The NPR Politics Podcast - President Trump Sides With Putin At Historic Summit

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

Trump himself declared his summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki a success, in what he called the "proud tradition of bold American diplomacy."The president said he pressed Putin about Moscow's interference in the election, but he appeared to take Putin's denial at face value, just days after a grand jury indicted 12 Russian intelligence agents on election-related charges. This episode: political reporter Asma Khalid, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, national security editor Phil Ewing, and White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe. 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

This is Steve in Helsinki, Finland, where we just saw Air Force One fly right over our house. This podcast was recorded at... How fitting, 12.24 p.m. on Monday, July 16th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. All right, here's the show. Hey there, this is the NPR Politics Podcast. President Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin today and had a strange press conference in which he called the probe into Russian election meddling

a disaster for our country. I do feel that we have both made some mistakes. I think that the probe is a disaster for our country. I think it's kept us apart. It's kept us separated. There was no collusion at all. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent.

I'm Phil Ewing, national security editor. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. So, Ayesha, you are traveling with the president. So why don't you start and just explain to us what happened here with the press conference? So this was the press conference to end the talks that happened between President Trump and President Putin. They were asked about election interference in the 2016 election, and that's where things got interesting. I've been in a lot of presidential

press conferences. I don't think I've ever been in one like this. Look, there has never been an American president who stood next to the president of Russia and attacked his own intelligence community. He said the Mueller probe has been a disaster for his country. When he was asked, do you hold Russia accountable for anything? I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we've all been foolish. We should have had this dialogue a long time ago. He didn't mention Crimea. He didn't mention Georgia. He didn't mention anything. He merely said, I hold both countries responsible. We are all to blame. And the Mueller probe has

been a disaster for our country. Now, what does that sound like? It sounds like both sides. It sounds like exactly what he said after the Charlottesville protests where a white supremacist killed one of the counter protesters. I think that this is a president who values toughness. There was only one alpha male in that room today. He's tough with the EU, Trump is. He's tough with NATO. He's tough with Angela Merkel. He's tough with Theresa May and Obama.

But with Vladimir Putin, he is uniformly, consistently deferential. And today it had its biggest, most extraordinary display of that. Total deference to Vladimir Putin. And I have to say, I did not hear a direct criticism of Putin today. I don't know if anyone else did. I was in the room. There were none. There was only praise.

You hear, I've heard President Trump throughout this trip talk about Angela Merkel, talk about even Theresa May before the trip in the interview that he did with the Sun. He talked about, he criticized her policies. You did not hear anything even kind of close to that, or even like just a general complaint about something that Russia has done. And Phil, what I found so striking was also the way that Putin sat there. You know, he is a former KGB spy chief, so he's familiar with how to play the optics in this type of room. But he sat there and he repeatedly reiterated the fact that the Russians

have not interfered in U.S. elections. And when President Trump was asked this very question by a reporter, he hedged on this. For President Putin, if I could follow up as well. Why should Americans and why should President Trump believe your statement that Russia did not intervene in the 2016 election, given the evidence that U.S. intelligence agencies have provided? And will you consider extraditing the 12 Russian officials that were indicted last week by a U.S. grand jury? Well, I'm going to let the president answer the second part of that question. But as you know, the whole concept of that came up perhaps a little bit before, but it came out as a reason why the Democrats lost an election, which frankly, they should have been able to win because the Electoral College is much more advantageous for Democrats, as you know, than it is to Republicans. We won the Electoral college by a lot, 306 to 223, I believe.

And that was a well-fought battle. We did a great job. What do you make of that? It was an extraordinary response by the president because he's already litigated a lot of this inside the United States. But the problem is, in this foreign place, in this strange room with this foreign leader, he kind of defaulted back to his original positions and talking points. He responded to some questions by asking why the Democratic National Committee didn't give the FBI the computer server that was involved with this attack in 2016.

I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don't think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They're missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton's emails? 33,000 emails gone. He brought up the testimony by the FBI agent Peter Strzok in the House last week. He treated it like a Fox News TV appearance as opposed to an international stage at which he was conducting this summit with the head of Russia. And he also, I think in the view of a lot of national security professionals, is going to come home looking a little bit foolish. Because what Putin was able to do at this press conference was seem like the reasonable party by saying, oh, well, you want us to extradite these alleged hackers to the United States? We'll

be happy to do that. How about you, the United States, extradite some hackers that we consider to be threats to us? He brought up the need for cooperation and interoperation between the cyber teams of Russia and the United States, which is what happened before. And when President Trump came home and said on Twitter last year, oh, we should have a joint cyber force with the Russians, he was kind of left out of the room. His own intelligence chiefs wouldn't even take that on. His own members of Congress, including Lindsey Graham, said they thought that was a ridiculous idea. And those are kind of the only things that he's able to come out of this meeting with. And that's not very much. Ayesha, there were a couple of very explicit questions asked by the American press courts of both President Trump and President Putin about the

questions of election interference. And I thought their answers were really telling. You were there in the room. Can you kind of walk us through what happened? Both presidents were asked what basically why should we believe that Putin did not interfere in this in the 2016 election when we have evidence from U.S. intelligence agencies basically staying stating that Russia was involved and have extensive evidence and on this topic on the answer to that both presidents seem to be on the same page Putin said basically oh well is this an issue of trust I'm representing the Russian Federation he said you know you have to talk about facts and not rumors and basically just kind of downplayed it. As to who is to be believed and who is not to be believed, you can trust no one if you take this. Where did you get this idea that President Trump trusts me or I trust him?

He defends the interests of the United States of America, and I do defend the interests of the Russian Federation. We do have interests that are common. We are looking for points of contact. And then President Trump, when he was asked, he kind of fell back into saying that, you know, he doesn't know, he doesn't see why Russia would have helped him or why it would be Russia that interfered.

And don't forget the fact that he did this not just standing next to Putin, but three days after his own Justice Department informed him. that they are prepared to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in public using evidence that Vladimir Putin has been lying to Donald Trump about Russia's non-interference in the 2016 elections. In other words, that's what those indictments said. They said, we can prove that all of his denials are false. And the president of the United States went, and we have this clip here, where he says, all I can do is ask the question. All I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others. They said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia. I will say this. I don't see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have confidence in both parties.

He is completely rejecting the conclusions of his own intelligence community. And what's amazing about this is this, the White House tried to play down this summit. They wouldn't call it a summit. They said it's just a meeting. The meeting itself is the deliverable. There's no real deliverables. And they were hoping for a kind of do no harm meeting between Trump and Putin. But instead, the president doubled down on his complete rejection of his own intelligence community and sided with Vladimir Putin's denials. So I have great confidence in my intelligence people. But I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. And what he did is an incredible offer. He offered to have the people

working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the 12 people. I think that's an incredible offer. I mean, that's where we are now. The President of the United States believes Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence community, over something that his current National Security Advisor said a year ago was an act of war. And John Bolton was there. To me, the interesting question is, what does John Bolton do now? What does Secretary of State Mike Pompeo do now? Apparently, I've understood, maybe Ayesha, you could tell us this, that he refused to answer questions after that press conference. I think it would be hard for any administration official to answer questions after that press conference. I think it would be hard for any administration official to answer a question right now. The officials, White House officials, have not been answering many questions on the record. I think that at times it seems as if the administration

has a different position on Russia than the president, and that it doesn't, that it's not reflective. You hear people within the administration, even on the one call that they did, which was probably like 10 days ago now, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Huntsman, he talked about Russia and things of that nature. And he was asked then whether the president would speak and use such tough language when he met with Putin. And today we got the answer. The president did not. The other thing that's a really And today we got the answer. The president did not. The other thing that's a really big theme here is the disconnect between the president and his own administration. A lot of times when John Bolton has been asked recently about something

that the president has said, his stock answer is this is not the position of the U.S. government. In other words, Trump might be saying this, but this is not the official position of the U.S. government. The U.S. government just signed a NATO communique condemning the annexation of Crimea, but you didn't hear the president say anything about that at all. And in point of fact, the president spent his whole European trip trying to embarrass the European countries into spending more on their defense to defend themselves against the Russians. He's taking a position on one day that hurts his own interests and then taking a position on a second day that is antithetical to that of the one taken by his own administration. And the other big question, just following your point, Mara, is why is all this happening?

That's what it comes down to for me. It's been clear since Trump's ascent on the political scene from 2015 till now that he was going to make one of his stocks in trade as a political figure, this interest in improving ties with Russia. And now he's governed on it. He went to Helsinki. He had this non-summit with Putin. And we've been discussing throughout this whole podcast that he is living that position. The question is why and what does he think he is going to get out of it or what the United States is going to get out of it. But isn't it also somewhat mutually beneficial? I mean, there was a question asked by an American reporter rather explicitly to Putin about whether he wanted Trump to win. And he candidly said, yes, yes, I did. He said, yes, which is exactly what's communicating that the

entire time we have. We've discussed on many podcasts how if you looked in the open source channels of the Russian state in 2016, there were people on RT and in Sputnik and on YouTube and everywhere else saying, we support this candidate and not this other candidate. We know that they took clandestine actions behind the scenes using the cyber attacks with intelligence officers and by many other means to help bring that about. But we continue even all these years after the fact to have this unreality between the man who benefited from it in our president and the man who was responsible for that effort in the Russian president. And that's why I think the listeners at home will be able to hear us trying to struggle to work through this after this press conference in Helsinki today. Why is all this happening?

And right now, nobody has the answer to that question. And, you know, nobody would argue against having better relations with Russia. That's something that's a consensus position. The question is, as Phil just pointed out, at what cost? At what cost to the U.S.? We know that he's already given President Putin a huge boost by having him stand on the world stage next to him, by not pushing back against him for forcibly annexing Crimea, for seeming to take his side over the U.S. intelligence community's assessment of election interference. So he's given a lot to Putin. What has Donald Trump gotten in return? What has the United States gotten in return? That's a great question. And also

does the Trump administration and the president himself have the self-awareness to recognize that they are following the same pattern as each of their two predecessors who have had to deal with Putin. What do we all remember about George W. Bush in his first meeting with Putin? He looked into his eyes and got a sense of his soul. Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, she goes to the East and meets with Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister. They push the quote-unquote reset button because they want to break away from what became a very toxic and poisonous relationship at the end of the Bush era. Guess what? The relationship became toxic and poisonous at the end of the Obama era. Now here's a third consecutive president, even as he criticizes his predecessor for

being too soft, for letting these things happen, for not being tough enough to stop the Russians from invading Ukraine, for example. He's trying to accommodate him again. He's following the exact same pattern. And the fascinating thing about this is he doesn't seem to appreciate how closely he's following in the same policy footsteps as his predecessors by going in with his hat in his hand and being polite and being nice and having this meeting in the interest of world peace. He's doing the same thing,

but he's gone much further. He's gone much further. There was pushback from both George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton against Russia's actions. We haven't seen any pushback from Donald Trump. Now, yes, the U.S. government has put sanctions on Ukraine, sent some lethal weapons. The U.S. Congress has passed overwhelming resolutions and legislation to put sanctions on Russia. But Trump himself has not done any of that. Ayesha, real quick, because I know you have to run. Do you have any sort of final thoughts here on the fact that Trump does seem to have taken a much softer tone here with Russia? And certainly you've been on a longer trip with him in Europe, a much softer tone than he took with our European allies and sort of what we can expect now. I think that he has made clear that this is that he wants to pursue a better relationship with Russia and that kind of like with North Korea, he feels like the way to do that is to complement and not really focus on negative things. And he was asked an interesting question,

I think, that we do have to touch on. And he, well, Putin was asked whether he had any damaging information on President Trump. And Putin said, Do you think that we try to collect compromising material on each and every single one of them? Well, it's difficult to imagine another nonsense of a bigger scale than this. Well, please just disregard these issues and don't think about this anymore again. And so he made this argument. But there is, I think, after this press conference, people are going to ask why and why be so kind to Russia. Phil and Mara, from both of you, do you have any final thoughts? I guess my final thought, other than just the gobsmacking aspect of this press conference,

is now what? Now what? I want to hear from John Bolton and Dan Coats and Secretary of State Pompeo. How are they going to explain this? And that's what I'm waiting for. We're in a situation where we have two world leaders go on the highest imaginable stage and debate whether or not the earth is round. That's what this boils down to. And that's why I think so many of us on the outside are trying to struggle

to wrap our minds around what took place and what we saw. There are facts that we've been getting, facts that we saw with our own eyes because we were in the United States in 2016 and all the work product that's come out of the special counsel's office and from Congress and all the other sources. And yet, accepting those facts and accepting that aspect of the story is still too difficult for the president. And I think the White House is going to have to do some explaining about what exactly its position is or what the president's position is as he does these TV interviews that we heard Mara talk about before on his way home, and then as they get back into their normal groove when the president returns to Washington. So we're going to have to watch

very closely to see how subtly their position changes or whether it does, or whether this is just the way we live now, where we're going to have the special counsel issuing indictments about foreign intelligence officers and having the president take a position that is completely antithetical to all that investigation that's taken place beforehand. We'll leave that there for now, but we will be back in your feeds again soon. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. I'm Phil Ewing, national security editor. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Hey, it's Guy Raz here, host of the TED Radio Hour. In our latest episode, we're exploring the causes and consequences of hatred, what makes it such a powerful force,

and why some people feel its pull more deeply? Take a listen to the TED Radio Hour on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts.