The Daily Beast Podcast - Who Is Trump’s Handler in Russia?

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who helped launch the Trump-Russia investigation, says the current occupant of the Oval Office “poses the greatest counterintelligence threat of any president in modern history.” It’s not just that Trump and all of his top people have lied about their connections to Moscow, Strzok tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson in the latest episode of The New Abnormal. (Although that is super weird.) It’s that he takes all of these inexplicably pro-Kremlin positions on issues he clearly doesn’t care about. (Montenegro? Really?) Which leads Molly to wonder: If Trump is really acting like a Russian asset, who would be Trump’s handler in Moscow? “I don't think he needs one,” Strzok responds. This isn’t some old-school spy case, with dead drops and covert communications. “The best intelligence relationship… if you want them to do something is: ‘I've got you on the hook. I know you're going to do, you know what I want. And I don't ever have to tell you because of the leverage I have over you.’ And that's what I think Russia has over Trump. How else do you explain all these fucking inexplicably things that he's doing with regard to NATO, with refusing to say word one about [Putin critic Alexei] Navalny being poisoned, about the bounties” Russia offered the Taliban for killing U.S. troops. Plus! Strzok addresses the charges that the White House dialed up his  investigation into Trump’s Russian connections. (No way, Strzok says.) Rick teases some material from Michael Cohen’s newly released book. Molly sheds tears over the sunken Trump flotilla—and reports from the raging hellscape that is Manhattan. And! Strzok reconsiders his earlier position. “I was maybe a little too flippant about saying [Trump] doesn't have a handler,” Strzok says. There are so many things Trump “says and does that are very much in Russia's interests [and] that he doesn't have an independent knowledge of.” It makes this counterintelligence veteran wonder. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, it's Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, a left-wing pundit, and editor-at-large at the Daily Beast. I'm also an editor at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, business, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of F-bombs and try to keep our... kids, pets, and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers. Good morning, Molly John Fast. Good morning, Rick Wilson. Are you having just a fabulous day?

As fabulous as I can have while Donald Trump still holds the office of the presidency. But a welcome and happy end to the summer, fall is coming and winter to follow. And so, here we are. And you know what one does on the Labor Day weekend to show your support of our glorious president? Gender reveal parties that start enormous fires? No, try again. Boat parades. Flotillas? As we all know, as we all know, boat parades are the most reliable poll of presidential support.

And so this weekend in Austin, Texas. Except for boat or fraud. Well, there's some of boat or fraud, obviously. Poor Jesse. I can hear our producer sighing because we made the voter fraud joke so many times. To make a problem. pun is to pick a pocket. So on late Travis in beautiful Austin, Texas this weekend, there's a massive Trump boater parade until they started sinking each other by splashing through each other's

wakes. So five boats. Right. Five boats sunk during the boater parade. You know, there's a piece of academic research about campaign coverage and by Kathleen Hall Jamison from back in the 90s that says campaigns end up having one or two, we're losing campaigns. one or two moments where there's the political thing that goes wrong or the mechanical thing in the campaign that goes wrong, but there's also some idiot or some thing or some symbolic moment. Yeah, sometimes it's a big externality like the financial crisis in 2008 ended McCain's campaign, functionally speaking. But people remember the silly shit from other campaigns like, you know, Mike Dukakis in a tank or or some other kind of moment that gets sort of, the media goes, that is symbolic of the campaign.

I just hope to God that Magas sinking their 50,000. $1,000 boats in Lake Travis because they are too overburdened with flags, stupidity, and white claw. It's a sign of things to come. So there was the flotilla. There was the gender reveal party that started the enormous fires in California. There was a weekend of Trump just playing golf and hanging out, right? Well, I mean, Molly, what else does one do when they're, we haven't even hit 200,000 dead?

yet from COVID. I mean, why wouldn't one golf? 200,000, those are those are rookie numbers. You've got to get those numbers up. Right. I don't understand why we're talking a lot about Wisconsin and these protests and whether or not. But I feel like we're not talking as much about the fact that we are the one country, you know, Europe got their COVID under control. Canada never had a surge. There are all these countries where COVID has sort of been addressed. And then we live in this country where COVID is just out of control and you can't go anywhere or do anything. And I feel like we're not talking about, are voters not affected by that? No, they're deeply affected by it, Molly.

I mean, our research at Lincoln Project and other public and private polling tells us that about 62% of the people who have changed their vote from Trump to Biden say it's about COVID. Now, that also includes the economic fallout of COVID and this sort of whistling past the graveyard bullshit of, oh, the jobs report looking great. Right. We added another. million to billion dollars. And CDC is going to stop the evictions? You know, it's very much sort of a, like I said, whistling past the graveyard feeling about it. And I think there's a degree of that that any campaign would do in the kind of situation they're in. But they're looking to turn a state. Biden's up round numbers in Wisconsin. My last survey out of there was a little more optimistic than the polling average.

So I always take it with a grain of salt. Biden's up about five, six points in Wisconsin. A state, Trump won by fewer than 20,000 or just over 20,000 votes, excuse me. And he's behind in Michigan. He's behind in Florida. I'm surprised about Michigan. Well, it's closer in Michigan than a lot of the other northern tier states. Just because he's attacked that female governor and she's been popular largely. No, that, you don't understand. That helps him in Michigan because his base, it generates an energy for his base. Right. Interesting. But look, he's also, Trump has pulled out of Arizona. They're out of the campaign business in Arizona. They've written it off. Right. Can we just talk about this for one second? I read something that was like a 2016 moratorium that

said that some of why Trump overperformed was because he was propped up by Senate candidates. There is an argument for that in 16, that there were Senate candidates that were pulling the train and driving along the lift behind it. So Martha McSally is not one of those candidates. No, no, she is not. In fact, she is, they're like a pair of bow-d- anchors entwined at a Trump flotilla at a lake in Texas, plunging to the bottom together. Happy to see it. You hate to see it. You hate to see it.

But the big news of the weekend was that Trump thinks that troops are losers. The big news of the weekend was that Donald Trump is an un-American shitbird of the First Order, who has called our troops babies, losers, suckers, and said, I don't understand what's in it for them. There's no money in it. And we will get more to this in a little while, because if our audience hasn't guessed yet, yet. Donald Trump will be entering the Fuck That Guy Circle for, I believe, my third entry of Fuck That Guy for Donald Trump himself. I think that's correct. We have a lot of ancillary Donald Trump fuck that guy, facts. But this is one that's going to be laid directly to his fat orange doorstep. Now, Rick, I have a question for you. Who do you think the source was who recounted the story of Trump in front of the grave of the son of General Kelly?

It rhymes with Schmon Schmelly. I have no idea who that is. But it is interesting that the story was recounted a story between two people. Maybe Trump was the source. Well, the other person involved, there are multiple sources. The Atlantic has multiple contemporaneous eyewitness sources. And you know what I noticed this weekend? It's something that I think we need to, of course, there is no civics education in America,

including about journalism and the role it plays in our society and our country and our founder's reverence for the free press. But one of the things that the model is, that the model is, seem to believe. And I noticed as I was reading some of the comments on Jeffrey Goldberg's Twitter feed, the magas seem to believe that because a source is anonymous, that the reporter doesn't know who they are. I'm right. How fucking dumb are you people? And then I realized the answer is asymptotically approaching infinity. Well, what's interesting to me is that these are people who believe in QAnon. Right. They believe in QAnon. They believe in QAnon. It's real, man. You trust the plan, but they don't believe a story by a highly credible journalist at one of the most

storied publications in America. And they think all these people must be completely fabricated. They're making them up because Donald Trump tweets it. It astounds me. Listen, Trump supporters, I know few of you listen to the show. Although I know you like to listen to things because reading is hard. Our poor producer, you can hear how stressed out a comment makes him. Oh, like I haven't said, worse. He has, and like he won't say worse. Right. I won't say worse.

Continue. Journalism is not just there to make you feel good. Sometimes it makes you feel shitty. That happens when journalism works as it should for both sides of the political equation. News actually happened. So you read Ben Smith's piece this morning, huh? I have not read Ben Smith's piece this. Oh, you haven't?

It was all about this. Right. Go on. Sorry. The great minds think alike. But Donald Trump makes shit up all the time. He makes up anonymous sources all the time. People tell me.

This guy, my friend Jim, he goes to Paris. He says it's like a Muslim, a Muslim hellscape in Paris. Yeah, Jim stopped going to Paris, I thought. Well, the vid obviously would prevent that. Yeah, the good news is Jim is no longer welcome in Paris, nor are any Americans. Oh, my God. I have actually, I have an expat friend who lives in France, and he said, he said, the strangest thing is there's no summer tourism here from anywhere in the U.S. And he doesn't seem, it's just very Chinese this year.

Oh, good news. Oh, really? Good news. Here's my question, because you talk to a lot of national security people. Are there going to be a lot more people coming out? I think there will be more people who come out. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. I don't think John Kelly's going to come out and admit it was him.

I just don't think he is. Right. I mean, anyone who can thread the needle, though. There are people around him who have said things like, well, you know, your role as a retired general officer is still to. And I, you know what, if this was Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or Barack Obama, and there was some horrible fucking thing that had happened inside. Maybe you keep that sort of like these, because these guys aren't so far outside of the historical boundaries.

But when you look at the fact that it's Donald Trump, you really need to reconsider if your role as a general officer in a constitutional republic is important, it is. And your separation of policy and politics should be strong. But in this case, he's a goddamn existential threat to the fucking future of the country. Stand the fuck up, but that's just me. We had James Kelly Elizabeth Newman

Elizabeth worked for John Kelly So the fact that John Kelly's people are coming out Seems like a pretty big deal Do you think that we're going to hear from Flames Flatus? No Okay, that's too bad Here's a follow-up question

Your audience has asked many times If you guys think that's who it anonymous is I do not No, I don't think so. It's not matters Do you know who it is, Rick? I have a pretty good idea Are you going to tell us?

No Do you think you'll just tell me if I text you later? I probably will not. As you know, I'm a secret keeping motherfucker. You really are monster. But I'm your monster to your audience. Hey, Rick Wilson, if you wanted to start a terrifying race war, how would you do it? Well, first, I would pick someone at Fox News.

I would make them dress up as Eric Cartman and make them walk through the... Bullpen room at Fox saying, Race War! It's on! It's going down! So Fox has built these graphics packages and these montages of footage of rioting and violence,

and they've sort of, they keep distilling them. So things that happened in, say, June or July, are being run in packages that say, Tonight in Minneapolis, the Antifa has arrived again. We're aware, America. They come to your suburbs with their taco trucks, their balaclavas, and their pepper spray.

You know, the whole idea is Fox is the Trumpian Reichs Ministerium of Propaganda, okay? I actually think they just shortened it to Propaganda Ministerium. You know, one gets confused with all the amst and deans and so on. Sorry, I was making a World War II German Nazi Party organizational joke. I got it. It's classy. It hits all the right note. It really does. It sings to America's soul. But they have decided that their role in the 2020 re-election, the in-kind contribution they're going to make to Donald Trump, is to go out every night and proclaim that there is a race war on the streets. And this is why you are going to have a large portion of the American population who will believe that every night in every city in America, block after block after block is on fire. I mean, Molly, how are you even doing this podcast in the middle of the ruined hellscape that is Manhattan?

I mean, this narrative that all liberal cities are burning is nuts. And I'll post pictures of just like beautiful streets and the park and downtown where there are people eating everywhere. And Jesse, our producer, lives in Brooklyn. And he has a lot of photos like that too. And people on Twitter will be like, that's not true. That's because you're in a special rich enclave. Real people. It's burning where the real people are.

And I'm like, it's not. So I don't know what the thinking is. But I guess some people really do believe that all these cities, these major cities are burning. But I don't know how they keep this going. Well, they keep it going because they have a multi-billion dollar news network that is going to be out there every night until all this thing is over with Tucker Carlson basically saying, we need more heroes to step forward, to stop the hoard. That is wearing black because you know what they look like under those black hoodies. I mean.

I mean, the racial. Adjutop. Is it's not subtle. Right. It's absolutely completely, it's completely nuts. And it's just,

I mean, I don't know how they can keep this going. Hey, so, Molly, you know Michael Cohen's book is coming out

soon, right? You mean the president's fixer? I mean the president's fixer. The man who paid off Donald Trump's sex workers. I know I'm told I can't say, but.

Yeah, I've really classed you up, have I? Really cleaned me up there, Molly. Yeah, that's right. Yes, the man who, I would say,

the man who organized all, of the payoffs during the campaign. The man who is the engineer of Trump's debaucheries has written a book. And you will be surprised to learn it is rather unflattering when it comes to our president. Wait, what? Tell me more. I know, right? I'm shocked. It describes, essentially, I know this is going to come as a real shock.

This is why this book is going to be such a bombshell that Donald Trump is a racist scumbag. I know that I know you're shocked by this. This is a big piece of news. the point where he said things like, blacks are too dumb to vote for Trump. But I think the thing that's leaked out of the book that's fascinated me the most is Donald Trump, I actually know a little more about the story now. Donald Trump in 2012 thought he was going to be helpful to Mitt Romney by filming a video of him firing an actor who looked like Barack Obama. Now, from what I understand from some senior folks at the Romney campaign, he approached them multiple times in multiple ways

With the following phrase, you will have great ratings from this. Trust me, you will have great ratings. And they kept saying, thank you, Donald. No, thank you. We appreciate your concern and your willingness to be helpful. But why don't we talk in another decade? So long story short, he just says, you know, fuck it, we'll do it live and films it himself.

And gets this black actor who looks like Barack Obama or an imitator. I don't even know if they got was a little bit. A little bit like Barack Obama. Yeah, not a lot. thin black guy with a short haircut. I think for Donald, they all look the same. And he then proceeds to berate the guy about what a terrible president he is and about how he golfs too much on and on and on.

And of course, Trump thinks this is like a campaign-winning act of political genius. Well, there were how many people, one of the people that I talked to said, yeah, I heard about it. And if we got it, it went in a file drawer somewhere because no one was ever going to fucking touch that thing. But he also in the book, it's going to come out that Trump has this thing. long. And here's one of those things where Trumpers will say, he would never say that.

Michael Cohen describes Trump as saying, no country run by blacks isn't a shithole. South Africa was beautiful, and now it's a shithole. And weirdly, they're going to say that was impossible. Donald Trump would never say something like that. Except he's already fucking said it in public in other circumstances.

And every one of the countries that he referred to when he wanted to keep people from the shithole countries out, what was it about? Was Norway on that list? Was Iceland on that list? Why no? But that's the weird joke of it all. It's like when Trump said troops were losers and everyone in Trump World was like, he would never say troops are losers. And then there's like a tweet of him being like John McCain was a loser. Of course he said this.

I think even Trump's, I mean, you saw on Thursday when they started pushing back and saying, because you know what's great about Trump World is they're so bad at this. So on Thursday they started pushing back Trump just said that he hates wars. Do you remember that? Uh, yeah, bullshit. Right. He doesn't hate the soldiers. He hates the war. Yeah, no.

That doesn't work. And I think that was one of them where they were trying to get, uh, some of the gentry conservatives back on side. Right. And so you've had the, you know, the federalist types and the national review types who still, who still like pretend to occasionally have some shred of dignity. We're like, well, we hope he's more clear in his language. The Susan Collins is.

The nuance of this is lost on us. I'm not going to support him, but I'm going to, I'm not going to support him. I strongly am concerned by many of the things he says, but that won't stop me from voting for him every single time I have to when he asks. Because a mean tweet. Because if I get a mean tweet, I'll die. Right. A mean tweet would be the end of my political career. And my God, nothing's worth that. Yeah, exactly. By the way, Molly, I think the best thing about the Michael Cohen thing, Kaley Mundacity, has the balls, if you will, to go to the podium and say, Michael Cohen is disgraced felon and disbored lawyer who lied to Congress. He lost all credibility. And it's unsurprising to see his latest.

attempt to profit off of lies. Do you know who you work for? Have you looked in that office right down the hall from you? Good God. Can we end on one weirdly hilarious note? When the president was in Paris in 2017, was it 18 or 17? I can't remember now. Is this Hairgate? No, this is Chachkey Gate. Chachkey Gate. When he visits the home of the American ambassador in Paris, Yes. He sees these little statuettes, these figurines, if you will. Little silver figurines. Silver figurines on a mantelpiece and a painting. And he says, I like those. We're taking them with us. And they were boxed up and loaded under Air Force One. And taken with him.

What the fuck? He's like a kleptomaniac. But the punchline to this story is if you've seen a picture of them, they are quite tacky. Like, if I'm going to steal something, that is going to be low on my list of things to steal. By the way, if we ever get Trump out of office, people are going to need to check his suitcases. Oh, no question. Right, he's going to have just suitcases filled with Jotchkes. We're delighted to have with us today, Pete Strzok, former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence. He was a 22-year veteran of the Bureau, and he's become one of the most hated people in Donald Trump's world. because Pete Strzok was one of the people who helped lead the counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump.

So Pete, tell us about the book. Yeah, thanks. It's great to be here. So the book essentially is outlining the threat posed by Donald Trump from the perspective of somebody who spent over two decades working counterintelligence at the FBI, everywhere from the ground level working Russian and Chinese spies here in the U.S. and overseas, up through promotions and leading the investigation of Clinton's server and ultimately landing on the investigations of Trump. And the point I lay out in the book, you know, kind of in a factually based way, is that Donald Trump poses the greatest counterintelligence threat of any president in modern history. And, you know, that sounds, it is an extraordinary statement. And, you know, we live in the day and age of hyperbole. But when you step back, and again, I've worked counterintelligence over six presidential administrations, Republicans and Democrats, studied many more.

And without question, when you look at Trump and the people around him as a counterintelligence, intelligence practitioner, it is exponentially worse than anything our country has seen. And so what I'm trying to do with the book is lay out in a detailed way, why I think that, provide the factual basis for that argument, and hopefully give people reading it and give America a way to think about Trump as they approach the polls this November. There is this accusation that you and everyone else involved in this investigation were being hand-managed, basically, by Barack Obama. Can you just go ahead and address that. Yeah, so look, that's utter bullshit. Should we trust the plan? Look, there is, unequivocally, was no direction by anybody at the White House, no involvement in any way,

no knowledge about the individual cases we were working about against U.S. persons. That includes, you know, were they aware that Russia was attacking our democratic process? Of course they were. Did Comey at some point brief them that, you know, we are looking at things inside the United States. It's certainly my understanding from what he told me and others, but there was never, never at any time, anything from anyone at the White House, which was directly or even could be construed as a direction to do anything or not do anything with any of the cases that we had open at the FBI. So you're saying there was a chance they did? No, beyond dumb and dumber. There is hypothetically metaphysically no chance whatsoever that occurred.

I mean, look, I was not at the White House. I was. was leading the team that was looking at all these cases. And from that vantage point, I can tell you unequivocally, there was never a point where anyone at the White House directly or indirectly told us to do anything or directed us to do anything. It simply never occurred. Do you know anything that the American people don't know that you can't say, and I'm not asking you for it, that makes you think that really Mueller didn't really get what he needed or where he needed to go? Look, I mean, I think when you look at the Senate Intel report. And when you look at some of the recent, you know, there's been recent reporting about the concern that Mueller not only was focused on criminal aspects of the investigation,

but that potentially DOJ had sought to prevent him from doing anything from the counterintelligence perspective. I was very concerned from the beginning of Mueller when I was there and leading, setting up the team on the FBI side, that we were going to be able to do a thorough counterintelligence investigation. I am concerned based on what I've seen that we hadn't solved that kind of way to do that by the time I was removed from the team, but I'm very concerned based on what I've seen that that was never done in a kind of very deep, comprehensive way, sort of along the lines of what you saw on the Senate Intel report. You know, to your question, there is stuff out there that is not publicly known. I mean, look at all these documents and all the redactions. There's data. There's

intelligence underneath those redactions. There are certainly things in there that are potentially damning or damaging. It's appropriate that they're redacted because they're classified or maybe their ongoing investigations, but I do think it is a fair belief that there are things not known to the public that would cause them concern about Trump and his counterintelligence vulnerabilities. So a lot of the people surrounding Donald Trump, and from the clownish Carter Page to like the much more sinister types like Paul Manafort. Was there ever any parallel that you could think of of the senior leadership of a campaign or a company that wasn't based in Little Odessa in Brooklyn that had so many ties back to Russian intelligence services and so many connections with

Russian intelligence services? No, none. And that's what I was saying about the exponentially greater threat from Trump and his campaign. I mean, Rick, think about it. At one point in time, we had the presidential candidate in Trump lying about his connections to Russia. We had his personal attorney and fixer lying about what he was doing or certainly concealing what he was doing with Russia. We had a foreign policy advisor lying to us about his connections to Russia. We had his incoming attorney general not telling the truth to Congress about his conversations with Russia.

We had his national security advisor, ultimately not telling the truth about conversations he had had with Russia. And then his campaign manager, his deputy campaign manager, not telling the truth and concealing about relationships they had with Russian people connected to Russia. And it is staggering to me. But yet, the Attorney General says the investigations had no factual basis to occur. And the fact that you can look at this staggering picture and at the same time somehow think, oh, there's nothing there is ludicrous. And I cannot think of any parallel again. I cannot think of any parallel in modern presidential history. I understand that Mueller was confined by confines that.

that he allowed to confine him. But why wasn't he able to sort of thread the needle here? That's a great question. I think there are three reasons. The first is when you look at the special counsel regulations themselves, they are very much focused on violations of law. They don't talk about intelligence and counterintelligence. They are set up from the perspective of prosecutions

or looking at investigating prosecuting violations of law. The second factor is his appointment order mirrors those regulations, and it's really narrow. So, you know, one of the things if you look at it, I mean, and you have to read it as the legal document that it is, but when it says, you know, connections to the Russian government, it doesn't say connections to Russia. And legally, and the way that gets interpreted, it are very different things. And then kind of the third is sort of more of a, you know, an underlying sort of feeling that, you know, Mueller was, you know, sure, he was the FBI director. He understands counterintelligence.

But at the end of the day, he was a prosecutor. He was a U.S. attorney. He was a senior department of justice attorney. When we set up the special counsel's office, it was in team. of attorneys and agents looking at violations of law by various individual people. So all of that kind of said, you know, his, as he understood it, I think, his job was to get out there and look at these violations of law. And there's a gap there, right? The counterintelligence look is the gap. And I knew, and the discussions I had with him, the discussions I had with, you know, at the time acting director, Annie McKay, was that the FBI people who were embedded and working with the special counsel's team, part of their job would be to do that counterintelligence look.

Now, the issue of that is that task, that investigation is probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, counterintelligence investigations in the FBI history, bigger than the atomic bomb thefts. But how to do that was something, you know, I was struggling with mightily and, you know, went back to the Bureau. And I just, my fear is that that was never fully developed and examined. It's amazing to me that we have this moment when, Mueller releases the report, and Bill Barr races out to the microphones and puts his own spin on it and then

holds on to it and lets that spin become the dominant Washington thing. I don't think Bob Mueller, and you, I'm curious what your thoughts on this are. I don't think Bob Mueller had any idea that Barr was about to fuck him that bad. I think that's right. You thought it his mental face, right? I am certain Director Mueller didn't probably think in those exact terms. The fact of the matter is when you look at, Director Mueller and the team go on paper. They actually write a letter to Barr, essentially saying, you are misrepresenting our report. I mean, they say it

in a very polite and appropriate and professional way, but what you've got to understand is you have to frame that act in the context of who Director Mueller is as a man and what he sees as the constraints on his job. He's an institutionalist. He is going to live within the regulation. He understands full well that he reports to the Attorney General, not to the public. And so for him, despite all of those sort of that deference to the law and regulation. He feels that the attorney general has so misrepresented the report that he writes this letter. And to me, again, you know, it is concerning, but for somebody who has worked with Director Mueller, who understands, you know, a little bit, his perspective on his role and its limitations, for him to go on paper was like this five-alarm fire. And it's hard to convey that

to people who don't kind of understand the nuanced way of the bureaucratic sort of back and forth. But that's a huge red flag. And it just goes to, I think you're absolutely right. I don't think there was an expectation that the Attorney General would do what he did. I think, and I know based on some of the comments afterwards, that the report had been written with the assumption that some of the summaries were ready to go and be released and could be used as that sort of initial takeaway before the entire report was cleared. So it's clear that I think you're absolutely right. I think they did not appreciate kind of the mendacity that was in store for them from the Department of Justice. Let's just talk a little bit about the Senate report and the recommendations for prosecution. So when that came out, there was a suggestion that Junior and Jared were both on that list of recommendations for prosecution.

Can you talk a little bit about Junior and WikiLeaks? Because that clearly, you know, he had that meeting with Natasha, not Natasha. Not Natasha. Yeah, Natia. Yeah. So I'm constrained by a lot that is still not either declassified or still, you know, the subject potentially of ongoing investigation or that hasn't been released. But it's clear, look at this. I mean, she was presenting herself as both from the Crown Prosecutor of Russia's office,

so a member of the government or connected very closely to a member of the government of Russia. So it wasn't about adoptions? No. Well, I mean, that's what she ended up hijacking it and wanting, you know, the Magnitsky Act lifted in exchange. But, you know, the whole point when it was being set up and Rob Goldstone, the, you know, the happy go lucky rotund British publicist, is talking with him saying they've got dirt, you know, they can, and that leads to juniors little if it's, you know, what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer. I mean, he wasn't talking about changing, you know, adoptions policy, for God's sake, he wanted that dirt. And so, you know, going into that meeting,

he understood, I'm going to meet somebody. If he didn't know they were allegedly in the Russian government, connected to the Russian government, for the specific intent of their offer to give us dirt on Hillary. Now, that's wrong. It's horrible. It's unpatriotic. No American of any party should be doing that or tolerating that in any other American citizen. The issue from a legal perspective is, I mean, there are a bunch of them. First and foremost, did he know that was wrong? Now, fucking anybody who graduated, you know, a high school civics class should know that's wrong. Which we don't know that junior dead, but yes. But, you know, two, was that offer of assistance a thing of value, did this, since they actually didn't give any dirt?

did the campaign receive? So, I mean, when you look and you say, well, Mueller didn't prosecute that. That doesn't mean that it's not wrong, inappropriate, unpatriotic. So, you know, that's part of what, obviously, is people parse through the Mueller report. They're going to try and use the absence of a criminal case to demonstrate the absence of ill intent or, you know, lack of patriotism. But there was a recommendation for prosecution. So I don't want to get into what the Mueller report said. No, but I'm saying in the Senate report, there was a recommendation. Yeah, I think they pointed to, I mean, I know they pointed to a variety of people that they said might have perjured themselves, right? To essentially that they might have given conflicting statements.

And I would hope in ordinary times I can tell you what we did. I mean, we had a perjury referral on Secretary Clinton for some of her congressional testimony against what she told us in the mid-year investigation. We got that referral and we took a look at it. We compared her statements to her statements to us and determined a case was not merited. On the other hand, what is now public as well is that we received a referral from the Senate about sessions confirmation hearings, determined that in fact he did. It was appropriate to an open investigation based on what he said compared to what we knew. So there is a process in place historically at the FBI and DOJ. What I can't tell you is whether or not this current DOJ is handling those referrals in a manner, in an apolitical manner, consistent with the way we did it when I was in the FBI.

Spoiler alert. They are not. Rick, you can do what I can't, right? I mean, that, yeah. So that brings me to the subject of Bill Barr. I mean, we saw his very, very heavy thumb on the Mueller report. We've seen it in the course of a lot of the subsequent, the faux investigation on the back side of this,

the deep state hunt that's going on the back of this, and how much they've tried on the right on the Fox world, to turn the investigation of Donald Trump's ties to Russia into the real scandal, which, what does it felt like watching that ridiculousness play out? Because they are trying to turn this into the deep state conspiracy, but they've got the attorney general of the United States at the head of the train pulling it. It's horrible. I mean, look, part of it, you know, the first thing is this is perverting an institution that I was

part of for 20 years that I loved, that one of the things I most respected about it was, you know, the blindfold on Lady Justice. Now, you know, there are all kinds of problems with the criminal justice system, and I'm not saying it's perfect. But by and large, certainly from my perspective in doing the work that I did on the counterintelligence in espionage front, it was blind. We did, we pursued the truth. And to see something turned so upside down is just distressing beyond my ability to tell you about it. And then the second thing is obviously like, I'm on the, I'm on the receiving end of that, all those little nebulous, dark statements about, you know, I don't have details, but it's bad and there was all this ill intent and all these people of which I'm one were up to

not only just incompetence but there was malfeasance and this was you know it should never happen to a president again and I'm going to throw out phrases that I know full well were used during the bureau's activities against student groups and others during the Vietnam War that you know this was domestic spying. Bill Barr's a fucking bright bright man when he says things like this and uses those phrases he knows exactly the dog whistle that represents he knows exactly what he's doing And it's just, it's so disheartening. And frankly, to be the target of it is like, you know, what the hell? You know, some black helicopter going to show up in all our houses one day.

And, you know, if you read my Twitter following hordes, you know, take it down to Guantanamo with a case of lube. You know, it's just, it's hard. Don't worry. We've been told many times we're already in Guantanamo. It's good. There won't be a vibrant social scene for sure. So that's, you know, it's in the prison yard. That'll be great.

Get a grill out every night. Do you think Trump has a handler? No, but I don't think he needs one. And that's something, you know, the point I try and make when I talk to folks is like everybody, if you were thinking about trying to understand if Trump is compromised to the Russians in the context of like a classic spy, who, you know, they've got a handler, they've got covert communications, they're receiving tasks. That was not doing dead drops at strip clubs. Right.

And he's not, you know, the phrase I'm like, he may be going to strip clubs, but he's not doing dead drops. And that's part of like, you know, and this is where it. overlays with like, you know, organized crime or so much else, the best intelligence relationship, particularly somebody who's not, you know, in an intel service somewhere who you're trying to get documents from, the best way to handle somebody and have them recruited if you want them to do something is, I've got you on the hook, I know you're going to do what I want, you know what I want, and I don't ever have to tell you because of the leverage I have over you or the agreement we have or whatever else. And that's what I think Russia has over Trump.

How else do you explain all these fucking inexplicable things that he's doing with regard to NATO, with Monegros, with refusing to say word one about Navalny being poison, about the bounties and time and time and time again. You know, there's not a handler saying Donald next time. Don't say so much. But he, but to your point, we always do voices on the show. We always go into impression sooner or later. My Russian sounds very unfortunately like an Italian, so I don't do it. You're welcome, yeah. My children roll their eyes at me that I should just not ever. Don't ever do that again.

But there is, Molly, there's some question. Like, you know, when he talks about, you know, Montenegro being a warlike people that he doesn't know that we should go to war by defending them as part of NATO, he doesn't know who the hell that Montenegrins are. So somebody is telling him that. And so, you know, I was maybe a little too flippin about saying he doesn't have a handler, But there are some things he says and does that are very much in Russia's interests that he doesn't have an independent knowledge of. So that's a good question.

Yeah, I think you're right. I don't think there's a handler per se. I think this is a guy who is the most useful of idiots. And he frames everything and he thinks, what would Vlad like? I'll do that. You know, if he hears there's an American interest. But then, well, we all, because we've all become desensitized, it's just a steady, like, so many affronts that we look down and we don't know whether we've cut our finger or cut it. off. And so when you hear it, you're like, you're like, yep, you're right, Rick. That's exactly

right. But then just stop and think you're talking about the president of the United States of America. Yeah, maybe useful idiot, but you're talking about the president of the United States of America, the leader of the free world. You know, once upon a time, I don't know that we qualify for that anymore. Yeah, I was going to, we don't know what the motivation is here. And it could just be something as stupid as he wants to build condos in Russia after this is over. I mean, he doesn't, don't know, but will the intelligence, will they ever be able to rebuild after this? Like, chilling effect has been enormous. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure, it's been huge. And we're going to have to rebuild. It's going to be hard. I mean, I think anytime when you look at the totality of

what has occurred with all the things that have been declassified, with all of the FBI sources that have either been described or, you know, all these internet sleuths going out and trying to identify them, and I'm not saying whether they've been successful or not, but just down the board, look at the kind of entire menu of what has been impacted. What current source of the FBI or anybody in the intelligence community is going to feel safe providing information about Trump, his campaign administration, or Russia?

Second, any potential source out there, anybody that we or anybody in the intelligence community are trying to recruit to give us information about Russia? Why are they going to put their lives in our hands? I mean, this is in the worst case, people are going to get killed. And so what potential, source out there is going to look at in this current environment and say, yeah, I'm willing to put, you know, yeah, I can trust you. You're going to keep my identity secret. And so here I'm going to tell you about what the presidential administration and Putin are doing right now with regard to the election. And then from that, what foreign intel service, friendly or otherwise, is going to share the first little bit of information they have about anything involving the administration. And you just go down and, you know, and the impact on whether agents and analysts on the ground, intelligence officers overseas are really going to want to aggressively dive into reporting about. the administration in Russia, it just cascades down this massive chilling effect that is so broad

to recover that is going to take an extraordinary amount of effort. And it's not going to be enough to simply say, oh, look, we've got a different administration, so trust us now. Because if I make up a notional country overseas, I'm going to say, well, that's great, Mr. the DCIA for the Biden administration. I trust you now, but if somebody else gets elected in 2024, how can you assure me that I can trust you then. So there has to be some sort of systemic fix. And it's, it's hard. It's going to take a tremendous amount of work because so much damage has been done. I think that that is one of the lasting legacies that it will take a say long time to recognize the depth of damage that's been done. Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, compare it to the response to the abuses of the Nixon

administration. You know, we had the church and pike committees. We had all that, you know, FISA was born. But you had, after that, you had an administration and a Congress, and to some extent courts who are all aligned with the same desire and intent to institute reforms, to do a thorough analysis and fix things. I don't think we're going to, we're not going to have that same atmosphere in four months or in whatever, 52 months. So I don't know how we, and in many ways, the abuses are worse. And so the fix is, we've just got so much profoundly challenging work ahead of us. What do you think broke Devin Nunes' brain?

I just think it was there. The new abnormal is going to release a limited run series of bonus interviews over the next few weeks. Starting in August, we'll release a new one each Sunday. But listen carefully, only Beast Inside members will have access to these. So head over to new abnormal. Dot the Daily Beast.com to join now. Your Beast Inside membership helps support the great reporting at The Beast and podcasts like the new abnormal. Thanks.

Rick Wilson, our producer Jesse has told me I'm not allowed to make that joke again. So who is? You mean the joke that we make about the segment we have to do every time? You're not allowed to make that. Don't make that joke, Rick. I will never again make the joke about the segment that is mandatory for this show, ever. With Trump as my witness. Okay, so who is your fuck-that guy? My fuck-that guy this week is inevitably Donald John fucking Trump.

Tell me more. Who is this fellow? The Atlantic has run a piece that is one of the most consequential pieces about this president because it is deeply sourced illustrates Donald Trump's absolute contempt for our men and women in uniform. Turns out he doesn't love the troops. He turns out he doesn't love the troops. He just loves the idea that he gets a missile parade. And it turns out that he uses words like babies and suckers and dopes and losers about men who have died valiantly for this country in combat and who serve valiantly in the defense of this nation. from our founding. And I would love for this to be the thing that destroys even a few percentage points of Donald Trump's standing with veterans. They were already turning against him. But we've

reached the point now that they've got this black and white recounting of what he said. And you know it's the truth? Because A, you know how he's talked about John McCain and you know how he's talked about the Khan family. You know he's talked about other losers. And you know how he's joked about, oh, my Vietnam was not getting VD in the 70s. Even Trump supporters know it's true. Deep in your hearts, you guys know it's true. You know this is who you've taken a ride with. You know you own it.

And Donald Trump, fuck that guy. And I just want to add on to your fuck that guy for one second. Last week, before we learned that he is passionate about disrespecting the troops, he did tweet like four times about how he didn't have mini strokes. Definitely, whenever I don't have a mini stroke, I definitely don't tweet about it. over and over again. Right? I mean, he was like, and I didn't have any mini-stroke. No mini-strokes. How dare you attack my health? You know, it is that fundamental Trump must confess about everything sooner or later, which I think is, right? Sooner or later, he's going to confess. I mean, we know sooner or later he's going to be like, I told John Kelly his son was a loser. Like Donald Trump famously saying to Hillary Clinton, no puppet, no puppet, you're the puppet. When in fact, we can see the goddamn strings coming out of his extra husky, brioni knockoff suits. I mean, Jesus Christ. So my fuck that guy

is a man you may not know. He's not a celebrity. His name is Francis Brennan. He works for, he's the director of strategic response for real Donald Trump. He works on the 2020 campaign. Yes. And he's involved, I guess he must run

Team Trump and the Trump war room. Uh-huh. I thought that was Matt Wicklock. I mean, who knows? There are a lot of... Who knows? I thought Matt Whitlock is the NRCC. They all look the same to me,

which is to say soon unemployed. So, well, I mean, can Breitbart employ all those people when this number? I'm afraid not. I'm afraid not. So Francis Brennan took a page out of, I don't know if you know about, Steve Gast is the GOP rapid response director. One of his things he did was he posted a picture of Biden with his son at a Red Sox game in the 70s. Oh, yeah, that fucking genius. Yeah, that genius.

And then he said, to the lips in my mentions, odds are this is a photo of Hunter. Joe Biden's, right, and not Joe Biden's son who died tragically of Brainer. cancer last year. So that was a win for Team Trump, but this one I think is pretty amazing. So Francis posted a video of a reporter following Biden around a graveyard when and said, Mr. Vice President, come talk to us and Joe Biden keeps meandering along. Well, that graveyard is the cemetery where his son, Bo, is actually buried. So Joe was going to visit his dead son. And Team Trump took this as a sign that he had dementia, which is real projection on their part. And so, Francis Brennan, you are my fuck that guy. Francis Brennan, I hope you get really fucking famous over this because in a

normal campaign run by humans, you would have been hung out already as an example of what not to do when it comes to the, I don't know, call me crazy, the dead son of an opponent. Fuck that guy. Right, exactly. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. We're just getting started and don't want you to miss an episode.

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