Overtime - Episode #432: Leakers, Bible Study, Trump Polls

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Okay, are we on?

All right, great.

Ralph, was it appropriate for the president to tweet, in America, we don't worship government, we worship God?

Yes.

Why wouldn't it be?

Yeah, I don't get the question.

I mean, it's, you know, I guess.

No one's for us worshiping the government, are they?

No.

Okay, good.

I mean, I'm not for worshiping God, but when I get the

bipartisan.

Yeah, well, no one's.

That's why we write the questions

regularly, and over time we get whatever people send in.

Should reporters be worried that the Trump administration will go after them for their sources as they try to contain leaks?

You mean kind of like Obama?

You mean kind of like Obama did?

Yeah, Obama did.

He did, yeah.

Right.

That's absolutely right.

Obama, get out here and defend yourself.

But you didn't have the Attorney General up on the podium essentially saying they're going to tighten the screws.

I tell you, what's scary is what he was saying in

West Virginia yesterday,

telling that crowd, you know, they're trying to take it away from you.

You know, this is third world stuff

when you start putting that idea in people's heads.

Because

what is going to happen if it comes to that?

Were they going to remove where he is impeached, or they remove him from office, and he don't want to go?

I don't think he's going to go voluntarily.

I think we're getting a little ahead of ourselves.

No, I don't.

What worries me as a reporter?

Is that a guy who's not going to be a little bit more?

I mean, you're talking impeachment?

Well.

Is that the agenda?

Well,

you know,

you need to have a little more evidence than you've got right now.

Well,

you know, when your son takes a meeting with the Russians and the headline on the email from him,

says, you know, we have dirt from the Russian government on your opponent.

Just taking that meeting meeting to me is traitorous.

I don't care what was said at the meeting or if anything came out of the meeting.

By the way, just on that point, and Mr.

Reed, I mean, I've written a lot about Veselnitskaya and that whole affair.

This is a woman who, by her own admission to the Wall Street Journal, has a personal relationship with Yuri Chaika, who's the prosecutor general of Russia.

If Jeff Sessions sent one of his lawyerly minions to a foreign country to feed dirt on an opposition candidate, you bet that that country would raise hell over the fact.

She also was a defense attorney for a Russian money laundering entity accused by the New York Southern District of having received millions of dollars from a notorious tax fraud perpetrated a decade ago.

She's been a lobbyist against U.S.

sanctions.

A Google search on this woman would have told the Trump camp, stay the hell away.

The fact that she got that meeting...

Couldn't agree more.

In a short way, Donald Trump Jr.

has said that if he had to do it over again,

he would have acted.

Yeah, but his father said that anybody would have taken that.

And the point is, she wasn't sent by the Russian government.

She was sent by a bizarre pop music promoter under a false guise that she had.

No, that was who sent Donald.

I can tell you based on my own reporting.

She was the one who sent the email and said, You ought to meet with this.

Out of the non-Republican bubble.

I don't think people believe

until Bob Mueller says that she wasn't sent to the city.

Okay, until somebody has evidence.

All I'm saying is, I'm not defending this woman or saying that the meeting should have happened.

All I'm saying is until somebody has tangible, real evidence that she coordinated with Russian government officials in setting up the meeting, that information harmful to Hillary Clinton was presented, then it's a nothing meeting.

And by the way, there's only one proven evidence of collusion by any foreign government with a campaign or a party during the last election.

And it was when an operative for the Democratic National Committee, this has been reported by Politico, went to the Ukrainian embassy, met with Ukrainian officials, got information damaging to Paul Manaford, leaked it to the media, leaked it to other people, and he was forced to resign as campaign manager because of it.

That was a foreign government and a Democratic National Committee operative that did that.

The information the Ukrainian embassy had came from a Ukrainian reporter who disclosed it, an anti-corruption crusader.

The DNC operative is a Ukrainian-American who is in charge of

the Democratic National Committee.

Correct, but what I'm saying is it came from civil society, not the Ukrainian government.

No, she's not.

And the information happened to be true.

No, that has not been demonstrated to be true.

No, the ledger that was presented has not been demonstrated to be authentic.

And even if it was authentic, this was the influence of a foreign government in a campaign.

And again, it gets back to the selective outrage.

You know, that nobody's upset about that going on, but everybody's upset about Russia.

But it wasn't a foreign government influencing the campaign.

Again, you can find any example of anything in some small degree somewhere else.

Can I read just what the email said that Don Jr.

got?

Very high-level and sensitive information that is part of Russia and its government support of Mr.

Trump.

Russia and its government support of Mr.

Trump.

Yeah.

This is from the pop music promoter, right?

Okay.

Well, but that's only one of eight people out there.

Well, he was a liaison.

You honestly believe that a conspiracy to to have the Russian government collude with the Trump campaign, that the intermediary would be a pop music promoter.

Well, he was more than his father.

But this is how things are done.

It's not Orson, Natasha.

It's not John LeCarret.

Hootin finds semi-anonymous, plausibly deniable people, and they're seconded as emissaries.

By the way, at that meeting was a man called Reinad Akhmeshin.

Reinad Akhmeshin was in the KGB during the Soviet period.

You can read about this in the New York Times.

So a former, quote-unquote, Russian spy attended the meeting with Ms.

Veselnitskaya, which Don Jr.

What information did he provide to anybody?

We don't know.

Quite frankly, I don't trust anybody who's at that meeting because they all say different things.

Vesel Nitskaya denied having a contact with the Moscow.

They all say that.

Veselnitskaya was campaigning against the Magnitsky Act.

Get me out of here.

And yet Jr changed his explanation for taking the meeting and the contents that were discussed therein multiple times he also he also released the emails to the American public and is cooperating fully with all of the New York Times

Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 emails preempted an exclusion

Hillary Clinton claimed that every email that was deleted

just one question just one question Jim Comey has testified that she deleted work in State Department related emails if there was an email from someone in the United States had a campaign that said, hey, there's an Iranian government lawyer or a North Korean government lawyer who wants to come and meet with us to give us shit on Donald Trump.

You and every other Republican in this country would be calling her a traitor.

Okay.

It demonstrates a willingness to collude.

That is what Donald Jr.

did, and his father

writing that explanation was a matter of time.

We would have said the same thing that we said about John Podesta.

John Podesta, when he got spam,

putting his password in and allowing somebody to get his emails, we would have said

that was not a smart thing to do.

It was not a smart thing to have a meeting.

That doesn't make it treasonous.

Okay.

And it doesn't make sense.

We're not going to solve it.

You have no evidence that it is either.

We're not going to solve it.

There's no evidence that it is either.

Let me get off this subject onto something else.

Beyond that, I have no opinion on the matter.

Before I get back to the cards, because we were talking about the Antichrist, I was wondering, and maybe you can answer this for me.

What is the difference between the Antichrist and the devil?

They're not the same person, right?

No, they're not.

They're two different fictional characters.

Well, not, okay, I mean, what?

Religious figures, whatever.

So there's the devil and there's the Antichrist.

But there must be some.

Are they competitive?

Does one work, is one below the...

Is the devil?

Does the devil work for the Antichrist?

Does the Antichrist work for the devil?

What is their relationship?

I want to know.

Did you know that?

I didn't know we were doing a Bible study tonight.

I just want to tell you.

Please tell me the relationship between the devil and the Antichrist.

Okay,

the devil is

the enemy of God and of heaven and of God's people.

He seeks to kill them, destroy them, deceive them.

Okay?

The Antichrist comes along at a stage in history, and we don't know when.

It's in the book of Revelation.

But he acts as a deceiver and an instrument of the devil to deceive people and get them to

works for the devil.

Ultimately.

The devil is on the

chart.

The contract employee.

Kristen, could Trump's approval numbers ever go below 35?

They could.

And part of why I say that is I am no longer in the business of ruling out any possible outcome when it comes to Donald Trump, on the high high or low end.

He still has a lot of support within the Republican Party.

A lot of support.

Yes, he does.

That he has, you know, that when he makes the case that people are out to get him and that's why things have not necessarily all panned out quite as well as he would have said, there are an awful lot of voters that say, yeah, I don't trust the media, I don't trust the government.

This sounds right to me.

And I think that within his own party, as long as he's able to hang on to 60 to 70 percent and maybe keep one out of every five independents.

You hover around that 35 percent.

You know what?

He's doing more than that right now.

I mean,

he's roughly 80 percent among Republicans.

And I can just tell you, Bill, that regardless of what the polls say, I live right next to Georgia 6, which was the most expensive congressional race in history.

$60 million in a congressional race.

This is a district that is not Trump country.

Donald Trump only carried it by 1.5 percent.

That's the general pass off election.

Exactly.

And this is a plus 10 Republican district.

And

so Trump is not necessarily the most popular guy in the district, but he came in, he campaigned for.

Karen Handel did not disassociate herself from him.

He did robo calls for her.

He did a fundraiser for her.

And Karen Handel won by four points.

I think

35% they're asking about.

Here's an interesting stat.

32% of Trump voters think this Don Jr.

meeting didn't take place, even though the source of it is Don Jr.

That,

there's some loyalty there.

But here's something Trump is doing.

He had a rally in West Virginia the other night, and what he did from the stage was essentially say, they're coming after me, they're trying to disempower you and take away your vote.

What he was doing, though, I think was clever.

He was trying to conscript his followers into this Russia scandal and make it about something broader than his possible personal corruption or his family's or his staffs.

He is thinking ahead a couple steps so that if he is indicted or someone close to him is indicted, he is going to have the strength and the following to back him up in a way that Richard Nixon didn't.

Nixon's party abandoned him.

Trump is strengthening that connection with his followers so that he doesn't fall below 70 percent.

Well, at least 60 percent

comes.

I think that he that the Trump team has gone to school on the way Clinton handled his own difficulties.

They look at how they basically made it partisan.

They went after the special prosecutor and they said, this is out to stop my agenda.

And we'll see how this ends.

Do you think that's a good idea?

But that's exactly what we're doing.

And in particular, he studied and talked to Lenny Davis, who was Hillary's pit bull during Bill, during the Whitewater investigation.

They're literally taking the same playbook.

But the other thing to bear in mind is that...

Monica Lewinsky didn't set foot in the White House until two years after the special prosecutor had been appointed.

These are the sorts of things that can spiral and develop.

And so it's possible that at this point in time, there was no collusion and nothing happened.

But if somebody changes their story under oath, that's how you get to the point.

Well, and

this is why special counsels and independent prosecutors are such a bad idea.

Because

it no, there's a reason why the law was allowed to lapse and it wasn't renewed.

Because

when Ken Starr started out investigating a real estate deal in the Ozarks,

and he ended up chasing a blue dress.

Right.

All right, Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to find out who leaked Valerie Plame's name.

On day one, he knew who all three sources were, and he had determined it was not a crime.

And Scooter Libby still got indicted

and convicted.

And I had friends who had to go before the grand jury two, three, four times and ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills.

And what a lot of people don't think about in a moment like this is it isn't just Donald Trump and it isn't just his family members.

They're well off financially.

It's everybody else who gets caught into this dragnet, did nothing wrong, and are borderline bankrupted because of a special prosecutor that goes amok.

I hope it doesn't happen with Bob Mueller.

I understand that he's a stand-up guy and I hope it doesn't happen.

But the history of these independent counsels is not encouraging.

Legal bills are a problem.

I agree, Ralph.

Compared to the survival of the Republic?

No, I'm not sure.

I think, Jesus Christ, I mean, this is what you're worried about.

Legal bills.

No, no, no.

I mean, I'm talking about...

Nothing is perfect.

No, I'm talking about people who were appointed to investigate one thing and they go investigate another thing.

Right, but keep in mind, the special counsel was appointed because President Trump fired the FBI director, and the FBI director said, I took contemporaneous notes because I thought the president was going to lie about the contents of our discussions, and also I felt he was putting undue pressure on me as FBI director to make this whole Russia thing go away.

If they're going to get him on anything, it'll probably be obstruction of justice rather than

conspiracy.

Vladimir Putin has ordered the murder of people.

Absolutely.

Do you think Trump is capable of that?

No.

Do you?

No, I don't think so.

Well, I can tell you, as somebody who studies the...

Because I do.

I think he loves dictators, loves the way they behave, compliments them all the time.

Cece and that nut in the Philippines and Erdogan and Kim Jong-un is a smart cookie.

What do you think?

I think he does.

Do you think Dio is

capable of ordering?

I would not hazard a guess, but I would say that he's capable and likely to fire Bob Mueller if he can at some point.

And the big question over the next one, two, three years is...

Will he have the strength to survive the constitutional crisis that followed?

I don't agree with that, by the way.

I don't believe that he's a good idea.

I think he's going to do extrajudicial assassination.

Yes, do you think he's capable of ordering that if he could?

I think if he thought he could get away with it, he would.

But one thing that we've learned is the resiliency of American institutions has checked this guy tremendously.

That's why he's the man raging in the tower.

Why can't I do what I just want to do?

And we've seen from Republicans more skeptical of Trump than Ralph that in the Senate they've moved to block him from removing Mueller as easily as he could right now by putting in some laws, by

having there be an appeals process in the event that he does manage to get Mueller out.

So, Republicans are worried about

that.

He has no intention of firing Bob Mueller.

As he himself said,

time will tell.

I think it's a relevant fact.

Time will tell.

Thank you very much, everybody.

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