The NPR Politics Podcast - Donald Trump Jr Meets Russian, POTUS Meets Putin

Episode Date: July 10, 2017

News of a meeting between the President's son and a Russian lawyer surfaces just after the President meets with the Russian President at the G20. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and editor/correspondent Ron Elving. More coverage at nprpolitics.org. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Chris, a volunteer with the U.S. Forest Service in the fire tower lookout high atop Takowitz Peak, overlooking beautiful Idlewild, California. This podcast was recorded at Monday, July 10th at 235 Eastern. Things may change by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org, the NPR app, or your local public radio station. Remember, only you can prevent forest fires. And here's the show. Put that cigarette out, Ron. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here to talk meetings, specifically the big meeting President Trump had with Vladimir Putin at the G20 and a meeting Donald Trump Jr. had last year with a lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. That meeting, which we first learned about over the weekend,

is important because the lawyer allegedly came to it offering information about Hillary Clinton and her campaign. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Carrie Johnson, justice correspondent. And I'm Ron Elving. I always douse my fires. All right, so meetings and Russia are what we're talking about here. A lot of Russia-related stuff to cover in the wake of the G20 last week. President Trump met with Vladimir Putin.

It was the first face-to-face conversation they have had since Trump has taken office. But let's start the conversation with a different Trump and a different meeting and a different year. We learned about this over the weekend, the New York Times reported at first that in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr. accepted an invitation to meet with a Russian lawyer because he was promised politically damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Trump's son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner also attended the meeting, as did then campaign manager Paul Manafort. So let's start with the basic details of this meeting. That's what the New York Times reported. What did Donald Trump Jr. say about this meeting? Interestingly, he had one response to the story on Saturday in its first iteration, when we heard there was a meeting. And he said, oh, you know, that was such a nothing meeting.

It was just about Russian adoption policy. Then on Sunday, when the Times had amplified their reporting by saying, well, actually, this meeting took place because the Russian lawyer was, and all right, let's take a crack at it. Her name is Natalia Veselnitskaya. And she had had some contact with World of Trump in the past. And as a result, they apparently were willing to entertain the prospect that she had proffered information about the Hillary Clinton campaign or about Hillary Clinton that might be of interest to the Trump campaign. And so they had a meeting. And the second day, Donald Trump Jr. said, oh, well, yes, there was that.

And we did talk about that for a little while, but she didn't seem to have much information. So we moved on to talking about adoption. So this is a quote from the statement that Trump Jr. gave to NPR and other news organizations. This is just part of it. After pleasantries were exchanged, the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous, and made no sense. Still, Kerry, Trump is conceding here, though he disputes the narrative of the initial New York Times story and other reporting.

He's conceding that there was a face-to-face conversation and the topic of information about the Clinton campaign came up. That's notable, isn't it? It's notable because the campaign and the president, since he was inaugurated, has denied having meetings with the Russians. You know, at various points, Donald Trump has defended his legitimacy in the White House and pushed back against all of these allegations and investigations on Capitol Hill and by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, by saying there's really no evidence that anybody in his camp did anything wrong or met with any Russians. Now we have evidence of a meeting which Donald Trump Jr.,

Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner don't deny happened. In fact, Scott, this all fits into a strange pattern. Many people, including Kushner, Manafort, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, among others, had mysteriously forgotten to disclose meetings and contacts they had with Russians in 2016 and earlier. And they've all been forced to slowly come around and tell Congress and the administration that they did, in fact, have some of these contacts. And, you know, that includes the short-lived National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, and also the still Attorney General, Jefferson Sessions. So let's sum up the way that the line has moved here, because we've all noted amongst ourselves that a lot of the details get confusing and fuzzy when you haven't thought about them for a couple of weeks. So the initial line was, never had any meetings with any Russian officials. Then, of course, Flynn and several other instances, there were meetings. Yes, there were meetings,

but they weren't about consequential things. They weren't about sanctions. Then it becomes, no, there were key conversations about key sanctions. That's why Flynn had to step down. So now there is a meeting. It's about information that is supposedly being offered. And here's what Donald Trump Jr. said on Twitter this morning. This is after those initial stories came out, after he's already revised his statement once. Obviously, I'm the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear information about an opponent, went nowhere, but had to listen. What is the normal course of events in a political campaign when somebody, when an outsider comes and says, hey, I have some oppo information on

your opponent? Well, let's just begin by saying the normal course of events is not that you have that person meet with the son of the candidate, the campaign manager, and the person who is very close, son-in-law, to the president or to the presidential nominee. That's a top-level meeting. And that's the kind of top-level meeting that people would kill for just at a point in a campaign where someone has sewn up the nomination, which had just happened in June of 2016. And longtime people in Washington are pointing out that Al Gore's campaign was mysteriously in receipt of a debate prep book from George W. Bush's camp. And their response to that was to call the FBI.

I guess there's also the question of whether it's illegal to begin with to even meet with a foreign operative when you're associated with a campaign. Well, there's this issue in campaign finance law circles right now. First advanced by Bob Bauer, who is a noted campaign finance lawyer, President Obama's first White House counsel, and Rick Hasen of a law school in California, University of California at Irvine, has also advanced this theory in light of the New York Times stories, suggesting that meeting in exchange for something of value could in fact trigger some kind of campaign finance law. I haven't seen a case like this, but real people are talking about it now. And people from other countries, foreign entities are not allowed to contribute to campaigns. That's right. And we are supposed to have very strict laws against that sort of thing.

Plus, you just have the political issue of appearing to be working with a foreign national. So Professor Rick Hasen of the University of California at Irvine also points out that campaign finance law not only bars accepting things from foreign nationals in the context of an election. But you're not supposed to solicit things of value either. So it doesn't just criminalize the foreign national end. There's exposure on the U.S. end if you're actively soliciting. There doesn't need to be a receipt. There needs to be a discussion of a transaction. So we've talked a lot about the fact that this was really a shoestrings kind of amateurish campaign compared to most other presidential campaigns, certainly all other presidential campaigns that get this far. Could this have been a case of people in the Trump orbit simply not realizing what laws they were brushing up against?

That is a defense we might very well be hearing. Well, Kellyanne Conway has already tried that out by saying that it was a lean and mean campaign and that that was the reason that they didn't have a lot of intermediaries or lower functionaries to handle this particular kind of negotiation. And that may be so, although they certainly did have enough of a campaign to win the nomination. And that had already been achieved. So they were clearly starting to staff up for a general election at this point. And it's not clear that even if they had had a thousand underlings, they would have had them do this particular meeting, given the people who seem to be interested in participating. I'd also point out that in this context, the panoply of things that these people are saying, that they're saying on camera, that they're saying in White House press briefings, that they're saying on Twitter, all come into play. So remember, when President Trump fired the FBI director, James Comey,

and there were a lot of questions about that and whether he understood the import of that and the circumstances surrounding that, the immediate defense of him was that, listen, he's new to government. He's never had a government job before. Paul Ryan said that. Yeah. But there were countervailing facts, like allegedly clearing the room of everybody else but James Comey before he had a conversation with Comey. And that's something that Comey said during his testimony that immediately raised his suspicions, because why would you do that if you didn't have concerns about the sensitivity of what you were about to say? So all I'm saying is we need to take a wide view

and understand we don't see the entire picture yet. But people like the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, and certainly Robert Mueller's team are going to be looking at all of those factors. So all along, even as the official line from the Trump campaign, the Trump administration has shifted on,

there were never any meetings, there were meetings, but there weren't, you know, and so on. The line has been, there's no smoking gun here. There's no proof of any collusion. This FBI investigation has been going on for a year. These congressional investigations have been going on for months. You've never found any facts that show a Trump campaign person in Russians talking about colluding. That's still the case after this news, right? Or no? I have not seen a transcript of this meeting that we now know about, and I'm not going to make any predictions until I find out more about that meeting. Moreover, I'm not the only one, Scott. Senator Susan Collins, a very moderate member Republican from Maine, has said the

revelation by the New York Times of this meeting means to her that all of these people need to testify to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they probably should be talking to the special counsel, Robert Mueller, too. So we are at the start of this investigation, not the middle, not the end. We don't know yet the scope of the evidence that's out there. Well, funny you should mention that, Carrie, because as we were sitting here talking, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted again. He retweeted a story about that very thing. Lawmakers saying he needs to testify, saying, quote, happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know. So lawmakers are asking questions. Trump Jr. says he's happy to talk to them. But the most important person, I guess, in the end is Robert Mueller, the special counsel, how he views this, how this fits into the ongoing special counsel investigation.

It's been a few weeks since we talked about that investigation at length here in the pod. Carrie, what has been going on in the investigation that we know of since then? Well, Robert Mueller doesn't do a lot of talking. But what we can say is that according to his spokesman, he's now hired 15 lawyers and he's not done hiring lawyers. And the kinds of lawyers, Scott, that he's been hiring are really interesting. They include a crackerjack terrorism and national security prosecutor from Brooklyn, Zainab Ahmed, the head of the public corruption unit in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan, Andrew Goldstein, the head of the Justice Department fraud section, a man who ran the Enron Task Force, Andrew Weissman. And also perhaps one of the most highly respected criminal law and appellate experts in the country, Michael Drebin. You hire these kinds of people if you think you have a case to build and you want to protect it. And you want to talk in advance of charging anybody with thorny issues like executive privilege, like can the president be charged with a crime?

How do you build these kinds of cases and get cooperation from people in the satellite and move toward the center? I'm not saying any of these things will happen. I'm not saying the president himself will be charged with wrongdoing or any member of his family. But what I am saying is that these are among the most serious and respected lawyers in the government today, and they all have been clamoring to join the Robert Mueller team. And if you're getting an expert in Topic X, it's safe to assume you're at least thinking about the possibility of looking in the direction of Topic X. Well, I think we already know, based on the previously reported investigations of former national security advisor Michael Flynn and former campaign manager Paul Manafort, that

there are some contacts with Russia, some payment issues, some disclosure issues out there. Now, the revelation by The New York Times of this meeting involving Donald Trump Jr., Manafort, Kushner, We now are into the campaign finance law area. There's a lot to look at here, and there's a lot internationally to look at, too. Without pushing this any further at this point, I think it is fair to say that these are not smoke chasers. They're firefighters, and they're world class. And that means somebody didn't put out their cigarette.

Way to bring it all back to fire safety, Ron. All right. I think with that full circle loop, we will take a quick break. We will come back to talk about the G20 and more meetings with Russia, this time between Trump and Putin. Be right back. All right, we're back. And let's talk about a different, more recent meeting. That's the sit down between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was their first face to face meeting since Trump took office. It happened at the G20 conference in Hamburg, Germany. This meeting lasted more than two hours and was a really intimate gathering. Ron, both of those things seem a little unusual. It was unusual to have such a small cast in this particular play.

You had the two principals. You had a couple of interpreters. And then you had Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and the Secretary of State for the United States, Rex Tillerson. That's a pretty small group of people. In the past, more typically, you'll have national security staff in there. You'll have other people in there who are note takers. And that's the big, long tables, people lined up on either side type situation. Sometimes. I don't mean to suggest that there are always huge tables with scores or dozens or anything like that, but at least a cast of people so that principals could turn to one of them and

say, what are the numbers on Syria? What are the numbers on this and that? They could have a reference point. But in this case, there seemed to be a tremendous value being placed on having a small circle and a very controlled environment. And a nice handshake, no yanking, no strange yanking and a back pat. You know, I was looking, I would say. Yeah. Well, on that note, we should talk about that before we dig into what they actually said, because it is always pointed out on that note, we should talk about that before we dig into what they actually said, because it is always pointed out that Putin has a KGB background and that he brings his psyops game to one-on-one encounters with other world leaders.

Was there anything that jumped out to either of you in the pictures, in the body language, in the statements coming out of it that made you think, hmm, interesting move there, Putin. Yeah, Putin said something to Trump before the reporters were filing out that's been translated as, are those the reporters that have been insulting you? Are those the reporters who have been bothering you? And Trump kind of nodded and shook his head like, yeah, yeah, those are the guys. And the notion of appealing to the president's sense of aggrievement at the media was something very potent, I thought. Especially since Putin has a track record of getting rid of the

reporters that bother him. There was also a contrast to some of the other psyops that Putin has tried with other world leaders. For example, when he first sat down to meet Angela Merkel, German chancellor, he brought a big black dog who immediately stationed himself right in front of the German leader, which is interesting given the fact that Angela Merkel has an aversion or a fear of dogs. And it's not typical to bring dogs to a summit meeting. So no dogs were brought in, but still a two hour meeting. And of course, this all happens in the context of what we've just been talking about, an ongoing political cloud, legal cloud hanging over Trump's head of Russian interference in the election. Of course,

Trump has continued to be skeptical of that claim, even saying maybe it was somebody else earlier in the week when he was in Poland. He is basically almost the only person in the federal government who's still a little skeptical of that storyline. Yes. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley on Sunday was enormously explicit in saying, of course, of course, we know the Russians. Everybody know the Russians meddled in our election. But the remarkable thing here is that when you start talking about the first topic discussed, which was apparently the Russian meddling, that's when you start hearing different versions from each side. It was apparently brought up in some iteration twice, both times Putin vehemently denied having been behind that meddling.

Now, does everyone agree on that? Well, not at all. Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister on the Russian side, then came out and said, and of course, President Trump accepted those denials. Well, Rex Tillerson had a somewhat different version of that story. And we heard from the president via Twitter that he was sort of in between. He wasn't really sure. It didn't seem quite whether he had accepted them or whether he was still entertaining the possibility that there was Russian meddling. Trump seems to be saying, yeah, maybe the Russians did it, but he thinks maybe they had some help or somebody else was involved. And I've never heard him explain who else might be involved. Other than the fat guy. Other than the 400-pound guy on the

bed in the hacking. Well, and even if he is acknowledging that they did it, he doesn't seem to be terribly concerned about it because he immediately said, again via Twitter, that it was time to move on. It was time to go forward with our relations with the Russians, including something that I think you're about to bring up. I think you're right. I've got that look of he's about to read a Donald Trump tweet that is so familiar here in our studio. So this is a series of tweets from yesterday, Sunday. This is after Trump had returned to the United States. Sunday morning, Putin and I discussed forming an impenetrable cybersecurity unit so that election hacking and many other negative things will be guarded and safe. Needless to say, that idea was immediately

slammed left and right. Lots of Fox in the hen house type analogies thrown out right away. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican senator, said this on Meet the Press. It's not the dumbest idea I've ever heard, but it's pretty close. He gave a really good speech in Poland, President Trump did, and he had what I think is a disastrous meeting with President Putin. Two hours and 15 minutes of meetings, Tillerson and Trump are ready to forgive and forget when it comes to cyber attacks on the American election of 2016. Nobody's saying, Mr. President, the Russians changed the outcome. You won fair and square. But they did try to attack our election

system. They were successful in many ways. And the more you do this, the more people are suspicious about you and Russia. Well, not the dumbest idea. Some praise from an ally. Well, Lindsey Graham is usually a pretty reliable guy to get on Sunday morning to say things that are negative about the president. But there were a lot of other Republicans slapping their foreheads as well, maybe not all on national television. But the idea was, what in the world are you talking about? Cooperating with the Russians on a cybersecurity investigation and panel, that's going to make everything safe. We're going to trust the Russians to do that. What are you talking about? That was praised by Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin.

And this is like any other strategic alliance, whether we're doing military exercises with our allies or anything else. This is about having capabilities to make sure that we both fight cyber together, which I think is a very significant accomplishment for President Trump. And then about sundown, the president said, well, we talked about it, but that can't happen and it won't. Well, what he actually said was the fact that President Putin and I discussed a cybersecurity unit doesn't mean I think it can happen. It can't. But a ceasefire can and did. Was this was this the shortest flight of a trial balloon that you had seen? Very low trajectory. All right. That gets us to another thing that came out of this meeting, a conversation about

a ceasefire. What is going on here? How big of a deal is this or how not big of a deal is this in the scheme of things happening in Syria? It's an enormous deal because if they could at least have a ceasefire, stop fighting, stop killing each other for a period of hours, days, and as we do this podcast, apparently the ceasefire is holding and that's not insignificant, that would be a true step forward. Now, was this arranged at this meeting? Was it brokered at this meeting? Or was it essentially a matter of let's announce that there's going to be a ceasefire and both sides agreed to do that?

And the Russians have a lot to do with whether or not a ceasefire can succeed. They have not been particularly helpful in this regard in the past. And if they could be brought around to being on the side of peace in Syria, we might be able to go forward with some negotiations. Anything else to take away from this meeting? I'm a little bit obsessed with the notion that reported by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, that at some point, the meeting between Trump and Putin was going on so long that they sent in the first lady to try to wrap it up. And they kept talking for another hour after Melania Trump entered the room in a signal to wrap things up.

Who hasn't had a spouse or a friend come in and try and get them out of a conversation that's lasted too long? Something we can all relate to. One other non-Russia thing to mention before we go, we've been talking a lot about health care. Dynamics haven't changed that much because Congress was gone for a whole week. They get back into town this evening. Ron, suffice to say, no major breakthroughs on the Senate Republican front over the week.

If anything, more Republican fallout. You have people such as West Virginia Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito coming out and saying, as it stands right now, I really can't vote for. This is somebody who saw Donald Trump win her state by more than 40 percentage points. And she's still willing to say, I'll be the Republican who says the bill goes down. There are a lot of others, too. There are something like 10 who are at least, if not saying they're going to definitely vote against it, who aren't on board and want big changes. And the changes all contradict each other. One more thing to get to before we go. The president tweeted a photo slideshow from the

G20 this week. That's something he's done before. This one stood out because of the music it was set to. Let's just take a listen. We're so lighter. We're so lighter. Everybody's swaying. What does this remind you of? Like, I can't quite place it. This is... Oh, I can place it. It's We Are the World, isn't it?

Isn't it We Are the World? But there's no Michael Jackson. There's no Michael Jackson. There is no Michael Jackson. But, you know, it does remind me of the tune and the air and the sort of, you know, sort of airiness of We Are the World. See, I'm thinking more like closing ceremonies at the Olympics type song. There you go. That's it.

Because the closing ceremonies are always much more low rent than the opening ceremonies. Isn't that true? You can get stuff like this. It's really true. Everyone's exhausted. Everyone wants to go home. But there you go. Make America Great Again, composed by Gary Moore, who is a former minister of music at a Baptist church in Dallas. The audio is from a live performance that the president first tweeted last week on July 4th. So there you go. Maybe something new for the Trump campaign rally playlist. All right. That is it for today. We'll be back Thursday with our regular weekly roundup.

Keep up with all the daily twists and turns and new songs on Trump's Twitter feed. With Up First, NPR's morning news podcast, it's 10 minutes every weekday morning right around 6 a.m. You can follow NPR Politics on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Email us with your questions and comments at nprpolitics at npr.org. Even if we can't answer your question, it helps us to hear what you're curious about. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Carrie Johnson, justice correspondent. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.