated the Georgians, but they paid a much higher price than by all any reason they should have.

They've spent a lot more money on their military.

They've engaged in some very interesting reforms.

Russian defense industry is not quite back to where it was under the Soviets, but they produce some pretty good kit.

And if you look, for example, at the Baltic Sea,

What you can see is that actually it would be a little bit difficult for NATO to operate there.

They've got some very sophisticated surface-to-air missiles, which makes it difficult for aircraft to operate over there.

They've got anti-ship cruise missiles, land base, which make it difficult, could make it difficult for ships to operate.

So the military challenge is non-trivial.

The one other thing, though, I'd also say is important to bear in mind.

They've got a lot of problems.

Their economy has not been doing particularly well.

It is based on extractive, it's an extractive economy, so oil and minerals and stuff like that.

Their demography, demographic profile continues to be.

Their bank bank system is collapsing as we speak yeah so um they are not up for a really big war although they do periodically work themselves into a lather about that possibility i wanted to ask you about a prediction made a couple of years ago back in may of 2014 our own david from reviewed a book by ben judah and he writes judah advances two predictions both borne out by the early phases of the crimea crisis so long as putin remains power russia can never evolve into a normal state.

Anything resembling the rule of law would put an end to the organized looting that has so fabulously enriched Putin and his inner circle.

At the same time, Putin cannot afford to push his confrontation with the West to an outright breach.

His entourage of bureaucrats and oligarchs has stashed tens of billions of dollars of ill-gotten gains in Western investments and bank accounts, where the fortunes could be traced and sequestered if the United States government were ever sufficiently provoked.

That's the dilemma of the political crook.

He can store money where it is protected against adverse events at home, or where it's beyond the reach of the the U.S.

Treasury Department, but not both.

Putin leads a brutal regime, but also a vulnerable state.

What do you think of that prediction three years hence?

I think it's pretty much true.

The only thing is that a state that is

that

weak internally and

that is led by a leader who has, you know, in 2012 returned to power clearly and legitimately, even when you're trying to maintain a facade of Western-style democracy, you have to earn your legitimacy in other ways.

And so, you know, if you watch Russian state TV now, you don't see anything about what's happening in Russia.

You only see things

about the Russian commandos in Syria.

You see news about North Korea, about how badly we're doing.

You don't see anything about what's happening domestically.

And so what does that tell you?

And the other thing is there's the rally around the flag effect.

That's very important.

The Crimean annexation gave Putin a giant bump in his ratings, and the Kremlin is addicted to ratings, to poll numbers, rather.

And

ratings, poll members.

Poll members.

They're addicted to polling, and they see it as a kind of democracy, like this weird micromanaged thing.

And it gave a huge boost of legitimacy and popularity to other organs of the state, which have historically been unpopular.

That effect is wearing off right now.

Putin is up for re-election a fourth time in March of 2018.

So, what I would expect to see is another, either Russia insinuating itself into a crisis like North Korea even further, or lashing out in a way that rallies people around the flag and delivers him a resounding victory in March of 2018.

I think, you know, even if, let's say, Putin gets eaten by some Siberian saber-toothed tiger that he's chasing around with a buoy knife,

we'd still have a serious problem.

I mean, I think that his replacement is likely to have a lot of the same attitude.

Some of these are quite deeply rooted in Russia.

And, And if you know something about Russian history,

there are deep veins of Russian nationalist thought that he is tapping.

So those won't go away.

Second thing I would say is part of what we have to worry about is not, and I think this was Julia's point,

is not just that he'll wake up one day and in a very coolly calculated way say, today's the day to drive to Berlin.

I don't think that is likely at all, but that there'll be a series of stupid things and miscalculations and you stumble into crisis.

And

since I'm basically an historian, I've got a profound belief in human stupidity.

And I think what's that isn't that is entirely conceivable.

And it is even more likely because of all the other stuff that's going on in the world.

where you'll have the United States that's distracted both by its domestic politics, but also stuff that's going around all over the globe.

There'll be a lot of factors interacting with one another.

So I think it's important as we think about Russia that you don't simply isolate the Russia problem from all the other stuff that's happening.

Hey, this is Matt in the studio.

We'll get back to the conversation in a moment.

But first, let me put in a quick plug.

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Okay, back to the show.

Questions from the crowd.

Hello.

Thank you for being here.

You've asked a good question about how sophisticated the Russian operation was.

So my question is to Julia, who traveled the country extensively during the election and

knows what was happening and how the electorate was reacting to all the rumors rolling about the candidates.

A lot of tropes about Hillary Clinton,

I assume, they were a result of Russian propaganda.

Is that so?

And if it is, then why are such a large portion of the American population proved to be so receptive to the Russian propaganda?

I should also stipulate that that's my cousin.

And I had no idea that he would be here.

Hello.

It's friends and family night here.

So I, for one, was

surprised to talk to a former Bernie

then-Jill Stein voter in Kent, Ohio,

who came out to hear Bernie stump for Hillary talk about how Hillary surely had Parkinson's, but she seemed to manage it really well with a lot of medications because she didn't have tremors.

But knowing the medications and having seen other people with Parkinson's, they would have made her a zombie.

But she seemed quite sharp, so we don't know how she did it.

But she definitely had Parkinson's.

And so, and this person had gotten this information off of RT.

Russia Today

and didn't care that it was Kremlin sponsored.

I think when it comes to this, you know, like that story landed on very fertile ground because Hillary Clinton has dealt with about 30 years of almost entirely negative press in a certain segment of the, you know, political segment of the population.

So that falls on very fertile ground.

You tell them, Hillary, you know, I had another

Donald Trump supporter tell me that Hillary Clinton went to witchcraft conventions and that she was a witch.

And I had to then ask him, you know, do you know of any spells that Hillary Clinton has cast?

And then I figured, you know, she's lost the election.

But so I think that, you know, the Russians didn't build the proverbial fire.

They didn't put the logs there.

They didn't set them on fire.

They were the bellows,

you know,

exacerbating social tensions.

And I think a lot of that is on us and how well educated our readers are in terms of

how we consume media and how critically and how much we allow ourselves to to be manipulated in this way.

So

I go to magic conventions so I wouldn't be all that surprised by somebody going to witch conventions.

You go to magic conventions?

The combined.

Separate weird, I didn't see you there.

I didn't see you there.

1,200 magicians in Louisville, Kentucky this summer.

Quite a sight.

That's a perfectly entertaining pesta.

All right.

Look, I think

I would put it more forcefully.

She was a terrible presidential candidate.

She managed to look at it.

Was she worse than Trump?

What?

Was she worse than Trump as a presidential candidate?

Would I prefer to have her as president?

Sure.

She was obviously a worse presidential candidate because she lost.

She would have been a better president, but she's a terrible politician.

She's really a terrible politician.

But wait, you don't think that the lies, lies, actual lies, coming from overseas sources did what Julia said?

I don't know if that weren't coming from overseas sources.

But like Benghazi was not a Russian creation.

You know, they didn't make Jason Chaffitz and Trey Gowdy run investigation after investigation on Benghazi.

I mean, I'll be open to that.

And cover it on Fox News every night.

I'll be open to the evidence.

They also, you know, the Russians didn't make her do something which, when I was at the State Department, would have gotten me fired, stripped of my clearances, and handed over to the FBI for prosecution.

Well, we'll never actually, all these counterfactuals, we'll never know the true calibration of this.

Well, we may learn more.

I mean, I think that's a good question.

And that's why I say it's important to be open-minded.

Jim Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said something recently where he indicated that he thought that it might have had an effect.

I will be open to the evidence.

But

from the very beginning, quite apart from, and before any of this Russian stuff came out,

I was saying to friends of mine, not that I thought Trump would win, but that I thought it was a serious possibility.

Both because of her weaknesses as a candidate and because of all the other stuff that had been happening in the country and because Trump does have that feral instinct for weakness and vulnerability and he played to a lot of those.

So I think it would be a mistake, I'd say, to say this was an election that was stolen by the Russians.

I don't think so.

I mean, there's enough other bad stuff the Russians have done, like murdering people.

Yeah, a lot of this is on us.

Stay tuned for what happened by Elliott Cohen coming in February.

What happened by

what also happened?

So given that Russia has effectively been able to attack the U.S.

and would be able to do a similar attack on other Western-style democracies, I don't feel like we've seen much of an effective international response to this.

Has there been an international response to the Russian-U.S.

interplay?

And can there be an effective international response to this?

So the first thing I think it's important for us to acknowledge, not that I think this is true,

the way the Russians think about this, and you can see it in the writings of the Chief of the General Staff and other military experts, is they think that they're only doing to us in an inferior way what we did to them, particularly in the Ukraine.

That's how they read it.

That we are the ones who are the sinister, incredibly clever manipulators of domestic politics with our so-called free press and our non-governmental organizations and Goldberg and Thompson and all of them.

They really believe that.

And I think one has to take that one has to take that seriously.

You know, the French, I think, and the Germans were both very alert to Russian interference in their elections.

It will be interesting to go a little bit more deeply into why we got the result we got in Germany just now, where the right-wing party did much better than I think people expected.

And again, the explanation may be purely in internal German politics.

It would also not surprise me if there's an element of Russian interference.

You know, I think the best cleansing agent, as is usually the case, is sunlight.

And

the more quickly and the more thoroughly you expose this, you cover it, you demonstrate it, the more you inoculate yourself against it.

I will say that the Russians, by the way, have already warned their citizens to be alert for American interference in their upcoming presidential elections.

And they're about to kick Facebook out of their country, which I think is pretty funny.

You're very, very dark.

I've got to throw out one more question from our third co-host, Alex Wagner, who could not be here with us tonight, but sends this.

She says.

So my question is for, I guess, Julia, but anyone else who cares to answer this question.

There's been a lot of talk about the relationship that our president may have had with unknown, unnamed Russian oligarchs who may have been looking to clean their assets, if you will.

I think the formal term is money laundering.

And I wonder whether any of you could shed some insight into sort of the relationship Russian oligarchs have to the U.S.

business world and the feasibility of something like that even happening.

So I think I would not be surprised if the Russia investigation resulted in money laundering charges or corruption charges, and if we discovered that Donald Trump's real estate empire in New York and Florida, such as it was, was

a laundromat for Russian dirty Russian money dirty Chinese money dirty Gulf money etc

if if you're in the Russian elite most likely you have gotten your money through illegitimate and illegal ways most likely

for any lawyers present

and if you have gotten the money that way that means somebody else can get it from you in that same way that means you have to get the money out.

And what's the best way to get your money out is to park it in real estate.

This is why half of London is owned by the Russians, half of Geneva is owned by the Russians, a lot of New York, a lot of Miami is owned by the Russians who don't actually live there.

It is just a way to get their money away from other people who can steal it from them the way they stole it.

Real estate is a very good way of laundering money.

I suppose we do have that statement by, I forget whether it was Eric or Donald, that there's Russian money in the Trump organization.

We also know that the New York Bank stopped lending to him to Trump a while back because he didn't have such a great reputation as a customer.

The main thing I would say is: look, is there any of this where you'd say, no, I just refuse to believe that Donald Trump would be party to something like that?

No.

And with that, it is time for us to turn to our always closing segment of Radio Atlantic Keepers.

What have you heard, read, watch, seen, experienced recently that you would like to not forget?

Jeff, let's start with you.

What would you like to keep?

Over

a spring break, I took two of our daughters to Ukraine, because that's the way we roll.

The

second prize, you can't even imagine, right?

But

I wanted them to see a bunch of different things in Ukraine, my Don in Kiev, and understand what was going on there.

And then we drove down and did a bunch of other things things and got to Odessa.

And I told them that I wanted them to go to Odessa because it's a great center of Jewish literature, Russian literature, Isaac Babel, and all the rest.

But actually, it's

this is brought to my mind by the fact that

we were preparing to do this topic.

There's a restaurant in Odessa called Dacha, which is in a Dacha, actually,

and it serves the best potato pancakes that I've ever had.

And we drove from Kiev to Odessa just to get latkes.

And thinking about Russia today just got me thinking about how I would love to go back to Odessa to get more latkas.

That's really, that's it.

That's it.

Sorry.

That's all I got.

Unforgettable potato pancakes.

Elliot.

I'm really glad you said that, because I was afraid that what I'm about to say might sound silly.

Wait, you know, you haven't eaten these latkas.

Okay, so just trust me.

All right.

So this is actually an experience I had last night.

And it really,

I want to hold on to this feeling.

I was able to get into pigeon pose for five full yoga breaths.

And

I got to my feet under my own power.

And I still had sensation in my right leg.

And that may not mean much to you, young man, but when you get to my age, it's a big deal.

Congratulations.

Elliot Cohen, esteemed author and yoga.

Julia.

And magician.

Congratulations.

Because this is a Russia panel, I'm just going to bring it down many notches to, you know, a really dark place.

I actually happened to turn on the TV this afternoon and saw Otto Warnbier's parents on CNN

talking about the experience of welcoming their son home from North Korea and not being prepared to see the condition he was in.

You know, they said he had his head shaved, a giant scar covering the top of one of his feet.

His father said that it looked like somebody took a pair of pliers and rearranged his bottom teeth, and that he was jerking around and like making these crazy howling sounds.

And it just struck me as

by the time we discover

a thing like that, that kind of texture of what actually happened when history ran over a small person,

the spotlight has generally moved on and we don't think about how these grand world historical events affect small people on the ground.

And it really reminded me of

probably the best book I've read in the last decade, which is Svetlana Alexievich's Second Hand Time,

about what it was like to go through the Soviet collapse and what it left in its wake.

We just think, oh, it happened, 1991, you know,

down came one flag, up went another, and she just goes through and interviews people who just share the very kind of fine texture of their lives and what it, what history feels like on the ground on a very personal level.

Man.

Sorry.

It's okay.

It's okay.

No, no, no.

It's the full range of human potato-based and yoga-based emotion here.

It's fine.

One day,

Vladimir Putin will not, no longer be the leader of Russia.

He'll be the leader of the United States.

And the question of who will next lead Russia will be upon us all.

I mean, many people are asking about this now.

And I'm curious if any of you on stage, or if any of you in the audience, have heard of the rule of bald hairy.

Bald hairy?

Anyone?

Yes, got a couple takers over here.

So, bald hairy is a pattern in Russian rulers that goes back, if you believe them, it all the way to 1825.

The legend goes that a balding Russian ruler will always be succeeded by one with a healthy pate of hair, and vice versa.

So, Lenin, bald.

Stalin, hairy.

Khrushchev, bald.

Brezhnev, hairy.

Andropov, balding.

Chernenko, luscious locks.

Gorbachev, shiny.

Yeltsin, immaculately coiffed.

Putin, balding.

Medvedev, hairy.

Putin, even balder.

If you want to know who's coming next, the clue is in the coiffure.

You heard it here first.

Bald hair.

Thank you, Matt.

Don't forget.

And that'll do it for this live taping of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to all of you for joining us tonight.

Thank you all.

Thanks very much for coming.

Battle Do It for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Katie Green and Kim Lau.

Thanks, as always, to the one and only John Batiste, creator of our theme, whose rendition of the battle hymn will play in full after these credits conclude.

We want to give a special thanks to Julia Yappi, Elliot Cohen, and to the folks at the 6th and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C.

If you've got thoughts, feedback, or questions about Russia, we want to hear from you.

Give us a call at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your contact information.

Once again, that's 202-266-7600.

As always, please look for us at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

And if you like what you're hearing, please don't forget to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

You'll find detailed show notes linked from our episode description.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

We'll see you next week.

Oh,

glory

to

rest under undercoming of the Lord.

He is trampling, defeated with red and threatening swords.

He had lost the faithful lighting of the terrible bliss war.

His troop is marching on.

Glory, glory,

hallelujah.

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

Hallelujah.

Hallelujah.

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