The Daily - Mueller’s Questions for Trump

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

The New York Times has obtained the list of questions that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel looking into Russia’s election interference, wants to ask President Trump. The wide-ranging queries offer a rare view into an investigation that has been shrouded in secrecy. Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, who has been covering the Russia investigation for The Times. 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, 49 questions. The Times obtains the list of what the special counsel wants to ask the President of the United States about what happened and why. It's Tuesday, May 1st. Number one, what is your knowledge of calls that General Flynn made with Kislyak

in late December of 2016? Number two, what is your reaction to press accounts on January 12th, 2017, and what did you know regarding Sally Yates' meeting? Number four, how was the decision made to request the resignation of General Flynn on February 13th, 2017? What did you think and what did you do about the Comey? Number ten, after General Flynn resigned, what calls or efforts were made, What did you think and what did you do about the COVID-19? What did the president think and do in reaction to the president's brief? What calls or efforts were made, including the intelligence community assessment?

Number 11. Number 16. Number 17. Number 25. What was the purpose of the January 27th dinner meeting you had? Mike Schmidt, tell me about these questions that you got your hands on. What we have is a list of 49 questions that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, wants to ask Donald Trump about. Where do these questions come from, if you can say?

Where do these questions come from, if you can say? These questions were written down by Trump's lawyers in a meeting with Mueller's investigators in March. Mueller really wants to sit down and interview Trump. Trump actually wants to do the interview as well. But the president's lawyers at the time, led by John Dowd, thought it was a very, very bad idea. And what was going on was that Mueller's folks were trying to get Dowd to come along and agree to let Trump do the interview. So what happened was, is they brought Dowd over to the special counsel's office and they said, look, here are the questions we want to ask. And they started rattling them off. Dowd and the other lawyers there took it down and created this document, these 49 questions that they knew Mueller wanted to ask Trump. It was an effort

at transparency, an effort at trying to win them over for the interview. Now, what you have to understand is that Dowd looks at these questions and says, this is not good. This is not a good thing for the president. This will put the president in a very difficult spot. He doesn't have the confidence in the president to give the interview without making a false statement or going off on a tangent. the confidence in the president to give the interview without making a false statement or going off on a tangent. Dowd tries to make that argument, realizes the president is not

going to listen to him, that the president wants to do the interview. And Dowd says, I can't have a client that's not going to listen to me. I think him going in is a terrible idea. I'm going to resign. And he leaves the team. So let's read these questions. How do you break these 49 inquiries from the special counsel down? How do you organize them? The lawyers, Trump's lawyers, broke them into four categories. General Mike Flynn, the former national security advisor who was fired less

than a month into Trump's presidency after it came out that he had misled the vice president about the nature of his calls with the Russian ambassador during the transition, category one. Category two, Comey, former FBI director, James Comey. The third category is the president's relationship with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. The fourth one is about Russia, connections between Trump's associates in Russia. And if you step back and look at it, it's interesting because what began almost two years ago

as a counterintelligence investigation into Russia's meddling in the election and ties between Trump's campaign and Russia is focused almost as much, if not, look, three out of the four categories on obstruction. So let's start with the first set of questions about Michael Flynn. What is the focus of those questions? Flynn questions are fairly straightforward and are along the lines of questions that have been out there in the public since Flynn was fired in February of 2017. What did Trump know about Flynn's calls with the Russian ambassador? How was the decision made to get rid of Flynn?

One that stood out at me was question number eight, which said, after Flynn resigned, what calls or efforts were made by people associated with you to reach out to General Flynn or to discuss Flynn seeking immunity or a possible pardon? This gets at a story that we had written last month

about how the president's lawyer, John Dowd, had discussions with Flynn's lawyer about a possible pardon. Right. Well, the question is, was the president or his associates or lawyers trying to use a pardon to stop Flynn from cooperating? So here you have Mueller in March telling Trump's lawyers about this question, even before we made it public in April, showing that Mueller knew about it before we published the story.

Okay, let's turn to the second bucket, James Comey. Comey. Well, the questions are the same ones that we have sought. Did Trump ask Comey to end the investigation? What were his motivations? Did that happen? Why is it that Trump asked Comey for his loyalty in that dinner? What were the president's motivations behind this? What were all of those Trump-Comey interactions about. We've obviously heard a lot from Jim Comey about how this went down and how he saw it all. But, you know, Mueller wants to know, Mr. President, what was the purpose of the January 27th dinner meeting you had with Comey? Was loyalty discussed? Did you communicate with Comey concerning his status at the end of the dinner? Those are the questions that Mueller wants to ask Trump to understand his side of this.

Right, so much of this is about two men in a room, and we've always had that as a limiting factor. And so now we finally get the other person's take with these questions. But Mueller's also saying, okay, what did you mean regarding your statements to Lester Holt about Comey in Russia? This is the famous interview that your statements to Lester Holt about Comey and Russia? This is the famous interview that Trump gave to Lester Holt right after he fired Comey,

in which he said he had Russia on his mind when he did it. Right. What does he mean by that? Correct. And what was the purpose of the May 12th tweet that Comey better hope there are no tapes? That is the tweet that Comey says led him to have his friend leak the memo about the February 14th interaction in the Oval Office when Comey says Trump asked him to end the Flynn investigation. So Mueller wants to know what President Trump meant when he wrote that tweet.

Correct. Okay, so that's one and two. Three was about Attorney General Sessions. What are those questions emphasizing from Mueller? The long, tortured relationship between the president and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. What did you think and what did you do regarding A.G. Sessions' recusal? This is in February of 2017. There's reports out there that Sessions may not have been forthcoming with Congress about his meetings with Russians during the campaign. The president goes nuts. Has the White House counsel, Don McGahn, try and lobby Sessions not to recuse himself?

The president looks at the person running the Justice Department as someone who should be loyal to him. That's the utmost important thing to him. He's very upfront about that. The question Mueller's trying to get at here is what is it that was motivating the president to have someone so loyal to him run the investigation? Did you have any discussions about whether the AG was going to protect him? What efforts did you make to try and get him to change his mind in reverse about the recusal? And what are these questions from Mueller about AG Sessions? What are they driving at legally and investigatorily?

Well, the question is, was Trump trying to replace Sessions to get someone in place who would end the Mueller investigation? Would it be someone that would not be recused from the investigation, someone who could actually oversee it and could do what the president wanted with the Russia investigation? Right. And this is an ongoing situation because Jeff Sessions remains attorney general and his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation and all that has happened as a result of that continues to infuriate the president. It is an issue that has not gone away, and it has been something that people around the president, around Sessions, say will continue to get worse if the Russia investigation intensifies. Okay, the fourth and final bucket.

Fourth and final bucket, Russia questions. Good old-fashioned collusion, the original question of the investigation. Interestingly, Mueller wants to know about the 2013 trip to Russia. This is this trip Trump took to Moscow when he owned the Miss Universe pageant. They had the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. What communication relationships did you have with the Agalarovs, the folks who were paying Trump to have the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, and any Russian government officials there? What discussions did you have during the campaign

regarding any meeting with Vladimir Putin? What discussions did you have during the campaign regarding U.S. sanctions towards Russia? What involvement did you have in the communication strategy regarding the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting and the release of Don Jr.'s emails concerning the same? This is how did the White House try and explain the June 2016 meeting when Don Jr. sits down with the Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. Right. What interaction and communications did you have with Michael Cohen, whose office and residences were raided in Manhattan earlier this month as part of an investigation into his work

for the president, cutting deals with women who had made allegations against the president, and a guy named Felix Sater and others, including foreign nationals regarding real estate developments in Russia during the period of the campaign. Another one, which is sort of a central question of the entire Russia investigation, what knowledge did you have of communications with or regarding Roger Stone, persons associated with Roger Stone, Julian Assange, or WikiLeaks. The question being, what did the president know of the release of the Russians' emails they had hacked from Democrats? Did the president know anything about that? And this final line of inquiry is, as you said, Mike,

about the sort of foundational question of the Mueller investigation, which is Russian meddling in the election, a subject that has, of course, expanded a lot in the months since the investigation began. I'm struck that this final set of questions is much more fact-based. What happened? What did you know? When did you know it? Whereas all the other questions in the first three categories about what's happened since the campaign, are much more about the president's motivations and feelings. This comes back to a discussion John Dowd had with Robert Mueller in one of the meetings about the interview. John Dowd says, look, we'll answer all these questions for you. We'll give them to you in writing.

You need this information, we will give it to you. And Mueller says, I need to question the president to know whether he had criminal intent. What was behind the decisions? What was truly motivating him? They're looking at how the president pulled the levers of power since he came into office. How did he wield his power? How did he wield his power? Why did he wield his power? Legally, the president can replace his attorney general. He can replace his FBI director. He can even try and end an investigation if he thinks it's a real problem

for the country. But the question is, what were the motivations? What was the intent? I'm curious, though, when it comes to a federal investigation, it's easy to prove that someone is lying about whether something happened, right? Either it did happen or it didn't happen, and the person was honest about it or they weren't. Isn't it harder to know if someone is telling the truth about how they felt, about what their motivations are? Can't they just inherently fib that because we can't know

someone's head? Well, you touch on one of the difficulties here. Proving intent is one of the most difficult things prosecutors investigate. And unless you have someone at the time saying, yes, the president told me I did this because of X, then the person can hide their intent. because of X, then the person can hide their intent. If you did something and never told anyone your intention, no one will truly know why you did it. And what Mueller's saying is that I need to question him directly about that. Simply getting written responses to this is not enough.

I need to understand directly from him why he did the things he did. At this point, does the president plan to sit down with Mueller's team and answer these 49 questions and any other questions they have? The president wants to sit down and do the interview. And the president has lawyers now that will go along with that. John Dowd was not one of those lawyers, and that's why he resigned. Do you think anything changes for the Trump team

or the special counsel's team now that these questions are public because of your reporting? No, I don't think so. Maybe they can send me the answers to the questions. That would be good. Or a better idea that our colleague Matt Apuzzo had was try and get me to interview Trump

but only ask the 49 questions. Hmm. That is intriguing. Maybe I could pop up at, you know, his golf course and say, hey. And hope that he says yes. I can, I'll do the interview. Finally, Mike,

why do you think that these questions are being made public now? I recognize that's a tricky question for you since you are part of the reporting process, making it public. But why do you think that someone, even if we can never know who, would give you these questions to make them public? I think there's a lot of people in Washington who are unnerved by the president and believe the more sunlight and attention that anything related gets is going to be something that is good. And they feel that pushing information out is a way to do this and to keep the public's focus on the issue. But like Bob Mueller, I don't know everyone's intentions. And was this more or less what you expected these questions to be?

The questions that Mueller would be interested in? I mean, we were kind of sort of laughing about him a bit saying, you know, if you sat us down and said, hey, come up with 49 questions to ask Donald Trump about the Russia investigation, they'd probably be very similar to these. We didn't learn a ton new here. But I guess the depth and breadth of it is still something that strikes me. You sort of cover the story, different angles and narratives pile up,

and then you kind of sit back and you read this and you go, wow, there's a lot of questions about the president's time in office and of stuff that went on in the campaign that we still don't know the answer to and that the president still has not answered. And we still don't know the why. Correct. And, you know, sometimes the truth takes a long time to suss out. Correct. And, you know, sometimes the truth takes a long time to suss out. 26. Did you have a discussion about whether the age? What was the purpose of what discussions did you have with Ryan's previous term?

My special counsel, special counsel criticism of Sessions via tweets during a 2013 trip to Russia? Trump Tower meeting. Real estate developments in Russia regarding any meeting with Putin. 49. What knowledge do you have about the Trump-Sessions-Francisco-Blackjack-Sessions campaign? Thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. Tonight we will present the world never before exposed information. And it's an intelligent achievement. One of the biggest Israel has known. In a theatrical televised presentation on Monday night, the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, accused Iran of repeatedly lying about its nuclear program, just days before President Trump is set to decide whether to pull out of the nuclear deal with Iran. Tonight we're going to show you something that the world has never seen before. Tonight we are going to reveal new and conclusive proof of the secret nuclear weapons program

that Iran has been hiding for years from the international community in its secret atomic archive. Netanyahu presented viewers with a massive archive of records stolen by Israel from a secret warehouse in Tehran that he suggested undermined the nuclear deal. Here's what the files included. Incriminating documents, incriminating charts, incriminating presentations, incriminating blueprints, incriminating documents, incriminating charts, incriminating presentations, incriminating blueprints, incriminating photos, incriminating videos, and more. But Netanyahu did not provide any evidence that Iran had violated the terms of the nuclear deal since it went into effect, raising the possibility that his real goal was to give President Trump a rationale

for pulling out of the agreement later this month, as Trump has repeatedly threatened to do. In response, Iran's deputy foreign minister called Netanyahu's presentation, quote, very childish and a prearranged show with the aim of impacting Trump's decision. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.