The FRONTLINE Interviews
Timothy O’Brien
Executive editor, Bloomberg View
Timothy O'Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg View and the author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore conducted on Aug. 10, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
This interview appears in:
TOP
Timothy O’Brien
Chapters
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
Putin and Trump
… Talk a little bit about Trump, the way he’s dealing with this whole Russian story, the Russian hacking case.… What is it about Donald Trump that helps to define the way he’s viewing this whole story?
I think the important thing to remember about Donald Trump is he is so extremely self-absorbed and self-involved that he sees everything from a very singular perspective: his own.He’s had a long career in which I think his wealth and his own force of will have insulated him from the consequences of some of his own mistakes.And he’s gotten used to getting his own way.He’s gotten used to reaching into processes.Whether that’s law enforcement officials looking at his businesses, whether it’s regulators looking at his businesses, whether it’s competitors, local governments, he doesn’t really brook the notion that it’s OK for people to tell him what to do or tell him that he’s done something wrong.
Then he lands in the White House, with very little preparation for I think the demands of the office, the kind of scrutiny he’s going to get and really the forces he’s up against.I also think it’s important to remember that he invited Russian hackers into the campaign.This isn't something that just sort of floated into his world and he wasn’t aware of it.He relished it to a certain extent.He was reckless, extraordinarily reckless for a presidential candidate when he suggested hackers take a closer look at Hillary Clinton’s email.
Now he’s dealing with the consequences [of] that, and he doesn’t like it, quite obviously.He’s labeled it a “witch hunt.”He’s fired Jim Comey.He’s made veiled threats against [Special Counsel] Robert Mueller.I believe, at some point, if push comes to shove, he’ll fire Bob Mueller.None of this is new behavior for Donald Trump.He has had a lifetime of striking back whenever he feels threatened.1
1
You talk about the fact that he is like—I'm using your words here, “a seven-year-old boy grown old,” who considers himself an outlaw.His motto is, “Rules are meant to be broken.”Explain that aspect of this man.
Well, he’s not—you know, he’s not a fully formed adult.I think we’ve come to see this now in his short tenure in the White House.He doesn’t really think about the consequences of his actions.He doesn’t think strategically.He’s not intellectually or emotionally disciplined.He essentially likes to do what he wants to do, and what he sees around him most of the time is a series of competitors, in a random, almost one-off way.He doesn’t have a programmatic sense of his presidency.He doesn’t really have an agenda he wants to push through.For him, as it is for, I think, children, he likes to be center stage all of the time.And he’s a little bit like the kid who likes to walk into the parents’ cocktail party and burp in the middle of the party to get attention.He does this time and time again.You’ve seen it throughout his whole career.I think what's extraordinary and what's hard for people to get their hands around is, how did a person with that kind of psychological landscape and background wind up in the Oval Office?
Winning is everything.
Winning is everything.But he’ll, when he loses—and he’s lost frequently throughout his career—he’ll redefine it as winning of some sort.We saw this with the health care debacle.He really didn’t pay any attention to the nuts and bolts of health care policy.They ended up having this disastrous bill in the House that he proclaimed was a victory.They brought it to the Senate.The Senate ended up not being able to get a bill of its own through.Trump tried to claim that that was going to emerge as a victory as well.But in the end, it was a failure; he didn’t get the legislation.But he’ll never say that.
And how does it relate to the Russian story?
I think Trump has expressed, for a long time he’s expressed this deep-seated admiration for Vladimir Putin.2He likes strong men.He likes people who are dictatorial in the way they roll.I think he sees himself as someone who shouldn’t be bound by normal rules or by outside forces.And somebody like Putin, who is constantly saber-rattling and randomly crossing other borders to enforce Russia’s dominion, regionally, is very appealing to Trump’s imagination.
2
I don’t think he’s someone who was informed about the nuts and bolts of U.S.-Russian foreign policy.I don’t think he has a historical sense of any of that.He has a theatrical sense of everything.And Vladimir Putin appealed to Trump’s cinematic sense of himself and his love for public theatrics.That’s now coming home to haunt him, because he courted Putin and misrepresented his relationship with Putin in very over-the-top ways, and that’s now haunting him in an investigation that’s also creeping into his possible financial ties to Russia.
And worry about that is what?
I think the worry for Trump, as a businessman, is that he’s someone who doesn’t have a closet full of skeletons; he has a warehouse full of them.And an investigator who begins examining a diplomatic event with Russia, an electoral event with Russia, can soon start to, of necessity, wander into the financial.And Trump is very afraid, I think, of relationships and financings around his empire that he knows don’t look very well.
Thus his warnings to Mueller.
Right. The warning to Bob Mueller is: “I am arbitrarily saying there's a red line here, and that red line is my family’s finances. If you cross that red line there will be consequences.”He, the president and his supporters, have tried to say that Bob Mueller’s mandate is very narrowly construed and that he simply has to focus on whether or not there was collusion in the 2016 campaign or not.But of course, if you read the language of Mueller’s appointment as special counsel, he’s allowed to look into any issue that may have informed the reason he was appointed.And of course that’s of necessity going to include a financial examination, because everyone wants to know whether there were quid pro quos.Did Jared Kushner lobby the Russian ambassador to the United States and Russian bankers to bail out 666 5th Avenue because the Kushners had a financial problem on their hands there?Has Trump’s past business dealings with real estate firms tied to career criminals from Russia compromised his ability to be a steward of our national security?These are all legitimate questions that Trump doesn’t want people to look at too closely.
The comments that you made, going back one more time to “winning is everything,” and your thoughts about why he admires Putin, but also operates in similar fashion—a quote of yours comes up which is that “Winning is everything, even if it means using deception, distraction and defiance.”If you can, word that the way you want, but explain that about Trump and how it relates to his attitude toward Putin and his attitude toward the direction that he should go.
I think it’s important to remember that Trump campaigned on this notion of winning.One of his catchphrases was, “There will be so much winning, you won't believe how much winning there's going to be.”He’s spent decades portraying his own business career as a series of wins, even though he almost went personally bankrupt, even though he threw some of his primary and most prized businesses into receivership because they were poorly managed and poorly financed.
His strategy around all of that is to use either deception or distraction or outright fabrications and lies to misrepresent what's occurred so he’s put in the most favorable light as a winner.That’s one of the animating forces of his life, is to be perceived as a winner, to constantly convey the idea that he’s a winner, and to let everyone know that he only associates with winners.His idea of a winner are people who do what they want at all costs and harvest most of the rewards of what they do for themselves.
Similar to what Putin does, I guess.
Yeah.And you know, in that regard, by Trump’s definition of winning, where a winner is someone who reigns supreme at the end of the day, regardless of what other people say, and regardless of the long-term consequences, Vladimir Putin slots very nicely into that scenario. …
One other aspect of his temperament, and then I think we’ve got sort of the overview of Trump done, his temperament and how it explains many of his decisions and moves toward the investigations, toward the Russian hacking story, toward almost everything else, that you write—that he’s impulsive, he’s immature, that he’s a bully who uses people.Sum that up for us.
You know, I think people have been bending over backward to try to explain, is there a strategy around what Donald Trump does?What are the sort of guiding lights? And how can we understand him?I've always thought there's just two easy lenses you can place on Donald Trump if you want to explain almost anything he does.One of those lenses is self-aggrandizement, and the other one is self-preservation.
Self-aggrandizement is all about him being center stage, him being seen as the smartest, richest, best-looking and most successful guy on the stage.And self-preservation is all about protecting his image from anything that runs contrary to that.Then of course his business holdings and his history, from the kind of deeper scrutiny that would suggest that, not only was he a poor dealmaker, but he was willing to cross ethical … boundaries to get what he wanted.
So how does that define his tactics?
Well, in vis-à-vis Mueller, can we get into that?
Well, yeah, OK, or more the Russian hacking story in general.
If you look at it then in terms of both self-aggrandizement and self-preservation, Trump liked, on the campaign trail, to portray the notion that wily hackers from Russia were there to service him and to help him through the campaign.That’s so recklessly disconnected from political norms and national security norms that it suggests—and I think it’s true—that he doesn’t really care about any of those norms.Once, however, that spun into a law enforcement investigation of what all of that meant, he quickly shifted away from self-aggrandizement into self-preservation.He fires Comey; he starts telling everyone on any phone call, interview or public speech that he’s making, that Bob Mueller is conducting a witch hunt.I think now he’s in full self-preservation mode because he’s scared of what's going on.
What do you think Vladimir Putin saw in Trump that would attract him or not?
Well, I imagine Putin and his advisers in the Kremlin, sitting around, laughing at most of Trump’s statements, right after they have a shot of vodka, are amazed at how easy he’s made this for them, because someone like Trump is essentially a patsy for any sophisticated intelligence operative or government official who wants to find weak channels that they can use to breach U.S. national security.In that context, Donald Trump is the classic patsy.He’s unsophisticated; he has a grandiose sense of himself; he’s ill-informed; and he’s more than willing to play along with the game, because he doesn’t really understand where the game is leading.
That’s one of the things that I think differentiates Team Trump from Team Putin.Team Putin, I think, is wily.They're sophisticated. They’ve been around the block on these issues.Team Trump is a series of novices and B players who are in over their heads and have never really dealt with this before, but I think lack the self-awareness or the humility to understand that and behave differently.
If you look at the whole story of the Russian involvement in these elections, trying to influence the elections, what they did with the disinformation and with the hacking and with trying to get into state systems and everything—you don’t have to go into specifics, but we’ll go through all that in a second.But looking at it all now and summarizing it, what do you think Putin got out of all the stuff that they have done, that the Intelligence Community has sort of seen them and defined them as being involved in over the past couple of years? What did he achieve?
Putin’s achieved quite a bit, merely by establishing himself as someone who can thumb his nose at the United States and Western Europe and convey to his base, in Russia, the average Russian citizen, that he’s made Russia respected again on the global landscape, that Russia won't be pushed around by the United States.And in the person of Donald Trump, they’ve actually co-opted the president.The president is someone who has a benign view of what Putin is doing in Eastern Europe.The president is someone who’s invited Russian hackers into a presidential campaign.The president of the United States is someone who’s had a career of associating with financiers and business partners from Eastern Europe.He’s one of them, in their eyes, and they know people like him.And Putin has essentially demonstrated that he can do what he wants at will in Eastern Europe, and the U.S. can be ignored.
Intervention in the U.S. Election
What do you think motivated Putin to get involved?It’s pretty dangerous territory.In fact, in the beginning of all this, intelligence folks thought this was espionage, and that’s pretty normal.But then to turn it into—then to sort of stick it out there for the world to see and have your fingerprints all over it is pretty serious stuff.So what do you think motivated Putin to make these moves?
Well, I don’t think Putin and the Kremlin think they're at risk here.[Foreign Minister] Sergey Lavrov has made light of this in press meetings.In the company of [Secretary of State] Rex Tillerson he’s made jokes about it.Putin has made a series of jokes about it in his own press conferences.I don’t think they have felt at any step of the way that they're mucking in something that’s going to come back to haunt them.I think they're reveling in the fact that there's a cartoonish person in the White House.He’s someone they feel they can control, and he’s someone who actually makes it easy for them.In that context, I don’t think they feel they have anything to worry about.
And the things that motivated him—it’s been written a lot about, the fact that he despised Clinton.3He’s attempting to sort of convince the world, payback, that the American electoral system is just as flawed as theirs is, that he’s sort of breaking down the structure of democracy in the United States and in the West.He’s paying back for other slights that he has felt the United States—the Panama Papers, for instance.What's your take on what are some of the things that have motivated him?
3
You know, Vladimir Putin comes into power at a time when the privatizations that had rocked the Russian economy had led to economic stress.There were concerns about Chechen terrorism.He’s a former KGB agent, I think, who had this very strong sense of a Soviet Union that was gone, but that had once stood strong and proud on the world stage.I think he set out from the very beginning to re-establish Russia in the world in that guise.And I think that’s why you see <i>siloviki </i>in the Kremlin.4He’s surrounded himself with former intelligence officials who he saw as patriots.Of course they went on, then, to take control of all of the Russian assets, in often as corrupt ways as the people who preceded them.
4
But I think he came in with this desire to re-establish Russia as a player on the international stage and to stride on that stage like a colossus.And that meant, I think, embarrassing or criticizing or pushing back against the United States in any theater and in any way possible.You saw him for years, even before the 2016 campaign, crack wise about the integrity of the U.S. election process and the voting process.Why should they shine the electoral monitors into our country or into Eastern Europe when they can't get their own elections straight?
You saw him in the Ukraine, push into the Ukraine, militarily, because the West felt that they could coax the Ukraine into NATO.5Putin saw that as a provocation on his doorstep, and he was going to make a point that this was unacceptable.Russia in the Putin era was not a country that was going to be pushed around.
5
I think when it came to Trump and the 2016 election, this big door opened up that offered him a number of opportunities to get retribution against Hillary Clinton, to show that Russia was strong enough and wily enough to interfere in the elections of the most powerful country on the planet, and lastly, to very baldly show to anyone who was looking that they had corralled a presidential candidate in the person of Donald Trump.
Why his animosity toward Hillary Clinton?
I think Putin felt that Hillary Clinton’s statements as secretary of state about parliamentary elections in Russia was intrusive.She was speaking out of turn.She was inserting the United States into Russia’s own domestic political affairs, and that was untoward.I think that he felt that that was something that he was going to come back at her for.And of course, then he did during the 2016 campaign. …
The 2016 elections, the FBI starts warning the DNC [Democratic National Committee] early on.I don’t know if you covered this part of it.
I did, yeah.
Talk a little bit about that whole story, that the FBI warns it.It’s sort of badly played by the FBI and by the DNC, where it goes months and months and months before anybody realizes that this is a serious situation.
Well, I think some of this we won't know the full story until years hence.But clearly, the FBI was picking up traces that Russian hackers were trying to penetrate the DNC and had ultimately had access to servers.This information was conveyed to the DNC. Action wasn’t taken very quickly.6There's been reporting that there were weak passwords around the servers themselves, that there was a certain naivete around all of this, and that was matched by an Obama administration that I think was reluctant to be as aggressive as they might otherwise have been on these issues because Obama—and I think quite properly—was concerned that he would be seen as interfering with the election.
6
It was this perfect storm, almost, of law enforcement, the DNC and the White House for various reasons not moving as aggressively and as quickly on this as they might otherwise have wanted to.What you ended up with was a hack and the release of email that became embarrassing for Clinton’s campaign.
When the DNC emails are released, just before the Democratic National Convention, what are the reverberations?What's being felt out there? Do they understand the seriousness of it immediately?It certainly causes havoc at the convention.
Certainly what came out in those emails was embarrassing.You had members of Clinton’s own team backstabbing one another or offering doubts about certain strategies, none of which made it appear that they were in lock-step with one another and fully behind their candidate. That was clearly embarrassing.The extent to which that actually mattered to voters and tipped the election, I'm a little dubious about that.I don’t think the issue here is that information came into the public sphere that unwound Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.I think information came into the public sphere that indicated that the Russians had a pretty free shot at trying to influence the election.And as we came to know, law enforcement officials were concerned enough about the actions of the Trump campaign; that it looked like collusion.And that's the problem.Regardless of whatever the impact of what was released was, to me the larger issue remains the extent of the collusion that law enforcement officials have identified.
Though it did cause some havoc at the DNC.There were demonstrations due to the favoritism, supposedly, shown toward Hillary.There was—[DNC Chair] Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign.It had some immediate effects.
Yeah, I guess personally.I'm not sure that that tilted anything away from Hillary Clinton.
Putin and Trump
OK.The thing, if we keep in chronology here, let’s do the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower.So the idea that [Paul] Manafort, [Jared] Kushner, and Don [Trump] Jr. would have this meeting would be the attitude toward—Don Jr.’s attitude toward the idea of a meeting with, as it is defined to him, Russian government connected lawyer and the lobbyist guy had some dirt that the Russian government wanted to hand over about Hillary Clinton because of their favoritism toward the Trump campaign.Lay out that meeting, what it shows about the campaign, what it shows about the Russians, and the tactics being used.Any part of this that you want to—and even the later information that came out, the fact that Trump dictates Don Jr.’s response when it finally becomes public.Tell us any part of that story that you're particularly interested in.
The thing that I'm most interested in about that June 2016 meeting, other than who might have been sponsoring the Russian lawyer and the others who came to the Trump Tower office, is the extent to which the Trump family bent over backward to cover what it was really about.This was a fairly—could have handled this in a fairly straightforward manner.Certainly Donald Trump Jr. wasn’t an expert in political protocol and campaign protocol, but certainly Paul Manafort was.7Paul Manafort is a veteran of political campaigns.And Jared Kushner is also something of a novice.
7
They're at a point in the campaign at that point where I don’t know if they think they're going to win.I don’t know. They had a lot of disarray with the leadership of the campaign.Manafort would be gone not long after that.They were never strategically in a consistent place through most of the campaign, and I think they were doing things in a very willy-nilly fashion.And into that bit of chaos lands this meeting with someone telling Don Jr., a music publicist who appears to be just somebody that Don went out on the town with, that, “I can get you some dirt on Hillary Clinton.”And of course Don Jr. says, “I’ll do this; I love it,” he says.
They take the meeting.By all accounts, some files were left behind.We still don’t know the full content of those files, but the Trump family has said they didn’t think there was anything actionable or of interest in those meetings, which then begs the question: If that was the case, why have they gone to such great lengths to lie about the meeting and misrepresent what occurred?
When this finally gets reported in <i>The</i> <i>New York Times</i>,<i> </i>Don Jr. says: “I'm going to be very transparent. I'm going to tweet out everything that happened here.” But his accounting isn't complete. …He doesn’t really resolve the fact that when he first described the meeting to reporters, he said it was going to be a discussion of adoption policies in Russia, when in fact, email and reporting ended up showing that it was clearly about getting dirt on Hillary Clinton.
What that means in the context of a law enforcement investigation is that this group has walked down a road in which they may not have been either candid or honest with law enforcement officials.That can end up being construed as a crime, obstruction of justice.They unnecessarily got themselves, I think, into a place that they didn’t need to get to, because they’re amateurs.
When you talk to folks from the Intelligence Community, they find it very interesting that, number one, they don’t report it, but they find it very interesting about what the Russians were up to here.And they’ve said that, you know, what it shows is, it seemed to be like a soft—I forget the term, but “soft intrusion” or something, where they're trying to see how far these people will go.
How vulnerable.
Yeah.
In intelligence circles, a meeting like that is seen as sort of a knock on the door.Will they answer the door?If they answer the door, can we get inside?If we get inside, who else can we meet?If we meet more people, who else can we compromise?If we compromise a lot of people, maybe we can go all the way to the top.That’s one way of thinking about it.
The other way to think about it, too, is that Russia, like most of the world, is a land of opportunists.A music producer had a relationship with the son of a presidential candidate and may have just said to everybody around him: “Hey, I think I can get you into a meeting with him. I know him really well. Let’s see what we can do.”I mean, this wasn’t—the people in that meeting were a mixed bag of characters, as you often find in these Russian intersections, and I think some time is going to have to pass before we’re certain about whether or not this was just the Keystone Kops or whether or not it was an espionage effort.But it has to be looked at so people can figure that out.
Great.So let’s jump back up to, after the Democratic convention, the emails have been released, and Trump’s reaction to that.Trump gleefully jumps all over it, starts using them all the time, encourages the Russians to find Clinton’s 30,000 missing [emails].Describe how Trump uses it and what it says about his campaign, and what it says, again, about his motivations and his tactics.
Trump had run a campaign, and we had already seen it in the primaries, of trying to belittle his opponents in deeply personal ways, and to make caricatures out of them: Lyin’ Ted Cruz; Little Marco Rubio; Jeb Bush was low energy.The email moment with Hillary allowed him to play into a longstanding public suspicion of the Clintons as a couple, and of Hillary in particular, as not being candid, hiding something, being Machiavellian, and played into Trump’s strengths as this carnivalesque P.T. Barnum character who could use any moment and spin it into publicity gold, something that of course the media would cover, because it was so over-the-top.And what he got in return for that was a lot of free news coverage.He got to sow further doubts about her viability as a candidate, and yet again, it kept him at center stage.
Intervention in the U.S. Election
During that summer, there is this other part of what the Russians are doing that is pretty fascinating, which is this propaganda war, this use of social media, these stories that kept on coming out about Hillary Clinton and her being in ill health.Talk a little bit about what you saw in the newsroom, and also sort of the way it was playing out in the campaign, and why the media and the government didn’t pick up on it quick enough.
Russia’s deployment of fake news as a propaganda tool wasn’t limited just to the United States.They had been doing it in Eastern Europe for the better part of the decade.Vladimir Putin plays long ball.They look at co-opting people and co-opting opinion and creating informational fissures in societies as a long-term game, and the U.S. was just one facet of this Kremlin strategy to seed the waters of misinformation.
I think what happened in the 2016 campaign is social media quite obviously took root as an information source for a huge part of the electorate, probably in a way it hadn’t in previous campaigns.And we of course, in Trump, had the Twitter candidate who used Twitter to go over the top of legacy media to go directly to his supporters and to raise doubts about his competitors and to raise doubts about the media.
Then, within the whole bloodstream of social [media] and particularly Facebook, you had people creating false news stories at volume, not just a few here or there, where people stuck their finger in the water to see if issues or doubts about Hillary Clinton’s health would get traction; they would simply do hundreds of stories about it and flood the zone, essentially, with pieces like this.8
8
I think, as public as social media can be, people’s own social media feeds are also fairly private, so there was no way the administration, in real time, was going to see the impact this was having on individual voters, seeing all this stuff flood through their streams.I think that legacy media that wasn’t really conversant with or observing the alt-right and the Putinistas’ efforts to channel this kind of stuff through social media missed it as well.It ended up becoming a postmortem.People became very aware of it after the campaign.But it wasn’t something, I think, a lot of newsrooms or a lot of authorities in the United States were aware of in real time.
And the effect of it?
I think the impact of this is something we’re going to live with for quite a while, because the central core of it is that there are no objective facts and that everything can be doubted.Particularly in a world like social media, where people tend to link up with people who already share their point of view, it becomes this self-reinforcing mechanism where people are only hearing one line and aren’t being exposed to alternative viewpoints, and certainly have lost faith in the idea that there's a screen out there for value, and there's a screen out there for truth that you can go to in times of doubt, or around momentous events like a presidential election, and glean what the truth might be.
And the savviness of Putin to tie into this?
Well, propaganda is not a new phenomenon, and the Soviet Union, and now Russia, have a long history of using propaganda in sophisticated and hard-charging ways to change people’s thinking or to keep them from thinking for themselves.Social media has simply put all of that on steroids.It’s given people global reach.It’s given them the power of having their own printing presses or their own broadcast networks, and that’s the real difference.Propaganda is not new, but social media is.
Is this whole way that, during the campaign, Putin, his views on NATO, his views on EU, his views on multilateral organizations, his positive views toward Russia, if you can, just sum up for us some of the other things that made Putin sort of interested in Trump, some of the positions he was constantly taking during the campaign and then now once he became president.
I don’t know how Vladimir Putin could have avoided becoming interested in Trump, because Trump openly courted Putin without Putin really having to do anything.Trump has spent decades claiming to be close to public figures he’s really not close to.He went to Russia to launch a beauty pageant in the aughts, and claimed when he went there that Putin was a friend, and he thought Putin would stop by.I don’t think they were friends at that time.Putin had—or Trump had claimed during <i>60 Minutes</i> interviews that they were thick as thieves, was one of their—I don’t think that was true at the time either.I don’t think Trump was thinking, in either of those moments, what it meant long term, should you become president, to say that you were really good friends with the Russian president.
There was always a lot of bluster around it.But of course Putin took notice of this, and of course Putin, as a trained KGB operative, knew the value in trying to develop long-term relationships with powerful political figures, powerful financiers, powerful businesspeople, in the hopes that later, if you either had a relationship with them or you had compromising information on them, you could co-opt them.That’s essentially how he cut his way through these big fields of Russian oligarchs who got in his way, and either cooperated with him or left the country.
I think he saw Donald Trump as just another oligarch, an unsophisticated rich guy who spoke out of turn and didn’t really understand the way the game was played, and somebody that, if need be, they could use later on.
Putin and Trump
Let’s talk, for a second, about Gen. Michael Flynn.Talk a little bit about him on the campaign trail, the role that he played and why Trump was drawn to him, and why he ended up as national security adviser.
I think there's two reasons Trump is drawn to Michael Flynn.One is because Trump is ignorant of foreign affairs, and he could essentially use Michael Flynn as his proxy for understanding how the world worked.Whether or not Michael Flynn had a rational or sophisticated grasp on how the world works is a separate matter.Trump felt he was loyal and he could trust him and would save Trump from having to do his own homework about foreign affairs and national security issues.
I think the second thing he really liked about Flynn was Flynn is just like Putin.He’s macho; he’s outspoken; he takes no prisoners; he rolls the way he wants to roll.Those sort of people appeal profoundly to Donald Trump, and they’ve appeared throughout his whole career.Roy Cohn, Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, Vladimir Putin, Michael Flynn—these people are all of a fit.They're macho men who see the world in very black-and-white terms and believe that you can just plow through weakness and complexity to get a result that you want, and the people that don’t understand that are just naysayers.Flynn appeals to Trump on both of those counts.
Intervention in the U.S. Election
There's one day in October which we spend a lot of time on, Oct. 7.It’s when the DNI [Director of National Intelligence’s] statement is released at 3:30 in the afternoon.9We’ve talked to the folks that released it, and they basically thought that it was going to be a thunderbolt, that people were going to be blown away and it was going to take over all the news headlines the next day and the weeks to follow.Well, lo and behold, a half an hour later, the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape is released and blows that all away.10
9
10
I forgot about that chronology, yeah.
And then a half an hour after that, WikiLeaks releases the first big group of [Clinton campaign chair John] Podesta emails.Talk a little bit about that day …I think the tape came out through a leaker at NBC, who gave it to David Fahrenthold.I don’t think that was on a timeline. It happened when it happened.I know from speaking to David that he tried to get that out quickly. That was really their only goal.And I don’t think, obviously, the White House knew that this tape was going to land on the same day [as] the DNI statement.
I do find it curious, and it does seem to me, that it wasn’t coincidence that the WikiLeaks trough came out shortly after the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape.I think that because everyone assumed, when the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape came out, that that was the end stroke for the Trump presidency, that he was going to be done.We know that Reince Preibus told Trump that weekend, “You should just withdraw from the campaign right now.” ...Jared Kushner encouraged Trump to do what he does best, to go on the sidewalk in front of Trump Tower and meet with people so he could see them cheering for him so he wouldn’t concede.
And then, into that maelstrom comes this trove of WikiLeaks emails that is supportive of Trump.The timing of that does not seem coincidental to me.
The U.S. Response to Russian Measures
The whole idea that the administration had been waiting for so long to finally tell the public what was going on, and then they kind of lost their opportunity?
I'm not in the White House, so I don’t know, but you have to think from the White House’s perspective, they're going to drop this thing on a Friday, and they're going to own news coverage over the weekend.They are shrewd about the media and when the media will take something and run with it.This was going to be a big story.They had no indication that this other cyclone of events was just going to drop in the middle of this and essentially leave that story orphaned.
However, I think they could have followed up on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday in a more aggressive way to get the word out that this was significant.And I think this gets back to the issue of the Obama administration, I think for good reason, not wanting to look like it was trying to muck around in an election in which you could see everyone else already trying to do it.I think possibly, without being in their heads, but they may have been more aggressive about it if they weren’t operating under those constraints.But, for whatever reason, that DNI statement did not get the traction in the media that it would have under normal circumstances.
But it was impressive.The information was impressive, and it was really pretty specific about the fact that Putin’s government was responsible.But two days later, in the next debate, one of the things that happens is that Trump is supporting Russia is again.What is going on?
I don’t think Trump has ever felt that it was problematic for him to be very overtly on the side of Russia and Putin when any of these issues came into play.I think he saw Russian hacking as beneficial to his own campaign.I don’t think he had a mature and sophisticated grasp on the national security and geopolitical consequences of him spouting off about the beauties of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.I think he just saw it as: “Hey, they're on my side.This is fun.I'm going to get on public stage and bloviate about it, and then we’ll see what happens.”
And the irony, or whatever it is, of the fact that, as you said, the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape which was released, and everybody is looking at for days and days and days, and everybody thinks, “That’s it; that’s going to blow away this campaign,” in fact, the Podesta emails seemed to have more legs.The sex scandal goes away eventually.But the dripping, drip, drip, drip of more and more of these emails coming out by WikiLeaks is the thing that sustains Trump much more than the tapes sustained Clinton.
And ultimately culminating with [FBI Director] Jim Comey.
Right.Just talk about that irony or whatever.
Well, I think the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape was maybe the last in a long series of events that would have derailed any other candidacy.We had Trump making light of [Sen.] John McCain’s war record.We had Trump talking about [then-Fox News journalist] Megyn Kelly menstruating.We had Trump in racially charged tones going after a federal judge about his Mexican heritage.And then we have a tape in which he’s overtly saying to a TV show, “I want to go out and grab them by the hoo-ha.”None of that in his base matters, because I think that they saw Trump as somebody who’s prone to be that way anyway.He was crass and unregulated and his own guy, and actually liked that about him.
The things that came out in the WikiLeaks release, and ultimately when Jim Comey said, “I've got to re-examine the email thread because I now have [Clinton campaign vice chair] Huma Abedin’s laptop,” that reinforced these longstanding suspicions about Hillary Clinton, that she was deceitful and deceptive and couldn’t be trusted.11I think ultimately, that dynamic meant that she got more scrutiny for these things than Trump did for this series of sort of grotesque and over-the-top outrages.
11
The Hillary people must have been just astounded by the inability to sort of—anybody to deal with the Russian story, which they at this point say they understood was much more serious than anybody else seemed to think.
Well, I also think the media, you know, I think the media took far too long to take Donald Trump seriously as a candidate.I think there wasn’t a lot of sophisticated explorations of his track record as a businessman.I don’t think there was a sophisticated attempt to understand exactly why he had hold on a significant part of the electorate.And I think that that wayward approach to covering Trump as a candidate I think opened up people to giving Trump less scrutiny than he deserved, until, of course, he got elected.
I think the Clinton campaign, for as much as they needed the media to surface these things and make the public aware of how serious they were and are, also I think they themselves weren’t taking Trump seriously enough.We know now in retrospect that they were getting early warning signals from the upper Midwest that there were these surges of support for Donald Trump in Wisconsin and Michigan and even further east, in Pennsylvania.And Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn discounted some of those things. “No, let’s—we can flip Georgia, and we can flip Arizona, and we can flip Florida.”
Their own campaign apparatus was focused on some of the wrong things.So I think you had this collision of the Clinton campaign not taking Trump seriously enough, Trump observers not really getting a handle on the kind of traction he had with his electorate, and a lot of outside forces filling the gaps, including Vladimir Putin at a time when it was really easy to just walk into the breach.12
12
Putin and Trump
Trump wins.The reaction from what you can see of the Trump folk winning?
The night of the election, Ivanka Trump was tweeting pictures of the Trump family watching election returns in Trump Tower, and all of them look elated, progressively excited.But in those pictures you start to see Trump himself slumping down a bit.His left hand is pushed up into his face. It’s almost like the weight of the world is on his shoulders.Of everyone in that room, he looked the least excited and the most war-weary.
I think in part, that was because I don’t think he ever thought he was going to get elected.I think he went into this campaign because it was a marketing event; it was free publicity.It was one of several presidential runs he had already made.And lo and behold, he gets out there, and this rambling, racially charged message about economic uncertainty and foreign powers tilts an entire election in his direction.I think he was as surprised by that as anybody, and so surprised, in fact, that I don’t think his team was doing the kind of nuts and bolts preparation for transition to power that a political campaign would normally do.I don’t think they had thought about who they wanted to run various federal agencies.I don’t think they had begun vetting people to fill those jobs.And I certainly don’t think they had thought about methodically drilling through their agenda into a Congress that didn’t know what to make of him.
Your thoughts about the Nov.14 Putin call to Trump, very supportive of him, trying to talk him into building a better relationship immediately.Of course, after the fact, for weeks and weeks and weeks, their interference in the election was a primary story.
I think the Nov. 14 phone call was extraordinary.13I think it was inappropriate. I think Trump should not have taken it.It shows that Putin felt he had free and easy access to someone who potentially could win the presidency.And I think it’s yet another data point in the Kremlin’s harvesting of Donald Trump as their sock puppet.
13
That’s pretty strong.Dec. 1, Kushner’s attempt to set up a back channel with [Ambassador Sergey] Kislyak at Trump Tower.What is your take on that event?
I think Jared Kushner is one of the big Achilles’ heels of this administration.It’s worth remembering that when Jared’s father went to prison, Jared got his hands on the family fortune and wildly overpaid for a skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, 666 Fifth Avenue, overpaid by hundreds of millions of dollars when he bought it in 2007.In 2008 the financial crisis begins, and he’s in danger of losing the building and hundreds of millions of dollars. It gets refinanced.But that payment is coming due about a decade later, and Jared finds himself in the happy position of suddenly being the son-in-law of the president-elect of the United States, and I think he begins to court financiers who can help the Kushner family refinance this ball and chain that's dragging the portfolio down.
Now, we don’t know what the substance of any of these conversations were.We know that he met with Anbang, a major Chinese insurer who was offering a very over-the-top price for the building that would have left the Kushners with equity and a handsome payout and relieved him of this debt that was killing the family business.That almost concluded but for the fact that reporters at Bloomberg and <i>The New York Times </i>and elsewhere got this information.It became public, and Anbang had to withdraw from the deal.
But the question that was raised by that was, was the Kushner family’s financial distress something that would lead Jared to make policy promises to the Chinese government in exchange for loans that would bail the Kushners out of their financial misery?The same question arises when Jared Kushner meets in December of 2016 with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States.We don’t know the substance of that conversation.But at least out of some of it, Kislyak brokers a meeting for Jared with Sergey Gorkov, who is the head of Vnesheconombank, one of the biggest Russian banks. It’s very close to the Kremlin.Again, Kushner takes this meeting, and I believe in one of the meetings with Michael Flynn, to have a discussion with a Russian banker about something. We don’t know what it is.
But I think what the investigators have to get to the bottom of in Kushner’s discussions with the Russians, and his discussion with the Chinese was, were there quid pro quos?Specifically with Russia, in exchange for the Kushner family being relieved of their financial misery, would the United States consider things like lifting economic sanctions on Russia?I have to believe that that is front and center is a question for [special counsel] Bob Mueller, and it’s an important question for this investigation to resolve.
And this, of course, is happening during the transition period.
It actually begins—Jared Kushner takes his first meetings with the Chinese around the time of the Republican convention in July of 2016, when Trump is clearly going to be the Republican candidate for president.At that point, he has a meeting in New York with the CEO of Anbang, and I think the groundwork is laid for a possible investment by Anbang.After Trump then gets elected, I think those discussions became much more concrete, and a financing package was put together. …
... So lo and behold, on the 29th of December, the same day that Obama calls from Hawaii to lay out the sanctions, from the Dominican Republic Gen.Flynn has a conversation with Ambassador Kislyak, where it comes out later, after he lies about it, that they talk about sanctions, whether they're the sanctions that have just been laid out or whether they're also the sanctions that took place after Ukraine.What's your overview about what was going on there and how it finally leads, because of the fact that, lo and behold, surprise, surprise, the ambassador of Russia is actually wiretapped, which is legally not a problem, which he must have, of course, understood—
—as all diplomats understand.
Yes, that all of this would become public, and sort of laid out before the Trump administration, [which] is not very happy about getting rid of Gen.Flynn, and in fact, takes quite a while before they actually get rid of him.Talk a little bit about that story, starting on that date of the 29th.
Well, I think when Michael Flynn has this conversation with the Russian ambassador, some of that could have been in keeping with the norms of any transition.14You're starting to put feelers out to your counterparts overseas, letting them know what your priorities are, etc., etc.But there are certain topics that shouldn’t be discussed, things like quid pro quos around economic sanctions.Flynn had never been part of a transition team before.Like everyone else in the Trump transition, I don’t know that they were prepared for the parameters they had to respect around the transitional process, or even how to handle it in a sophisticated way.I think they were all freelancing, to a certain extent, based on their own self-interests, and that’s a classic hallmark of the way that Trump operates.He ran his business with a bunch of people who essentially freelanced around him leading this cult of personality, and he’s grafted that onto his transition team, and later grafts it onto his White House.
14
The problem in that environment is, not everyone’s on message, not everyone is being told the correct way to play ball, or even if they are told the correct way to play ball, [they] may not respect that.Clearly, in Michael Flynn, you have someone who sees himself as a solo operator.I think Trump likes that about him.Trump sees him as someone who’s loyal to him early in the campaign.He sees him as someone who’s more knowledgeable, and he sees him as someone who is an embodiment of his sort of macho projections about the right way to conduct U.S. foreign policy.
I think Flynn takes that phone call assuming he has free range to say whatever he wants on the call and plant whatever flags he wants to plant in the ground, without thinking about the consequences of those.
I'm sorry. Go ahead.
No, go ahead.
But then is willing then to lie to the vice president and to the press office, who then go out on the national media and basically tell the story that they have been told.
Well, what's extraordinary here is that Flynn clearly didn’t think he was going to get caught out.He obviously didn’t know, at that point, that he was being surveiled, though it would have been wise of him to assume that his Russian counterpart was, and he didn’t.Then he lies to Mike Pence, and he lies to the White House’s press operation about what he said.Pence goes on the Sunday talk shows and says, “I don’t think that Michael Flynn did anything wrong here.”The press operation says the same thing, and Trump backs him up.Trump is loyal to people who are loyal to him, sometimes to a fault if he feels supportive of them.He can pull that rug out willy-nilly oftentimes with people.But clearly, with Michael Flynn, he felt that this was somebody he was going to back to the hilt.And Flynn didn’t care if he exposed other people to any kind of reputational pain, because he was lying.
These following events, I’d just like to get your views of what's taking place and why Trump reacts in the way he does.So Jan. 6, Comey, [CIA Director] Brennan, and [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper brief Trump in Trump Tower about the DNI report.They also talk about the Steele dossier as well.His reaction is that, a few days later, on Jan. 11, he gives a press conference where he reluctantly admits the Russian role.Your overview of those events, and of what it says about Trump?
Trump has repeatedly been presented with concrete evidence by law enforcement officials and intelligence officials that Russia penetrated the U.S. electoral process in 2016 and attempted to tilt the election in his favor.Despite repeated exposures to that information, Trump has either ignored it or downplayed it or dismissed it as part of a conspiracy against him.Why? Because he doesn’t want to own the consequences of his own mistakes, first and foremost being that he’s availed himself of the Kremlin and of Vladimir Putin far too easily and for far too long.
Secondly, it raises questions about the legitimacy of his election win, and he already knows he’s lost the popular vote.He misrepresents, repeatedly, the actual results of the popular vote, because it’s important to him, again, that he’s portrayed as a winner.The DNI statement and the DNI report both undermine the notion of it being a clean win, and it also shows him out as being injudicious and a fumbler when it came to the way that he conducted his relationship with Putin.Neither of those things are things he wants to own up to.So in lieu of taking that on in a responsible and adult way, he simply smears Comey and the Intelligence Community as anti-Trump and propagandists and out to get him on a witch hunt.
Jan. 23, there's sort of—what we talked about, that’s really the Flynn stuff.And then [Acting Attorney General Sally] Yates warns the White House about Flynn.
And they killed the messenger.
Then they killed the messenger right after that, but for a different reason of course, but a few days afterward.But the controversy is growing, and eventually Flynn ends up resigning.Give us your summation of all that and how Trump seemed to try to protect him, because it took a couple weeks before—
<v Timothy O’Brien> Well, I think that Trump really wanted Flynn to remain in the administration.He was one of the last people, I think, to finally cut the rope, and I think that's because he saw Flynn as a loyalist, and Flynn was someone who was with him from the very beginning.We still don’t know everything about what Michael Flynn said to the Russian ambassador.It could be quite true that he didn’t recollect part of the conversations that came to light later. We just don’t know yet.
Unfortunately, other people in the administration felt that Flynn lied to them, and Trump had to make a choice, I think, between Michael Flynn or others in the administration who had started to become concerned about Flynn as a liability.And he doesn’t fire him until the fact that Yates—Yeah, but that doesn’t happen until Yates comes to the White House, does her thing. Then she’s off.But then <i>The</i> <i>Washington Post </i>gets the story and runs it, and when they all of a sudden realized that it was going to run in <i>The</i> <i>Washington Post</i>, then that seemed to have changed—Yeah.
Right. I think, as it does often with Donald Trump, the threat of negative publicity spurred him into action.Other things often aren’t the final thing that pushes him over the edge and forces him to make a necessary decision.In Michael Flynn’s case, it was this mounting publicity.And ultimately, <i>The Washington Post </i>got its hands on some very damaging information about the way that Flynn had conducted himself.At that point, I think in Trump’s mind, it’s a choice between him looking good or him looking bad, and of course, when it comes to that choice, he’s going to avoid looking bad, so out goes Michael Flynn.
He resigns on Feb. 13.On Feb. 14, Trump pressures Comey to back off the Flynn investigation. What's going on there?15And also, this is connected to the request for Comey’s loyalty.
15
And also now, … what we don’t know is what Jared Kushner has told Trump at that point about Flynn and his meetings with Sergey.We don’t know all the wheels that were spinning.In reading both Comey and Trump’s accounts of that meeting, and as it pertained to Michael Flynn, I think Flynn—I think that Trump is saying to Comey: “This guy made a mistake. He’s gone. He’s paid his dues. Why don’t we just go easy on him and not make this a bigger thing?I would really appreciate if you did that for me,” again, Trump not really recognizing that the FBI is meant to be an independent law enforcement branch of the government and not his royal guard.
And he’s asking Comey essentially to do this favor, give Michael Flynn a break.I think that could have come from just a very simple place of Trump wanting to be loyal to Flynn and feeling like Flynn had already gotten damaged.However, it can't be discounted that Trump is also aware that any of these investigations, whether they're emanating from the Congress or from the FBI, can ultimately turn over stones about financial conflicts of interest and financial dealings that don’t reflect well on the president and his family.
Survivalist comes out again.
Yes.
March 3. So March 3, Trump is pressuring Comey to say he’s not under investigation.By the 20th, Comey goes before Congress and states that the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign connections.
—and reasserts that the Russians definitely played a role in tilting the election toward Trump’s favor.
Trump is not happy.
Trump is very unhappy.When Comey testifies, Trump, as he always is, is glued to the television watching this, and he sees Comey as completely disloyal, and not drinking the Kool-Aid.He hasn’t gotten the message that the FBI isn’t there at his behest.He hits some very highly charged buttons on Russia and the elections and further investigations into the White House around collusion.Essentially, in Trump’s mind at that point, his fate is sealed.And I don’t think—and we know this is the case, that for Trump at that point, it wasn’t about trying to find a working relationship with Jim Comey; it was about trying to drum up whatever he could drum up as an excuse to push Comey out.
He latches onto Comey’s statement during that same hearing about his examination of Hillary Clinton’s laptop and the press conference that he had in association with that, which of course Trump delighted in.It was a major high point for his candidacy.
The firing of Comey, self-preservation move?
The firing of Jim Comey is totally about self-preservation, and it’s handled in a classically Donald Trump way.He just decides to do it.He’s not aware even if Comey is in Washington, which he wasn’t. Comey’s out in Los Angeles giving a speech to FBI staffers in LA.Trump isn't going to deliver the message himself. He sends his longtime bodyguard in a White House car with the pink slip over to the FBI to deliver the bad news, and when they get there, Comey is not home. Comey is out in Los Angeles.
So Jim Comey is in LA giving a speech to his staff out there, and it starts to pass on television sets that he’s been fired. That’s how Jim Comey finds out that the president has fired him. …
The firing happens on May 9. On May 10 there is the meeting in the Oval Office with Kislyak and Lavrov where he’s saying that, you know, he fired this “nut job” Comey.
They all get to laugh about that together, in front of cameras.And in the same meeting, Trump has refused to let U.S. media in to cover the event, but they let Russian media in.
Tell the story.
Trump fires Jim Comey on a crazy Monday.It raises all these question about a possible constitutional crisis and the separation of powers.You would think that the White House then would go into messaging mode and figure out the best way to present their case the next day, but instead, Trump invites the Russian ambassador to the United States and Russia’s foreign minister into a meeting at the Oval Office, in which they revel at Comey being fired.16Trump keeps U.S. media out but lets Russian media in, without thinking, perhaps, that anybody in that Russian media gaggle that had cameras and recording devices might have represented an intelligence problem.And then [he] goes on in the same meeting to brag about Israeli-based intelligence that he has received from the Middle East that makes the burdens of his job that much more complex.
16
And the fact that he would say that the pressure was off—the pressure was off, that this was the thing that was keeping him from developing the relations that he should have with Russia.What does that say about his whole attitude toward all of this?
When Trump says in front of Kislyak and Lavrov that the pressure is off, it’s an extraordinary moment, because he’s saying, “I've been unshackled from this FBI investigation that was weighing me down and not allowing me to pursue the kind of relationship with Russia that I want to.”But of course the investigation, the core of it, is that he’s compromised U.S. national security by pursuing an untoward relationship with Russia, or allowing his campaign to do so.
Also, I think it shows his incredible naivete, because I think he thought that getting rid of Jim Comey meant it was over.I don’t think in that moment he ever anticipated the fact that he was about to get Bob Mueller, and that in Bob Mueller, he was going to get a legendary investigator who understood quite well how to pull various levers of government and investigative powers and legal powers to launch an investigation on Trump, [one] that I think is as complex and more threatening than the one he thought he got rid of.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Policies
Teacher Center
Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
Koo and Patricia Yuen
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
