The FRONTLINE Interviews

Robert Costa

The Washington Post

Robert Costa is a national political reporter for The Washington Post, where he covers Congress and the White House. Costa has written extensively about Donald Trump's rise to the presidency, his populist message and the growing role of hardline nationalism in U.S. politics. Costa is also the moderator of "Washington Week" on PBS and a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC.

This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore conducted on Sept. 4, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.

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Putin’s Road to War

The Putin Files

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The U.S. Response to Russian Measures

The Intelligence Community sort of understands what's been going on with the hacking of the DNC [Democratic National Committee].¹

Talk a little bit about the story of how that eventually comes out.It takes a long time before people understand exactly what is taking place.There is this whole problem with people not understanding the importance of it at the DNC or in the FBI.Was this an intelligence failure or failure to understand what response—a complete misunderstanding of what the capabilities of the Russians were?How do you look back at that story?How do you view it?

There was a real reluctance inside of the Obama administration to inject itself into a presidential campaign.They knew there were risks if they started to make a clamor about all this Russian hacking going on, because it would seem almost politicized; that the environment at the time was so highly charged that all sides, especially the Obama administration, they were sensitive about injecting themselves into a presidential election.One thing I remember is, when I was on the campaign plane with Trump, he would shrug off every single story about Russian hacking.Traveling around the country, I’d see him throw away newspapers and articles about Russia and about hacking.He did not think it was pertinent. He thought it was a distraction.

He really believed in the general election, during the latter stage of the primary election, Donald Trump truly believed that the media and the Obama administration were aligned against him, and they were using the Russian hacking story as a cudgel.That’s why you saw Trump at the convention, when the Democrats are having their convention in Philadelphia, Trump stands up at a lectern and he says: “If Russia has the emails, hack away. Go after the emails.”Trump always saw Russian hacking not as a serious issue to be grappled with as a future statesman, but as a political football that he wanted to kick back.

Putin and Trump

But he was getting briefings as the campaign continued, and he became the major player and eventually the Republican that would run for president and such.He was getting more and more briefings by the intelligence folks.Why was he rejecting everything that he was hearing from the Intelligence Community?

For so long Trump had been maligned by the political establishment in both parties.Trump didn’t trust the political establishment.And when it came to intelligence information, he was really only listening to one person, Gen. [Michael] Flynn.Flynn had been with him at the beginning, talking him through foreign policy and national security.So when the intelligence briefings started, the candidate wasn’t actually that interested in having the Intelligence Community tell him what to believe and where to go, perhaps, on policy, how to think about the world.You have to remember, Trump was such an outsider that he didn’t trust his own party, and he didn’t trust the political establishment in the Democratic Party. He did not trust the Obama administration.What made Trump so different is that on foreign policy, Trump’s such an outlier, he does not come at his worldview in a traditional way in that hawkish approach when it comes to Russia.He thought of Russia as a transactional business partner during his career in real estate, and why were they such a threat when it came to geopolitics?He was never able to comprehend how deep of a threat Russia could be.

Why the statements about what a powerful leader Putin is?What's behind it? What motivates that?

Trump has always connected throughout his career with people who project strength, images that project strength.He has always been supersensitive about his net worth, that he’s a billionaire, not a multimillionaire.When he walks into a room, he wants to be broad-shouldered. He wants to be seen as the leader, the strongman.It’s actually not that surprising, when you study Trump, to see how he really connected with someone like Putin, this strongman.It was an aesthetic quality, not a political quality, that connected Trump to Putin.

That style means everything to Donald Trump.And Putin’s style, as someone who’s an outsider on the world stage, connected with Trump viscerally.He saw: “This is who I want to be. I want to be someone who clashes with the Western European establishment.I want to be a total outsider. I want to come up with my own opinions.I want to be seen as strong. I want to be seen as a nationalist.”

Intervention in the U.S. Election

So the release of the weaponization of the stolen, the hacked emails from the DNC early on, just before the DNC, the convention, and the effect that those emails had, were you at the convention?

Both of them.

So you're at the convention.What's the effect on the DNC, the demonstrations that break out during the DNC? What was the effect of these emails being released at that period of time?

Right now we have these somber discussions about Russia and election threats and the fragility of democracy.But when you think back to the conventions, I was there on the ground at the convention, and there was a lot of cheering going on inside of the Trump campaign, inside of the Republican Party, about the hacking.They believed that the hacking was exposing the fault lines in the Democratic Party, that Sen. Bernie Sanders and Secretary Clinton, their supporters were being split up because of these hacked emails.They saw that perhaps [they were witnessing] the destruction of the Democratic Party.

Republicans reveled in the hacking, in particular Donald Trump and his top campaign advisers.They wanted to split apart the Democratic Party, and they saw the emails as the tool to do so.

The irony?Did they not understand the irony, when Trump gets up there and sort of says, you know: “Russian hackers, go at it. There's 30,000 emails out there that Hillary Clinton has destroyed. If you’ve got them, we’d like to see them”?Is there any irony to the fact that what he’s doing here is trying to convince an adversary to spy on the American political system?

It was a jarring moment.I remember exactly where I was when we saw Trump do that press conference.The whole Washington Post national political team—The Washington Post was in this tiny hotel in Philadelphia, and we’re all watching this one television in the lobby as Trump goes on and on about encouraging Russia to hack into Secretary Clinton’s emails, to release hacked emails.

We sat there with our jaws open.We couldn’t believe that a presidential candidate was encouraging a foreign power, an adversary, to meddle in an election.Of course we recognized the theater, the circus of it all, the power in the circus.We saw that Trump had power in political theaterpopul, that he was a person striding across the stage and saying, “Russia, if you have it, release it,” and his populace base was cheering him for it.

But as journalists, we sat there wondering, how are we supposed to encounter this?How are we supposed to cover this?Journalists, the Democratic Party, many Republicans had a tough time dealing with Trump.

At the Democratic convention, what was the effect of the release of those emails on the Democrats themselves, on that convention, on the thing that probably the Republicans enjoyed so much?Take us to that and what was going on at the convention.

If you watch the Democratic National Convention on television, you saw the Obama coalition, you saw the peaceful transition from the Obama people to the Clinton people.It was red, white and blue. It was American flags.The Democratic convention in Philadelphia was a picture-perfect convention, at least on television.Behind the scenes it was a different story, ruptures behind the scenes, in the party.Behind the scenes there were real cracks in the Democratic Party because of Russia hacking, because of the DNC hacks.You saw Democrats warring with each other.²

Forget about all the big speeches from President Obama and Secretary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton.The real images that matter in the Democratic convention were Senator Sanders’ supporters railing against the Clinton supporters on the convention floor, the swelling protests throughout the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia.It was chaos in Philly, and it was because of these emails.

Democratic activists were suspicious of the party, thought the emails revealed the true nature of the DNC, and they started to lose faith in Secretary Clinton.The emails in Philly, it was the beginning of the unraveling of the Democratic Party in 2016 and of Secretary Clinton’s campaign.The convention, it was about more than the big speeches on the big stage.It was about how activists started to walk away from the party because of the emails.

… That’s unbelievably fascinating, because you can go back that far and actually start to see some of the reasons why she lost?

Clinton’s whole campaign was founded in the belief in institutions, the institution of the Clinton family in Democratic politics, the institution of the Democratic Party in the Obama presidency.The institutions of American life were at the core of the Clinton candidacy.What the emails did, what the hacking did, was erode institutions in America, eroded institutional trust within the Democratic Party about Democratic leaders.That’s what the Trump campaign was all about.It wasn’t just about winning over voters; it was about suppressing votes on the other side and breaking apart the opposition party.

The emails also, the drip-drip-drip aspect of them, from when the DNC stuff came out to when the [Clinton campaign chair John] Podesta ones came out, and how it had such a lasting effect, talk a little bit about being on the road with Trump, and he would rip out some of the emails and start reading verbatim from these emails, realizing, of course, that they had come from what the news and intelligence folks were saying, from Russian hacking into a political system within the United States.Take us to those moments, what that was like, why he was doing that.

Everything changes in August of 2016.Paul Manafort had been Trump’s campaign chairman.³

He had his own entanglements with Russia that overshadowed the Trump campaign.But once he was gone, and Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway came in, it became full-bore attack on Secretary Clinton, and that meant citing the emails day by day on the campaign trail.Trump loved to talk about the emails because he thought he could portray them as a glimpse into power, a corrupt institution that was the Democratic Party, and the federal government.He wanted to erode all trust in the government, in the Obama administration, in the Clinton campaign, so he could cast himself as the lone person.“I alone,” he said, “could be the one to fix it.”What he was saying was, “I alone am the only person who can represent your interests.”And he kept painting the picture of corruption, in his mind, in his view, with the emails.

That summer, also what was happening—and certainly the Intelligence Community was picking up on it more and more.And of course it was obvious to anybody in the press that there were outrageous stories being told, especially about Hillary Clinton.There was really a summer of fake news, troll attacks, influence peddling, or stories being peddled by RT and other media from Russia.Talk about what was happening during the summer, as far as the propaganda war, the intelligence war, that now is apparent that Russia was in control of.

It was shocking to many people in the Obama administration that the Trump campaign did not step out and say that what was happening with Russian hacking and Russian meddling was wrong.There was an expectation in the establishments of both parties that Trump would somehow, someday, acknowledge that Russia was meddling, and that they should put a stop to it.

Trump totally walked away from what the expectation was in the establishment of both parties.Instead of acknowledging, as everyone else did, that Russia was meddling and it was a problem, he thought it was a questioning of his legitimacy.This gets to the heart of why Trump never really takes Russia seriously.I used to talk about Russia with then-candidate Trump all the time on the campaign trail.We’d be in Trump Tower.We’d be on his plane.He always saw the issue of Russia collusion as an attempt by his enemies to delegitimize his campaign and delegitimize his potential victory.You have to understand that this conviction sunk in with Trump early in the summer of 2016.Trump came to believe that his enemies were out to get him and that Russia was going to be the weapon they used to take him down.So in the face of all evidence, in the face of all these things being presented to him about Russian meddling, Trump stuck by this conviction that it was fake, that it was not real.

Putin and Trump

... Talk a little bit about that propaganda war that Russia was so aptly running and why the Trump campaign was susceptible to it.

Trump wouldn’t always be the purveyor of questionable stories, but he would echo them.He’d echo them on the campaign trail.Whether it was about Secretary Clinton’s illness, whether it was about all these different kinds of things that were popping up on Reddit, The Donald subreddit.You had Breitbart and Reddit and all these different dark web websites.Trump would mine the right-wing Web and pick up stories, pick up things from social media.He’d scan his Twitter account on his phone, and he’d pick up what people were saying.

One of Trump’s favorite phrases on the campaign trail was always, “Some people are saying,” and he was talking about what I call the “comment section” of American politics.It isn't verified news. It isn't really mainstream news.But it’s discussion and chatter in the comment sections of sites like Breitbart or Reddit or Facebook.

The thing is, Trump delegitimized the media, the mainstream media, every single day.And into that vacuum he put right-wing media organs that reflected an entirely different worldview.This had sweeping consequences for his campaign, because he would cite material and read material that was from what we used to call “the fringe.”But the fringe became the center of American political life, and some of that fringe involved Russian stories that weren't accurate, that were very pro-Putin.

One thing I think is important to call is that in the Democratic Party and in the Republican Party, after the Cold War, there has been a consensus that Putin is a threat, that Putin is up to no good when it comes to human rights.This is a consensus I see every day when I'm covering Capitol Hill.Republicans and Democrats are wary of Putin.They see Putin as a threat to human rights, and they think that Putin wants to meddle in American elections to destroy U.S. democracy.

Trump is so outside of this Republican-Democratic foreign policy consensus, and he didn’t have advisers around him who reflected this consensus, that it’s understandable, if you just are reading the right-wing media, and you have Gen.Flynn briefing you from time to time, that your worldview can almost grow like a mushroom on the outside of American political norms and become this totally different view when it comes to Russia; that Russia is fine; that Putin is an admirable strongman.These were things that were in elements of the Internet.

Let’s talk about the whole question of collusion.… What do we know at this point?

It really depends on what time of the campaign you're talking about.When Corey Lewandowski and Donald Trump were traveling around early in 2015 throughout much of 2016, Russia rarely came up.Lewandowski wasn’t a foreign policy expert.The campaign wasn’t full of people who were interested in Russia.The key turning point in the campaign is when Manafort comes on.Manafort has these connections to Putin-friendly forces in Eastern Europe, so the campaign suddenly started to reflect more of Manafort’s instincts than the disorienting Trump instincts on foreign policy that we saw earlier in the campaign.There wasn’t really a Russia view from Trump or his campaign team until the summer of 2016, the spring of 2016, when Manafort comes on.Then you see all these Putin forces start to see Trump as a real ship for them to get onboard.They see Trump as a champion for a different kind of worldview when it comes to Russia.But that’s thanks to Manafort, who sent a lot of signals that Trump was going to be a different kind of candidate when it came to Russia.

And he’s also getting closer, of course, to being the one that was going to run for president of the United States.I mean, by June—so you’ve got the June meeting, June 9, the Trump Tower meeting with [Jared] Kushner and Don [Trump] Jr. with the Russian lobbyist and lawyer.⁴

What is the lesson to be learned, or what do you take from that meeting?I mean, is that a signal that the campaign was interested in colluding with the Russians if they were going to get good information that would help them in their election against Hillary Clinton?Or what, when you look at the whole story about that meeting, what's your take on it?

It tells us that the Trump campaign was vulnerable, vulnerable to infiltration of different people, different points of view, real controversy.This was not a campaign that had a lot of gatekeepers.Instead, Putin friends were able to waltz right into Trump Tower and have a meeting with the candidate’s son and the candidate’s son-in-law, as well as the campaign chairman.How did this all happen?It wouldn’t happen in a normal campaign like this.There would be gatekeepers.There would be checks and balances on the time of these top advisers.There would be lawyers involved.

In the Trump campaign, it was an amateur operation.It was dozens of people working around Trump’s 26th-floor office, and meetings were just haphazard. They were put together.Trump, even in the summer of 2016, was so outside of his own party that he operated on his own, and this left the campaign vulnerable to different kinds of people coming in.

When that story started breaking, you reported on pieces all the way through, but do you remember sort of your attitude?Did you have conversations with members of the campaign about it?What was their attitude?

What do you mean?The June meeting with Don Jr.?

The Don Jr. meeting.

That didn’t break until recently.

All right.But when it did break, and you were finding out about it and talking to people, what was your take about their answers to sort of what had taken place?

The reaction to the Don Jr. meeting was revealing about how Trump operates and how people around him operate.They were really nervous about it.They wanted to make clear that the president was not in the loop when it came to that material.They first started to say it was about Don Jr. talking adoption policy with Russians.Of course it was about Secretary Clinton and campaign information, but at first they didn’t say that.And it shows you that they were vulnerable to being met, engaged with a lot of different forces, a lot of different people, during the campaign.

But their reaction to it shows what remains true today, that the Trump campaign, and now the Trump White House and the Trump administration, are nervous about how a lot of things unfolded in 2016, because they were so porous in how they had different people involved in policymaking, involved in meetings.They're vulnerable to questions of collusion, to questions of what exactly were you doing?

People close to Trump say they didn’t really know what they were doing.They were taking meetings with everybody.If you had something on Clinton, if you had a piece of advice, if you were a celebrity, you got into Trump Tower.Looking back, a lot of those sources of mine say that was a mistake, that if they had just closed the door on some of these outsiders who were trying to come into the inside, they would have protected themselves.

Your overview on the fact that perhaps, with all this smoke, there might be some fire?

It’s hard to say. I mean, things change every day.What we’re seeing is an administration consumed by many fires—congressional investigations, a special prosecutor.You have all these different players who seem to pop up, Russian names, foreign names that Americans have never heard about, that are now part of the Trump story.And that to people close to Trump is the tragedy, that he still believes, as of late 2017, that the collusion story is fake, and it’s a way to delegitimize his presidency.But he knows that this has become an all-consuming issue in his presidency.People close to Trump have told me that he grouses privately all of the time, deep into 2017, in his first year as president, that Russia remains, as he’s put it, “the cloud.”The president says Russia remains the cloud, the suffocating cloud over his presidency, where, in spite of all of his efforts on the economy, on foreign policy, he has these investigations from the special prosecutor and Congress hovering.

… You wrote about this frustration that he feels about it and that it kind of—it keeps him glued to—you tell this one story about glued to television, watching the cable news, fuming about fake news, and how he led into decisions on [firing] Comey.Talk a little bit about the frustration level, how it’s affected his agenda, how it’s affected him and how he views being president of the United States.

The president has been furious.He knows that, even though he thinks it’s fake news, it remains news.He watches it day by day in this conference room off of the Oval Office.He’s monitoring CNN and MSNBC, and especially Fox News, and he watches the testimony.When he got so angry about Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions recusing himself from the Russia investigation, he made sure he paid close attention to what Sessions said on Capitol Hill.

He knows, as a member—he’s a former reality TV star.He’s a television guy. He’s the first person who will say he thinks in terms of television.⁵

And when Russia is on TV week after week, it takes a toll on him, and a lot of his advisers say they wish he would just turn off the TV.But he keeps getting printouts of articles that infuriate him. And he watches television.He sits there with a Diet Coke, and he watches TV, often early in the morning and during the day. He keeps an eye on it.For Trump, television is everything.Print matters a little bit; it drives the story. But television is the drama that he wants to be in control of.And when it’s all Russia, he feels he has to retake the narrative. He has to inject himself into it.

We’ll get back to that, but let’s finish up with the collusion story.So what do you find to be the most important elements of some of these stories?You’ve got the Felix Sater recent story about, up until—from ’15 until January 2016, they were working toward this Trump Tower deal, that there was a letter of intent that the president signed—or not president yet, but it was early January of ’16, candidate, that during his candidacy, that he was involved in this business deal.How important is that to understand that when it comes to the question about collusion?

It’s very important.The Trump Organization, even throughout the whole campaign, the Trump Organization was this machine that kept moving.In spite of his candidacy, it kept trying to get branding deals, trying to get development deals.In the latter stage of his career, the Trump Organization has really become a branding exercise.It’s a way for Trump to get paid, to let other people use his names on apartment complexes.He actually isn't owning the land; he’s not owning the apartments themselves.But he owns his name, and he owns the rights to his name, and because he has such a reputation as a celebrity, as a glamorous businessman, that he thinks his name has value.

Michael Cohen, his trusted lawyer, was having dozens of meetings throughout the presidential campaign, not just with Felix Sater and with others, but with developers around the world, in sometimes questionable places, because the Trump Organization needs to sell that name to stay afloat.It’s an organization that depends on constantly getting an inflow of cash due to that Trump name.So they’ll have meetings with anyone if you're willing to think about branding it out.If you think about buying the Trump name, they’ll meet with you.

Again, this comes back to the vulnerability that Trump has always had.He may have separated a little bit from his business, but he never really did.Part of the presidential campaign at the start was to present himself as this global figure, this important figure, in part to help raise his own company’s profile as a name that mattered, a name that you could sell.

But this is a man running for the presidency of the United States.I mean, what are the problems that incurred, if you're also involved in trying to do deals with countries that most people view as our adversaries?

Ethics lawyers throughout the campaign urged Trump to step away in a more significant way, and especially when he became president, they said: “Enough. Step away from the business. Tell your family to step away from the business.”But we still see his sons are running the company.Different family members are involved.The Ivanka Trump business continues to run, even though she’s inside of the White House.For so many decades, Trump thought about his life as a family business.It was a family business that had to be cultivated.He just has been unable to change from that M.O.

Another important meeting is the Dec. 1, 2016, meeting.Kushner and Flynn meet with [Ambassador Sergey] Kislyak at Trump Tower, and they talk about secret back channels.What's your take on the damaging aspects of that story, whether again it’s just being dupes or misunderstanding the seriousness of this?

When I used to cover Jared on the campaign trail, I started to see, in the summer and fall, that he was really going to be a shadow secretary of state if Trump actually got elected.Kushner, throughout the campaign, told foreign leaders and corporate leaders that he was the person to talk to when it came to policy, when it came to truly connecting with then-candidate and then-President-elect Trump.Kushner always wanted to be the person that foreign leaders and business leaders came to.He wanted to be the gatekeeper, and he also wanted to operate on his own, outside of the national security establishment.Kushner, like Trump, does not trust the establishment of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, so you see him trying to develop his own network.Kushner takes the meeting with Kislyak.Kushner has the meeting with Kislyak because he considers himself, in many ways, to be a shadow secretary of state, someone who can build Trump’s foreign policy outside of the traditional national security apparatus.So it wasn’t that surprising to followers of Jared Kushner to see him meet with Kislyak.He wanted to meet with everyone and have him be the one managing the process, not anyone else.

Lay it out simply for us: What's the problem of trying to do that within a Russian communication system that the United States cannot eavesdrop on ?

Kushner and the Trump transition think it’s totally fine for him to meet with Kislyak.If he is going to be the shadow secretary of state, why not? Why can't he build the relationship?At the same time, the national security community and the Intelligence Community, they're monitoring Kislyak’s calls, and they're telling each other, and some people in the press: “What is going on here?You're not supposed to talk with the Russian ambassador about these kind of very delicate, sensitive issues when you know he’s being bugged, when you know he’s a person you maybe can't trust.”

There is such a chasm between how Kushner and Trump see the meeting and how the Intelligence Community sees the meeting.The Intelligence Community is apoplectic.Don’t the Trumps know we’re bugging this guy?Don’t you know you can't trust the Russian ambassador to the United States?Meanwhile, Kushner and Trump say: “We want to build a better relationship with Russia. What's wrong with that?”

But they trust the Russians more than they trust the American Intelligence Community?

Trump, Kushner and many others around Trump, the Trump team associates the Intelligence Community with the Obama administration.You have to underscore that, because that leads to the lack of trust.They think all of this advice, all of these briefings they were getting during the campaign and the transition was coming not from a nonpartisan Intelligence Community but from a partisan Obama administration, an administration they saw as the enemy.So from the start, the Intelligence Community was not what it normally was when it came to dealing with Trump, which was this nonpartisan entity meant to inform the candidate.The Trumps were suspicious of it.They saw the Intelligence Community as part of Obama’s circle.

Another meeting, what's your take?Kushner later meets with [Sergey] Gorkov, the head of the Russian bank, and they talk about U.S. sanctions and such.⁶

The question, of course, comes up with the fact of whether they were looking for help with his company’s problematic 666 Fifth Avenue property.What's your take on that story and the importance of it?

Kushner maintains that he was acting as the foreign policy adviser to the president-elect, that he was someone who was just trying to build these relationships.His critics say he was someone who has properties that are underwater, that need funding, and he’s looking for friends in the foreign policy community as much as he’s looking for donors or funders for his properties.

There is, again, a total difference in how both of the sides explain these stories.Kushner’s critics say, what is he doing having these meetings with financial types?And you do see Bob Mueller looking into financial crimes.I mean, that’s the whole thing.We could go over each of these episodes.You could go through each and every episode, when it comes to Trump and Russia, and you’ll get entirely different stories from both sides.The Kushner and Trump side will say: “We were cultivating relationships. We were building a government.”The critics will say: “What the heck were you doing? This raises a lot of red flags, because your business, when it comes to Kushner, was underwater. You needed money, and you were meeting with financial types.”

But again, the challenge for Mueller is finding out which side is correct, which side is accurate.This is the looming question over everything with Russia.Trump and Kushner say fake news; they were doing the duty for the country; they were building relationships with foreign powers.And the critics say it was all corrupt; it was about getting money for properties or building unseemly relationships with foreign adversaries.

It’s the challenge for Congress and Bob Mueller to figure out what's the actual story here.We still don’t know.We’re deep into the Trump presidency, and both of these sides continue to maintain that they are right when it comes to Russia.That’s why it’s not only a cloud, as the president says; it is a swamp of information.It is so murky, because every time you report something in the Post or The New York Times on Trump and Russia, it immediately leads to a barrage of accusations of fake news, and that it’s delegitimate, delegitimizing, trying to—whatever. You know what I'm saying.

But say it.

Every time you come out with a new report on Trump and Russia, you get an immediate barrage from Trump allies saying, “This is fake news, and you're trying to delegitimize the president.”So we’re not really having a conversation in this country about what happened.We’re having a fight, day in, day out, about real news versus fake news.Who’s going to adjudicate this, Bob Mueller?The congressional investigations?Because it’s not the media.The media is trying to reveal the facts of what the heck happened in 2016, but the judgment is yet to be determined.

Great.Roger Stone’s statements before the Podesta emails are released. Your take on that story?⁷

Stone’s a rabble-rouser.He loves to be at the center of attention, at the center of American politics.He also has broken with the establishment, going back to 1996, when he got run out of the Bob Dole campaign.He is someone who has been close to Trump and someone who never clicked with the establishment of the Republican Party, so when it came to Russia, he was a fighter for Trump.He was someone who wanted to build a relationship with WikiLeaks, who saw Julian Assange as someone who was almost a freedom fighter going against the global political elites.

Stone has become a central figure in the Alex Jones-Julian Assange world of media that’s outside of the norm, conservative politics that’s agitated, that’s against what we usually perceive as the normal American right.Stone is part of this new group that’s rising up, that’s nationalist, that’s populist, in a way like Steve Bannon.Stone is someone who’s saying, “The entire elite in America is corrupt, and I'm going to provide you with a whole different kind of information.”

So Stone, even though he was out of the campaign, he was always on its edges.Stone remained close to Manafort, going back years.Roger Stone and Paul Manafort were close friends going back to the 1970s. Manafort and Stone were close.So when Manafort finally ascends in the summer and spring of 2016, it’s Stone who’s there, whispering in the president’s ear, who’s close to Manafort.I mean, Manafort and Stone—Stone was not some isolated figure when all the Russian stories were happening.He was not someone on the fringe. Stone was at the center.Stone may have views that are out there, but there was no one closer to Paul Manafort during the summer of 2016 than Roger Stone.

So his involvement in being in touch with WikiLeaks people or [Guccifer] 2.0, what's the problem there?

Stone’s a provocateur.Going back to Watergate, he is someone who has loved that he’s known as a dirty trickster.Stone has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back.He likes that he was involved with Watergate.Stone likes to be seen as a rabble-rouser.Stone is not known as an ideologue when it comes to Russia.He’s not someone who’s trying to push a pro-Putin view.But he was useful to Trump as someone who was so disruptive that he would do things that maybe the campaign couldn’t do.He would say things that maybe the campaign couldn’t say.But Stone was always close to Trump, close to Paul Manafort.You have to pay attention to Stone, because even though he wasn’t formally involved, he was a mirror into a lot of the thinking inside of the Trump campaign.

The U.S. Response to Russian Measures

Let’s talk about the Obama administration and how they handled all this, the debate going on at the White House that sort of lasted forever, and with the indecision about releasing information about what the intelligence folks knew, as early as they could have.What was going on in the White House?And they certainly—you know, we’ve talked to folks after the election that of course have second thoughts now about what actually took place.But from what you saw, from what your reporting uncovered, how did the Obama administration deal with these issues, and what do we know at this point?

President Obama was sensitive to the idea that he wanted to be removed from the general-election political debate.He wanted to let that unfold on its own.You can understand the Obama administration’s reluctance to really play this up during the heart of the campaign, because it would make Obama, even if he didn’t want to be it, a politicized player, someone who was bringing an issue to the fore, that had real political implications.

So you saw, throughout the end of the campaign, the Obama administration balancing the national security interests with the political. ...The Trump base would have revolted if Obama got involved in a bigger way, because they were so acutely sensitive already to Obama’s involvement in the election and his role in the election as this looming figure, as the incumbent president, supportive of Secretary Clinton.I believe, based on my conversations with Democrats, that people around the president wanted to make it clear that Russia was meddling, but they didn’t want to be playing it up so much on their own, that they seemed like they were making a case against Trump.

Sort of a catch-22 situation.And then you’ve got Trump himself saying that the election is going to be rigged, which how does that play into their decision-making in the White House, the Obama White House?

Trump keeps saying the election is going to be rigged, and that the Democrats are working against him, and that they're going to have all these fake voters throughout the country.There was this atmosphere that the elections, the integrity of the elections were on the line and that Trump, every day, was questioning the integrity of the elections.It’s in that highly charged atmosphere that President Obama and people around him make the decision to not give Trump more of a case to make that somehow the Obama administration or the federal government are aligned against him.It’s a tough call.History is going to judge President Obama. Could he have spoken out more and said that Russia was doing A, B and C?They didn’t do that because the environment was so highly charged that he had a Republican candidate saying that the elections themselves were going to be rigged.And Trump, for a long time, would not even say whether he would acknowledge the results of the election if he lost.

Obama does go to Putin and has conversation with him in China.Basically, what Obama gets—and there's also, I think, another telephone call at one point—and what he gets is denials.… How does the Obama administration deal with the fact that the facts are not the facts?

Of course Putin was going to deny it.Putin sees the United States as involved in elections around the world, so he’s not going to cop up to the fact that he was, through his different media arms and different organs, trying to influence the U.S.election.It was obvious to the Obama administration that Putin would never admit to it.What Obama was trying to do is send a signal to Putin that we know what you're up to; we’re well aware of your activities.Even if you deny it to my face, or you deny it on the phone, we’re well aware of what you're doing.

Should Secretary Clinton have won, the Clintonites and the Obama alumni were ready to go hard at Russia with sanctions for what they were doing in the election.But part of the calculus, you have to remember, was that they thought Secretary Clinton was likely going to win.They thought Secretary Clinton was likely going to win, and in that scenario that could wait until after the election to go after Russia with full force.Until then, they wanted to tread carefully as Trump questioned the integrity of the elections.There was this thought that all of this fight against Russia, the sanctions, they could wait until November.

And the motivations for Putin to do this, to take on the greatest power in the world?

Putin loves chaos.Putin sees chaos as a way to control the narrative, to control people, to have power.Chaos is the way he’s often dominated Russia, and if he could try to have some chaos in Europe, have some chaos even in the United States, he sees it as a win for Russia, because if the West is off kilter, if the West is at war with itself, Russia could perhaps find a window to jump through.Russia could be ascended if the West was in chaos. …

The DNI [Director of National Intelligence] report, let’s talk about that.⁸

Oct. 7, the release of the DNI report.It’s a pretty specific statement.It’s a pretty important statement.… Why was it impossible for the Obama administration to make more hay about the importance of this story?They certainly tried, on Oct. 7, but with no success.

It was difficult for the Obama administration to make it above-the-fold news day in and day out.Secretary Clinton certainly talked about Russia on the campaign trail in October, but she, too, had to respond to the flurry, the blizzard of news events that were confronting her each and every day.You had Access Hollywood come out.You had so many different controversies with Trump.There was questions of even, would Trump stay on the ticket after Access Hollywood?

A DNI report, as important as it was, it was pretty dry.It didn’t dominate early October, and it didn’t dominate mid- or late October.It was a one- or two-day story, and it gave us a lot of information about what Russia was up to, but the administration wasn’t trying to make it their clarion call a month before the election.The administration wanted the information to be out there.Secretary Clinton was talking about Russia, but it disappeared.

Did you have many conversations with the Clinton campaign about their anger over the fact that the emails was the only thing that was being talked about all the time, and the Russian story sort of disappeared among the midst here?

To this day, people who worked on the Clinton campaign are angry at the press coverage of the Clinton emails and the Clinton email server.They wonder why so much attention was paid to the Clinton email controversy and the federal investigation into her conduct rather than on Russia.They believe firmly, almost a year later, that the Clinton email story should never have overshadowed Russia and that Russia should have been the big story of 2016.They are convinced that if Russia and the hacking and the DNI report had gotten more coverage and had gotten more attention, the election maybe would have [gone] a different way.

The problem for Clinton, Secretary Clinton had her own problems throughout October that consumed the news cycle.It wasn’t like she was talking about Russian hacking every day with perfect focus and that the media somehow missed her argument.She, too, like Trump, was consumed by other issues, and when you look back, that was a problem for her.Russia faded not just because Trump had all of his distractions, but because Clinton had hers, too.

Election Day, Trump wins.Is there remorse in the White House over this issue, that now that they lost, they understand the bigger issues and the fact that they should have done more?

It wasn’t remorse; it was shock.There was a shock to the entire global political system that Donald Trump was able to win the White House with over 300 electoral votes.This outsider who spoke in such blunt and often controversial ways, he was able to win.The candidate who encouraged Russia to release hacked emails of Secretary Clinton, the candidate who touted Putin as an ally, he won.There was such an expectation on election night that Clinton would win and that the norms of American politics would somewhat recover in the coming weeks and months.And when he won, no one really knew what to do.There wasn’t an immediate turn to what—“Maybe we could have said more about Russia.”There was just shock. No one knew how to process Trump’s victory inside of the Clinton campaign.Even inside of the Trump campaign, there was shock. How could this have happened at the scale it happened?But it was a global moment.Russia saw that they maybe only wanted chaos at the start in America, but they ended up getting the White House.The consequence of the meddling was immense.People who know Putin well say, at the start, he wanted to just cause trouble for Clinton; he wanted to have America be in chaos.At the end of the day, Trump wins the White House, and Putin, he gets much more than he ever could have imagined.

Putin and Trump

… Just give us the overview of how the Russians might have been viewing this.

The Russians thought they had a new ally in Trump, someone who could help them out.The problem for Russia became that the meddling became such a shackle on Trump.Trump may have had instincts to work with Russia in a warmer way, but because of the accusations of meddling and collusion, Trump was limited in what he could do.So Russia had an ally in spirit, but they didn’t have an ally in action once Trump’s elected.

Once Trump’s elected, they have an ally in spirit with Trump, but not an ally in action.Trump is shackled from doing anything significant with Russia because of the ongoing investigations, and he does not want to be perceived as playing into Putin’s hand.Trump did want to reimagine U.S.-Russia relations.He did want to rethink NATO.But he was dealing with the cloud, the cloud of the investigations.

Also, holding down Trump was his own party.Republicans were insistent, from the day Trump got elected, that they were not going to budge when it came to Russian policy.They were going to keep the sanctions in, and they were going to continue to be hawkish and hostile to Vladimir Putin.So the Republicans, Sen. [John] McCain, Sen. [Lindsey] Graham, Speaker [Paul] Ryan, they may not agree with Trump on Russia, but Speaker Ryan, Sen. McCain, Sen. Graham, they were a wall of opposition to Trump from day one of his transition; that you may like Putin, and you may like Russia, but you're not going to do anything with our blessing.

… The congressional vote on the sanctions, how significant was that?How did Trump take it?What does it say about the relationship between the two?

The vote on sanctions was perhaps the most significant moment on Russia in Trump’s presidency.⁹

A Republican-controlled Congress was sending a direct signal to the president saying, “You will not do what you want when it comes to Russia.”It was Congress asserting power, Congress asserting its dominance over foreign policy.It infuriated the White House. The White House thought they were the ones to set foreign policy. The president is the one who sets foreign policy, no?Congress said to the president: “We’re going to determine whether there are sanctions or not.You can have your talks with Putin. You can meet with him. But when it comes to policy, we’re going to determine it.”Congress never acted so forcefully in Trump’s early months than on Russia and on that sanctions vote.

How clear was it when the administration came in that they were going to do away with the Ukrainian sanctions?

Trump himself, the Trump campaign didn’t have a real plan when it came to policy and foreign policy.They were struggling in the transition to get people to come into the government to understand the direction they were trying to go in.Part of the reason Kushner has all of these meetings is that he’s just trying to navigate where exactly the Trump administration wants to go.There was no doctrine coming in with Russia.There was a thought that they could work with Russia in a more productive way.But there were no promises about getting rid of the sanctions.There was no real game plan for how to enact foreign policy and to get Congress to come along.It was a mess of instincts and feelings and ambitions, but no real coherent game plan.

… There certainly was a fear within Congress. Why else would they vote for that about sanctions?

The veteran lawmakers in the Republican Party saw immediately that they needed to be a blockade against Trump and Russia.They saw Trump being tempted by Putin, being tempted to walk away from NATO, and they began to travel around the world, and particularly Sen.McCain went to all of these places, all of these different cities, to talk to American allies and reassure them that though President Trump was running the White House and running foreign policy, the Republican Congress, the hawkish Republicans, would be really dictating what could happen.They determined the extent to which Trump could make policy.

One thing back on the Obama side that we haven't talked about: Finally they do put out these sanctions on Dec. 29.¹⁰

The president speaks from Hawaii and makes this statement and talks about the sanctions that are being brought against Russia.A lot of people say [they’re] basically toothless, nothing like the sanctions that were brought after Ukraine.They really didn’t—the response itself was pretty lukewarm, and the Russians don’t even retaliate.

The Russians mocked President Obama.They say, “Our ally Donald Trump is about to be sworn in as president of the United States,” and they shrugged off this last gesture from President Obama.The Russians thought, we have a president of the United States coming in who really isn't for NATO and likes Putin.What a difference.Let’s just wait a month.

… What’s your take of Trump recently basically saying that Obama was weak in his response to Russia?He questions why didn’t Obama, when he had this information, this intelligence, do something versus Russia if they were so concerned about it?

Trump’s a transactional politician.He’s also someone who has no real guiding ideology or doctrine.It’s all about strength.And he’s played the Obama’s sensitivity.Trump has played the Obama administration’s sensitivity on intervening in the election and talking about Russia more, against them.He now says the Obama administration should have been tougher on Putin, should have had more talk about sanctions.He’s making a strength argument against Obama, even though the Obama administration was trying not to be seen as going against Trump.

And the irony of that?

Oh, it’s everything. It’s everything. There's irony everywhere.

All right, so let’s talk about Flynn.The same day that Obama puts out his sanctions, there is this telephone conversation from I guess a beach in the Dominican Republic between Flynn and Kislyak, and they talk about sanctions.¹¹

… Tell us some of the parts of that story that you find fascinating.

Flynn was a lot like Kushner in the sense that they wanted to operate outside of the normal channels and develop their own relationships and their own networks.Flynn was burned by his experience in the Obama administration; his relationship with the president had frayed.He left by saying—Flynn retired angry with President Obama, angry about how he had been treated, and he brought that anger to the Trump campaign and to the Trump transition.It’s no surprise that Flynn, in spite of coming out of the Intelligence Community, wants to work on his own when it comes to foreign relationships, because he doesn’t have warm relations anymore with the Intelligence Community.He had been there at the highest levels of the American Intelligence Community and the American military, but with Trump in the transition, he was a Trump confidante who was deeply suspicious of people who were in the Obama administration.So he wants to talk to Kislyak on his own; he wants to talk with other foreign leaders on his own.

And the sanctions conversation, that takes place on the 29th?

I mean, it’s been reported that they talked about sanctions, right?

Yeah.

The key issue on the mind of the Russians were the sanctions. What exactly would this new ally do?You saw Russian officials and Russian figures in the transition trying to answer the question of, what would they get from Trump?Could they count on the sanctions going away?

And the fact that—you actually covered the retaliation.But Trump’s reaction to the fact that there is no retaliation, that he says about Putin, “I always knew he was very smart,” what was Trump’s reaction to the fact of how the Russians played the Obama sanctions?

President Trump has deep animus for President Obama, so anyone who’s an enemy of President Obama is going to usually get a fair hearing from President Trump, and if that means Vladimir Putin, so be it.He saw in Putin a strongman who was making President Obama look weak.At least that’s how the president saw it, president-elect saw it.President-elect Trump saw Putin making fun of Obama, making Obama look weak, and anyone who was an enemy of President Obama is a potential friend for President-elect Trump, so he is happy with how it all plays out.

Jan. 5, the DNI report comes out.¹²

Jan. 6, [then-CIA Director John] Brennan and Clapper and [then-FBI Director James] Comey, I guess, go up to Trump Tower and brief the president-elect.Were you there by any chance?

No.

All right.They brief him on the evidence that they have in more detail than they had before.Soon after, a couple days later, Trump gives his press conference, where he reluctantly sort of says, “Well, Russia seems to have been involved in all of this.”How interesting, how important or inconsequential, in the end, was that moment?

Trump’s affinity for Russia is often overstated.He thinks Russia is a weapon his enemies used against him.But on the actual merits of Russian collusion and Russian meddling, he’s shown himself, at times, to be open to argument.When you have these top officials—Comey and Clapper come to meet with the president-elect, he’s open to hearing them out when it comes to Russian involvement.He does not love the idea of his election being seen as illegitimate.At the same time, he doesn’t love the idea of Putin meddling in the election.

So you see Comey and Clapper able to break through, at least for a moment, with the president-elect and say: “Here is what Russia did. Here is why you have to take it seriously.”But it didn’t catch. It didn’t hold with Trump.

... So just to finish up Flynn, The Washington Post on Jan. 12 writes an article about the Flynn conversations.Pence and others check with Flynn, who lies to them, and then they go on television.They came up saying he wasn’t talking about sanctions.Then the leaks come out of the intelligence recordings of it, and he resigns.What's the importance of that part of the story, and how significant [is it]?

It was a huge moment early in the Trump presidency, because Flynn had been controlling the national security team.He was the national security adviser, and his people worked throughout the administration.When Flynn goes, the dynamic begins to change.This hard-line, deeply suspicious national security apparatus inside of the White House starts to become more mainstream.You have H.R. McMaster come in as national security adviser, and he is totally of the mainstream.So you had Flynn, this antagonist of the Obama administration, this person who sometimes espoused fringe views, who was very combative, be replaced by a friend of Gen.[David] Petraeus, by a friend of many in Congress, in H.R. McMaster.You see, when it comes to Russia, a movement away from the base of the Trump campaign to a more Republican, traditional approach.

And the fact that—would Trump have had to know about what Flynn was doing and talking about sanctions, and knowing their relationship, and knowing what was being said, and what his interests were?

It’s sometimes hard to know the extent of what President Trump knew about Russia and about conversations about sanctions.His lawyers and advisers say he was out of the loop, but Flynn was a confidante when he was national security adviser.Jared Kushner couldn’t be closer to the president.These are realities that these were two of his closest advisers, and they were having conversations that were taped by the Intelligence Community and that were highly questionable.

And his son, having meetings to sort of find dirt on Hillary, I mean, that’s not something that would have come up?

I think you’ve got to separate Flynn and Kushner and their conversations with Kislyak [from] Don Jr.Don Jr. is not a political pro.He’s someone who is open to having a meeting that would be hurtful to Secretary Clinton.But Donald Trump Jr. was never part of the inner circle of the campaign or the transition in the same way that Kushner and Flynn were.Kushner and Flynn were players in the transition. …

Why Trump’s stance on Putin, and never ridicules him? What does he see in Putin?

Well, he’s the strongman. Putin’s the strongman.Trump, his entire career, wants to have the right hair, the right suits, the right tie, the right house, the right-looking family.He wants it all. It’s a presentation.It’s a sale—a sale of strength, entrepreneurial spirit, a sale of America.But really, at this core, it’s strength.Trump wants to be seen as someone who’s strong.Strong equals a higher brand value.Strong equals more endurance in American life.So you saw on The Apprentice, he was the strongman.

In Putin, he sees someone like him, someone who takes his image as a strongman seriously, someone who cultivates the image of a strongman, and someone who’s never been accepted by the political elites.Putin does not have friends on the global stage like [Chancellor Angela] Merkel does in Germany, or like [Prime Minister] Theresa May does in the U.K., or even like [Chinese President] Xi Jinping does in Asia.Putin is an isolated figure in Russia.Trump identifies with being the isolated outsider.Trump identifies with someone who takes being a strongman seriously.At its core, at its base, the Trump respect for Putin is someone who sees someone a reflection of themselves.Putin hates the press; Trump hates the press.Putin presents himself like a strongman; Trump presents himself like a strongman.The elites have always condescended to Trump; the elites in the global political community have condescended to Putin.In Putin, Trump saw a mirror of himself.

Let’s talk about Comey for a little bit.… What's going on in that relationship early on, and what are the resentments between the two?

Comey and Trump come from totally different worlds.Comey abides by a code.He is a creature of the government.He is an attorney. I believe he is an attorney.

He must be. You have to be an attorney.

Yeah. Comey lives by a code. Comey sees integrity as everything.Trump is a transactional figure.They come from different worlds.The transactional world of New York real estate is very different from the law enforcement world of Washington, D.C.Comey is taken aback by these requests for loyalty from the president of the United States, totally inappropriate in Comey’s view.But Trump sees Comey as someone who may just want something from him, who may want to keep his job.

Go back to Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, the people who taught Trump politics, taught him that politics was transaction, people have prices.He was trying to see, with Comey, maybe he had a price.Trump wanted his loyalty.What did he need to give Comey to get that loyalty? Maybe he extended his time as FBI director.Comey is taken aback and says this is not the way he usually works.

The frustrations that grow in Trump’s mind over the fact that Comey will not come out and state publicly that there [are] no investigations into the president himself, and then the congressional statements that he makes about the fact that there are investigations into members of the campaign.Tell us a little bit of that story …

Trump can't stand that the FBI is so mum about the investigations and about who is being investigated.Trump wants to be exonerated.He wants to be cleared.And when he’s told by Comey privately that the FBI is not looking into the president, he thinks that should be played on every single TV station for 24 hours a day: Trump is not a target; Trump is not a target.He begins to tell his friends and associates: “I'm not a target. Comey has told me I'm not a target. Why isn't this being covered? Why isn't the FBI saying more?”Trump gets angrier and angrier that the FBI is, for some reason, in his mind, not doing enough to say to the public that the president isn't under the microscope.

And how does this lead to the ultimate firing?¹³

The cloud continues.Trump sees Russia as a distraction and Comey as an FBI director who’s not working in his interests.Of course that’s not the FBI director’s job.And Trump gets angry, and he says: “I want to get rid of Comey, and I want to get rid of the Russian investigation if possible. And if I can't do that, I want to at least lessen it.”Trump is encouraged by Kushner to get rid of Comey.

There's an argument made to Trump privately that many Democrats don’t like Comey because of the way he handled the election, and Comey is not well liked at the FBI.So Trump is given these talking points by some of his allies [who] say: “If you get rid of Comey, it won't be a total political storm. He doesn’t have a lot of friends, a lot of allies inside the FBI. It could actually play out OK for you.”Trump is hearing all of these different things, and he makes his decision.

Is it just a political mistake about how many people will view this as, you can't ax the guy who’s head of the investigation looking into campaign members and how you guys dealt with the Russian issue?How is that possible?

There are some Trump allies who say the Comey firing was the biggest mistake of Trump’s presidency.It, of course, prompted a special prosecutor, and it led to a whole new wave of questions of what the president was doing when it came to potential obstruction of an ongoing federal investigation.

So a possibility of obstruction of justice.

The story went from about being purely about Russian collusion to be about being obstruction.The story went from collusion to being about potential obstruction.That was a moment where everything changed, because of Trump’s decision, not because of something in the investigation.

And the original argument that the reason that the decision was made to get rid of him was due to the way he handled the Clinton case?

Yeah.Like everything with the Russian investigation, there's usually a sheen that’s different from the actual answer on top of the initial explanation.At first we’re all told that Comey was fired because he was doing a poor job as FBI director, and there was a memo that detailed all of the different ways that Comey was failing in his job in the president’s view.Of course Trump articulated to his friends, associates and advisers that he was sick of the Russian investigations, and Comey wasn’t doing enough to exonerate him, so he wanted him out.It was always about Russia.My reporting, others’ reporting, has shown it was always about Russia.But at first, the president gave a different explanation.

And that meeting in the White House with Kislyak and [Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov on the next day after the firing, take us into that room, what was said, and just why it was said, and how— <v Robert Costa> We don’t really know what was said.It’s been very murky about what was actually said in the meeting.What we do see are the images and the images of a smiling President Trump, a smiling Lavrov, a grinning Kislyak.These photos were provided by the Russians.And the statement, though, that was leaked, which was that he said, “Finally I fired Comey, and finally there's a huge relief, because the pressure is taken off of me on my dealings with Russia.”

It’s an amazing moment.The president has just fired the FBI director who is investigating Russian collusion.Now he’s sitting with two of the top officials in the Russian government, and they're laughing about the firing of the investigator, and the pictures are there to show the atmosphere.We may not have been in the room, but we all got a sense from those pictures, and of course the leak afterward, that this was a chummy exchange, an exchange of people who really saw Comey and the political establishment in Washington as aligned against both of them.That is where the Russians have been savvy in connecting with President Trump.They know that they're outsiders in world politics, and they know that Trump is an outsider within his own American political system, and they’ve connected as outsiders.

That moment when Lavrov is going into a room off the White House or whatever, and the press is asking him about the firing, and he jokes about, “Oh, has he really been fired?”What was your take of that moment?

It was casual; it was informal.It was a moment—there was no angst among the Russians about being at the White House the day after the Comey firing; there was no nervousness.The Russians were at ease at the White House that day.Things were moving in a positive direction in their view.Was Trump in political trouble in the United States? Sure.But they were winning incrementally in having this investigation really be a political hot button that not everyone knew much—the Russians felt like they were winning.The Republican Congress may be fighting to keep the sanctions in, but the president was giving them every indication that he was still friendly with them.

Where are we now with relations?

We have a Republican Congress that is very suspicious of Russia, that wants to keep the sanctions in; we have Democrats in Congress who are anti-Putin; and we have a president who is pretty boxed in by that dynamic, as well as with the investigations.But he’s still tempted to see Putin as an ally, whether it’s in Syria or in going after different terrorism challenges around the world.He thinks about Russia in a different way.And as the presidency continues, and the investigations continue that could knock his presidency off, at the same time, Russia still has a president who’s willing to engage with them in a way almost no president has ever engaged with them.

You know Trump pretty well among reporters, better than most.How does this president react to being boxed in in that way, having his agenda being thrown off the tracks due to this “cloud,” as you define? How do you think he eventually reacts?I mean, this status quo is not going to remain for much longer, one would guess.

Whenever he’s boxed in, Trump fights back.Trump recoils against advice or constraints.I've seen Trump up close so many times, where he is advised to do one thing and he’ll do the exact opposite.So as the Republicans and Democrats and his own advisers say, “Keep Russia at bay; don’t embrace Putin,” you could expect Trump to do the exact opposite.President Trump is someone, throughout his entire life, [who] has hated to be told what to do and believes he can rethink and reimagine situations that work to his benefit; that he’s so transactional and such a deal-maker in his own mind, that the usual way of responding and reacting to situations doesn’t apply to him.So he doesn’t follow the usual rules, and we shouldn’t expect the usual rules to continue with Russia.

So if the usual rules don’t usually count for much when it comes to this president, you know, what can one expect no matter what the investigations show?

Regardless of what happened with the investigations, this is going to be an issue that the president sees as a political war against him.He could leave office or stay in office for another few years.Regardless of what happens, the president is going to see the Russia controversy as a political war, and because of that, any conclusion by investigators, by the special prosecutors, is always going to have an asterisk next to it when it comes to the Trump base and the Trump supporters.They’ll think that their guy, their president was taken down by the establishment.

The facts are not just the facts when it comes to Trump and Russia. They're up for debate.That’s the way the president has set up this entire episode, that there's no black and white here; it’s all gray.

Fake news could be coming; the investigations could become fake investigations?

Yeah.There's no arbiter of truth in this entire conversation—not the FBI, not the special counsel, not Congress, not the White House.Every person has a point of view.Every side seems to have an agenda.No one really trusts the other side to come and say what's actually the fact.As a reporter covering this, there's no trust in this entire national conversation about Trump and Russia.There's no trust [from] the investigators to the White House; there's no trust from the White House to the investigators.The media has become politicized, fake news versus real news. It’s a mess.And I don’t see the mess changing any time soon. We live in the mess. We live in the chaos.

… What did Putin get out of all this?

At the end of the day, Putin got power.Putin has been able to accumulate more power because of everything that has happened.Because of everything that has happened, Putin has been able to accumulate more power.Inside Russia, Putin is seen as someone who went to the United States, and regardless of what he did exactly, he is someone who was able to change an American election.He was able to be someone who is seen as a—Russia has been hobbled on the world stage ever since the end of the Cold War, and Putin has been recovering Russian identity in the world.Part of that means causing chaos in the United States and to have the United States, in the form of the president himself, respect Russia.Putin may not have ever predicted he could help Trump get elected, but he wanted to have Russia have more respect on the world stage and among the American political establishment.In that sense, Putin has already won.

The president of the United States has acknowledged that Putin is a global player, is a global leader, is someone he has to take seriously, is not someone just to wag a finger at.The United States used to just wag its finger at Putin, used to say Putin was up to no good.Now that whole approach has been scrambled, scrambled because of Donald Trump, scrambled because of Vladimir Putin. …

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