The FRONTLINE Interviews
Greg Miller
The Washington Post
Greg Miller is a reporter covering intelligence at The Washington Post. He was part of a team at The Post that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for its coverage of the U.S. surveillance program revealed by Edward Snowden.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore conducted on Sept. 5, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
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Putin and Hybrid Warfare
… Just talk a little bit about what happened in Crimea and Ukraine and the use of hybrid tactics, the use of cyberattacks, and how, in some ways, it would come to haunt us as well.
What we saw in the 2016 election in the United States is something that Russia had been developing, practicing, exercising for a long time in Ukraine, in Europe and elsewhere.Russia has been developing this capability of using digital tools to interfere, to reach into foreign affairs in a way that was impossible before the Internet era, and to sow instability.There's a larger, bigger-picture goal that Russia has, and then, in some cases, like we saw in the U.S. race, they become more narrow.The larger goals are discrediting democracy, making other countries and their systems look as dysfunctional as the West tries to portray Russia’s systems, just as corrupt, just as broken.
In Ukraine and elsewhere, we saw small-scale exercises, or smaller-scale exercises, where there was a lot of experimenting in the use of messaging, ranging up to cyber intrusions and attacks.That all led up to the 2016 race in the United States, where Russia used all of these capabilities, still I think in an experimental way to a large degree, not really knowing what the impact or outcome or effect would be, but [they] had already gotten used to just trying these things.
The U.S. Response to Russian Measures
The Russians had been playing with this in the United States as well.[Then-Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper said 2015 was kind of raising red flags.1… They see something.The DNC [Democratic National Committee] doesn’t take it seriously; the FBI doesn’t push it forward.What sort of failure was this?Was this because we just couldn’t believe it would happen, or just that it wasn’t as serious as it turned out to be?
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I think that the response to that initial penetration of the DNC, when it was detected, was constrained by a number of things, including the inability to conceive that this would have larger repercussions.I think at the time it was seen in the context of, this is yet another intrusion, another penetration.The State Department had been penetrated; the White House had been penetrated; the Pentagon had been penetrated.2All the time, there is this probing that’s going on, poking around in sensitive systems, pilfering some material.But that usually is the end of it.
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There's a reaction at that moment, like: “Well, we've had the State Department be vulnerable to this and other institutions. Here is the DNC; of course this is going to happen to the DNC. Why should we view that any differently than we viewed these other intrusions?”I think that ended up being one of the regrets for the administration in the end.
Regrets in what way?
In treating this intrusion as if it were the same as those others, as if there were no broader potential for harm here, as something to contain, as something to stamp out and perhaps even confront Russia over, but without envisioning, without imagining the way that Russia might use the material that it got from this particular theft.
Tell us a little bit about it.The DNC finally acknowledges the fact of what's going on and brings CrowdStrike in to take a look at it.… Tell us a little bit about the investigation into it and why people from that point on took it as the truth, that in fact this was the Russian government involved.
The capabilities of organizations like CrowdStrike are pretty sophisticated.In some ways they approximate what the U.S. federal investigative agencies do.In this case, the signatures—I mean, these intrusions, in some ways, were sort of clumsy, right.They were poking around, rummaging around in these networks, not in a completely sophisticated way that would have been designed to obscure or hide the author.I think that there was a pattern in terms of the tools used, in terms of the nature of the probing that they saw, that pointed back to Russia pretty early on.
As of July 2016, [then-CIA Director John] Brennan convenes a secret task force for the CIA, NSA [National Security Agency] and FBI to do what?3Why did—at that point, had it gotten that serious?What are they understanding what had happened that sort of caused them to understand?And what were their goals?
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When Brennan convenes that task force in July, that’s really driven by a breakthrough of intelligence that really rattles him and rattles others inside the CIA.Until that point, the DNC hack looked like any other hack, to a large degree.But at that point in the timeline, the CIA gets intelligence that shows that Putin himself is behind this.Putin himself is authorizing this, directing it, not in a minute-by-minute, “OK, turn your attention to this computer or that,” but he has signed off on this.There is a connection to this operation straight to the top of the Russian government. That’s disconcerting. That is what Brennan sees.That is what alarms him, and that is what leads him to set up a task force to bring in the NSA, to bring in experts from the FBI, because they suddenly feel like this is something they need to take more seriously and try to figure out.
And the goals are to do what?I mean, this is before the DNC, before the release of the information, right?
The goals are to try to understand why this is happening.These are largely analysts who are assembled in this task force.It is basically to try to understand what is happening here. Why is Russia doing this?What do we make of the fact that not only the Russian intelligence services are behind it, but Vladimir Putin is connected to this?
Intervention in the U.S. Election
Putin weaponizes the material that they’ve stolen. Tell us that story.
The main innovation here, the main change that separates what happens in 2016 from prior cases of penetrations by Russians, by the Russian government or Russian intelligence services, or frankly, the Chinese or North Korea or others, is what they do with this information.For years, there has been an expectation that Russia is going to root around in these networks and in systems trying to gather intelligence.In fact, it’s what the United States does in a reciprocal way.
But in this case, Russia takes that information, gathers this, stockpiles it, and then decides to use it, turn it into a weapon against the United States.4It recognizes the damaging potential of this information.Most of the time spy agencies don’t want to use the information they get in an obvious, overt way, because they're all about preserving the access, the tool.Whatever it was that got them inside that secret door, they want to be able to return to that door over and over again.Russia made a completely different calculation in this case.They were willing to obliterate that door in order to take maximum advantage of the material that they got out of it.
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They release the DNC material before the [Clinton campaign chair John] Podesta stuff. They release it before the Democratic convention.How does it poke at the divides within the Democratic Party, within America? Why is it so effective?
The effectiveness of this interference from Russia depends on a couple things.It depends on the polarization of politics in America, to some extent, polarization not between the right and the left necessarily, all the time, but even within the left, right.In this election you had staunch Hillary supporters; you had staunch Bernie Sanders supporters. There were divides.Russia was pushing out material that exploited those divides, that broadened them, that called attention to those divides.It’s just destabilizing, because it is exacerbating these divides that are already there. It’s driving a deeper wedge.
But it goes beyond that.They are also depending on the complicity of mainstream media in the United States, the inability of news organizations to see a dump of material on a place like WikiLeaks and treat it as anything but a repository of titillating information that you can mine for stories.
… The people talk about the divide between the Bernie people and the Hillary people, the demonstrations that were breaking out, and the headache basically that it gave immediately the Hillary folks, who were at the convention trying to talk to all the media saying: “Do you see what's going on? This is the Russians doing this.”And no one wanted to listen.
What this interference does, at that point in the story, in the election, is that it reinforces this perception that angers a lot of people in the Democratic Party, that the establishment part of the party, is behind Hillary, while there is this other highly active wing of the party that is behind Bernie.The material that Russia releases helps to depict this as a rigged game, rigged against the insurgent, always in favor of the establishment.So it worsens it, undermines the trust even within the party itself, from one faction to the next.It prevents them from coming together around a candidate.
Also happening in the summer, besides the hacking, besides the release, is a very troubling pattern of propaganda, fake news, of use of social media to spread and bots to spread fake stories about Hillary’s illness or the pope backing Trump.Talk a little bit about that and some more quivers from Putin’s collection.
The Russian manipulation in the election in 2016 isn't just stealing information from DNC servers and then spilling them out into WikiLeaks.It’s much, much broader.It involves the use of bots, the use of technology, to spread artificial news, what many people call “fake news,” or to amplify news or some story that might have some kernel of truth, but to put a more sinister spin on that and distribute that and push it out.5This really gets at how news is consumed in the United States and elsewhere these days.
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This would not have been possible in an era where people stepped out of their doors to walk down their driveways to pick up a newspaper each and every day.That wasn’t a time when you could manipulate the press the way you can now.Now, people get so much of their information online from Facebook, from social media, from friends, from other sites.The ability to see that media landscape, with so much artificial material, and make it, mask it, with all the accoutrements that people associate with actual, authentic news, is one of the powerful forces in this election.
The Trump campaign, at this point, [was] basically ignoring the intelligence that was out there.There's the famous moment of Trump at the podium calling on the Russian hackers, if they're out there, to look for the 30,000 emails, Hillary Clinton emails that she had deleted.Talk about that, how extraordinary that moment was, what it said, the message sent to Putin, and the message sent to the American public.
When Trump basically prods the Russian intelligence services to keep at it, to keep looking for those supposedly disappeared Hillary Clinton emails, what I remember about that moment is that it was a turning point in the way people looked at Trump, among the agencies that I cover, the CIA, NSA, other U.S. intelligence agencies.Veterans of national security were aghast at that.How could a man who wants to be president of the United States invite an adversary to engage in espionage in that explicit a way?I think that many people had a real hard time hearing that and not seeing that as a betrayal.
… What was Trump’s attitude toward American intelligence services and the information that they were providing the government?
Trump is full of bluster.By this point in the campaign he’s talked about how he knows more than all the generals, these intelligence services.Look how badly they screwed up things in Iraq.He’s been largely dismissive of the work that they do, the functions that they have.He knows very little about it.He’s never, unlike many other presidential candidates, unlike Hillary Clinton, who spent years in the Senate or at the State Department actually seeing classified intelligence reports, Trump has no familiarity with it.He has very little understanding about how these agencies work, and very little regard for them.To him, this is just part of the campaign.They become another foil, the same way that the media is a foil for him.
Sort of an arm of the Obama administration basically: Is that how he sees the intelligence forces?
He certainly has come to see them as an antagonistic entity that has sought to undermine his legitimacy.I think that he sees this Russia story as an effort to depict his surprising election win as artificial.He cares about that more than almost anything.
The U.S. Response to Russian Measures
So the secret envelope story, August.Finally it’s come to the point where Brennan says it's time to go further than we have.Tell us the story of the envelope, the meeting that takes place afterward, why it happens at that point, and what is the concern at the White House.
In early August, this courier is sent from the CIA to the White House with a pretty extraordinary piece of intelligence.This is a report. It’s very brief, and it has specific handling instructions on this envelope.It is to be shared with only a small number of individuals at the White House, five people essentially.
Inside is a report from agency Russia analysts with a breathtaking revelation.The agency has obtained intelligence that shows that Putin is behind this operation.Putin is setting its goals.Putin is not only aware of this, not only in a passive way aware that his intelligence services are out there collecting against American targets, including American presidential candidates, but aware that they're planning to weaponize this information, aware that he has given them authorization to do something with that information that they’ve never done before.
For Brennan, what does this mean?
For Brennan, this is pretty earthshaking.You can see in his reaction—from that moment forward he treats this as a completely different problem.He scrambles to arrange private, one-on-one briefings with every senior member of Congress he can.That’s pretty extraordinary.Usually, if the CIA comes across something significant, they’ll make a trip up, brief the intelligence committees as a group, and proceed from there.He’s looking for one-on-one briefings right away, with everyone who matters on Capitol Hill after he has already gone straight to the White House with this intelligence, almost within hours of its assembly.
What is the reaction of Obama to the information?
Obama’s senior-most officials have told us that he was taken aback by this, that the president was alarmed as well, and that his first impulse was to direct U.S. intelligence agencies to get more.This was information the agency had gotten from extremely sensitive sourcing, and Obama wanted every resource now thrown at this problem, to make sure that they understood, in totality, what was happening here.
And when we talk about the sensitive nature of the sources, this means either electronic or spies on the ground.I mean, this seemed to be at a greater level than figuring out a code within cyber messages.
This isn't forensics, looking back at something and seeing a signature.This is actually what one senior Russia person at the agency described as “getting the crown jewels,” getting inside Putin’s head, at his own intentions, as the leader of Russia.6The way the agency gets there—I mean, when we wrote that story, we had multiple discussions with the government, with the CIA.We agreed to blur some of the detail around that because it was so sensitive.But the importance of this was, Putin, in his own words, Putin’s own involvement, direct involvement in overseeing this operation to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential race.
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… What took place within the White House?How were they viewing what was going on?What were the concerns and the debate?
… There is a growing alarm inside the White House, in the upper ranks of the national security apparatus, about what Russia is doing.It’s becoming more evident, more alarming.It sets in motion a series of very close-held meetings in the White House about what is this?What are we looking at?What do we do about it?But for all of this alarm and concern, there is an oddly halting, hesitant response, at least at that point.I think that one of the main concerns for the White House was that they were acutely aware that this was already a very tense, heated, combative election, and that weighing in, entering that fray in the wrong way with this information would only make that environment worse, would likely leave them open to accusations of interference in the election, which is something they want to avoid at all costs.
And the effect of Donald Trump starting to shout about the fact that these elections were rigged, and that he might not actually support the final results in the end?
… At this point, Trump has already said repeatedly: “You watch. This election is rigged. They're already trying to take your vote away from you, America.”7So he in a way has precluded, or at least complicated, the Obama administration’s ability to handle this problem, handle this crisis, because they're going to step into that.If Obama comes out and goes on television and organizes a speech to inform the country, “Russia is meddling in our election in a way we've never seen before,” well, a lot of people would see that and say: “We know something we didn’t know. We need to do something about that. We need to take that into consideration.”But a lot of other people would have seen that as just proving what Trump had been saying was going to happen.The level of distrust in the U.S. system has reached a point where it’s just as likely that a significant portion of the population would have regarded such a message as interference, as a signal that Obama was trying to steal something from Trump.
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Meanwhile, the intelligence folks are also finding out that another layer of this hybrid war that they're under attack with is states around the country are being infiltrated.8Their electoral systems are being infiltrated.Doesn’t seem like vote counting is involved, but as recent reports from <i>The Washington Post </i>define, the front end, data banks are being affected such that some people are not able to vote, or the system on Election Day gets overheated to some extent in some states like North Carolina, and people give up on voting because it’s closing things down, and it’s slowing everything up.
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Talk a little bit about that and how important that element of the pie was….
When we set out to examine that part of the timeline and the administration’s handling of the Russian interference, and we talked to [then-White House Chief of Staff] Denis McDonough, we talked to [then-National Security Adviser] Susan Rice and others, they emphasized that that was their overriding concern.It’s super important to understand this.After the CIA comes to the White House with the information that Putin is organizing this campaign, theirs is a kind of interference in an American election we haven't seen before.They're starting to look at worst-case scenarios, and the one that is most worrisome to them is the possibility that on Election Day, Russia might use this access, might use its cyber weaponry, to wreak havoc on voting systems.A lot of the energy that the Obama administration put toward dealing with this problem was devoted to determining whether that might happen and how to prevent it. It was a huge consideration for the White House.
They're constrained in multiple ways, their response, ultimately.One, they're really worried about being seen as politicizing intelligence, weighing in into an election with some pretty explosive information and being accused of putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton.On the other hand, they're worried about provoking Putin.They're worried that if they go too far in calling out Russia or challenging Russia or retaliating against Russia, that maybe, maybe, just maybe, Russia is sitting on buttons that it can push on Election Day that will make things even worse.
Talk about the conversation that they have in China.
They decide that Obama needs to pull aside Putin in China at this meeting and have a face-to-face confrontation over it.The pictures from that meeting are pretty extraordinary, when you look back and you realize the words that were exchanged.I mean, this is the most direct warning that one state can deliver to another.The head of the United States, President Obama, is looking down on Putin, and towers over him by almost a full head, looks at him and says, “We know what you're doing, and you need to stop it.”
We were told by those who were there, [who] got a readout from the president shortly afterward, that the thrust of Obama’s message was, “We will regard any interference on Election Day as a severe attack on our system.”The hack of the DNC, there's stuff spilling out on WikiLeaks, it’s already creating a mess.He’s focused in that moment on making sure, trying to warn Russia not to do anything worse.
How, at this point, and certainly this is a developing story, but at this point, how deep into state systems did it seem that they had gotten?What had the intelligence folk found? And why did that add to the worries?
What we know is that state voting systems, several dozen of them had been penetrated or probed.There was a lot of kicking the tires around states systems that looked awfully worrisome.Actual penetrations were far fewer.We’re still only learning the full extent of what Russia might have been capable of on Election Day.But I think that the worry was palpable.
Jeh Johnson’s inability to work with states and to get them to accept help, just tell us a little bit about that story.
As part of the Obama administration’s effort to protect the election, to protect Election Day, to protect voting systems, they tapped Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, to appeal to the states, to try to find ways for the federal government to shore up those states’ defenses, because in the United States, elections are run by states.9The mechanisms, the computer systems, the administration, those are all state enterprises.The federal government has a limited ability on its own to try to take last-minute measures to shore up their defenses.
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Nonetheless, they're asking Jeh Johnson: “See what we can do in this short amount of time. See what we can do.”The response catches the White House off guard.The response is grounded in the divisive political climate of the United States.That mere outreach by the Department of Homeland Security is perceived by many secretaries of state and state voting officials as encroachment, as a secret sort of federal conspiracy, takeover of voting systems, and they want nothing to do with it.I've talked to Jeh Johnson about this moment. He has described the reaction as ranging from hostile to indifferent.
Another dead end they go down is Obama wants a congressional bipartisan letter published that would condemn Moscow to sort of take away the sting of it coming from the White House.But that also fails. Explain what he wanted and why it failed.
Because the Obama administration is so concerned about being accused of politicizing intelligence during the election, they're really reluctant for the president himself to go out on a limb and say: “Look, Russia is doing this. Russia is messing around in our election. They are trying to help Donald Trump.”To the senior White House officials we’ve talked to, that wasn’t going to work.They really wanted this to be a bipartisan statement of condemnation of Moscow’s interference.They again run into political opposition.To me that’s one of the more significant and troubling moments in this timeline, is the effort to send the FBI director, send Jeh Johnson and others to the Hill in an effort to enlist a bipartisan—just to try to put together a simple message that everybody can get around; both parties can sign off on.
The failure to do that becomes a real gut-check moment for us in the United States.It’s a moment when politics and partisan positioning appears to take precedence over national security.In other words, they're so worried about each other, the Democrats and Republicans, as adversaries that they can't get around the idea that there is a bigger adversary.
What was [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell’s specific response to the request?
The intelligence that the CIA got on Putin’s direct involvement in this operation, at the time they got that, they thought, wow, this is going to come in handy, because who can possibly look at this and not see this as a threat to us that needs to be dealt with?The White House officials were stunned that Republicans and McConnell in particular cast doubt, or at least claimed to have doubt about the veracity of the intelligence, about the accuracy of it, about whether it was true that Russia was interfering the way Obama’s spy chiefs were saying it was.10
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The red-phone call, Oct. 31, the attempt to talk to Moscow, to tell them to abandon other plans, [what is] the importance of that?Any part of that story you want to tell?
When Obama confronts Putin in China, it’s one of several moments when the United States and the Obama administration is doing what it can to make clear to Moscow how seriously it takes this issue.Another is the use of the red phone, the use of a communication system that was set up to enable last-minute conversation between Moscow and Washington to avert nuclear war.They actually used that communication system to convey one message, sort of late, as the election is approaching: “We know what you're up to, and you need to stop. We cannot tolerate any interference on Election Day.”They were using that communication system to underline the magnitude of the U.S. concern.
Did the people you talked to feel that they had been successful?
The response from Moscow to that effort was initially just a reply that indicated they’d received the message.Then, days later, a more fulsome reply came, which basically said: “We don’t know what you're talking about. We’re not interfering in your election. You guys need to stop accusing us of being the source of all your problems.”
By the end of September, what was the attitude at the White House?What was Obama’s decision about going forward?
By the end of September, it’s increasingly looking bleak that there is going to be any kind of bipartisan aspect to whatever response the United States can assemble, so they start to think about, well, what can we do short of that?If we can't accomplish that, if we can't get a statement from all the top Republicans and Democrats on this together, what can we do?Obama still doesn’t want this to be in his name.He enlists his intelligence chief, James Clapper, and his Homeland Security chief, Jeh Johnson, to put out a statement in their names, hoping that that will be perceived as less partisan than if the president had done so himself.
Before we get to the Oct. 7 story, though, by the end of September, the White House had basically ruled out also retaliation against the Russians?… What was that—a little bit about the debate, and by the end of September, what was the attitude toward that?
There were intense debates, and often frustrating debates, inside the White House throughout this August and September time frame.At the higher levels of the National Security Council, they're meeting on Russia. They're trying to figure out what's happening.But at lower levels, they’ve been instructed to try to come up with ideas.What should the U.S. do in response?There are lots of proposals for really aggressive countermeasures here.There are ideas [ranging from] the United States ought to retaliate in kind, embarrass Putin, release information that will show where he’s hidden his offshore accounts, where he’s hiding the millions he’s made while serving as the president of Russia to cyber measures that would take down parts of a grid temporarily.I think the one that got the most consideration was the imposition of further sanctions on Russia’s economy, because this is seen as, short of war, the most effective weapon the United States has in its arsenal.The U.S. economy dwarfs Russia’s.The U.S. can use that as leverage and inflict heavy penalty on Russia, and in fact had done so over Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.
But in this stretch, in this pre-election period, the White House and President Obama in particular have basically decided, by September, they're not going to respond before the election.There's not going to be any retaliation.One of the main reasons is, they're worried about what Moscow might do. You end up in a game of chicken with Moscow is the worry.You end up giving Russia an incentive to raise their game, to come after voting systems on Election Day.That was the outcome that the Obama administration most wanted to avoid.
We seem to have lost that game of chicken.
That’s one of the problems with the game of chicken in this context.Cyber conflict is such a new phenomenon that the rules and philosophies that evolved that help shape nuclear posturing, we’re nowhere near that far along in understanding escalation cycles.In fact, one of the worries for the White House was, when they contemplated various kind of cyber measures, was whether they could really be guaranteed that those countermeasures would be contained, wouldn’t create cyber or digital wildfires that would spread beyond the intended targets and make things so much worse.I think that there are many people in the Obama White House who do believe that they lost that game of chicken with Vladimir Putin.
So the Oct. 7 story.3:30 in the afternoon, the DNI released the statement on Russia’s active measures.[What were] the expectations, and what were the results?
On Oct. 7, when the nation’s top intelligence official and top Homeland Security official release a statement, it’s a pretty extraordinary moment.11I can't think of another one like it in the middle of an election, to have the nation’s spy chief basically say, “Russia is interfering in our election, and this is something we've never seen before.”I think the White House expected this to be a clarion call, expected the public to see the significance of this, to understand that this is a very, very big deal.
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But in this crazy political season, that story is overtaken within hours by more craziness.<i>The Washington Post</i>, one of my colleagues obtained that same day the tape, the infamous <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape, in which Donald Trump talks about groping women.12That story is posted online just shortly after the release of that October statement, and it’s like an avalanche.The news, the warning, that the Obama administration was desperately trying to convey with that statement ends up at the bottom of that avalanche.
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And you’ve got a half an hour later the WikiLeaks dump of the Podesta emails.
And you have a WikiLeaks dump, the Podesta emails.You also have, I think, a hurricane somewhere in the mix. It literally was a perfect news storm.It wasn’t perfect for the Obama administration, because here was a moment when they're finally moving out into the open with what they’ve been sitting on, what they’ve known is happening for a long time.They finally bring themselves to call out Russia in a public way, and almost nobody hears it. It’s drowned out.
… Is this just also a failure of a willingness to make sure that the message gets out?
There are several problems that undermine the message.Obviously, one is just what happens in the immediate aftermath with the release of the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape and so forth.The other part of it is, you're leaning on your nation’s intelligence chief to deliver this message, and Homeland Security chief. These guys are not guys who are set up to go out on a campaign to call attention to an issue like this. Their putting their signatures on a document is a pretty substantial thing in and of itself.They're not part of the communications office of the White House.So part of it is just the decisions that are made inside the White House on how to handle this messaging, blunt its impact, blunt its reach.
… Even after the DNI report goes away, and after the sex scandal goes away, you’ve still got the drip, drip, drip of the Podesta emails.13How does Trump use it? How does he weaponize it in some ways himself?And how does the campaign deal with this accusation that you're using Russian intelligence leaks to make your point during the campaign?
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Trump’s willingness to exploit this situation, to use these materials on WikiLeaks, to use all these emails, all of these embarrassing revelations about Podesta and others, really compound the impact.Russia couldn’t have envisioned that it would have a candidate willing to do that.That is a huge factor in the overall impact on the election.If Russia does this and releases these emails on WikiLeaks, and news organizations might sift through it and write these stories, that’s one thing.When you have a candidate out there, day after day, calling attention to WikiLeaks, calling attention to what's in those emails, praising the Russian effort behind them, or at least prodding Russia, daring Russia to keep at it, is really goes beyond what I think most Americans had come to think of as possible in a presidential race.14
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I think that, well—
[Sebastian] Gorka just told us a half hour ago that every campaign uses damaging information about their opponents.15There's nothing new here. This was information that was already released. It was on WikiLeaks.Of course he’s going to use it. Any candidate would use it.
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I think it’s true that in politics, every candidate, to some degree or another, is using opposition research, a lot of that material probably gathered in ways that would make many of us blush.But the idea that you had a candidate for president of the United States willing to exploit a material purloined by not just an adversary, but for many Americans, for decades and decades, <i>the</i> adversary, Russia, was astonishing.I think that it’s something that national security officials in the United States that we talked to couldn’t fathom. Why would he do that?
His rationale for it was all over the place.On the one hand he’s saying, “Oh, who knows if it’s Russia?,” casting nothing but doubt and scorn on the idea that Russia would do this; on the other hand, prodding Russia to keep at it, find those additional Hillary emails.It’s a threshold moment in American politics, and not a proud one.
When Trump wins the election, what's the view within the White House, that they completely blew it? They missed their opportunity to act? …
One of the really important things to understand here is that throughout all these deliberations inside the White House and elsewhere about what to do about this Russian interference, in the back of everyone’s mind is this idea: “Well, this is all inevitably leading to a Hillary Clinton victory.She’s going to win. She’s going to be in a position to deal with the aftermath of this.Therefore, the Obama administration doesn’t have to bear the brunt of that, and maybe shouldn’t, because we’re coming up on a transition.”
That calculation is scrambled the day after the election.You can talk to Obama officials who will insist that they carried about their work, and just as professionally the day after Trump’s victory as they might have under a Hillary administration.But you can see the impact on their faces.You can see the impact across other agencies.
It creates a new pressure, a new imperative, that the Obama administration has to now act, because there is no Obama administration part three, right.There is no Hillary Clinton administration looming that can deal with this cleanup.
And the sanctions that eventually, from Hawaii, Obama announces, they seem somewhat toothless, or at least that's a lot of what the critics say.They really were minimal, compared to, for instance, the sanctions after Ukraine.Why such a limited response? …
You get different versions and different explanations and different rationales for why those sanctions that Obama finally announced in late December were not more aggressive, were not more robust.I think that the contrast with what the administration had done after Russian intervention in Ukraine is, to me, the most striking.It was the hardest thing for Obama administration officials that we talked to to try to explain.How can it be that, after Russia intervenes in Ukraine, you hit them with economic sanctions that take a measurable dent out of the Russian economy?Oil prices are plunging, and there are other factors there, but Russia’s economy takes a measurable hit.
The sanctions that were announced in late December aren’t even designed to inflict that kind of pain.Why would you have a retaliatory measure so severe after Ukraine, and so much lower, so less intense, less painful for Russia, after interference in the U.S. election?
Putin and Trump
Dec. 29, you covered the [Michael] Flynn story as well.Tell us the major points of the Flynn story. …
As the Obama administration is trying to calibrate the sanctions, the penalties it’s going to impose before Obama leaves office, in late December, I think one of their considerations is, “Well, we can't go too far here, because if we go too far, then the next White House is just going to repeal them.”They were trying to come up with a formula where you could point to some pain that they were inflicting on Moscow, but not go so far as that President Trump would pull the plug on all of that the second he is sworn in.
You can see that Moscow is watching all of this from afar and trying to gauge where things are headed and feeling pretty good about it.Knowing that Trump has been elected, all the nice things he keeps saying about Putin is one part of it.But then you have other really important figures in his emerging administration who also share this—“affection” might be too strong a word, but desire to improve relations with Moscow, and Michael Flynn is one of those.
Just as these sanctions are being announced by the Obama administration, of course Russian ambassador [Sergey] Kislyak is going to reach out to the Trump team: “What are you guys going to do about this?”That call goes to Mike Flynn, the guy who’s going to be Trump’s national security adviser.16And he takes this call.He’s on vacation in the Dominican Republic.He takes the call.Of course the sanctions have come up.They come up in that conversation.
16
What he does is he sends a signal of reassurance: “We’re going to revisit this. We’re going to take a look at this. Sit tight. Don’t worry about it.”Now, there's still this huge question that looms over all of this: To what extent does that account for the fact that Putin does not retaliate?Russia always retaliates.We’re caught right now, as we do this interview, in a cycle of retaliatory expulsions.They kick out a bunch of U.S. people working at American embassies there.They do the same here.Back and forth.That’s a cycle that’s been in place for decades.But weirdly, bizarrely in this case, Putin doesn’t follow that script.We still don’t know quite why.I think it’s safe to assume that he thinks better days are coming.He’s going to wait this out, see how this plays out with this new administration.He has a reason to think that things will be better for him.
Now this doesn’t work out very well for Michael Flynn. Let’s jump to that.… Just describe the rest of that story and why Flynn has to resign, and the hole it leaves in the Trump administration.
Flynn was really important to Donald Trump as a candidate.He was the most senior person in uniform out there campaigning for Trump throughout a campaign in which Trump was having trouble enlisting real meaningful support from people with stars on their shoulders.Flynn felt burned by the Obama administration.He had been pushed out of his job as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and was really bitter about it.He was willing to campaign for Trump in a really intense way.
It looked like he was going to be in line for a really important job in this White House.He would have been the one in the president’s ear, day after day after day on national security issues.Hard to think of a more important, more influential position.One of the weirdest mysteries to me is why he squanders that the way he does.We witnessed that firsthand at the <i>Post</i>, because we were pursuing this story for a while.We’d had sources saying: “Flynn talked about sanctions with this guy, with the Russian ambassador in this call, and he’s out there saying he didn’t. It doesn’t add up. What's going on here?”
When you look back, it just seems almost inexplicable why Flynn doesn’t just come clean at the outset: “Yeah, of course the Russian ambassador called me that day.Of course he wants to know what we’re going to do with sanctions. That’s his job.And what I told him was, ‘Yeah, there's a time and a place to have that conversation.’”Everything would have gone away, and he would have settled into his position as national security adviser.
Weirdly, he catches himself in a lie.To this day, to Donald Trump, when Trump talks about this, it’s not the conversation that Flynn has with Kislyak that was the problem; it is Flynn’s dishonesty about that, and his own conversations with Vice President Pence and others inside the White House.
… Jan. 5, the DNI report is released, with the nonclassified version.17And the next day, on the 6th of January, Clapper, Brennan and Comey go up to Trump Tower, and they brief the incoming president.A few days later there's a press conference where Trump reluctantly admits the fact that the Russians are involved.… Take us to that moment, though, the fact that the intelligence services have to go to him; they show him everything, the full monty, basically; and the reaction that Trump gives.
17
That Jan. 6 meeting at Trump Tower is one of the more extraordinary moments of any initial period in any administration I can think of.Obviously, there was the tension over the Russia issue itself, but it went beyond that.You have the top intelligence official in the United States, the CIA director and the FBI chief all traveling up to meet an incoming president, who has been doing nothing but disparaging their agencies, disparaging the work they do, basically depicting them as cops who can't shoot straight on any subject.
They're already loaded for bear going into this meeting.Then you layer on top of that the fact that what they are really trying to accomplish in this meeting is to impress upon this new president the full significance of the Russian interference in the election in a way that he can't wriggle out of.They bring up all of the most sensitive intelligence that they can put on the table to make a case that is, in their view, irrefutable, and they lay this out for him.
The weird thing is that it works, but it only works temporarily.Trump’s behavior after that meeting is noticeably different.He stops being so dismissive of this, and then grudgingly kind of acknowledges: “Yeah, looks like Russia did interfere in the election.They didn’t help. Of course they didn’t help. They had no significance in my landmark victory. But yeah, they interfered.”That wears off as the weeks and the months go by, until they are sort of back where they began.
It’s pretty remarkable to have those three people who have decades and decades, maybe more than a century of experience in intelligence and law enforcement at the highest levels of the U.S. government trying to make this case with an incoming president, and succeeding, but only succeeding for a couple of weeks.
Let’s talk about a couple of the events around the collusion question.In general, the collusion cases that are ID’d, and we’ll talk about a couple of them very specifically, your take on them. …
All of these connections that we’ve learned about between Russian individuals, Russians with affiliations of intelligence services and associates of Trump and associates of the campaign, tell us a number of things; one, that when you look at Russian interference in the United States and its intelligence collection efforts, they're all over the place.It is a multipronged—it is constantly probing, constantly poking, looking for vulnerabilities.Where can we push? Where can we get through? Where can we get inside?They cast a wide net.
It looks, at least at this stage, based on what we know about these encounters, like many of those very close to Trump, including members of his family, were perfectly willing to entertain those possible connections, to entertain that possible help.18I think we’re a ways from knowing definitively the answer to the collusion question that looms over this whole story.But I think already, it’s clear, through all of these interactions, that you have two sides who are, at a minimum, willing to entertain cooperation, to subvert an American process.
18
The June 6 meeting or the June meeting, whatever date it is, in Trump Tower with Don [Trump] Jr. and [Jared] Kushner and [Paul] Manafort, with the two Russians, the emails that come out that show that he, Don Jr., was willing to meet with them, even though the way it’s sold is that these are folks that are able to connect you to Russian government authorities that have damaging information on your adversary, and they would like it to come out because they're interested in helping your campaign.Talk a little bit about that June meeting, what the message is from it.
… I think sometimes it’s hard for the public to understand these points on the timeline.Here you don’t have a known Russian intelligence officer walking out of the Russian Embassy here in the United States and going to some park to sit down with Donald Jr.These are really indirect contacts.These are people with murky connections back to the Kremlin.Nevertheless, they're reaching out to the very highest levels of the Trump campaign, saying, “We can help you,” setting up a meeting, “We have stuff that will be of assistance to you and your father in helping to defeat Hillary Clinton.”19
19
I think that that one of the things that you take from what happened in that meeting in particular is that the Trump campaign, and even senior members of the Trump family, regard that as not troubling.See, that offer is tantalizing, not troubling.
And you’ve got Manafort … and Kushner, who will go on to play a very important role.I mean, it seems to be throughout the—
Over and over again, I think the story you see, you see a willingness to take meetings, to have discussions, to discuss subjects, whether it’s Flynn, whether it’s Kushner, whether it’s Don Jr., willingness to talk about things with Moscow that many would consider troubling, including many senior establishment figures in the Republican Party find troubling.Then you have this other pattern that plays out over and over and over again.Rather than getting in front of this at any time, at any point, and acknowledging these contacts, explaining them before they surface in news reports as clumsy or misguided meetings or conversations, they're always forced to explain this only after they’ve been thrust out into the open by some news story.So they're always chasing.
They're always chasing?
I mean they're always following. They're always trying to clean something up.Even their efforts to clean it up are so problematic that they often make it worse.
The other meeting that’s of interest to us is the Dec. 1 meeting about the looking for the back channel, Kushner looking for the back channel. …
As the story is unfolded, you find yourself confronting situations where you can't really figure out, are they doing this out of lack of experience, or is there something more sinister hidden here?That Kushner meeting is a perfect example.20I mean, here he is, in a meeting, in Trump Tower, with a Russian ambassador, where they're discussing not only how to have a productive flow of communication between the still-forming administration and Moscow, but how we can do it in secret.I mean, why do you need to have it in secret?What is the reason that you have to have this discussion in secret?You're going to be in office in a matter of weeks.You’ll have all the secure communications gear you can ever dream of.You can have all those conversations with all those Russian generals if you can just wait a little while.Why would you need to go to suggest—and raise the possibility of walking into a Russian Embassy or a consulate and using Russian secure channels?
20
How do you interpret that? It’s confusing.Of course Kushner and others will just say: “Well, that’s just naivete. There's just a lack of understanding of how these things work. We’re just new to this game.”Oh, if that’s so, how does that speak to your qualifications to handle the Middle East portfolio, right?You're giving people enormous responsibility, significant jobs with a lot at stake.Then you're explaining away a lot of mistakes based on naivete, inexperience or just, in some cases, stupidity.
Lastly, what did Putin get out of all this? …
Putin’s motivations shifted over time in the election.Initially they were to sow instability, to destabilize, to discredit basic American mechanisms of democracy, to make America look bad.But I think that in the end, what he gets out of this is a more mixed bag.On the one hand, he doesn’t get relief from sanctions, at least; in fact, it’s heading in the opposite direction.
Whatever aspirations he had at entering some new sanctions-free relationship with the United States, that appears like that’s not going to happen.But on the other hand, the damage to American confidence and public confidence and our basic democratic processes I think is hard to even calculate at this point.We’re living in an era now that is awash in fake news, where people can dismiss facts because of their political inconvenience, where the president of the United States can disparage all of the most important institutions of national security, judges, CIA, FBI, can fire an FBI director.Putin may never have thought it possible to make America look so feckless, to make America look so dysfunctional, as it often seems to appear now. …
The big story of the Russian story, and some people have defined it as this cloud that has befuddled the administration, prevented them from following through on their agenda.… Comey was fired leading to obstruction of justice issues being thought about, leading to Mueller, leading to an unraveling.
It’s really hard to see how Trump’s handling of this issue has at any stage made things better for him or, in particular, made things better for him and Vladimir Putin.He gets rid of Comey out of frustration with the progress and the course of this investigation, and Comey is replaced by Robert Mueller, who quickly assembles this sort of elite team of investigators to dig into every corner of the Trump empire.I mean, how can that be a good outcome for Trump?
For Putin, looking in at this from abroad, he must be befuddled sometimes as well.For all of these impulses that Trump has, or appears to have had, wanting improved relationships with Russia, praising Putin, even being seen as a likeminded kind of nationalist, that his ability to act on or put forward any kind of agenda that would advance any of those objectives has been undermined by the political miscalculations and the political mishandling of this whole issue.
If he really wants lifting or easing of sanctions, you’d have to position yourself to the American public as a staunch independent capable of going toe to toe with Moscow.Instead, he weirdly often seems supplicant to Putin.He’s never, that I can think of, even criticized the guy.This is a president who lashes out in all directions in all institutions all the time, and there's just one entity, one person who seems protected from that, and it’s Vladimir Putin.
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