The NPR Politics Podcast - Reconstructing The 2016 Campaign After Trump Jr.'s Russia Meeting

Episode Date: July 15, 2017

This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith talks to national security editor Phil Ewing about the timeline of what was happening in the campaign last year when Donald Trump Jr. received an email offering Russian help for his father's presidential campaign. 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

Hey guys, this is Tamara Keith with a special quick take for your weekend listening. So on the weekly roundup, I mentioned I'd been working on a big story piecing together the timeline of what happened in the campaign last year when Donald Trump Jr. received that email offering Russian help for his father's presidential campaign. The story will air Monday on Morning Edition, but there's a lot that we couldn't fit in. So this is what you might call the director's cut. And I've dragged one of my editors, Phil Ewing, into the studio to help out. Hey, Phil. Hi, Tam. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you for being here and welcome to the NPR Politics team. Thank you. And you specialize in? Defense intelligence and lately Russia.

And it's been a whole lot of Russia. Yeah, a whole lot of Russia. So, Phil, that email chain that came out, it sort of got us all thinking about the timeline, about what was happening in the campaign at that time. Yeah, it certainly did. It's very odd to have a story in which you have all the information first and you have to figure out later. Usually the way it works is you're going along, you're putting pieces together,

you know, you're like little ants taking little crumbs to your nest and trying to figure out what it add up to. Now we have a thing where we have all the information at the beginning in these Donald Trump Jr. emails and now we have to go back and see how it fits into the story that everybody lived through. Yeah, I mean, we were definitely living through it. But because we were living through it, we couldn't really tell what was happening. Hindsight is 2020.

Yeah. Okay, so let's go back to March of 2016. The Russian military intelligence service known as the GRU began rifling through the email accounts and networks of Democratic Party officials and political figures. Now, we know that now because of the intelligence community's declassified assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. That same month, a Russian political commentator known variously as Putin's Brain and Putin's Rasputin made it clear in a video in English posted on YouTube that Russia was officially rooting for Trump. Go ahead, Mr. Trump.

In Trump, we trust. Alexander Dugin praised Trump as an anti-elite American who wouldn't make mistakes like invading Iraq. He was critical of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, but he saved his harshest words for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic primary process. So there is nothing more stupid and fake than the American vote counting system. It is a disgrace and not a democracy. The majority votes for Sanders, but Clinton wins, bribing the electors. How dare they lecture us about human rights and the fight against corruption? Phil, his name is Alexander

Dugan. You first told me about him. Who is he? Is he just some internet crank or is he the real deal? He's not an internet crank. He actually is very closely connected with the Russian government. And he's got a great look, too, if you go on YouTube and look him up. He's a guy who's got this great gray beard and these kind of very piercing blue eyes. He looks into the camera and delivers these pronouncements. And as you said, people call him Putin's Rasputin. He's a guy who's been close to the Russian government leadership. And when he talks, people listen.

And what they hear is a lot of people believe the official position that the Russian government wants to articulate. He's doing it openly, overtly. Anybody can go to his YouTube channel and see what he expresses, which is what people say the Russian leadership is thinking. So why didn't we notice this at the time? Or why didn't this register? You know, the funny thing to me is at NPR, we were reporting on it at the time. Our colleague David Wellner had a piece on the radio in June of last year, quoting some of these YouTube videos by Alexander Dugan, talking about his support for Trump. But there was so much going on inside the United States. I don't know that a lot of people were focused on anything beyond the day-to-day headlines of the campaign. Donald

Trump was a very new figure politically for a lot of people. They were kind of still getting used to seeing him every day, hearing the way he talks, seeing the way he does things. And for all the other events that were taking place outside the U.S., especially in Russia, it might not just have registered for a lot of people. It's almost like Dugan was talking about a rigged system, which is something that we started hearing a lot about a little bit later in the campaign, about a month later. Candidate Trump started talking about a system rigged against himself and Bernie Sanders. He wins and then you listen to the pundits, but he can't win.

You know why? Because it's a rigged system, folks. It's a rigged system. Russia's interest in Trump seemed to be driven largely by his America-first approach to foreign policy. Just like Russia's leadership, he was critical of the Iraq War, American encouragement of the Arab Spring, and the decision to invade Libya. This set Trump apart from both Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Republican field of candidates. In late April, Trump delivered a foreign policy speech at a fancy hotel in Washington, D.C. 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. Some say the Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out. Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergei Kislyak, was there. And according to a report by Radio Free Europe, he was sitting in the front row. The U.S. intelligence assessment says that by May of 2016, Russian hackers had already extracted large volumes of data from the DNC's systems. In early June, as the primaries in both parties were winding down, Hillary Clinton turned her fire to Donald Trump. In a speech on June 2nd in San Diego, California. She mocked Trump for saying

so many nice things about Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now, I will leave it to the psychiatrist to explain his affection for tyrants. I just wonder how anyone could be so wrong about who America's real friends are. Because it matters. If you don't know exactly who you're dealing with, men like Putin will eat your lunch. The next day, on June 3rd, Donald Trump Jr. receives the now notorious email. It came from a man linked to a Russian real estate developer the Trumps had partnered with on the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013.

He offered to connect the Trump campaign with people who could supply official Russian documents that would incriminate Hillary Clinton. The offer was said to be part of, quote, Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump. He was traveling at the time, but it only took Trump Jr. 20 minutes to respond. If it is what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer. On June 7th, they set a date for Trump campaign officials to meet with someone described in the emails

as a Russian government lawyer. That very day was the end of the 2016 Republican presidential primaries. You've given me the honor to lead the Republican Party to victory this fall. We're going to do it. We're going to do it, folks. We're going to do it. In his speech to supporters that night, Trump said something that's getting a lot of attention now. He teased an attack on Clinton. I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week, and we're going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you're going to find it very informative and very, very interesting. When asked whether this had anything to do with what was promised in the email chain,

a spokesman for President Trump's outside legal team said the candidate was not aware of and did not attend the meeting. Two days later, on June 9th, the meeting happened at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr., the campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, now a White House advisor, all in attendance. And I'm going to bring Phil back in here because it turns out we've just learned in the last few hours that it wasn't just one lawyer who was there, but several people. Yeah, that's right. We're learning on the day that we're recording this that there were more people besides just one or two Russians or Russian advocates in this meeting with Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower at New York City.

In fact, right now we don't know for certain exactly how many people there were. CNN has reports saying there could have been as many as eight total people in this meeting, but it isn't the account that Trump Jr. has given in the past couple of days where it was just him, this Russian woman, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and in fact there might have been many other people there. We have no independent account of what they discussed, but it's beyond what was described in these Trump Jr. emails. Yeah, the story just keeps evolving, I guess. So in defending the meeting, Trump Jr. told Sean Hannity on Fox News that the Russians just didn't deliver the goods.

It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame. Candidate Trump's major speech about Hillary Clinton didn't materialize that Monday. The Pulse nightclub shooting happened over the weekend and briefly changed the focus of the campaign. Something else happened that weekend that seemed sort of insignificant at the time. In an interview with the British ITV, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, gave a preview of what was to come. We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which is great. We actually have, WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead. But some of the ones that have not yet come into the public domain, you are planning to put out?

We have emails related to Hillary Clinton, which are pending publication. That is correct. Now, Tim, we should remind people that a lot of the audience members who heard Julian Assange say that thought that he was talking about her personal emails, the one that she sent and received while she was Secretary of State. That turned out not to be the case. The emails that WikiLeaks went on to publish came from the DNC and Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. But it is really interesting to hear in retrospect a year later, Julian Assange say, quote, we have a very big year ahead, as he does there. That turned out to be the case in ways that no one could have known at the time when he gave

that interview. Yeah, a lot of people at the time, it seemed like he was sort of blowing smoke because WikiLeaks had been releasing the same emails. They'd been posting the same emails that the State Department had been releasing. And so you heard that reporter sort of pressing him like, well, do you have this? Do you have the deleted emails? Do you have the other emails? Yeah, it turns out he had emails and they were ultimately pivotal in the campaign. But they weren't the emails that everybody was thinking about at the time. Exactly right. And we should remind people the U.S. intelligence community has

said in its assessment about this Russian attack on the election that Russia's GRU intelligence agency used WikiLeaks as a fence or a cutout to release these emails into the public, but still maintain some kind of deniability about its role in actually hacking them. Okay, so let's get back to the story. Assange and WikiLeaks have long had an ideological affinity and close ties with Russia. The first release of data from Democratic Systems came a few days later. It was released on a site called DCLeaks by someone claiming to be Guccifer 2.0. The U.S. intelligence assessment says with high confidence that it was just a front for Russia's GRU. Former CIA Director John Brennan testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee

that GRU delivered to WikiLeaks DNC emails and those taken from senior Democratic officials, like Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. It's very clear that the GRU was responsible for hacking into the networks of the DNC, DCCC, and were responsible through a cutout, releasing it through places like Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks, and others. Phil, now both you and John Brennan have used the term cutout. Can you define it a little bit better? Sure. Let's say that I want to give something to you, whether a physical thing or I want to communicate some kind of information to you, but I don't want to be seen in the same place as you, or I don't want to send you an email or a call you on the phone. I use somebody who I know knows you and knows me, who I can give this thing to or give this information, who I know will give it to you

and create deniability for the both of us. So you can say, oh, that Ewing guy, I've never dealt with him. I got this thing from somebody else and I've never heard of this Ewing fellow. So I don't know what you're talking about. That may be true and it may be not. They want to have deniability along the chain so that they can't have a Russian government employee ever dealing with the person they're trying to communicate with. Instead, there's two or three steps along the chain, which is the way a cutout typically works in these intelligence circles.

Well, and in fact, Assange has vociferously denied that he got this stuff from Russia. That's right. And it may be plausible that that's the case. He could have two or three other steps between the GRU, which the U.S. intelligence community says is responsible for this, and his actual servers that he runs for WikiLeaks. And he may be telling the truth as far as it goes when he says he didn't get the stuff from Russia. But we know what the CIA says. We know what the National Security Agency says here in the United States, which is that Russia hacked these emails or other materials and then ultimately got them to WikiLeaks so they could release them publicly. Our timeline has now taken us to June 22nd, when candidate Trump finally delivered a speech that went after Clinton and her family's foundation.

But there were no major revelations in that speech. It was sort of a greatest hits version of previous attacks that he'd made against her. In early July 2016, Carter Page went to Moscow to deliver a speech. Now, his name may or may not be familiar. He was a minor figure in the Trump campaign, a policy advisor that few people had ever heard of before when Trump mentioned him in an editorial board meeting with The Washington Post. And we now know that it was around that time that the FBI began investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. In Cleveland on July 21st, a year ago this coming weekend.

This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton. Death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness. President Trump and candidate Trump closed out the GOP convention with a dark speech that fired up his supporters and perplexed his opponents. The next morning, WikiLeaks posted nearly 20,000 emails hacked from the DNC. The emails contained damaging information that confirmed the narrative that Democratic leaders preferred Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. The revelations roiled the Democratic convention that began just three days later. Hell no, DNC! We will vote for Hillary! Hell no, DNC! We will vote for Hillary! Trump tweeted about the DNC hack repeatedly, including this one, quote,

The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should never have been written. Stupid. Because Putin likes me. The Russian propaganda machine, including RT, the Russian-sponsored English-language television channel that's beamed into homes all over America, had an undeniable message at that time. The Clinton campaign made it about Russia. Some are convinced there was collusion between Clinton's campaign and the media. Speaking of crime and internet and fame and money and politicians, one immediately thinks of Hillary Clinton. On July 27th, Trump held a press conference. A reporter asked if he would call on Putin to stay out of the election. I'm not going to tell Putin what to do. Why should I tell Putin what to do?

He already did something today where he said, don't blame them essentially for your incompetence. Let me tell you, it's not even about Russia or China or whoever it is that's doing the hacking. It was about the things that were said in those emails. They were terrible things. The point Trump made was perfectly in line with what a reporter for RT said on the air two days earlier. When immediately after the leaks, the Clinton campaign began to blame Russia instead of addressing the revelations in the leaks. To many, it sounded like a joke, like something you would see in the onion fake news, except it was real news. Rather than condemn the hacking, Trump seemingly encouraged Russia to keep going.

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. Let's see if that happens. That'll be next. After that, a reporter pressed Trump on whether he had any qualms about asking a foreign government to interfere, to hack. No, gives me no pause. If they have them, they have them. Now, the 30,000 personal emails deleted from Clinton's private server never did surface publicly. But in early October, WikiLeaks began posting a new batch of internal Clinton campaign emails every day. And they were rewarded mightily with a constant stream of negative stories about

Clinton. Clint Watts is the Robert A. Fox Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He began raising alarms about Russia's measures to influence the American public's political views last July, a full year ago. I just talked to him recently. Once you see both the campaign echoing the messages and themes that are coming out from RT and Sputnik News, when you see hacked materials of the DNC strategically leaked and timed in terms of their release to influence the U.S. election in favor of Trump. Then when you see Trump get onto stages or make prepared speeches where he refers to both Russia and Clinton's emails, it seems very ominous in terms of maybe there was some connection between the two.

At a minimum, they were at least looking or aware of those lines or influenced by Russian propaganda to be saying it almost near verbatim throughout those months. Whether Trump was a witting or unwitting beneficiary of Russia's efforts hasn't been proven. But as Watts sees it, Russia benefited from the way candidate Trump ran his campaign. The bottom line is Russian active measures were deployed to influence the U.S. election. They worked in large part because one candidate used Russian active measures to his own benefit. Phil, Clint Watts referred to active measures. What exactly does that mean? It's a way that intelligence services can use the public information space that we all see to achieve their

ends. So they use their spy capabilities, whether it's hacking emails and then releasing them, or changing what you see on your Facebook feed or posting stories that are false, or any number of other things to influence the public information environment in such a way that they benefit. And the contention by the U.S. intelligence community is that the Russians use these active measures, as we've been hearing you talk about, Tam, to influence the outcome of the 2016 election in the way that U.S. intelligence says they wanted Donald Trump to eventually become president, which he did. And there are sort of like different views of what the Russian goal was at any given time. Like they started out wanting to tear Hillary Clinton down or, you know, weaken her.

And and then they, according to the intelligence assessment, decided, hey, maybe we could actually help Trump win this thing. That's right. And the story that has captured everyone's attention is how much were they doing with direct reach out from Russian officials in Moscow through these cutouts, as we talked about a little earlier, to directly help the Trump campaign, providing them with opposition research about Hillary Clinton, for example, or do other things? And how much did they keep the Trumps away from what had already begun? The former FBI director, James Comey, told Congress that Russia's cyber attacks began as early as late 2015. And so by the time Russia used these cutouts to reach Trump Jr. in June, they had already been hacking and collecting information from American political sources for months. And do we even know that these people were Russian cutouts at this point? At this point, it's not clear who knew what about what was taking place. We know what was in Donald Trump Jr.'s

emails about his family business associates, this pop star, Emin Agalarov and his father. And we know that they had some role in this. But until we learn more, either from more explosive press leaks or from Senate Intelligence Committee members or potentially U.S. federal law enforcement officials, everyone on the outside is still kind of trying to piece this puzzle together. Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of dots on this timeline and they could all be coincidences or they could all be connected. That's right. What we don't know now is if all these dots are just this random scatterplot or if they're connected in some way. And that's what Senate investigators and the special counsel, the FBI, and the Justice Department have brought in, Robert Mueller,

are going to be looking for as they try to make the connections between all these data points that we've been talking about. So what comes next? Well, there's a big hearing coming up next week in Washington. The Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, is going to have a hearing about the role that foreign agents have played in influencing the United States. Grassley has also asked Donald Trump Jr. to appear himself in an open hearing to talk about this email that he received and this chain of events that we've been talking about in your story. So everyone here in town is going to be paying very close attention to that because we could learn quite a bit more about this story. And we could open up the newspaper in the morning and learn quite a bit more about this story. This is a fast evolving story that we are both reporting and watching, and we promise we will be back in your feed very soon. So, Phil, thanks for joining us for this thing. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. And all of you out there, make sure you're listening to us on Up First. That's NPR's morning news podcast.

It's 10 minutes long and comes out every weekday morning. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at NPR Politics. As soon as we get the text version of this story done, we will put it up on the NPR Politics Facebook page. And you can support this podcast by supporting your local public radio station. Find yours and donate at the link in our episode data, npr.org slash stations. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR.

And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.