The Daily - Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018

Episode Date: January 2, 2018

It’s 2018, and the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election is nowhere near complete — as the Trump administration had predicted it would be. Instead, new reporting on what prompted a federal inquiry in the first place has shed light on what Robert Mueller, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, was up to over the past year. Guest: Matt Apuzzo, who covers national security for The New York Times

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, it's 2018, and the special counsel's Russia investigation is nowhere near done, as the Trump administration had predicted it would be. Instead, new reporting on what prompted a federal investigation in the first place sheds new light on what Mueller was up to this past year. It's Tuesday, January 2nd. So, May of 2016. We're in London.

We're in London. George Papadopoulos, a recently named foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, is out drinking at the Kensington Wine Rooms. It's an upscale bar with an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer. Matt Apuzzo has been covering this story from the beginning. And they're drinking and they're schmoozing and doing what campaign foreign policy advisor does and try to make some connections. And the Australians trying to do what a diplomat does and feel out this new advisor. And at some point in the night, Papadopoulos lets slip that he knows the Russian government has political dirt on Hillary Clinton. Today, in 2018, the significance of that statement is obvious. In the moment, it's not clear how significant that statement was.

So nothing happens from May through July. And then at the end of July, WikiLeaks dumps a bunch of hacked Democratic emails and the United States government begins to realize the Russians have hacked Democratic emails. And the United States government begins to realize the Russians have hacked Democratic targets and are probably trying to influence the election. They've basically weaponized their hacking. Tonight, the FBI is investigating a new hacking incident

involving computers inside the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Party officials say it's similar to the DNC hack, which is being blamed on Russian hackers. And it's at that moment that the Australian government comes to the FBI and says there's something you should know. We had this conversation back in May with George Papadopoulos and there was at least the indication that he and the Trump campaign may have known about this stuff in advance. You take those two things, the hacking and the release of the Democratic emails and the

knowledge from the Australians that somebody in the Trump campaign may have known about it in advance. You put those two together. And that was the match that started this fire that has been burning for over a year. that started this fire that has been burning for over a year. So Matt, what you're outlining after months of reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election is entirely new reporting on how the whole investigation started. Yeah, absolutely. One of the real questions that has gone unanswered here for months is what exactly got American intelligence agencies so worried in the summer and fall of last

year? You know, because we heard from John Brennan, the former CIA director, he testified last year. Did evidence exist of collusion, coordination, conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian state actors at the time you learned of 2016 efforts? I encountered and I'm aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign. The CIA was seeing information that suggested Russian agents were trying to suborn members of the Trump campaign. I don't know whether or not such collusion, that's your term, such collusion existed. I don't know. But I know that there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation by the Bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials.

But we didn't really know what that meant. colluding with Russian officials. But we didn't really know what that meant. And now we know, in the most unlikely of ways, it's this kind of obscure campaign advisor letting something slip over drinks one night in a bar in London. That's interesting because the Trump administration has said ever since Papadopoulos' name emerged in this investigation. I never heard of Papadopoulos. He never showed up at Trump Tower.

Papadopoulos was the equivalent of a coffee fetcher. He was a nobody in the campaign. He was the coffee boy. I mean, you might have called him a foreign policy analyst, but in fact, you know, if he was going to wear a wire, all we'd know now is whether he prefers a caramel macchiato over a regular American coffee in conversations with his barrister. He had nothing to do with the campaign. And all of this contact with alleged Russians is something completely beyond the scope of his volunteer duties. Yeah, he wasn't running the campaign. He wasn't in the Trump inner circle.

He didn't have the candidate's ear. But we've seen a bunch of emails now between him and campaign officials. And it's pretty clear that he wasn't a coffee boy. I mean, he was in contact, regular contact with top people in the campaign, throughout the campaign, into the transition. He was asked to edit the first major foreign policy speech that Donald Trump gave as a candidate. We can't dismiss him because he was a, quote, unpaid volunteer. And now, whether that's true or not, he's the guy who started this whole investigation, right? By talking to the Australian diplomat, he inadvertently starts the federal investigation.

Absolutely. And one of the things that's been really interesting is how people around the president have basically said, well, this can't be some sort of sophisticated Russian intelligence operation because George Papadopoulos is this fringe player. But the truth is, that's how espionage works. You work your way in.

You make your contacts on the outside. You look for people who are ambitious and maybe not sophisticated and maybe don't have experience. And you look for ways to somebody who's been doing this for years who said, we weren't alarmed that the Russians were trying to make contact. That's what they do. That's their job. We were alarmed that it seemed to be working. They do. That's their job. We were alarmed that it seemed to be working. What Papadopoulos was very focused on was trying to broker a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump or top campaign aides and top officials of the Russian government. That was the shared goal of the Russian contacts and of George Papadopoulos.

The story has been from the Trump administration that when George Papadopoulos floated this idea at a campaign roundtable that Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general, shot it down. I mean, he testified about it. I didn't remember the meeting. Frankly, I had no recollection of this meeting until I saw these news reports. But now that I remember it, I definitely know I shot that idea down. And I would gladly have reported it had I remembered it, because I pushed back against his suggestion that I thought may have been improper. If that's the case, that is not the message that George Papadopoulos got. What do you mean? You can see from his emails, he is committed to trying to arrange that meeting with Russia.

And he is keeping people in the campaign abreast of his progress. He clearly thinks he's doing a great thing for the campaign. And at one point, there's this foreign policy speech that the president gives. We are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests. And Papadopoulos' Russian contracts, they love it. They say, oh, that's a statesman speech. He needs to talk about that again and again. And the line in that speech is, I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia from a position of strength only is possible, absolutely possible.

Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries. I believe we can have better relations with Russia. And so that was applauded by Papadopoulos' contacts. And at one point, Papadopoulos says the speech should have been the signal to meet. To meet between a top Russian? To get, yeah, to get Trump and Putin to meet. That should have been the signal that it's time to meet. The 35-page dossier details some of the most explosive allegations

now under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. President Trump continued to dismiss the document today. It was made up, and I understand they paid a tremendous amount of money. And Hillary Clinton always denied it. The Democrats always denied it. The Democrats always denied it. So, Matt, let's talk about how this origin story that you've been piecing together fits into everything else you've been reporting over the course of this past year. First of all, how does it square with how the Trump administration has been characterizing the start of the federal investigation into Russia? the start of the federal investigation into Russia. The Trump administration and, to a greater degree,

congressional Republicans have tried to cast the FBI investigation as kind of an offshoot of this, what is now known as the Trump dossier, which is this series of documents that were prepared by a British spy who was hired essentially by Hillary Clinton's campaign to do opposition research on Donald Trump. President Trump today called it a disgrace that Democrats helped pay for some of the information in a dossier of allegations against him. that represented both the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary for America campaign has confirmed that it paid Fusion GPS in April of 2016 to perform a variety of research services. And so from the Republican standpoint, if you can say, well, the FBI is only investigating because the Clinton campaign paid for some opposition research and got it in the hands of the FBI. It makes the FBI investigation look tainted, or at the very least, like the byproduct of politics.

What we now know for sure is it wasn't some politically charged dossier. It was firsthand information from one of the nation's closest intelligence allies that got this thing rolling. We already knew that George Papadopoulos is cooperating with the Mueller investigation. Does this recent reporting inform your understanding of what Mueller might get out of a cooperating Papadopoulos?

Nothing in this story is going to have come as a surprise to anybody on Bob Mueller's team because they have access to George Papadopoulos. And the question, of course, if I'm Bob Mueller, I want to know, who in the campaign did you tell, if anyone, who did you tell that the Russians had dirt in emails on Hillary Clinton? that the Russians had dirt in emails on Hillary Clinton. Because if you told a diplomat from Australia when you were drinking, it stands to reason that you might tell your bosses when you're sober. Right. If you recognize it's important enough to say it to impress a foreign diplomat, then you might also recognize that it's going to impress the people who you're working for. And why does that matter? Why does it ultimately mean something that George Papadopoulos would tell people in the chain of command of the Trump campaign that he had had these contacts with someone close to Russia and that they had

described having dirt on Hillary Clinton before all these emails get made public? Well, for a number of reasons. The first is, if the campaign knows in advance that the Russian government is trying to undermine Hillary Clinton, then in the summer, when the emails start to get released, it changes how we should read the statements coming out of the campaign. Because the Trump campaign was saying, well, look, we don't know who did this. We don't know why they did it. But if they knew in advance that that was the case, then that changes our understanding of Donald Trump getting up and saying,

Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. I'd love it if you go find the missing Hillary Clinton emails, right? If you know that they did do that before, it changes the understanding when you stand up and say, even jokingly, hey, I hope you can do that again. So Matt, talking to you at the beginning of the new year

about this investigation feels significant because the White House said over and over that this investigation would be over by the end of 2017. Clearly, it's not over. It's not over. And the White House has been operating under the assumption that if they cooperate, they make everybody available for interviews,

and they turn over a bunch of documents, they could get out from under this by or very shortly after the new year. That hasn't happened, and it's not clear right now where Mueller's headed. So everybody's kind of looking around trying to figure that out right now. It's where do we go from here? It'll be interesting to see if the president starts to adopt a more anti-Mueller tone, to date, he has kind of stopped short of doing that. And just in the interview last week with Mike Schmidt, he said, look, I think Mueller's going to be fair to me. That's an important line. If we start to hear the president change his tone about Mueller, then I think he could very well be signaling that he's changing legal strategy. And I don't know how you change legal strategy at this point. What does that look like? Everybody's already given interviews. to be in the president's ear saying, you can't play nice with Bob Mueller and you need to go on the offensive. And this is a president who likes to fight.

Matt, I'm sure that we're going to be talking to you many times in the months to come. Happy New Year and thank you. Thanks. I hope we do. I think we will. Bye, guys. Cheers. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Iran's biggest protests in nearly a decade have killed at least 12 people as demonstrations enter a sixth day and state security forces clash with the protesters

in cities across the country. The protests began over frustration, especially from young people in Iran, with the failure of President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate figure, to deliver on promises of political change and economic reform. As the protests have spread, they have grown to include Iran's entire political establishment, with some demonstrators calling for the death of Rouhani and Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. On Monday, President Trump seemed to encourage the demonstrators, writing in a tweet, quote, big protests in Iran. The people are finally getting wise as to how their money and wealth is being stolen and squandered on terrorism. Looks like they will not take it any longer. The USA, Trump added, is watching very closely

for human rights violations. And in his annual New Year's speech, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un indicated a willingness to ease his country's tensions with South Korea, offering to send a delegation to the Winter Olympics there, and proposing an immediate dialogue between the two countries to discuss the North's participation in the Games next month. But in the same speech, Kim reiterated developments in his country's nuclear program, claiming to have achieved new capabilities in reaching the United States. It's not a mere threat, but a reality that I have a nuclear button on the desk in my office, Kim said. All of the mainland United States is within the range of our nuclear strike.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.