Making Sense with Sam Harris - # 118 — The View from Trumpistan

Episode Date: February 27, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Preet Bharara about President Trump and the Russia investigation.  If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Okay, this is a podcast that is a little beholden to the news cycle. This is about Trump and the Russia investigation. the news cycle. This is about Trump and the Russia investigation. This is just a brief, by my podcast standards, one-hour tour of how a lawyer and former U.S. attorney trained in the relevant areas views the Trump presidency and the Mueller investigation. My guest today is Preet Bharara. Preet is, as I said, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 to 2017. He prosecuted cases involving terrorism, narcotics, arms trafficking, financial and health care fraud, cybercrime, public corruption, gang violence, organized crime, civil rights violations. public corruption, gang violence, organized crime, civil rights violations. He's been featured by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. And in 2017, he joined the faculty of NYU Law School. And he has his own podcast, which is excellent, titled Stay Tuned

with Preet. So fair warning, if you're sick of conversations about Trump and the Russia investigation. This is not the podcast for you, but otherwise it might well be. So now I give you Preet Bharara. I am here with Preet Bharara. Preet, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me on. Let's just summarize your background because you really have the perfect background for the conversation we're about to have. Please give us your potted bio and just briefly touch on the kinds of areas you have focused on in the law.

Wow. Okay. So we can take up the hour with this. I was born in 1960. No. So I was born in India, came to the United States. born in 1960. No. So I was born in India, came to the United States. My father is a proud Indian immigrant pediatrician and hoped for his sons to become doctors. We disappointed him deeply. Neither my brother nor I became doctors. Ended up going to law school. After law school, I worked in private

practice. Although my goal and destination always was really the U.S. Attorney's Office from the time I took a trial practice class, trial advocacy class at Columbia. But it took me a while to get into shape to go to the U.S. Attorney's Office. I applied, got in after about six years in private practice. And while I was a line prosecutor, I prosecuted all sorts of things, as you might imagine, in Manhattan. Narcotics cases, mob cases. Ultimately, I focused more on Russian organized crime, Chinese organized crime, Italian La Cosa Nostra. Did some terrorism cases, not too many. Fraud cases, you name it, we did it. Then I spent four and a half years working as chief counsel to Senator Schumer on the Judiciary Committee,

during which time we had multiple Supreme Court vacancies and I got to work on judicial confirmation process. And then after Barack Obama became the president, upon the recommendation of the senator, I was nominated to be the U.S. attorney. And then I got to serve in that position for seven and a half years, where we did, again, you name it, except I was overseeing the office instead of being a line person in that office. And what I'm proud of during that tenure is there are some offices I think that are known for focusing on one or two things. And I believe that we didn't disproportionately focus on any one thing. Sometimes some of the stuff we did got disproportionate attention, like insider trading cases. We were working this hard on cyber security threats,

on gang cases, on securities fraud, on terrorism cases, on public corruption cases, also civil fraud cases. So I think we did a lot of things in a lot of different areas. If you want to talk about them, we can. And I served very humbly and appreciatively in that position until I was fired by Donald Trump last March. Obviously, your expertise with Russia and Russian organized crime and financial crime is highly relevant to the conversation we'll have here. Say a little bit more about the firing. Was there some point of principle you were standing on in order to be fired? I seem to remember reading that all the U.S. attorneys under President Obama were told to resign and you refused. Is that right? Yeah, well, it's slightly more complicated than that. I had been expecting to leave the office

when Donald Trump got elected because that's how it works. But usually, almost in every case, and some people get this wrong, after a period of transition, you know, I got confirmed after Barack Obama became the president in August of 2009. And there was an orderly transition process, you know, people aren't just booted out, even when Clinton got rid of the holdover US attorneys, that was over a period of time with built-in transition process. So in any event, I expected to leave a few months after the election, but Donald Trump made the extraordinary move of asking me to stay, which is a little bit of a story, through Senator Schumer. And not only that, invited me to Trump Tower up to the 26th floor, where I met first first because Donald Trump was busy with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner who kept me company until the president could come and meet. And it was a lovely meeting

in which he was very complimentary of how I conducted myself in the position and how the office had done. I made a little speech about independence and we went on our merry way with him asking me to stay another term. So fast forward several months, went out of the blue. The president called me for reasons that are still unclear. I thought it was inappropriate. That was on March 9th of 2017. I thought for various reasons, and after consultation with the attorney general's office, the chief of staff to Jeff Sessions, that it was inappropriate not knowing the subject matter and knowing how it might look to the public if there was a

conversation, you know, on the side between a sitting president and a sitting U.S. attorney who had jurisdiction over various things, including, you know, him, his associates, his businesses, and a lot of other interests, that unless we knew what it was about, it was the better course to not speak directly with the president. And 20 hours later, I was asked to resign. Now, I don't know if they're connected. I don't know if they're not connected. And so when that happened the first day, so that was on a Friday, not to belabor the story, but I wasn't sure if they meant to include me. So at the beginning, I wasn't thinking to myself, I'm going to be defiant and require being fired. I just wanted to know, given some track record of incompetence and quick decision-making on the part of people in the White House,

if they had meant to do that. There were two other people who were sitting U.S. attorneys also, who I don't think they meant to ask for their resignations. That was Rod Rosenstein, who was nominated to be the Deputy Attorney General, and Dana Benta, who was the Acting Attorney General at that time. I think, you know, given the haste with which it was done, I was just trying to make sure, as an initial matter, that it meant to include me. And then I consulted with folks in my office, senior staff, and I've lived long enough to know that you don't know what the reasoning is behind certain things. I had in my mind, no understanding or explanation as to what may have changed between the time that Donald Trump said, please stay and orchestrated in a fairly high profile meeting,

even before he had named a secretary of defense, before he had named a secretary of state, I believe. And I just wanted the record to be clear, you know, for the future, that the person who had personally invited me to come meet with him, shake my hand, look me in the eye, ask me for my phone numbers, that it would be clear from the record that that person also wanted me gone. And it wasn't just sort of some, you know, mass bureaucratic shuffle. And then once I was assured of that, then I left. Okay, so if someone has been asleep for the last 14 months or just arrived from Mars, I would like to have you walk us through what you think they should understand about our current situation. I guess this is narrowly focused on the Russia investigation and what seems to be our kind of the most plausible picture of what has happened there and what is happening to uncover more of the facts and the president's behavior through this whole time with respect to the investigation. Can you just start a kind of a narrative as to what has been going on and where we think we are now and where you think this is all going? Sure. So I think if the alien had a deep understanding of what American history

had been like, I think the alien would think to himself, herself, or itself, things seem a little bit different. You have a president of the United States who has a different background from anyone else who's been elected, which is not necessarily a terrible thing. A person, the first time in maybe forever, I can't remember if this is true, but with no political experience, no public service experience, and no military experience of any kind, which is a first, which can be a good thing, which can be, you know, precedents were made to be broken and the status quo is meant to be disrupted. And that can be a tremendous thing. It's important in technology. It's important in science. It can be important in government as well. But you don't want to throw out the things

that are good and the things that make, you know, the country strong and the institutions that got us to where we are. So I think, you know, if you're looking at it from the outside, you're thinking to yourself, how did we get to a point where a president is trashing the press, is calling one of the great, I think, protectors of democracy and freedom, even though they get it wrong sometimes. The press is made up of human beings like any other institution is. But calling the press the enemy of the state, we've fallen a little bit far if that's the current state of affairs. How you have a president who can't say a bad word about certain kinds of people, including authoritarians like Putin and Duterte and Erdogan, while at the same time, if anyone in the United States has the temerity to engage in some kind of protest that he doesn't

agree with, he slams them by name, he punches down, he bullies people. He doesn't like how judges operate. You get the sense, if you're observing from the outside, that thank God the framers had certain structural protections in place. And the places where the Constitution has structural protection, I think we're okay. If the president doesn't like a judge's ruling, the most he can do at this point is holler about it, yell about it, vent about it, tweet about it, or do all of those things. And the judge, you know, has in the federal system, has life tenure and may not like it and may not like, you know, being named publicly and it may be difficult to get the hate mail, but can just continue to do his or her duty under the constitution. And that's because the framers made that possible. I think the same is true

with the institution of the press. You can complain about it, you can call it fake news, you can denigrate it, you can undermine it. But at the end of the day, that was tending some silly talk about wanting to revamp the libel laws and expressing concern about the First Amendment. The First Amendment is pretty much here to stay as well. Where I worry about the state of affairs over the last 14 months is the president, where he has the ability not to follow tradition, where there are no hard laws, there are no constitutional provisions, he can get away with a lot of things. And we have come to expect presidents to behave a certain way, to release their tax returns when they run for office so that there's transparency,

to divest their economic interests so there's no conflicts of interest, not to surround himself with people who are not even able to get a security clearance after 13 or 14 months, to have unpaid around him, his daughter, his son-in-law. There's a whole variety of things that are bad, not because they are different necessarily from how prior presidents have done things, but because they undermine, I think, people's faith in democracy and undermine what I think makes us strong. And when you talk about the particulars of the Russia investigation, which I don't have any personal knowledge of, you know, it's being conducted by

Bob Mueller and a team of people who I know personally to some degree. You know, the idea that there has been meddling in the election by the Russians, and the president doesn't seem to care, doesn't seem to want to talk about it, and more importantly, doesn't seem to want to do anything about it, in part because it maybe undermines, in his mind, the legitimacy of the last election, I think is an abomination. And it's not good for the country. And it puts in question the president's slogan that he loves to utter, which is very simplistic and could resonate if it were true and backed up by action, America first. So that's sort of how I'm thinking about how things are going on. You raised a few points here, which on their face

should be astounding to people or to anyone who's thinking about this through an unbiased lens. unbiased lens. Partisanship aside, it is astonishing to have a president who is attacking our bipartisan institutions from an apparently personally defensive and, quite frankly, often unhinged place. And maybe nihilistic even, too. Yeah. So he's attacking the press as the enemy of the people. He's attacking individuals on Twitter, private citizens. He's singling out for abuse. He's attacking the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of our intelligence agencies upon which he has to rely to get any information about what's actually going on in the world. And as you say, what he hasn't done is say a single

negative word about dictators whose reputations precede them by now decades, someone like Putin. I mean, there's no way to not criticize Putin as an autocrat if you're actually speaking about what's happening in the world. Yeah. I mean, he likes autocrats. I think he wishes he could be one. I mean, the question of some relevance is, we were talking about the Constitution and the checks and balances and the structure of the various branches of government, which are bulwarks against this kind of thing.

But it's an interesting question to ask. If Donald Trump had his druthers, right? And he doesn't, but if he had his druthers, right, and he doesn't, but if he had his druthers and he did not have limitation, is there something in his own mind, body, soul, intellect, moral compass that would prevent him from doing various things? In other words, if he had his druthers, would he put journalists in jail who didn't like? If he had his druthers, would he completely revamp the libel law to make him able to sue anyone who criticized him? If he had his druthers, what kind of a police state

would he think would be okay? If he had his druthers, how independent do you think he would allow the Justice Department to be? He's restrained and curtailed in that respect in a lot of ways, but I don't know if there has been a president, and people point to Nixon, but I don't really know, but I don't know if there has been a president, and people point to Nixon, but I don't really know, who, if given unrestricted authority, ability, power, would be capable of doing what I believe is in Donald Trump's heart and mind to do. And part of that is evidenced by, as we've been discussing, his apparent affection for, not necessarily the people themselves, although maybe he has personal affection for Putin and others, but he seems to be enamored of what they are able to do and how strong they're able to be and how unchallenged and unchecked they can go about

their business. And I think he loves that. And I think if there's any way possible, he could be that way, he would. I think he is unpatriotic in the sense that not only does he undermine the institutions, he doesn't have respect for them. And he wishes, and I don't hear people asking him this in this way, and I'm sure he would evade and deflect, but I don't think he has respect for the institutions that check the president, because he doesn't want to be checked. As you say, it's even worse than that, because he doesn't even care that the people he's praising, in this case, Putin, are adversaries of the United States. We're dealing with, in the main,

a hostile foreign power that has targeted our democracy in ways that are now well-established. And obviously, this is believed to be a mere conspiracy theory by many of Trump's defenders. But the fact that there seems to be no doubt that Russia does this, not just to the United States, but to basically every democracy that it cares to pay attention to. And it's just amazing that given all the evidence of their meddling and given the continuous problem of cyber attacks that emanate not just from Russia, but other countries like North Korea and China, the fact that he has shown no willingness to get to the bottom of this and to defend us against our obvious adversaries and is rather joining the people who are claiming this is all

a conspiracy theory, apart from the fact that it signals that he has something to hide, it is just a nearly treasonous level of unconcern as president. It's just, I've never heard a defense of that. Sam, look, I think treasonous is a word that's only reserved for Democrats who don't clap for him during the State of the Union. That's right. I realize it's a big word to even in this context to get a lawyer to sign off. Russian meddling is because, you know, he has something to hide. If, you know, as some people love to speculate that Putin has, you know, a lovely file on him and he's beholden and Trump is beholden to Putin, but there's something else that's going on, you know, without having to resort to conspiracy theory, we know something else about the president. I'm not trying to play

armchair psychology. You know, he's, he has a lot of power and he's incredibly insecure. And the combination of tremendous power, which he sort of walked into accidentally, combined with tremendous insecurity, not only about sort of, you know, his wealth, but about a lot of other things, including the legitimacy of having won, you know, of his election victory, combines to create a dynamic in which anything relating to Russia and anything relating to the future, which is not a partisan issue, he doesn't like to talk about, he doesn't like to reflect on, he doesn't like to lead on because it threatens to throw into the air again this question about what happened in 2016. And did he get elected on his own, or did he have

aid from this other country? And I think his insecurity causes him to hate that so much that it blinds him to the other responsibilities that he has as a president of the entire country, and someone who's supposed to be the guarantor of free and fair elections for both parties. Yeah, although if it was just a matter of his insecurity and the perception of the legitimacy of the election, and there was no collusion or no way in which he was beholden to Russia, you know, for, you know, financial arrangements that predate his campaign by probably decades, I don't know why he wouldn't just go on offense and say the things you would expect an innocent person who was outraged by

Russian meddling and Putin's own history as an autocrat would say. This is completely unacceptable. If there was any meddling, you know, obviously I don't think it accounts for my winning the election, but it's completely unacceptable and we will get to the bottom of it. And Putin is somebody who has to straighten out. He's not a Democrat. He kills journalists. This is all well-established. And we have to deal with him, but he doesn't appear to be any friend of the United States. What would prevent him from saying those obviously sane things if he were just concerned about the public's perception? I don't disagree with you. I think multiple things can be going on at once. You know, we often say when we're investigating cases, and this can be said of the White House and certain things that they were doing, you know, nefariousness and incompetence are not

mutually exclusive. So insecurity and misconduct are not mutually exclusive either. And in his case, at least the way we're talking about it, they both, you know, sort of suggest acting in the same direction, right? They're not in conflict with each other. As far as he's concerned, I think he likes the autocratic power those folks have. He may have something to hide because he's acting like it. And he also doesn't like the way it makes him feel because he's insecure. All those three factors lead to the same kind of conduct. lead to the same kind of conduct. And by the way, you know, it also doesn't necessarily explain, you know, his affection for and compliments of, you know, these other strong arm folks with whom

we don't have the same antagonistic relationship with respect to the election, like Erdogan and like Duterte. I mean, Duterte in particular, given the kind of work that I have done and used to do, you know, the way that Duterte talks about fighting the war against drugs and the extrajudicial killings, the extrajudicial killings that not only have happened, but that Duterte brags about and claims that he has personally, I think he's claimed he's personally killed people or thrown people from helicopters and engaged in all sorts of violence as a populist hero trying to eradicate drugs from that country. I don't think Trump has specifically advocated any of those particular things, but he speaks

in general terms about the great job that Duterte has done. And I don't believe the Philippines meddled in our election. So there is this other thing going on, this effect for people who have that kind of power, because maybe he aspires to it. And by the way, the other thing going on this this this effect yeah for people who have that kind of power because maybe he aspires to it right and by the way the other thing we haven't talked about but going back to our alien coming from mars that i think um imbues all of this with something terrible separate and apart from the attacks on institutions and you know something he may be hiding and everything else this is a person who does not believe in speaking the truth in any context and virtually at any moment. And that is something that is more dangerous than a lot of other things. You know, casting not just aspersions on people who he disagrees with, but casting doubt on all

truth. And literally, without compunction, tweeting out things that are demonstrably wrong and false on a regular basis, and then you're treated to this vision of tens of millions of people not caring about that and agreeing with him regardless and manufacturing counter theories and counter conspiracy theories. manufacturing counter theories and counter conspiracy theories. That's in some people's minds, I think, the worst thing that's going on because he has a lot of power and is using the bully pulpit in a particular way that no one has used it before, but in favor of disbelief in anything you hear. Just because you saw it with your own eyes doesn't mean you have to believe it. And people are starting to subscribe to that. I have, I had, I have a podcast too. It's not as, I've been around as long as yours. And I had Gary Kasparov on. It's a great one. Thank you.

But, you know, Gary Kasparov was on, who's no, you know, friend of Putin's. And he said something interesting. You know, the idea behind being a certain kind of autocrat like Putin, and Trump seems to emulate some of this, is not to say that this other person is always wrong. It's not to say that this other news outlet is always incorrect. And not to have every single outlet, you know, lionize you and say everything you do is great. It's to cause people to not know what is true and what is not true. It's to sow confusion about what the truth is. So if somebody says, you know, this person was fired for this reason, or somebody says, you know, this ruling is okay or not okay, Donald Trump can cast enough doubt about it

that people have to wonder, are we getting the truth from anywhere? I mean, he flips on a regular... There was a time when he said Fox News was terrible because they weren't saying good things about him. And then he says Fox News is great. There are times when he says, you know, the New York Times is terrible. They're failing New York Times. Then they say something positive and then he calls them up and he sits for an interview and he says that they're terrific. He cites sources that he hates when they support him or support a proposition that he espouses, and then he does the opposite.

And so it's kind of a confusing merry-go-round of truth, untruth, that upends people's understanding and, I think, confidence in every outlet. Yeah, well, that's where we are. We're in this place where our epistemology has broken down and everyone is now siloed in their echo chamber and you have people who are taking InfoWars as a legitimate organ of the news, apparently with a totally clear conscience, right? And even if they would bracket that with some question as to the veracity of everything they get there, they certainly would compare it favorably with any legitimate organ of the news, whether it's the New York Times or The Economist or The Atlantic. And so that already is a fairly terrifying destabilization

of our public conversation. It's one that we should remind people has been explicitly endorsed by the president. I mean, the president sat down with Alex Jones and praised him as basically the new Walter Cronkite. That kills me the most. I mean, one of the things that kills me the most in all this is that I don't know that there's a more odious outlet figure than Alex Jones. And every time there is a tragic massacre of children, like we just saw this week when we're taping in Florida, one's mind sometimes goes to Alex Jones, who put the families of people who suffered loss and death and grief- Unbelievable.

In Sandy Hook, that you can have a president of the United States say about that person, you're terrific and you're great, and sit down with him for an interview. And at the same time say that some other outlet like the New York Times, which, you know, they make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. I make mistakes. I'm sure you don't make any mistakes, but we all make a few.

And to basically, to his constituency, suggest not only that you can equate Alex Jones's disgusting reporting and nonsense and made-up garbage with the New York Times, but that one is, the first is superior to the second in some ways. And when people follow, there's some, maybe this is a quaint thought, but when people have power, they have responsibility to something other than themselves, other than to their own self-aggrandizement. And Donald Trump has a lot of power because there are a lot of disaffected people who believe in him and hated the status

quo, and it is what it is. He has the ability to take them to bad places, and he doesn't need to do it. I mean, maybe he does need to do it to maintain the standing that he has in the 30s as far as approval ratings go. But it seems that he takes it farther than other politicians, even fairly odious politicians have taken it. What do you make of the fact that so few people seem to care? If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs

and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org. Thank you.