The Daily - A Year in the Russia Investigation

Episode Date: December 18, 2018

At the start of 2018, the biggest threat to the Trump presidency was an investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia. As the year draws to a close, it’s his hush payments to women. We look at what’s behind that change — and how the threat may change again next year. Guests: Mark Mazzetti and Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times reporters who have been covering the special counsel investigation. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. At the start of 2018, the biggest threat to the Trump presidency was an investigation into his campaign's ties to Russia. As the year draws to a close, it's his hush payments to women.

Mike Schmidt and Mark Mazzetti on the story behind that change and how the threat is likely to change again next year. It's Tuesday, December 18th. Mark, at this time last year, you had just spent the first year of the Trump administration editing all of the Russia coverage that we did about the investigation, whether there was collusion, the appointment of Mueller. At the end of the year, you came back to being a reporter. And the story of the investigations into Donald Trump is focused on two things, on collusion and obstruction, right? Those are the two things that we were looking at. Right.

Right. Those are the two things that we were looking at. Right. We had spent the first year of the Russia investigation compiling this sort of catalog of contacts between the Trump team and Russians of different stripes. And we didn't know then where those pieces fit together, whether it added up to any kind of conspiracy. At the same time, we ended last year with a mounting body of evidence that the president, at the very least, was leaning on his top aides to throw sand into the gears of this investigation. So there's sort of two big lines of reporting that we have. It's still trying to answer the Russia question and trying to understand whether the president has essentially broken the law

by trying to interfere in that investigation. That's right. So early on this year, we learned from Mueller new information about what Russia had done during the election. What did Mueller tell him? Good afternoon. A grand jury in the District of Columbia today returned an indictment presented by the special counsel's office. Mueller puts out an extremely detailed indictment in February that charges a group of Russians with a massive and very coordinated disinformation campaign of social media manipulation, fake news, attempts to

basically suppress the vote by filling people's Facebook feeds with misinformation. The defendants allegedly conducted what they called information warfare against the United States with the stated goal of spreading distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general. It was a really extraordinary indictment because of the level of detail that Mueller's team had about this group of Russians. And I think it was, you know, if people were still doubting that the Russians were behind this campaign, I think that indictment ended most of the doubts. The special counsel's investigation is ongoing. There will be no comments from the special counsel at this time.

This indictment serves as a reminder that people are not always who they appear to be on the internet. So it's putting another layer on what the Russians were doing. It's helping to fill out the picture. Bob Mueller, as we know, does not speak publicly. But in his documents, he's telling the American public a story about what happened to the election. There was the hacking and leaking of emails. And then there was the third prong, the social media campaign. And this indictment in February really spelled out in extreme detail the levels that the Russians went to carry out that third part. So what was in those documents from Mueller that really illustrated what the Russians were doing? It was pretty extraordinary.

what the Russians were doing. It was pretty extraordinary. You had anecdotes about two Russian women who were sort of the advance party who came to the United States scouting out different states and how they might be able to make contact with different political operatives to eventually carry out this campaign in the 2016 election. You had information of people in swing states like Florida

who were paid unwittingly by the Russians to hold rallies in favor of Trump and against Hillary Clinton. You saw people who had been paid to dress up like Hillary Clinton and sit in a cage for a rally as people chanted Locker Up. And it turns out the money for that entire effort was paid by Russians. So this was Mueller sort of showing the level of Russian involvement. But it was also in February that another story starts to percolate. Breaking right now, a report from the Wall Street Journal. And now what could be a new scandal involving the president and a porn star. Her name is Stephanie Clifford, but her stage name is Stormy Daniels. According to this story in the journal, Trump had this encounter at a celebrity golf tournament.

Michael Cohen reportedly arranged for a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels. Cohen did not deny the payment happened, but claimed the sexual encounter did not take place. Do you remember what we were thinking about that at the time? Besides that's a hell of a story, we were thinking that we didn't quite know where, if at all, this fit into our overall investigation. We certainly had been quite interested in Michael Cohen as a player in this kind of Russia narrative because he had popped in and out of the narrative and we'd put some investigative resources into Michael Cohen. But his role in the hush money payments, we didn't really know where it fit in. And it wasn't until a couple months later. New York Times breaking the news in the last few minutes that the FBI.

We find out that the FBI raids Cohen's office and had come up with a lot of information related to this aspect of the story. The New York Times also reporting that the FBI also seized emails, tax documents and business records, and that the records include communications between Michael Cohen, the president's attorney, and President Trump. I remember thinking this was a huge deal because lawyers are supposed to get this extra protection in criminal investigations. And here was the FBI clearing the bar of proving to a judge that they should get a warrant, court approval, to raid the offices of the president's lawyer. So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, good man. And it's an incredibly provocative move at a time when the FBI is already perceived by the president as an enemy force. And it's a disgrace. It's frankly a real disgrace. It's an attack on

our country in a true sense. It's an attack on what we all stand for. So when I saw this and when I heard it, I heard it like you did. I said, that is really now in a whole new level of unfairness. And we learned, interestingly, that it had been a sort of referral from the Mueller office to, you know, the Southern District of New York to go after Cohen. So suddenly, Trump, who was facing a one-front war with Mueller

on Russia and obstruction, has an entirely new front with these prosecutors in New York. And what's going on in April is that the president's closest advisors and lawyers and associates are quietly saying, we think the Cohen investigation, the investigation into the payments, could be a bigger problem for the president than Mueller. problem for the president than Mueller. But we don't quite know what those problems will look like yet. And then in August, I mean, it's a it's a pretty intense scene inside there. Michael Cohen is addressing the court right now. Cohen tells a courtroom he had made those payments at the

behest of Donald Trump. Now, specifically, when asked by the judge to describe the crime, Michael Cohen said in coordination and at the direction of the candidate for federal office, he had made these payments. So he is implicating Donald Trump in this. And at that moment was the first time he brings Trump directly into the narrative. All of a sudden, the stakes for the president become very apparent. His longtime lawyer, fixer, handler is telling prosecutors that he was just taking orders from Donald Trump and basically wrapping the president into actual crimes. So Cohen had gone into court and pled guilty to tax charges, to bank fraud charges, but to also making an illegal payment to Stormy Daniels during the campaign. by using private money to silence someone to benefit a candidate who was just weeks away from election day for president. Right. You are paying money to keep information from the public that the

public might need in order to make a decision about who they want to be president. That's why you have election laws and That's why you have election laws, and that's why you have laws governing the finances of elections. And this secret hush money payment broke those laws. And the problems get even more grave for Trump because at the same time that Cohen is pleading guilty in Manhattan. You've said again in the interviews you've done over the last 24 hours or so that Michael Cohen has knowledge about the computer crime of hacking. Cohen's lawyer is going on CNN and he's saying, you know, if Robert Mueller were to come calling,

we'd have some information for him. Mr. Cohen has knowledge that would be of interest to the special counsel about the issue of whether Donald Trump ahead of time knew about the hacking. So Cohen's looking at a lot of prison time on these charges he's pled to in New York. And he's trying to say to the Justice Department, hey, I can give you things I can help you because he wants to try and reduce the time he'll have to go to behind bars. Right. And then we come to learn.

Tonight, what has Michael Cohen told Robert Mueller already after spending more than 70 hours answering questions from Mueller's team? What, in fact, it is that Michael Cohen tells Mueller, or at least part of what he has told Mueller. And that comes out in a court filing that Mueller sends to New York saying that Cohen has provided information about the extent of a business negotiation, you call it, during the 2016 presidential campaign that Trump had with Russians.

Our blockbuster news, the president's former fixer and keeper of secrets, apparently not keeping those secrets anymore. According to Michael Cohen, Trump was trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. What's more, two U.S. law enforcement officials tell BuzzFeed News, Cohen and a Russian official discussed plans to give President Vladimir Putin a $50 million penthouse in that proposed tower. In the midst of this Cohen mess, where he's been charged in New York and he's trying to prove to the Justice Department that he has something to offer, Mueller learns about the

extent of a real estate deal that Trump was trying to do during the campaign. What did we learn about that? We had known that there had been this sort of nascent attempt by Cohen and other advisors to Trump to do a Trump Tower Moscow deal to build the biggest skyscraper in downtown Moscow and put Donald Trump's name on it. The spin from the Trump world was, it didn't get very far and it ended very quickly. But what Cohen tells Mueller

is that he had far more discussions with Trump about this deal than was previously known. And the discussions went far later, far deeper into the presidential campaign than was known all the way up to June of 2016. Now, this is why this is important. It really raises questions about the extent that Donald Trump was really trying to advance his business interests with the Russians. At the same time, there was this escalating Russian attack on the election to help him and to hurt Hillary Clinton. So we're learning about a new layer in the Trump-Russia story where he's trying to do business with Russia as he's running for office.

he's running for office, does it start to answer the questions of why he was so favorable to Russia on the campaign? I don't think it answers the questions. I think that it certainly, though, raises more questions about, you know, whether his campaign rhetoric of wanting a better relationship with Russia, of dropping economic sanctions against Russia, somehow were entwined with his business interests. question. At this moment, after months of investigations, all of this stuff that we, Mueller, the Hill have looked at about Russia, about obstruction, the only criminal exposure that we know for sure involving the president is not about Russia or collusion or obstruction of justice. That's right. We end this year with a lot of the same questions of the extent of Donald Trump's exposure in these obstruction and conspiracy questions. But let's be clear.

What we're really waiting on is sometime next year, Mueller's team reporting its findings about conspiracy and obstruction and what those findings do in the new political landscape in Washington. So as we go into next year, we're all still waiting for Mueller? As we were at the beginning of this year. On Monday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a new report detailing Russia's online efforts to influence the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump.

The report found that the Russian campaign was heavily focused on swaying African American voters, a traditionally Democratic Party constituency, through posts on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, designed to look like they were made

by African Americans. Those posts, created by Russia's Internet Research Agency, encouraged Black voters to shun Hillary Clinton, vote for one of her opponents, or stay home on Election Day. The Times reports that the impact of the Russian campaign is hard to judge, but that Black voter turnout declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, federal authorities indicted two business associates of the former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, in the latest charges to stem from the special counsel investigation.

The two men, Bijan Kian and Akeem Alptakhin, were indicted for their role in a secret campaign to pressure the United States to expel an enemy of Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in violation of American lobbying rules. According to the indictment, the two men sought to conceal that Turkey was directing and financing their work, sought to conceal that Turkey was directing and financing their work, which included payments to Flynn's consulting business, in the months before Flynn joined the Trump administration. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.