The FRONTLINE Interviews
Michael Isikoff
Co-author, Russian Roulette
Michael Isikoff is the chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo! News, where he covers national security and politics. He co-wrote the 2017 book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, with journalist David Corn.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on May 8, 2018. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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To Trump Tower, Jan. 6, the [then-]four intelligence, the IC [intelligence community] guys—[CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, and National Security Adviser Michael Rogers]—are coming to town.Walk me in.What are they coming there to do?
This was to give President-elect Trump the same briefing they had just given the day before to President Obama about the Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. election.The intelligence community had been tasked by President Obama to do a full-scale review of all the intelligence, about what happened during the 2016 election.It was all pulled together over a period of weeks by intelligence analysts, and it was a lot more than virtually anybody realized here.This was what was described as a “multifaceted” campaign of cyberattacks, of dumping of emails, information warfare, social media.
The intelligence community reached the conclusion that, while this began as an effort to sow discord and denigrate Hillary Clinton in what seemed like the likely event she would become president, it evolved into an effort to elect Donald Trump himself, and that the orders came from the very top of the Russian government, Vladimir Putin.
So when these fellows go in there to meet the president-elect, trepidation?Anxiety?Are they there to sell him something?What are they doing?
I think there was a great deal of apprehension for a lot of reasons.Number one is, Trump had dismissed the entire Russian attack during the campaign, suggested that it might not have happened.It wasn’t the Russians.It could have been some 400-pound guy in his sofa at home.And despite the Oct. 7 statement from the director of national intelligence and Homeland Security that the White House expected was going to get a lot of attention, and then quickly got overshadowed by the Access Hollywood tape, Trump even then refused to accept what had been the public findings of the intelligence community.
So here you have the intelligence chiefs going in, knowing that their audience is skeptical of what they're about to say, and then you put on top of that everything they’ve learned about the contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians and Russian cutouts [representatives or intermediaries], and that only increased the anxiety, because there's a deep-seated concern that the Russians may have gotten their hooks into Donald Trump’s campaign at the very least, if not Donald Trump himself, and that made this all the more fraught with danger for the intelligence chiefs.
Certainly Comey had an open investigation into lots of connections that he couldn’t tell Trump about, wouldn’t tell Trump about.
Right.
And yet there it was, a kind of burning hole in his pocket.
Yeah.There was an ongoing counterintelligence investigation by the FBI into Donald Trump’s campaign, over its contacts with various players in either the Russian government or cutouts for Russian intelligence.And that was something that was truly extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented, for an incoming president to have this kind of intelligence about how he came to be president-elect out there .
And then you add on top of that the dossier, which is the real hot potato here, because the FBI has had this for a while now.They got it in the summer of 2016, when [former M16 intelligence officer] Christopher Steele provided it to his contact at the FBI, and they’ve been reviewing it.They're well aware of its context.But then, in December, [Sen.] John McCain (R-Ariz.) personally gives a copy to Jim Comey, and at that point, the stakes get even higher, because now the FBI, Comey knows it’s on the Hill.Press calls are coming in to various members of the intelligence community and the FBI: “What do you know about this?"The dossier has begun to circulate, or at least some of its contents have begun to circulate among the media.
The decision is made that they have to brief Trump about this, to give him a heads-up, to let him know what's out there.At least that was the articulated thinking.But how were they going to do it?The intelligence chiefs and Comey meet a couple days before, and they discuss this.And they actually come up with a plan that they vote on.The plan is, everybody else would leave the room after the main briefing, and Jim Comey will stay back, and he will hand a synopsis of the most salacious allegation in the dossier to Donald Trump.
Before we get to the dossier, how does Trump respond to the first presentation?I seem to remember that he had a kind of marketing orientation to what—
Right.Look, the reports vary a little bit about how he responded, but it was not overly contentious.He listened; he asked some questions.He clearly was skeptical, because he had been publicly skeptical of these findings, and he was looking for possible holes.“How do you know this?Didn’t they also do the attack—the RNC [Republican National Committee], the Russians?"He’s asking for questions.But the thing he’s most focused on is, “Do you have any evidence that this actually swayed the results of the election?,” because his big concern all along is, this was a way to delegitimize his presidency.
Right.
And he wants to be able to say: “That didn’t happen.Whatever the Russians did or didn’t do, it had no effect on me being elected president and beating Hillary Clinton."And what James Clapper responds is: “We can't answer that question, because that’s not within our purview.We don’t study how the American public decides who to vote for and what influenced elections.That’s not our business as intelligence leaders."But Trump interprets this as evidence that the Russian campaign didn’t influence the election.The fact that they can't say it did or did not, he will put the positive spin on it; it’s evidence that it didn’t have an impact.That’s what he was most focused on in that main briefing.
So then they leave; the others leave.And eventually, after some back-and-forth, Trump clears his guys out, too, and it’s just the two of them, these two men, 6’8” Comey, 6’3” Trump.
Right.
Standing, I gather?… And what transpires?
Comey hands him a document that has the salacious allegation from the dossier about the Russians having kompromat [compromising material] on him in the form of a sex tape.Trump is obviously taken aback.It’s not clear that he has heard this before.Comey explains that he just wants to give him a heads-up.“We’re not saying this is true.We just want you to know what's out there and what could be coming."And it’s obviously a tense moment.
But what's really interesting is what happens after Comey leaves, because then Trump is talking to his top aides, [Chief of Staff Reince] Priebus, [Chief Strategist Steve] Bannon, others, who are all in the room at that point.And he views this as blackmail.“It’s a shakedown,” he tells them.His assumption is that Comey is giving this to him to show him that he’s got something on him; that the FBI has got evidence that can bring down Donald Trump in some way, because that’s the way Trump looks at the world.I mean, this is something that Roy Cohn, his mentor, would have done.This is something that J. Edgar Hoover notoriously was known for doing, letting politicians, celebrities, others know what the FBI has on you.And in many ways, it sowed the seeds for Comey’s firing.That was the moment that Trump came to view Comey as a threat.
… It’s not very long after that that [Jake] Tapper, on CNN, uses the fact of the meeting and the fact of the dossier being delivered to the president-elect for a story, which lights the fire under BuzzFeed, which runs the whole dossier.
It was a critical moment.In many ways, it was the most important moment that would shape Trump’s presidency, because it’s all there, right in that one instant of Comey presenting the dossier to the president-elect.
What's all there?
All the distrust between the president and his FBI director, for all practical purposes, begins at that moment.And at that point, Trump is fixated on one thing: He wants Comey to publicly declare that none of this is true, and he’s not under investigation.He wants to be cleared by Comey, and as becomes very clear, very soon, Comey is not going to do that.
A concept like the rule of law—Donald Trump is sitting there.Does this enter his calculation?
I think it’s fair to say that the rule of law was not paramount in Donald Trump’s mind at that point, or any moment after.You know, it’s interesting.In Comey’s interviews, he’s made it clear that he was advised by his chief counsel, Jim Baker, not to tell the president he was not under investigation, because an investigation of this kind, the FBI is investigating his campaign, if they uncover information that points to Trump’s knowledge himself, he could well become a target of this investigation.
So it’s really fraught with peril for the FBI director to even privately tell him he’s not under investigation, because at any moment, that can change.And then what happens?Does Comey have to go back to him and tell him, “Oh by the way, you are under investigation”?Comey acknowledges now that he made a mistake by telling Donald Trump he was not under investigation.
Privately.
And I think he regrets that.
Trump’s response to CNN, then BuzzFeed, then all of the headlines that cascade out.This is where it’s full-on tweets and an unbelievable press conference—you know, “witch hunt,” “fake news,” all the phrases.
Something the Gestapo would have done, Trump says .So it really—it was broader than just Comey.I mean, he now viewed the entire intelligence community and the FBI as enemies, as people who were out to get him and didn’t accept his presidency.
[Soon after] we see the scene where Jim Comey is trying to hide in the curtains and not walk across the room and shake Donald Trump's hand.Why?What's going on there?What is that scene?What is the meaning of that scene?
Well, at this point, Comey knows that there is this ongoing counterintelligence investigation that is looking at people who were close to Donald Trump, who were in his administration, Michael Flynn, the national security adviser.And Comey is—he is a stickler for the rule of law and for the independence of the FBI and the Justice Department, from any taint of political manipulation.So he's in an awkward position.
He's serving a new president, a new president whose campaign is under investigation.And, you know, famously, one of his predecessors, Louis Freeh, wouldn't even accept a White House pass, because he did not want it to ever be perceived that the FBI director was in any way close to the president other than to perform his official duties and give him briefings on vital national security matters.Comey was very much imbued with the same ethic and was wary of Donald Trump.
When you think, as a reporter, as a person who's been around this town many decades, what was Comey’s reputation?What's his Washington political back story?
Yeah.Well, he became best known for the moment in 2004 when he resists the Bush White House’s efforts to get the Justice Department to sign off on an extension of the warrantless wiretapping program.This led to this famous confrontation at the hospital between Comey and John Ashcroft, the then-attorney general, who's ailing and in the hospital, and the then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and the White House Chief of Staff [Andrew Card].And Comey stood up to the Bush White House.That really was more than just the inspiration for everything that came afterward.
But that's what put him on the map.That's how he came to be selected by Barack Obama, a Democrat, as his FBI director, because this was a guy who didn't kowtow to political influences.It was all about the independence of the FBI, the independence of law enforcement and the rule of law.
Before we get too far from the hiding-in-the-curtains moment, what do you think, from what we now know, is Trump's calculation in that moment?What's he trying to assess, do you think?
He was trying to take the measure of Comey and whether he is susceptible to seduction.He’s already wary about him because of what happened at the Trump Tower presentation, but he hasn't decided to fire him yet, and he wants to check him out.Can he, will he be my guy?That's what Donald Trump wants to know.Will you have my back?And Comey is resisting in every way he possibly can.
Who's Michael Flynn? …
Michael Flynn is the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who effectively became Donald Trump's top national security adviser.They became extremely close during the campaign.Flynn endeared himself to Trump at the Republican Convention when he gave that famous speech, “Lock her up!Lock her up!,” leading the crowd in the chant about Hillary Clinton.I had a source who told me they were like a band of brothers, Trump and Flynn, during the campaign.A real bond developed between them.Trump saw Flynn as his guy, and the fact that he was under investigation by the FBI was yet one more reason for Trump to be wary of Jim Comey.
And on the 24th [of January] is when two FBI agents [take] the extraordinary step of going over to the White House and interviewing Mike Flynn.What did they have?They had an intercept basically.
Yes.And they'd been alerted to the fact that these conversations have taken place.They know that [Ambassador Sergey] Kislyak has reported back to his masters in the Kremlin that Flynn has given positive signals to the lifting of sanctions under certain conditions, and they want to know, did Flynn discuss sanctions with the Russian ambassador?Now, at this point, remember, this is during the transition, so Donald Trump is not president; Michael Flynn has no official status in the U.S. government.He's the national security adviser during the transition, but he's not a U.S. government employee, and people at the Justice Department raise the issue of the Logan Act.
The Logan Act is an 18th-century law that forbids U.S. citizens from conducting foreign policy that's contrary to the interests of the United States government.It's not a law that's ever been successfully prosecuted, so there's a lot of debate about whether there were grounds for the FBI to go down this road.But in the context of the counterintelligence investigation that had been going on since the previous summer, it was clearly something that made people in the bureau highly suspicious, people in the Justice Department highly suspicious.And I think that the decision was made to confront Flynn about his communications with Kislyak.
And when asked the question, what does Flynn do?
He dissembles.He suggests that he did not have such conversations with the Russian ambassador, which conflicts with the account they've gotten from the intercept … of Kislyak reporting back to the Kremlin that that is indeed something they did talk about.
OK. So at that moment, they have this information; Comey has this information.
Right.
[Flynn] does lie to the vice president [Mike Pence] and others that he did not have this conversation with Kislyak.And armed with the information that he has dissembled, [Acting Attorney General] Sally Yates decides she has to do something, or should do something about this vis-à-vis the vulnerability of the national security adviser and heads to the White House.
Yes.And she goes to see Don McGahn, the new White House counsel, and tells McGahn that Michael Flynn, the new national security adviser for the White House, has compromised himself, is in a position where he could be blackmailed by the Russians because he has denied something that the Russians knew had taken place; to wit, they had had a conversation about the lifting of sanctions.
This is an amazing day.This is the 27th of January.As she leaves the White House, the travel ban is just being initiated.Trump has signed it out at the Pentagon.Airports are clogging up everywhere.She didn't know about it.Nobody ran the regulation, the EO [executive order], in front of her.That night it will be dinner for two at the White House with Trump and Comey.Pretty amazing stuff happening right around there.Make sense of it for me.
That dinner that night is one of the most extraordinary moments, because it's this lengthy dinner.Trump starts out by telling Comey that nobody knows we’re having this dinner.Of course, by the end of the dinner, he makes reference to the fact that Reince Priebus knows all about the fact that they're having dinner, so he contradicts himself in the course of it.But Trump's agenda is, number one, he wants a pledge of loyalty from Jim Comey, and that leads to this awkward moment where Comey, after receiving this request, just sits there in silence, a pregnant pause—he doesn't know how to respond—and finally says, “You'll have my honesty,” and then Trump frames that as “honest loyalty."
But what do they talk about?This is what I find so fascinating about this.I mean, Trump wants to tell him why the “golden showers” scene couldn’t have possibly taken place.He didn't even spend the night in Moscow, he claims falsely to Comey, when he clearly did.He wants to talk about the 2016 election and the investigation into Hillary Clinton.He wants to know about the Obama folks and the role they played, [Attorney General] Loretta Lynch.
But here he has his first extended meeting with the director of the FBI.He doesn't ask a thing about the terrorist threats to the country.He doesn't ask anything about the cyberthreats to the country.He doesn’t ask anything about what Comey needs to do his job better, about anything that a president, talking at length with his FBI director for the first time, would want to know about how best to do his job as president.What does he need to know from the top law enforcement officer in the country?Donald Trump doesn't talk about any of that.He's focused on himself, the allegations against him, and the investigation into Hillary Clinton, who he defeated.
… When he talks about loyalty, what do you think Donald Trump, where's he coming from with that?Where does that come from?
This is the way Donald Trump has looked at the world for decades.This is the way he's done business.Either you're with me or you're against me.Are you on my team, or are you on the other guy's team?
You mean this is stuff that comes from Fred [Trump] and Roy Cohn and everybody else.
Yeah.
All of his life.
This is the Roy Cohn view of the world.This has been the Donald Trump view of the world.There's no appreciation for the traditions of the Justice Department and the FBI for the idea that these are supposed to be independent institutions.Donald Trump's view is, “I'm the president; you're working for me now."
Is there a threat inherent in this?Even the existence of the two of them around a table, sitting there on a Friday night, is Comey in a job interview situation?
Well, in a way, because Comey knows, at this point, that his tenure could be shaky .He's got a 10-year term, but the president can fire him at anytime.It hasn't really been on the table, publicly.There hasn't been any talk at this point that Trump was going to fire Comey, for no other reason that, you know, for most of the public, and certainly for most Democrats, Comey did more than anybody else to help Donald Trump become elected president.I mean, one could argue that Comey did more to help elect Trump than Vladimir Putin did.
Nobody really viewed Comey as an enemy of Trump at that point.If anything, the FBI had gotten a lot of heat for not telling more about what it knew about the Trump campaign’s ties to the Russians.But Comey knows how much the FBI has got, and he knows what a threat this investigation could be to his own tenure as FBI director.
So he's unwilling to pledge what Donald Trump wants him to pledge, which is straight up and down loyalty.
Right.
He knows Trump, and he knows that Trump is testing him, I guess.And not very long after that, Sally Yates is fired.
Yes.
Message?… What was it?
On the Sally Yates firing, I mean, she was an Obama holdover, so nobody expected her to stick around very long.She was acting attorney general at that point, and she had refused to sign off on what was a major policy initiative of the Trump White House at that point, which was the travel ban.So it was not all that surprising that the Trump folks would give Sally Yates an accelerated boot, because it was their government now.
At least on policy issues, there's no question that the White House has the authority and the obligation to set policy and expect the various departments of the government to go along with it, as long as it doesn't conflict with the rule of law.Now of course, in Sally Yates’ view, and several federal judges’ view, what the Trump White House folks were doing with the travel ban did conflict with the rule of law, but at the end of the day, this was a policy matter.
Then I think The New York Times breaks the story that Flynn had lied, that there were intercepts that seemed to prove that Flynn had been lying.And now it's public. …
Mike Pence had gone out there on national television and confidently said that he had talked to Flynn, and Flynn hadn't discussed sanctions with Kislyak.So once it became clear that wasn't true, Pence was in a very difficult situation, and Flynn was in an untenable situation.
But the president didn't want to have to do it, did he?
No.Trump doesn't really like to fire people.I mean, he likes to talk about firing people, but the actual firing he leaves to others.
… Let’s stay with this.It isn't long after this that there is the empty-room moment where everybody's in the Oval Office, and he says to everybody, including [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions, who kind of hangs behind, he says: “You, too, Jeff.Let me have a little time with Jim here."And he essentially asks again.Well, you tell me what he does in that situation.
Now, Trump is really upping the ante, because he asks Comey about Michael Flynn, and says, “I hope you can let him go."[Trump’s] talking to the director of the FBI about an ongoing investigation by the FBI, and at that point he's really, from Comey’s perspective, crossed the line.This is beyond just asking for a general pledge of loyalty.Now he's speaking to him about an actual ongoing case, and from anybody in the FBI's perspective, you're crossing a redline there.
Comey goes back, and he has a meeting with Sessions, and he says to his boss, now confirmed, now confirmed attorney general, “Don't leave me alone with him."
Right, right.
Can you tell me about this?
Well, Comey at this point realizes he's dealing with a loose cannon in terms of the president; that these interactions he's having are potentially dangerous, because they are treading close to the obstruction of justice, a line that he's fearful of.And he begins documenting his conversations with Donald Trump, writing these memos, something he had never done before with any of his interactions with previous presidents.
He really starts after the dossier delivery up in the Trump Tower.He comes down to the car and starts writing.
Right, right.
There's something that’s been triggered in him.
He is now extremely suspicious of Donald Trump.He's watched Trump during the campaign.He knows that Trump does not have a reputation as a truthteller, and he's now worried that these conversations he's having could become potential evidence in the investigation that the FBI is working on, so he feels the need to start documenting it.And when Trump asks him specifically about Michael Flynn, to let him go, or he hopes he can let him go, now Comey is extremely concerned that this is something that could well come back in the course of the FBI's investigation.He wants to document it, and he wants to alert his senior staff, and he wants to alert his superior at the Justice Department, Attorney General Sessions.
Who is Sessions?What's the Washington reputation of why Sessions gets this job?What did he do?
Sessions was the one Republican senator who endorsed Donald Trump from the get-go.At a time when everybody else in Washington, the Washington establishment and the Republican establishment, was steering clear of Donald Trump and alarmed by Donald Trump and worried that he could become their party's standard-bearer, Jeff Sessions was there, side by side with him.So it's not surprising that Trump would turn to the most loyal senator out there to be his attorney general.
And I guess there is loyalty there.
I think there's no question that there's loyalty there.But Sessions is in a tough spot, because he was a part of the campaign.… Because he was part of the campaign, he could not, under Justice Department ethics rules, oversee an investigation into the campaign that he was a part of.He consulted with the top ethics people at the Justice Department, and they told him he had to recuse himself from the investigation, and this drove Trump crazy.
Because?
Because it meant that the guy who was most loyal to him was not going to be there to have his back in this investigation.
… From Trump's point of view, it's like: “What did I make you attorney general for if you're not going to protect me on that which is the biggest threat to my presidency, this FBI investigation into my campaign?"
If only Roy Cohn was alive.… But, I mean, in a funny way, that's the model, yeah?
The Roy Cohn thing I find so fascinating on so many levels.This is probably not even within the orbit of your film, but if you think about it, Roy Cohn left Washington in the 1950s, basically in disgrace.He was [Sen. Joe] McCarthy's hatchetman.Nobody would ever have anything to do with him in polite company.He goes to New York, builds up a reputation as a political fixer, a lawyer for mobsters, whatever.Bobby Kennedy tries to indict him.There was that epic feud between Bobby Kennedy and Roy Cohn.If you asked anybody 10, 20, 30 years ago, Bobby Kennedy: hero, martyr; Roy Cohn, disgraced fixer.And yet 2016, Roy Cohn's acolyte becomes president of the United States.It's almost like Roy Cohn is having the last laugh from wherever.
… In this very period in our chronology, Trump starts to get really aggressive.He goes after the FBI.This is playbook Cohn.This is: “Be the aggressor.Never, never say you've lost.Go at them as hard as they come at you."
Exactly.This was a lesson that Trump learned from Roy Cohn very early on, when the Justice Department sued the Trump [Management] for racial discrimination in its housing properties in New York.And Trump turns to Roy Cohn, who comes up with the aggressive counterstrategy, “We’ll go after the Justice Department; we’ll countersue them,” because that's the way Roy Cohn did business.That's the way Donald Trump learned to do business.
The Russia “cloud” is all over him at this moment in his presidency.It seems like you read that book, the list, and you see the list getting longer and longer of the arguments and the tweets and the back and the forth.He's all in the middle of it, and it's all over him, and he's increasingly blaming Comey and the Justice Department, right?
This is the single biggest threat, from Trump's perspective, to his being president.Now, if you talk to people in the White House, they'll tell you that Trump was reinforced in this view by a phone call with the President of Egypt, [Abdel Fattah] el-Sisi, who asks him about the Russia investigation and what's going on with it.From Trump's perspective, “This shows this investigation is undermining my ability to be president.If I'm being asked by foreign leaders about this, I can't do my job as president."So he wants the investigation shut down, or at least he wants to be publicly cleared.He wants Comey to go out there publicly and declare Donald Trump, the president, is not under investigation.
And why won't Comey do that?
Well, by now, he's learned that Jim Baker, his chief counsel, was right; that you don't know where this investigation is going to go, and at some point, they may well have to question Trump, or they may learn, come across evidence that directly points to the president's knowledge.You cannot rule that out while the investigation is going on.
And it's all been pretty hush-hush between them.I mean, nothing's been really overt.You don't really know what Comey’s into, how far is he going.You know something's going on if you're Trump.You can hear the smoke signals.You can see it out there happening, but you don't know what it is.Then Comey testifies late March. …
March 22, I think.
March 22.And boy, does that light the rocket in so many ways.Why?
Well, this is the first time that the FBI has publicly affirmed there was an investigation.That was a stunning moment.I was in the House hearing that day, and you could tell that people were jolted, particularly Republican members of the committee, who were there to protect the Trump White House.They viewed that as their mission.And here they have the sitting director of the FBI telling them that the Trump campaign was under investigation by the FBI.Now it's public.And [Rep.] Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who was the chairman of the committee, says, “There is a cloud over the White House now."Devin Nunes, the fiercest protector of President Trump in the House, a man who had served on the transition team, is hearing, “Oh, my God, the FBI is investigating my president's campaign,” and that is a really uncomfortable moment for Nunes and the House Republicans.
Why did Jim Comey do that?He's no amateur.This is all orchestrated in some way.Why does he do it?
Well, the main reason he does it is because it's true, because there was an investigation.It had been going on for sometime.At this point, it’s sort of becoming increasingly clear that there is something going on, and he wants to set the record straight as to what it is, and he affirms that the FBI has this, and has had since the summer, this counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign.
The scary thing for Trump and the Trump White House is that they don't know what he actually has.They don't know where he's been or what he's doing.And slowly but surely, the press is kind of catching up. …
But there were details we didn't know about, including the precipitating event, which was George Papadopoulos, the campaign foreign policy adviser, … in a London bar and spilling his guts to the Australian ambassador [Alexander Downer], and telling him about how he's been told that the Russians have dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails.And remember, this is a couple months before it's known that the Russians have hacked the DNC [Democratic National Committee].
So you go back in time to the FBI during the summer, and they get this report that there's somebody in the Trump campaign who knows about thousands of emails that are supposedly in the possession of the Kremlin, dirt on Hillary Clinton, and you then see the hack.You learn that the Russians have hacked the DNC and stolen thousands of emails, and you later learn that they've hacked the Clinton campaign as well through [Clinton campaign chair] John Podesta's Gmail account.And the FBI is trying to figure out what is going on here.
… It wasn't just that, you know.At this point, Paul Manafort had been the campaign chairman.Paul Manafort, who had had a relationship with the pro-Russian thug, President of Ukraine [Victor] Yanukovych; Paul Manafort, who had been a business partner of Oleg Deripaska, one of the billionaire oligarchs closest to Vladimir Putin; Paul Manafort, whose top aide in Kiev was a known Russian military intelligence asset.So they see that; they see Mike Flynn, who had flown to Moscow in December of 2015 to attend this celebratory dinner for the RT, the Russian television propaganda station, and ends up sitting next to Vladimir Putin.They see Carter Page, another foreign policy adviser, who flies to Moscow in the summer of 2016 and has meetings with various Russian officials.They're seeing a lot of these contacts, and from a counterintelligence perspective, there's real concern about whether a foreign power has basically infiltrated an American political campaign.That's a serious matter if you're an FBI counterintelligence agent.
Trump, in the midst of all of this, asks Comey one more time: “Make a public statement.Can you just make a public statement that it's not me, that I'm not under investigation?"So one more time in the spring, … there's a phone call.
Now at this point, there's something else going on.Comey has briefed, privately, the Senate Judiciary Committee and basically given them some details about who was under investigation, who were the targets of this investigation.He doesn't say that the president was a target of the investigation.This gets back to Trump that Comey has privately indicated that he's not under investigation, but Comey won't say this publicly, and this infuriates Trump.“Why can't you say publicly what you've been telling senators privately?"
There are a lot of reasons for that, including the fact that the FBI customarily doesn't publicly declare who the targets or subjects of its investigations are, for a multitude of reasons, including the fact that, as Jim Baker told Comey from the get-go, once you go down that road, you may have to amend it.And remember, Comey has already been bitten in this score during the campaign, when he publicly said the FBI wasn't going to bring charges against Hillary Clinton, the investigation was over, and then those Anthony Wiener emails pop up, and he has to amend the record.He feels compelled to correct what he had previously said, when he said the investigation had been over into Hillary Clinton.And that's what blew up.That's what he got the most heat for during the campaign, so Comey does not want a repeat of what happened in 2016 with Hillary Clinton.
He doesn't want to say anything out loud.Then he’s called once more to testify.This is now, he's rounding the bend.He’s in the final turn.He does the testimony, and it's a lot about Hillary Clinton—another thing that Trump is not exactly thrilled about hearing about.The way we read it, Trump is watching the testimony on Tivo and going back and forth and back and forth, listening and just kind of grinding away at what has, by now, become sort of full-blown antipathy toward Jim Comey.
… This is the Senate testimony by Comey, and Comey basically seals his fate in that testimony when he publicly defends his conduct during the 2016 election and his handling of the Hillary Clinton matter and shows no contrition.He says it makes him nauseous to believe that what he did influenced the election, but if he had to do it all over again, he'd do the same thing.He believes he did the right thing.
And at this point, his audience at the Justice Department, particularly [Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein, is not pleased.Rosenstein and others at the Justice Department believe that Comey did violate Justice Department rules and regulations during the 2016 election, and that becomes the basis for the famous memo that Rosenstein writes to the president, essentially recommending that Comey be displaced as FBI director.
What is Trump on about?Why does Trump care so much?
Well, Trump doesn't care about what Comey did to hurt Hillary Clinton.In fact, he had praised Comey’s last-minute letter about Hilary Clinton, so this is not something that was going to move him to remove Jim Comey.But it becomes the excuse, or at least the initial excuse the White House uses, to explain why they were firing the FBI director.
… Comey is in Los Angeles.What happens?
He looks up on the TV screen and sees that he's been fired, without any heads-up, without any warning.He’s visiting an FBI office in Los Angeles, and he learns from TV that he's no longer the FBI director.
But there it was, OK. If Donald Trump believed somehow that Democrats would join him in a bipartisan applause moment for firing Jim Comey, that was not what ensued.
No.[Trump’s son-in-law and adviser] Jared Kushner had told the president that Democrats would applaud the firing of Jim Comey.But this just shows how the political antennae of Kushner and others at the White House were so off, because what they didn't count on is the antipathy among Democrats for Donald Trump.As angry as Democrats were for what Comey did in the 2016 election, at this point, the idea that President Donald Trump would be disabusing the rule of law to the extent that he was, by firing an FBI director for the apparent purpose of ending an investigation into his own campaign and its ties to Russia, that “trumped,” as it were, the antipathy that so many Democrats had for Jim Comey.
And in that chaos, in the maelstrom, Rod Rosenstein is, in some way, blamed, receives a lot of the huzzahs or fist-shaking.Why?
You mean from Republicans?
Yeah.
Yeah.Well, because he's now in charge of the investigation, and the very next day he appoints Robert Mueller as the special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation.Mueller was Trump's worst nightmare.However much he was angry about Jim Comey, the idea that Robert Mueller, somebody who would be completely impervious to political leanings or influence, would be in charge of the investigation, was something that just drove the president even battier.
Mueller—you’ve been around a long time. …
Yes, yes.I’ve known Mueller for years.
All right.
I covered him when he was at the Justice Department, years ago, as chief of the Criminal Division under George H. W. Bush's presidency.Bob Mueller cares about one thing, and one thing only: indicting bad guys and putting them in prison.I don’t believe he has any other sincere passions in life other than bringing criminal cases.And I think that is, when you put somebody like Mueller in that job as special counsel, you know you're going to get a vigorous, aggressive investigation that is not going to pull any punches, and if people in the White House come into their crosshairs, they're in deep trouble.
Do you think Donald Trump knew that?
I think on some level he knew that.He knew that Mueller was not anybody he was going to be able to seduce or ask for loyalty or even talk to.The fact that he had Rosenstein, that Mueller had Rosenstein as his protector, was even more infuriating.He put Sessions in there to be the attorney general, and now he's got to deal with Rosenstein, who served as U.S. attorney during the entire eight years of the Obama presidency.Now Rosenstein was, and as far as we know, is a Republican.He had been originally nominated as U.S. attorney by George W. Bush.But Obama kept him on.And, you know, in Trump's worldview, you can't have been an Obama U.S. attorney and in any way have any feelings of loyalty to him.
And Mueller and Comey, what's the difference between these two guys?
Comey likes to talk to the press, likes to have a public profile, very much cares about his public profile.Mueller doesn't care one whit about his public profile.He doesn't like talking in public.He doesn't like going on TV. He rarely did it as FBI director.He has no interest in that.His only interest is in bringing criminal cases.
Trump saw something in Comey that he thought he could get in.This guy's a super salesman.He saw something in there, an ego he could fluff or something.But he doesn't see that in Mueller.
Not in Mueller, no.I said that from the moment Mueller got appointed, this was going to be Trump's worst nightmare.
So Mueller comes into that office.There on the desk are the files, Russia investigation.Collusion meetings.Tell me what he finds.What's the short version of what's laying on that desk, open and glowing and ready for Bob Mueller’s treatment?
Well, you have an investigation into Manafort and all the millions of dollars he’d gotten from his Ukraine consulting work from the pro-Russia political party.You have an investigation into Michael Flynn based on his contacts with the Russian ambassador Kislyak.You have an ongoing FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant against Carter Page for his contacts in Moscow when he flew there in the summer of 2016.And you have the matter of George Papadopoulos, who sounded off about his contacts with Russian cutouts during the 2016 campaign.So you've got a lot on your plate that the FBI has been trying to sort out for quite some time, and you've got a lot of avenues to pursue.
It doesn't take Trump long to think about firing Mueller, and everybody, his lawyers, everybody says: “You cannot fire your way out of this situation.This is not going to be.You may have gotten away with it once, or you may have done it once, but you can't fire your way out of this problem."
Right, because one thing that I think Trump probably doesn't understand is that, no matter how many people he fires, the investigation continues.There's a team of FBI agents and federal prosecutors who are working on this.The evidence doesn't go away.The intercepts don't disappear.The testimony that they've already gathered from interviewing witnesses are not going to vanish.So there's very little Trump can do.Now, from Trump's perspective, because he is a guy who thinks in personality terms, it's all about me versus him.He views it very much as a matter of personalities.But it's not.This is the government; this is the FBI.The files exist; the agents exist.They're not going to somehow go up in smoke just because you fire the top guy.
There is, of course, a classic Donald Trump response, which is to counterattack through the press, through Fox, through Breitbart, through others, to go after the FBI, go after the Justice Department.
Right.Trump begins a campaign to delegitimize the FBI and its entire investigation.
How?
By attacking Comey, then by attacking Mueller, then by attacking the agents within the FBI who had worked on the case.This becomes the mantra, the deep state that's out to get him, and it very much connects with those early dealings in January, when the intelligence leaders came to see him along with Comey.That's when his suspicions about the intelligence community and the FBI began.And now, from Trump's perspective, he's been vindicated.
When he's out there fighting and saying what he's saying, suddenly the story of Don Jr.’s meeting with the Russian attorney over adoption is revealed.He's in Germany.He's just seen Putin.He and [former White House communications director] Hope Hicks and others are going to fly back and write a statement.Walk me through that, will you?
The news of the Trump Tower meeting was a bombshell, because the email trail was so damning.There it was.Rob Goldstone, the music publicist for Emin Agalarov, the pop star singer with whom Trump had forged a bond during the Miss Universe Pageant—he had tried to do business with the Agalarovs to build the Trump Tower in Moscow.There they were, coming back, telling him, “We've got something,” telling Don Jr.: “We've got something for you.We’ve got official Russian government files with incriminating information about Hillary Clinton."
And what does Don Jr. write back in an email?“If it's what you say, I love it."He invites Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, Jared Kushner and himself to a meeting with this Russian delegation that is supposedly going to give them the files about Hillary Clinton.Coming on top of everything else that had come out about all these Russian contacts with the campaign, the Trump Tower email trail was incredibly damning.
And the president's response?
To deny that the meeting had anything to do with providing incriminating information about Hillary Clinton; that this was about something else, the Magnitsky Act, the adoptions, the ability of Americans to adopt Russian babies.Now, it is true that there was a bit of a bait-and-switch here.From all accounts, when the Russian delegation arrives in Trump Tower for this meeting, they don't really have what Donald Trump Jr. had been told they were going to deliver.They use that as a way to get into Trump Tower and have this meeting.But they've got their own agenda.What the Kremlin cares about is the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on human rights violators in Russia, which led Putin to pull the plug on American adoptions of Russian babies.This was the last thing Donald Trump Jr. and the Trump campaign chiefs were interested in.This was completely off their radar screen.It’s not even clear Don Jr. knew what they were talking about.But they took the meeting.That was the damning thing.
So what was the problem?Why not just say that out loud, get that over with?Why does the president and Hope Hicks get involved in writing a statement?
Well, because they did not want to publicly acknowledge what the initial purpose of the meeting was, which would have, by the way, pointed to the president's own relationship with these Russian characters, the Agalarovs. That's what his Miss Universe visit was all about, forging a business relationship with Aras Agalarov, the billionaire real estate magnate in Russia, who was known as Putin's builder.Trump wanted to do business with Agalarov in 2013.They had signed a letter of intent to build the Trump Tower in Moscow.These same characters with whom Trump had sought to do business were now coming back , trying to help him become elected president, using, so they said, official Kremlin files.
And as this is all happening, Trump suddenly decides to fire Sessions, or to try to anyway.
Yeah.Well, look, Trump rails about lots of things and rails about people he wants to fire quite a bit.What is not always clear is, does that railing translate into action?In this case, I think he came to understand that firing Sessions or firing Mueller wouldn't really get him out of this box.
And that's really when it feels like he decides to delegitimatize, to the extent that he can, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, really going after— <v MICHAEL ISIKOFF> It is extraordinary to have a president essentially attacking the FBI, delegitimizing the people who are charged with protecting the country.That’s not something we've seen before.
Mueller ramps it up, a lot of indictments, a lot of—you know, picking the lock of Manafort’s house.
Right.He’s got a team of very aggressive prosecutors he assembles.I mean that was the first warning sign for the Trump White House, because at the White House, they see Mueller hiring all these really top-of-the-line, aggressive prosecutors.They're “killers,” Steve Bannon calls them.These are people who have been around the block, brought a lot of criminal cases in white-collar fraud and other areas.And they know at the White House that these are people who generally get their people, get the people that they want to indict. …
Help me fit Michael Cohen … Help me fit that into the story we've just told, this epic battle of the Titans.Suddenly in comes a shyster lawyer from, you know, Queens or wherever.
You can’t make this up, can you?Michael Cohen is a character right out of Guys and Dolls, the streetwise lawyer with shady connections left and right.And God only knows what he's done for Donald Trump.
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