The Daily - Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018

Episode Date: January 10, 2018

George Papadopoulos drew worldwide attention when he was identified as the low-ranking foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign who got in over his head with Russia and inadvertently set off the Mueller investigation. But another foreign policy adviser, Carter Page, also drew the attention of the F.B.I.: Why did his story end so differently? Guest: Jason Zengerle, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.To take our audience survey, visit nytimes.com/podcasts and look for the "take our listener survey" button.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, George Papadopoulos has become infamous as the low-ranking foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, who got in over his head with Russia and inadvertently triggered the Mueller investigation. and inadvertently triggered the Mueller investigation. But there was another foreign policy advisor on the Trump campaign who drew the attention of the FBI. Who is Carter Page? And why did his story end so differently? It's Wednesday, January 10th.

You know, from the very beginning, they kind of framed me as the Russia guy. Yeah. And admittedly, you know, in terms of both having lived there for several years as a professional, and then, you know, having done all those degrees. Yeah. Of anyone else on the hit list? Yeah. Anyone else on the hit list?

I'm definitely... What do you mean by the hit list? Just, you know, the Trump associates that are kind of being looked at. Jason Zengerle recently interviewed Carter Page for The Times magazine. But the hit list, I mean, is that like Manafort and Deerwood? I mean, it seems like they're in a whole lot more trouble than you are. No, well, sure.

But I want to say, you know, I think everyone is sort of in the same boat. Jason, when did the public first hear the name Carter Page? How did we learn about him initially? So it was March of 2016. Mr. Trump, welcome to The Washington Post. Thank you. Thank you for making time. Yeah, you closed those doors.

And around that time, there'd been a lot of questions about the Trump campaign's seriousness and whether it had sort of the necessary policy advisors a typical presidential campaign would have, especially when it came to foreign policy. This has been agreed. This is an on-the-record meeting with the editorial board. And Donald Trump went to the Washington Post building in Washington, D.C., for a meeting with the editorial board. Perhaps we heard you might be announcing your foreign policy advisory team soon, if there's anything you can share on that.

We are going to be doing that, in fact. And he started it off by volunteering that he had a list of foreign policy advisors that he wanted to unveil. Okay, you ready? And he wanted to unveil some of their names. George Papadopoulos. He's an oil and energy consultant. Excellent guy. And one of the names he mentioned was? Carter Page, Ph.D. Carter Page, Ph.D. Carter Page, Ph.D.

No one sort of in the general public had ever heard of him before. But the first time he was mentioned by anyone sort of important, it was Trump saying Carter Page, Ph.D. And I have quite a few more. But that's a group of some of the people. I mean, it suggests, one, that Trump was impressed by the credential, but it also, you know, it showed how Trump wanted people to take him and his advisors seriously. And, yeah, you might not have heard of Carter Page before, but Carter Page, Ph.D., gives you some sort of credibility. I think as the truth is starting to come out, I feel less, you know, I know there's still a lot of hatred. And it's part of the reason why philosophically, like Dan talked about it in his article of, you know, changing. I just lost my train of thought.

What was I just saying? Less hatred in New York. Yeah. The truth's coming out. So who is this PhD, Carter Page, that the Trump campaign brings on as a foreign policy advisor? So Carter Page is, he's a Naval Academy graduate, and he does have, you know, multiple degrees. He has an MBA. He has, I think, a master's in national security studies, and then he has a PhD. He has a real affinity for Russia. He went there as a midshipman to study for a month. He worked there in the aughts as a banker for Merrill Lynch. He's very interested in the country. He

speaks some Russian. He's the kind of guy, though, that in a normal presidential campaign, he wouldn't get within a million miles of a regular presidential campaign. Why not? What would have stopped him before from having a role like this? One would just be lack of connections and experience and credentials. The second thing would be his views, especially when it comes to Russia. His views on Russia are very much outside the mainstream foreign policy consensus in the United States. Which is that Russia is... That Russia is misunderstood and mistreated and that Putin's actions are understandable and

possibly even defensible in light of American and Western aggression towards Russia. It's great to be here in Moscow's World Trade Center today. You know, in July of 2016, he went to Moscow himself. He went as a private citizen. He wasn't there on behalf of the Trump campaign officially. So therefore, the ideas that we'll discuss tonight do not necessarily reflect other people or organizations that I may be working with at the present time. But he went to Moscow to give a speech at a university. The speech was billed as being given by Carter Page,

foreign policy advisor to Donald Trump. The West's combination of a nearly universal critical tone and continued proactive steps to encourage leadership change overseas may understandably advance a certain level of insecurity, understandably so. Why is this speech that Carter he's in Russia. It's just it's a little bit surprising that there would be a foreign policy advisor to a presidential campaign going to Russia at that point to give a speech. Number two, the tenor of the speech, the content of the speech were just more sympathetic to Russia and pro-Russia than you would think a foreign policy advisor to an American presidential candidate would say. And the fact that he was saying them on Russian soil was significant. Ironically, Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change. I mean, Page insisted that he was there in a personal capacity.

He was not there on, you know, representing the Trump campaign. At the same time, it was, you know, very difficult to separate him from the Trump campaign. There was certainly the impression among people in Moscow that he would not have been invited to give the speech were he not associated with the Trump campaign. And he was saying things that directly contradicted the American foreign policy establishment's consensus view on Russia. Despite broad suspicions in the West regarding the intentions and influence of Russia, my related research has demonstrated the evolving similarities between Russia and Central Asia that have actually positively impacted these states.

Are U.S. intelligence officials aware of this speech that Carter Page is giving? Yeah. I mean, not only are U.S. intelligence officials aware of the speech that Carter's giving, they're aware of Carter. He's been someone that they've had contact with before. Three years earlier, the FBI discovered that a couple of Russian intelligence operatives in the United States had met with Carter to discuss some business deals with him. Unbeknownst to Carter at the time, they were under FBI surveillance. Carter says, and I think it's believable, he didn't know that these were Russian intelligence operatives. He thought they were Russian businessmen or Russian diplomats. But in the course of the FBI investigating these operatives, they had wiretaps

on them and they have audio of them discussing Carter and how they were hoping to recruit Carter and the difficulties they were encountering in that, because as one of them says in this tape that's come out, they thought Carter was an idiot. An idiot. And they were, yeah, they were encountering difficulties with him because they just didn't think he was smart enough. But to be clear, Carter Page didn't know that he was dealing with spies. No, he says, and I believe him and the FBI, I think, believes him as well, that he did not realize that these were spies. He thought that they were just Russian businessmen, Russian diplomats who were interested in the same things he was interested in, both as a business proposition advisor this guy who already has this really questionable relationship with Russia.

Did the Trump campaign know about Page's contact with Russian spies? No, I don't think so. I don't think anybody did except for the FBI. That information didn't come to light until I think even after the campaign was over. It was not something that was known. But obviously Russia knows about their past communications with him. So knowing what we now know about Russia's very deliberate efforts to infiltrate the Trump campaign, why didn't they target Carter more once they learned he was part of the team?

Well, I mean, for one thing, the guys who had that relationship with him back in 2013 were discovered, you know, as Russian spies. I think one of them went to prison in the United States. The other one was expelled and went back to Russia. Two, I think it's very likely they did target Carter. You know, I think one of the things we've learned about in the last year or so is the efforts by the Russians to make inroads in the Trump campaign. And it seems only natural that Carter would have been one of the individuals they reached out to. And I think that's one of the big questions about that trip to Moscow in July of 2016 is who did Carter talk to while he was there? 2016 is who did Carter talk to while he was there? Apparently, he talked to people on that trip that raised enough concerns back in the United States, back at FBI headquarters, that the FBI was able to obtain a secret court order to monitor his communications, that they had enough evidence

that they were able to convince the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there was probable cause to believe that Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power. So this is the summer of 2016, and you're saying that Carter Page, with this trip to Russia, has just attracted the attention of the FBI. That's fascinating fascinating because around that

same time, we now know, another foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, one who has turned out to be very consequential, also attracts FBI attention for his communications with Russia, George Papadopoulos. I'm struck that we're talking these days about Papadopoulos as the guy who inadvertently started the Mueller investigation, but we're not talking about Page. Yeah, Papadopoulos is another one of these characters who on a normal presidential campaign would not have come within anywhere near where he was on the Trump campaign. I mean, he's another good example of how desperate the Trump campaign was to build out its foreign policy team. And Papadopoulos, I think, was very aggressive in using his credential of being a Trump foreign

policy advisor to make contact with various foreign officials, including Russian officials. He was at a similar level, I think, to Carter on the campaign. Both of them were, you know, they were on this foreign policy advisory team, but I don't think either one of them were very senior. Unlike Carter, though, Papadopoulos had, I think, probably the social skills and the sort of the emotional intelligence or social IQ that he was able to secure a bunch of meetings and make real headway on arranging a meeting between Trump and Putin. You know, Carter, that's just not his skill set. I think he's not socially adept at all. He's someone,

if you just spend a few minutes with him, you realize pretty quickly he's odd. And I think the Trump campaign, after initially being impressed by his PhD and all of his credentials and looking at his resume, came to realize that, you know, he's kind of an odd duck who's going to bombard us with strange policy proposals and really long memos. And that's not what the Trump campaign was interested in. They didn't want, you know, a 10-point plan on building better relations with Russia. They wanted to get meetings with people, and that's not Carter's skill set. But isn't being incompetent or even, in the words of these Russian spies, idiotic,

isn't that what Russia is looking for when it tries to find a vulnerable person it can lean on to infiltrate a campaign? And yet that doesn't happen to Page. Well, the person can't be viewed as an idiot by the campaign. You know, I mean, Papadopoulos, he was probably a better target for the Russians because he was viewed in a more favorable light by the Trump campaign. You know, the Russians could sort of, no matter what kind of inroads they made with Carter, if Carter wasn't making inroads with a campaign, he wouldn't be useful to them. He wouldn't be someone that would provide them access to the campaign because I think increasingly Carter didn't have access to the campaign. So in a sense, Carter Page was the other

advisor in this episode, but he's kind of left behind. Yeah, he's sort of the other side of the Papadopoulos coin. You know, both of them sort of inexperienced, bumbling, bumping around, but Papadopoulos was more successful than Carter was and therefore proved more useful. We'll be right back. So in the summer of 2016, Carter Page draws the attention of the FBI with the speech he gives in Russia. What does the Trump campaign make of it?

After the Russia speech, I think the campaign realized that they had a problem with Carter, and they realized that he could cause them trouble. So they started distancing themselves from him. And Donald Trump's campaign is denying any connections to a man Trump himself had previously named as a foreign policy advisor amid a probe over his alleged ties to Russia. In late September of 2016, Yahoo News runs a report saying... Just this past week, we learned about troubling connections between a campaign advisor to him, Carter Page, who's been having meetings with Russian government officials. And that's apparently being looked at by U.S. intelligence. That the FBI or American intelligence officials have reason to believe that Carter Page on this trip to Moscow met with these two senior Russian officials. Carter denies that he met with them, but the news is now out in the public and he and the campaign agree

that he's going to leave the campaign. He takes a leave of absence, it's called, but it's basically a severing of their relationship. The campaign basically throws Carter overboard at that point. But at this point, it's too late, right? The FBI has already started investigating the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, in part because of these suspicious activities by Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Yes. The Senate Intelligence Committee announcing an investigation into possible contacts between Donald Trump's campaign and Russia.

So let's talk about where that investigation has led. Many months later, it's grown and evolved into this special counsel investigation, and the House and Senate are holding their own investigations in Russian interference. Has Carter Page been of interest to these investigators and to these committees? and to these committees? He's testified for over 20 hours. I'm not entirely sure how many discrete sessions that entails. And he would neither confirm or deny to me that he testified in front of the grand jury, but he testified in front

of Mueller's grand jury. He's been very cooperative and forthcoming in terms of appearing at these things. What he's actually said has oftentimes not been helpful. And that, I don't know if that's because Carter's trying to be unhelpful or if it's just his personality and the way his brain works that more often than not, he says something and you leave the conversation more confused than you

were when you went into it. He just has a particular style of thinking and style of speaking that tends to shed less light than more. I mean, I think one of the other things interesting about you is you, you haven't lawyered up. You don't have a communications consultant. I mean, did you ever consider doing that? And why haven't you? It's complete a hundred 100 confidence that this is just a complete joke right and look there's always let me tell you something i know from firsthand experience across the board you talk about any that the letter to umessions where I quoted his speech. Oh yeah, the Federalist Society speech.

What were we just talking about? About why you don't have a lawyer. The man himself, Carter Page, foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign. Welcome to here to GMA right now. So let's just begin with some of the basic facts. And during this whole process, Carter Page has also been talking to the news media. What are your qualifications? I'm trying to figure out who you are and what you did.

Well, in terms of how I've been involved in foreign policy issues going back to my days at the Naval Academy. Yeah, and that's what makes him such an unusual figure. Typically, if you're involved, if you're a target of one of these kind of investigations, you don't talk except when you have to, when you're subpoenaed, when you're in front of a grand jury, when you're in front of a congressional intelligence panel. And when you do talk, you have a lawyer next to you, you're very careful in everything you say. Carter has taken the opposite approach. He goes on TV, he goes on these cable shows, he talks a lot, he talks to reporters like me. He's really, you know, out there kind of trying his case in public. And that is very unusual. Why is Carter Page talking so much to everyone? I think Carter does like the attention

as a guy who has wanted to be at the center of things, be in the mix, you know, be kind of a wise man for all these years and has not achieved that. He now has attention on him and people want to talk to him. And I think he doesn't necessarily want to talk about the things that reporters want to talk to him about. He doesn't want to talk about sort of what he did or didn't do during the Trump campaign and, you know, what he calls gossip. He wants to talk about his grand ideas about foreign policy and rapprochement between Russia and the United States. You know, he's a person of substance, he says. The second part of it, though, has to do a little bit with how alone United States. You know, he's a person of substance, he says. The second part of it, though, has to do a little bit with how alone Carter is. You know, all the other people caught

up in this investigation have people working on their behalf. They have people who are going out there and defending them. Carter doesn't have any of that. If anyone is going to defend Carter Page, it's going to have to be Carter Page. So the FBI, among other institutions, was concerned that Page's links to Russian officials and his placement on the Trump campaign meant that he was suspect, that he could have been a link in these understandings of potential collusion. But it turns out that both components of that equation were kind of flimsy. He wasn't held in high esteem by the campaign, and he wasn't really a meaningful target in the end of the Russians. I think that's right. Yeah. That's one of the interesting things about where Carter sits right now. Among partisans, he's still of great interest. You read the transcript of his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee and the way the Democrats were really going after him and really seeing a lot of important meaning in this Moscow trip.

It suggests that they still think he is, you know, a real, real significant person in this vast conspiracy. I think if you talk to people who are familiar or know about Mueller's investigation, it seems as if Carter is not a focus of that anymore, that they have come to the conclusion that you just stated, that he wasn't of, you know, great significance to either the Russians or the Trump campaign. And yet, he's a figure who kind of started it all. Yeah, and that's the real kind of the riddle of Carter Page. He's sort of at the center of everything and yet, like, is maybe absolutely irrelevant. You know, in some ways, that's his great defense in all this,

that, you know, he really didn't do anything wrong. There were no sort of consequences from anything he did. Nothing bad happened. The people he needed to impress, the people he needed to cultivate, he wound up alienating them just by his sort of his personality and his behavior. In that short period of time, in the weird kind of bubble and vacuum that was the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos was a tremendous success. Carter was a failure. Jason, thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Here's what else you need to know today. So I'm appealing to everyone in the room to put the country before a party and to sit down and negotiate and to compromise and let's see if we can get something done. On Tuesday, during a televised negotiating session with lawmakers from both parties, President Trump endorsed the idea of a sweeping immigration deal that would eventually grant millions of undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship. I feel having the Democrats in with us is absolutely vital because this should be a bipartisan bill. This should be a bill of love. Truly, it should be a bill of love. And we can do that.

His remarks came as he tried to reach a shorter-term deal to protect undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children under a program known as DACA that's set to expire in March. The president said he understood that his willingness to support a broader immigration overhaul could anger his supporters. I'll take the heat. I don't care. I don't care. I'll take all the heat you want to give me, and I'll take the heat off I don't care. I don't care. I'll take all the heat you want to give me. And I'll take the heat off both the Democrats and the Republicans. My whole life has been heat. I like heat

in a certain way. I'll take all the heat you want. But you are not that far away from comprehensive immigration reform. And if you wanted to go that final step, I think you should do it. And a panel of federal judges has rejected North Carolina's congressional map as unconstitutionally partisan, marking the first time that a federal court has ever struck down a congressional map on those grounds.

In their ruling, the judges wrote that the state's Republican-controlled legislature had drawn the map to, quote, Finally, in the latest fallout from a book about the Trump administration, Steve Bannon has been forced out as the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the right-wing website whose prominence exploded under his control. The Times reports that Bannon was ousted by Rebecca Mercer, a Trump campaign donor and an investor in Breitbart News, over remarks in the book in which Bannon questions the president's mental fitness and disparages his son, Donald Trump Jr. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow. We've been making The Daily for almost a year now, and we want your feedback on the show. Let us know what you think by filling out our listener survey at nytimes.com slash podcasts. That's nytimes.com slash podcasts. And as always, thank you.