Front Burner - An essential timeline of the Mueller investigation

Episode Date: February 14, 2019

The talk around Washington these days, is that the Mueller investigation is winding down. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's inquiry into whether there was collusion between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election has dominated the headlines since 2017. Nobody knows for sure when it will wrap. But we do know that this story has taken a long and winding road. Today on Front Burner, CBC Washington correspondent Keith Boag breaks down the most essential elements of the saga.

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The talk around Washington these days is that the Mueller investigation is winding down. The Mueller investigation, as in special counsel Robert Mueller's inquiry into whether there was collusion between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. The entire thing has been a witch hunt, and there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign. Of course, Mueller places cards really close, and nobody knows for sure when it will wrap or what he'll even reveal. But we do know that this story has taken a long and winding road. Papadopoulos, he has pled guilty and is now

cooperating with the Mueller investigation. Michael Flynn has pled guilty to making false statements to the FBI. Paul Manafort has agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department. So today, we're going to try and sum it all up. My colleague Keith Bogue has followed all the threads here, and he's joining me from Washington. That's coming up on Frontburner. Hi, Keith. Hi, Jamie. It's really nice to talk to you again. Good to be back. Thank you. So can we start with what we're trying to do here today? What are we trying to accomplish? Well, you know, I kind of had this feeling that the Russia story is not really penetrating because there are so many elements to it and it's so confusingly ordered. And so what I thought would be useful was to strip away everything but the most essential things.

Even some high profile news stories are not essential to understanding the narrative. Get rid of all of that, then take what you have left and put it in its proper chronological order as opposed to the order in which we learned about it. And I'm hoping that by doing that, we get a narrative that's much easier to understand. So I hope today what we can do is just go through it step by step. So first, we're going to talk about a meeting that really sets the stage for this whole story. We're in the spring of 2016. Donald Trump is campaigning for the Republican nomination. We lose with borders.

We lose with everything. We're not going to lose. We're going to start winning again and we're going to win bigly. And it looks like he's going to get it. And one of his young foreign policy advisors, George Papadopoulos, a name that is now very familiar to a lot of us, meets someone at the Kensington Wine Rooms, which is in London, England. And can you take me through what happened during that meeting? Yeah, I mean, you say George Papadopoulos, his name is very familiar now.

It wasn't known at all. He wasn't somebody we had any idea was a part of the campaign. But he's invited to this thing, the wine rooms in London's Mayfair district, by someone from the Australian embassy who wants to introduce him to the High Commissioner from Australia. And so they meet and they have a few drinks. And I guess they have enough that Papadopoulos' tongue is loose because he casually says something quite stunning to the High Commissioner. He says that Russia has damaging information on the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and they're holding on to it to release it in the final stage of the election campaign. It's an astonishing thing, but at that time it wasn't presented in the context that we understand it now because people didn't know about the hacking of the DNC.

And is it fair to say that this is the first indication that anyone connected to the campaign had knowledge of information that the Russians had gathered? Absolutely it is. And that's a crucial point because the Trump campaign knows about it before the FBI knows about it, before the public knows about it. They have this inside information that has to do with Russia very early on before Trump is even the nominee. It's interesting, and I know we're going to talk about this more later, but this meeting between the Australian high commissioner

and this guy who's essentially a bit player in the Trump campaign, it actually is what triggers the FBI investigation, right? Later on, it does, but they put it together with other information. Remember, the Australian high commissioner doesn't know that Russia has hacked the DNC computer. He doesn't know they're talking possibly about Hillary Clinton's private emails or about the DNC's confidential emails. He just knows that he's heard someone say the Russians have something on Hillary Clinton that they're saving until later in the campaign because it'll embarrass her and damage her campaign. Okay, so we have this meeting at the Kensington Wine Rooms, and then we fast forward a few months, and there's another meeting, one that has been talked about a lot.

And this takes place at Trump Tower. Can you take me through how this meeting comes about and who's involved? connections in the entertainment industry that somehow wind up connecting him with a Kremlin connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, whom he's told has damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Now that we put that together with what they knew from Papadopoulos, he has a sense of what it might be. And he's very keen to learn more. So he responds to his contact, if it's what you say it is, I love it. So clearly, there is a purpose to this meeting. The purpose, as far as Donald Trump Jr. is concerned, is to get damaging information from a Russian connected lawyer who has contacts with the Kremlin that could help him in the

campaign. And he thinks it's so important. He invites the most senior people of the campaign to come to this meeting with him. And that includes Jared Kushner, Donald Trump, the candidate's son-in-law, and Paul Manafort, someone with his own deep connections to Russia who is now running the Trump campaign. And this is in June 2016. So it's after the Kensington Wine Rooms meeting, but it's before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. So Donald Trump is not yet the nominee, but it's quite clear that he's going to be the Republican candidate for president. And what do we know about what happened in this meeting? What we think we know

is based entirely on what the participants have said happened there, which is essentially nothing. That it was a misunderstanding. That Donald Trump Jr. wound up sitting there wondering, why am I in this meeting? We're talking about Russian adoptions. I don't care about that stuff. Don Jr. says the information, specifically from Natalia Veselnitskaya, was useless.

Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. But all of the people in that meeting would have an interest in misrepresenting what actually happened. So I think the only truthful thing that we can say is that we do not know for certain. And when you hear people talk about this meeting in Trump Tower, it seems to turn a lot on this idea of collusion, about whether or not some kind of collusion happened during this meeting. And so before we go any further, can we talk about the definition of collusion? Well, I think there are two definitions in the sense that I think there's a public understanding of collusion, which is that you're working with somebody to do something to

achieve a common end or something like that. That's not the legal definition of what might be a crime. There is no crime called collusion, but there is something called conspiracy. And it's really, that's a fairly simple thing. I've asked lawyers about it here, and the explanation is simply that it's an agreement between two people to do something that's illegal. OK, so now that we know what it means when we talk about collusion, I want to try and sum up what we've learned so far. At this point, we know that someone from the Trump campaign knew that Russia had damaging info on Hillary Clinton. And we also know that Russia was actively working, or at least looking, to help Trump's presidential campaign.

And then we know that some of Trump's top advisors, including his son, Donald Trump Jr., went to a meeting at Trump Tower with a Kremlin-connected lawyer. And we know that Trump Jr.'s emails showed that he had hoped to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russians. Okay, got it. And now we get to the Republican and Democratic conventions. And it's the summer of 2016 now.

How does Russia figure prominently in both of these conventions? Well, by the time Trump arrives at the Cleveland convention, where he's going to be nominated as the party's candidate for president in 2016. He, too, wants to make Cleveland believe land and inspire those Republicans who still have misgivings about his takeover of the party of Lincoln. His team has already gone over the foreign policy platform of the Republican Party and forced a change on it that will wind up being sympathetic to Russia's interests in its conflict with Ukraine. The Trump team forces on a Republican Party that's traditional foreign policy position on that had been entirely opposed to that kind of language.

They softened it, I heard, but I was not involved. They took away the part of the platform calling for provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine to defend themselves. Why is that a good idea? Look, you know, I have my own ideas. He's not going into Ukraine. OK, just so you understand, he's not going to go into Ukraine. And so that convention comes and goes. And then very soon after, we see the run up to the Democratic convention. And I remember this moment really clearly when we saw this massive dump of emails from WikiLeaks. On the eve of the convention, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails from the DNC appearing to show favoritism towards Hillary Clinton.

The Republican National Convention ends on a Thursday. On the Friday, the day after the WikiLeaks dump of the emails happens. And it is, of course, that the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Philadelphia. And so the impact of this dump of emails is to disrupt the opening of the Democratic National Convention. Of course it does. It creates internal scandals. It's all anyone's talking about as they move into their convention, and it's timed for that. It's a major embarrassment for Democrats on the eve of their nominating convention. The party chairperson, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, announced her resignation. Can you remind me what the WikiLeaks email said

about Clinton, about the DNC? Yeah, I mean, you know, consider they're just starting this convention, and then the WikiLeaks done seems to show that the DNC, which is supposed to be a neutral kind of referee in the competition for the nomination, actually has its thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton. Does he believe in a God, wondered one official. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he's an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peep. That was like an earthquake at the convention. It divided the convention.

It created bitterness that stands until this day. And then I remember this other moment where Trump just essentially makes a plea to Russia to steal even more information. Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be next. Yes. It's an astonishing thing. I mean, everybody understood that. It was an extraordinary story. Even if they hadn't fully made connections between the WikiLeaks dump and the Trump campaign, they understood that what the president was saying was encouraging

Russia to do more hacking and more stealing of documents and emails that might be harmful to his opponent's campaign. If Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I mean, to be honest with you, I'd love to see them. And we know that that night, Russians directed by the Kremlin tried to hack Clinton's own computer, right? Yes. That night, after Trump had asked them to go try to find Hillary Clinton's emails, it appears as though they might have actually tried to do that. They might have actually responded to Donald Trump's request.

So now after this extraordinary plea, things are getting clearer. We know the Trump campaign knew that Russia had damaging info on Hillary Clinton. We know about the meeting at Trump Tower. We know that Trump's team pushed for changes to make Republican policy more sympathetic to Russia. And on top of all of this, we now have this massive dump of emails that are really embarrassing to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. So at this point, the FBI really starts connecting some dots here. And what elements came together for them at that time? Yeah, what happens is that the dump of the emails, WikiLeaks dump of the emails is, in fact, a worldwide story. And Australian High Commissioner, who had had the conversation at the Kensington Wine Rooms with George Papadopoulos, sees the dump of the emails and remembers that conversation.

And although he's already reported it to his own people, nobody has informed the FBI. And so that's what they do next. They tell the FBI about this conversation. The FBI puts that together with what it already knows. First of all, that it's just seen the dump of the emails. It's heard what the president has said. And now it has this connection First of all, that it's just seen the dump of the emails. It's heard what the president has said. And now it has this connection to the Trump campaign that goes back to the spring of 2016. And that's when they decide that they have to open a counterintelligence investigation to see what exactly is the connection between Russia, the hacking of the emails, and Donald Trump's presidential election campaign.

And clearly there are other people on the team that have connections to Russia as well, right? You mentioned Paul Manafort before. Sure. Paul Manafort is somebody that the FBI would naturally have been aware of because of his deep contacts with Russia, with Ukraine. The work I was doing in Ukraine was to help Ukraine get into Europe and we succeeded. But I'm not working for any clients right now other than Mr. Trump. And are you going to make a promise in the future that if he's president, you'll be careful what clients you take? I'm always careful what clients I take. They had a long list of reasons why they might have been somewhat interested in him before

he ever joined the Trump campaign. But when they see these signals, their interest is heightened. That's also true of Carter Page. Carter Page is another foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign. But when they see these signals, their interest is heightened. That's also true of Carter Page. Carter Page is another foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign that the FBI had been keeping tabs on even before Page joined the Trump campaign because he had connections with Russia through the oil and gas industry. You know, I may have, back in the G20, when they were getting ready to do that in St. Petersburg, I might have participated in a few meetings. So they have all of these things to put together. And I think it sets off a number of alarms. And it makes them think that, boy, we really need to pursue this more deeply.

And so this investigation, the voters don't know about this when they vote for Donald Trump. And yet also another investigation into Hillary Clinton's destroyed emails is announced publicly. She believes that that hurt her chances to become president. Independent observers like Nate Silver and others say, yes, but for that intervention, I would have won. But it stopped my momentum. It drove voters from me. We knew that the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton for using a private email server while she was Secretary of State. We did not know that the FBI was already investigating the Trump campaign because of its ties or perceived ties with Russia and we wouldn't find that out and the American voter wouldn't find that out until after Trump

is elected president. I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. We'll be back in a second. Discover what millions around the world already have. Audible has Canada's largest library of audiobooks, including exclusive content curated by and for Canadians. Experience books in a whole new way, where stories are brought to life by powerful performances from renowned actors and narrators.

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Let's talk about Trump as president. What are some examples of Trump's behavior that raise even more questions, additional alarm bells? One of the alarm bells that goes off early is when it's discovered that Trump's national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, had lied to the FBI about contacts with Russia in between the election and the inauguration. Special counsel team also emphasizing that before meeting with the FBI agents, Flynn had already been lying about his conversations with the Russian ambassador for weeks, lying to the Washington Post, lying to Vice President Pence,

lying to Chief of Staff Priebus. He lied to the FBI about those connections and that led to him being fired. And then there's this sensitivity that Trump has. He has meetings with the FBI director, where he reportedly asks the FBI director to go easy on Michael Flynn. And then, ultimately, in May of 2017, he fires Comey, the FBI director. And though the ostensible reason presented by his attorney general and his deputy attorney general is that Comey was fired because of his behavior during the campaign with regard to Hillary Clinton's emails, Trump goes out and says, actually, I fired him because of this Russia thing. where he's there with the foreign minister of Russia and the Russian ambassador to the United States telling him that he got rid of Comey because of this Russia thing,

and now, you know, he's made that go away, and seemingly brag about it. The New York Times has been read a description of the president's remarks to the Russian officials in his meeting at the Oval Office with them, in which he called allegedly FBI Director James Comey a nut job and said that he had relieved some of the pressure of the Russia investigation by firing Comey. I mean, that's an astonishing thing just in its own right.

But it certainly makes the FBI wonder what it is they're dealing with here. And at that point, they open a counterintelligence investigation into a sitting president. That's something that's almost incomprehensible. They already had a counterintelligence investigation going into his campaign, but they had specifically said they were not investigating the president. At this point, they decide they have to investigate the president as well because they're not sure he isn't working in the interests of Russia. Knowing everything we know now about these meetings with his team and people connected

with Russia, it's extraordinary. It's even more extraordinary to think about that meeting that he had in the Oval Office the day after he fired Comey. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then, you know, another baffling moment is in 2018 in Helsinki. Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen. Donald Trump has this two-hour meeting with Vladimir Putin, and then he

cast doubt on the essential conclusion of U.S. intelligence that Russia has actually meddled in the 2016 election. Yeah, I mean, all of that is incredible. It's an extraordinary thing for the president of the United States to sit down privately with the president of Russia with no aides or advisors, just with translators. Nobody knows. His security people don't even know. And I mean, that's the intelligence community, not his personal security, the security of the nation. Those people who are entrusted with that do not know what happened in that meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. And then when he addresses reporters after the meeting and he's asked directly by a reporter, you know, would you say right now to Vladimir Putin, who's standing right next to you,

that you believe the intelligence community's assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election? People came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia. I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be. And it's an astonishing thing that shakes up even very serious Trump supporters back in Washington who wonder what the heck is going on. And I just want to sit with this for a second because, and this is why having you put this in chronological order has been so helpful for me to understand this, because at this moment when he is in Helsinki, all these other things have happened. George Papadopoulos has told the Australian high commissioner that Russia has damaging information

on Clinton. His own son has received emails indicating that Russia has damaging information on Clinton. He has asked the Russians to hack her emails and steal more information. And yet he's standing up there with Putin and saying, oh, Putin told me they didn't meddle in this election. So I see no reason why he did. Exactly. Donald Trump has been, could not be more clear that he had no knowledge that Russia meddled in the election and that there has been no collusion. The entire thing has been a witch hunt. Phony witch hunts going against me. It's a Democrat hoax.

Hoax. It's hoax. We're under siege. You understand that. And so why does he say that? Well, it may be because that's the truth. It may be that's what he believes. There may be room in this for his campaign to have reached out to Russia, which it seems that they did,

to try to get information that they knew to be stolen that would be damaging to the Clinton campaign, which is entirely possible, and that Donald Trump didn't know a thing about it. But I think, you know, through all of this, through every step of this, the one outstanding question to me is why does everybody lie about it? Why did George Papadopoulos lie about his meeting at the Kensington wine rooms? Why did Donald Trump Jr. lie about his meeting in Trump Tower until, of course, the emails surfaced about it and they couldn't deny it any longer? Why have so many people, including his national security advisor, his campaign chairman, his lawyer and close associate Michael Cohen, why have they all lied about it if there's really nothing there? Keith, thank you so much for taking us through this today. Thanks, Jamie. So where does the story go now?

Well, it's not clear when or even if we'll get to see the results of Robert Mueller's investigation. But there has been some movement. The Senate Intelligence Committee looking at this is close to wrapping up. That's all for us today. But if you want to learn more, Keith also dove into this story in a doc for The National, and that will be airing early next week. You can also find it online. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.