The NPR Politics Podcast - Senate Releases More Details on Trump Jr. And Russian Lawyer Meeting & Tuesday's Primaries Takeaways

Episode Date: May 16, 2018

The Senate Judiciary Committee released more than 2,500 pages related to an investigation of a meeting between top Trump aides and a delegation of Russians. We sift through what the testimony tells us. Plus, women continue to be front and center in this year's primaries. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, justice correspondent Ryan Lucas, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, and Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell. 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 Kelly, a brand new college graduate from Loyola University, Chicago. This podcast was recorded at 1213 Eastern on Wednesday, May 16th. Things may change by the time you hear it. Cheers to adulthood. Here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here to dig through 2,500 pages of documents about a meeting at Trump Tower. And we'll also talk about Tuesday night's primaries. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department.

And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. So guys, we talked about the live show we're having in Charlotte in a couple of weeks, but we neglected to mention the live show that's happening right now at BWI Airport on the floor between the B and C terminals, because that's where I am sitting right now. It's so quiet. It is. This was, I did a long walk through the airport.

I'm here because I'm on my way to Texas to do some reporting on their runoff primaries. Next week, I have found the best location without Muzak, but two dogs came up and sniffed me already. So we're off to a good start. Well, I think I'm impressed because I've tried to do this in an airport and I could never escape the Muzak. Well, we'll see if an announcement breaks up this podcast. You'll know why. So let's let's get into this because we had a bunch of Russia news this morning. Ryan, two thousand,500 pages worth of documents coming from the Senate Judiciary Committee. This all relates to this meeting that we've given a lot of attention to in the past between Donald Trump Jr., other members of the campaign,

and somebody saying they were there to represent Russian interests. Before we get into what we learned today, can you just give us a reset on why this meeting matters and how it fits into the big puzzle of the Trump-Russia investigation? You bet. So this is the meeting that took place at Trump Tower on June 9th of 2016. So right kind of in the thick of the presidential race. The Trump campaign was represented by Donald Trump Jr., by President Trump's son-in-law and now senior advisor, Jared Kush Kushner and then campaign chairman Paul Manafort. On the other side of the table was a Russian lawyer by the name of Natalia Veselnitskaya.

She was the main person for whom this meeting was set up because she reportedly was coming in with an offer of what would have been damaging information against Trump's rival, Hillary Clinton. Now, the meeting has attracted a ton of attention since it first came out. It was reported by the New York Times in the summer of 2017, so a year after the meeting actually took place. It's attracted a lot of attention because of the fact that you had a Russian lawyer there who reportedly has contacts with the Russian government

and this offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton. And pretty blunt exchanges about the meeting, right? This is the one where Donald Trump Jr. sent the note saying, hey, if that's what you say it is, I love it. Especially later in the summer, exactly. And that was a back and forth with a music promoter by the name of Rob Goldstone setting up this meeting. And those emails have since come out. They came out after the name of Rob Goldstone setting up this meeting. And those emails have since come out. They came out after the news of this meeting broke. But the way that this has

played out is Democrats say that what this meeting means is it shows that the Trump campaign, one, did indeed have contacts with Russians during the campaign, which of course is something that members of the Trump campaign repeatedly denied over the course of 2016. They said they never had any contacts with Russians. This is a meeting where they indeed did. And more importantly, they say that it also shows that the Trump campaign was willing to accept information or help from Russians. The president's supporters, on the other hand, are saying that, you know what, there's really nothing to see here. They say that the meeting fizzled, the Trump campaign didn't get anything out of it. And so it's no big deal. Let's all move along.

Is there anything in the documents about whether Don Jr. told his father about the meeting? He definitely gets questioned about that. And there's a lot of one of the things that is quite apparent in this meeting is either one, Don Jr. has a very bad memory, or he is systematically unable to recall certain details that took place over time. One instance of that, for example, is one of the members of the meeting came dressed in pink. It was a man who was wearing, he's a Russian-American lobbyist by the name of Renat Akhmetian, who was dressed in pink jeans with holes in the knees and like a pink shirt. This is according to one of the other participants of the meeting. And Donald Trump Jr. was asked who was there. And he said he mentioned eight people, but he said he couldn't

remember this individual, this individual who everyone else remarked was dressed in a bizarre fashion. Donald Trump Jr. said he couldn't remember. But on the question of whether Donald Trump Jr. ever talked to his father about the meeting. He was asked about that several times, and he repeatedly said either no or I don't recall. The reason why that's significant is because Steve Bannon famously said that he considered it absolutely impossible that Don Jr. would not have reported about that meeting to his father, because that was anything that happened of any significance, any kind of meeting at Trump Tower was reported to Trump. Absolutely. And Trump Jr. was also asked whether he talked about it beforehand,

because there was that tantalizing dangle of, you know, information, high level secret information from the Russian government that would be damaging towards Hillary Clinton. And Trump Jr. says that he never talked to anybody about it. He never referenced it at all. Can we just back up a bit, though, Ryan, because we've got the Mueller investigation, we've got the House Intelligence Committee, we've got the Senate Intelligence Committee. This document dump comes from none of those places. Could you explain why we all of a sudden have 2,500 pages of documents to sort through and what exactly we're looking at today? The tangled web of all the various Russia investigations. So you mentioned the Mueller investigation, which is the big one that we all know about and are keeping

close tabs on. There's also the Senate Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation, which is still going on. You mentioned the House Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation, which has closed. The Republicans on that committee decided that they had done enough investigating and said that they had found no evidence of collusion. Democrats pushed back against that and said it was closed prematurely. Then there is the committee where this document dump comes from, and that is the Senate Judiciary Committee, which started looking into the question of Russia's interference in the 2016 election last year. It has become a very partisan effort. The top Republican on the committee, Senator Charles Grassley, and the top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, have kind of gotten into it,

a partisan snipping war on this. Just as bad as the House intelligence or a little more Senate-ified when it comes to the disagreements? A little more senatorial. OK. But certainly it has been tinged by bipartisan fervor. But they were in agreement on releasing these transcripts. It's been really interesting looking at the Trump campaign's relationship with Russia. And Senator Grassley said in his statement that this provides a broader understanding of all of what transpired and that there really aren't any big conclusions to draw from this other than nothing came of the meeting ultimately. So you mentioned we have learned that Donald Trump Jr. seems to have a bad memory and that he says he did not communicate with his father about this meeting at all.

Any other big picture stuff that's jumped out to you in like the three hours you've had to, you know, read through thousands of pages of transcripts and evidence? Well, there are... How fast of a reader are you? I bet you're a fast reader. I can read quickly. The question is how much I retain. Okay, well, we'll find out. Well, there are a couple of things. One thing that struck me was the fact that there was,

we see an indication of concern among people who took part in that meeting about how it was perceived publicly after news of this meeting broke. There was certainly a degree of scrambling among members of the Trump campaign, Trump Jr. in particular, as well as Rob Goldstone and other folks who took place trying to find a way to have a kind of unified message when responding to inquiries about what exactly transpired at that meeting in Trump Tower. And we also get into the question of what role did Trump himself play in crafting a response from Trump Jr.? That was a big deal at the time. Mara, can you remind us why that matters?

The reason why it mattered is because the statement, which might have been drafted by the president, or he had a big hand in it, was describing the meeting as merely about adoptions. And if he knew that it wasn't about adoptions, then that goes to his state of mind. Why would he want to put out a story that was at odds with the truth about the meeting? You know, that goes to possible obstruction. That's why it's significant. Right. Because the initial response said this was just about adoptions. And then the emails came out and reporting came out and they changed their story very quickly. Well, there's all of that. And then Trump Jr. was also asked whether his father was involved in drafting the statement in response

to that, which is a question that has come up in the context of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's interference. And what Trump Jr. says is that he didn't discuss it with his father at all, but he says that his father may have weighed in via Hope Hicks. Hope Hicks was the former White House communications director and kind of very close aide to the president. Now, that would then mean that the president was indeed weighing in on the statement. And the shifting tone that we heard may have been a representation of the president's work in this. So we don't get a final answer on a lot of the big picture questions that we have, but we do get kind of tantalizing leads and just kind of more questions raised by

all of the responses that we have from the folks who were interviewed by the committee. And the previous reporting of how the Air Force One drafting of that statement transpired was more dictated than weighing in. I mean, generally, when Donald Trump tells Hope Hicks to put a statement out, he generally does more than just weigh in. He pretty much dictates it. So, Mara, no collusion. It's a witch hunt. Like, we're pretty familiar with that pushback from not just Trump, but an increasing number of House Republicans, a lot of Trump allies. This new information, does that help his argument or hurt his argument? Because on one hand, this is a meeting with someone on the topic of we have dirt on Hillary Clinton.

On the other hand, all the accounts we're reading today are it was a rambly meeting. There wasn't much said. Everybody on all sides was annoyed. I think it's a total wash. I don't think that this affects the bigger battle over shaping the public's perception of the Mueller investigation. Right now, the Republicans and Donald Trump supporters feel that they have made a lot of headway, not just in convincing their own base voters, but also with independent voters, that the Mueller investigation is a witch hunt, it should end, it's been going on too long. And if the whole strategy is to undermine the credibility of the Mueller investigation, not so much to fire him, but just to get into the position where you can dismiss whatever conclusions he might come to, dismiss them as just partisan, witch hunt, you know, meaningless. I think that the Trump camp is feeling more confident about that today.

One thing that I will add is what we are getting in this transcript is the presentation that the participants of the meeting want to give. It doesn't necessarily mean that that's exactly what transpired. And there's somebody who will be looking into, you know, drilling down on the question of what indeed happened, and will have the ability to subpoena more documents and look at call logs. That is Robert Mueller's investigation. Right. And one of the reasons why it's so difficult to cover this story and why my hat is really off to Ryan is because we get this in little bits and pieces. We sometimes look at the Mueller investigation through a straw. You know, he doesn't talk, he doesn't leak. And it's very incremental. It's a grinding process. And we also know, at least politically, that most people,

ordinary people, are not interested in this, find it confusing. It's not what they really care about. So this is the kind of thing, this is, you know, one moment in a real marathon. At this point in time, having read through these documents as far as I have, there are no big glaring headlines to come out of this. What we get are some new details on the margins, but nothing that changes our understanding of what happened or its place in the bigger picture of the Russia question. So Ryan, we'll let you get back to those documents. Thanks for stopping by. Mara, stick around. You, Kelsey Snell, and I are going to talk about yesterday's primary results after a quick break. Fly simply and understand all the details so you can mortgage confidently. To get started, go to rocketmortgage.com slash NPR politics. Equal housing lender, licensed in all 50 states. NMLSconsumeraccess.org number 3030.

Hey everyone, I'm Robin Hilton with All Songs Considered, NPR's music discovery podcast. When you're in school, sometimes a song can be your best friend. It gives you hope, help purge your anxieties, or just lets you know you're not alone in the world. On this week's show, we play the songs that got you through school. Hear all songs considered in the NPR One app or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we are back. I am still at the airport, but now Kelsey Snell is in the studio instead of Ryan. Hey, Kelsey. Hi there. It's Studio Magic. I'm just like Ryan in the exact same spot, just different topics. All right. So primaries last night, Pennsylvania, Idaho, Nebraska, Oregon, some interesting results.

Let's start with Pennsylvania because we've spent so much time this year talking about all the women candidates, particularly on the Democratic side. Pennsylvania is a place, its entire congressional delegation is dudes right now. It has never elected a woman senator or governor. But Kelsey, a lot of women won last night. A lot of women won last night. And now the state will not be able to avoid electing a woman to Congress because there is one of the races where two women are running against each other. And as far as we can tell, it looks like Democrats might pick up four people and they likely will be all women. It's a big step forward in that regard. And it's

part of a broader trend that we're seeing of women having a ton of success in these early primaries. And there are still a lot of women on the ballot in the months to come. So this doesn't look like this is the end of something. It seems like we're kind of in the middle of a really big shift. Mara, did you see anything last night that caught your eye when it comes to turnout or Republican versus Democratic enthusiasm, either in Pennsylvania or the other states voting? I think that in terms of turnout, Democrats can feel pretty good. Their numbers were strong in Pennsylvania, better than Republicans. Strong in Pennsylvania, even though they did not have anybody competitive at the statewide level,

which is something that Democrats were cautioning all throughout the run-up to this, was that we can't read too much into turnout in Pennsylvania because of that. Right, because Casey wasn't being challenged, the sitting Democratic senator, whereas Lou Barletta, you would have thought, since it was a contested Republican primary, they would have gotten more Republicans out and they didn't. And in that Senate race, Democrat Bob Casey is running for a third term. His opponent is going to be Lou Barletta, congressman, one of the many Pennsylvania congressmen giving up his seat to run for another office or just retire? I would say there's a warning sign for Democrats, which is a couple of very liberal Democrats beat centrist Democrats, including one of them in Pennsylvania. And the question that the Democratic Party has is, can these more progressive left-wing Democrats actually win in the fall? So to the extent that Republicans have been hoping for a Democratic lurch to the left, not unlike the way Republicans lurched to the Tea Party in the past and nominated some

people who couldn't win in a general election, they're hoping that that happens to Democrats here. And there were in Nebraska and in Pennsylvania, a couple of, you know, establishment backed Democratic candidates who lost to more left wing candidates. Yeah, Brad Ashford in Nebraska is the one that comes to mind first. And Scott, you and I have been looking at this a lot, kind of figure out these trends. Does it seem to you like this is a these couple of really progressive candidates, people backed by Bernie Sanders are, you know, are they are they part of a new part of the trend? Are they a blip in the radar? I'm not sure.

Yeah, and it's hard to figure out an obvious trend line for that because it's been a mixed bag, right? Like Bernie Sanders giving you his endorsement, even coming to campaign for you, isn't necessarily a sign you're going to surprise people and win your race, we found. On the other hand, there were a couple Bernie candidates who did do well last night. I think one of the interesting Democratic proxy war races we were looking at last night was the 7th Congressional District in Pennsylvania. The numbers are all screwed up because when the state Supreme Court rewrote the map earlier this year, they also renumbered all the districts. But the 7th is the one that was held by moderate Republican Charlie Dent, a friend to NPR because he gave great quotes in the

hallway. And sadly for reporters, he's retired. Yeah, he resigned. But his seat became pretty competitive with the new map. You had you had a Bernie backed Democrat running. You had a Democrat backed by, you know, groups like Emily's List. You had a pretty-backed Democrat running. You had a Democrat backed by, you know, groups like Emily's List. You had a pretty conservative Democrat who had actually, like, tweeted at Donald Trump. Yep. And that was one we were all keeping our eyes on. And, you know, it's so interesting to me because the story up until now, and this is the problem of having the primaries dribble out in little bits at a time, you don't get a whole cohesive narrative. But up until now, we've seen candidates like Conor Lamb or Ralph Northam or Doug Jones, pretty moderate stylistically, at least, candidates, not left-wing ideologues. They've been winning. And it seemed like they were showing a real path to Democrats how to win in

these competitive districts. Now we're seeing a kind of handful of more liberal candidates winning. You know, what does that mean? If the wave is big enough, they're going to get swept in, too. Or, you know, will the story be that they actually can't win in the end in these districts that are more purplish, you know, that aren't just solid blue districts. This raises the question that has been plaguing Democrats and that their leadership gets all of the time, which is, do you need to be a party with a cohesive message about jobs, about the economy, about your approach on social issues, or is it more effective to go about running each race as if it's its own different kind of Democrat? And I don't know that we're going to know the answer to that until the general election, because we won't know if this enthusiasm and the turnout really pulls through into a general when you don't have the far left candidates on the ballot. Right. And the interesting thing is, even though I would say on jobs and the economy, I think the Democrats do have a pretty unified message. But where these more centrist Democrats who lost yesterday got in trouble is some of them

had recently been Republicans. Or, as Scott just mentioned, Morgan Nellie, the candidate in Pennsylvania, if you've said really nice things about Donald Trump, that's probably a disqualifier in today's Democratic primaries because the Democratic base is really animated by anti-Trump fervor. Yeah. And I think Democrats are still trying to figure out if they want to be winning the resist left and bringing more of them in and hoping that their numbers are actually just greater than the number of people who turned out in 2016. Or do they want to fight for these moderates or these people who might have voted for Trump and might have

called themselves Republican in 2016? It's not something that they can do at the same time with most of these candidates. Well, except that if every Democratic operative I talk to say they have to do both of those things at the same time, they can't just win just with the base. They have to be able to get some of those Obama-Trump voters, for instance. And the question is, when you talk to progressives, of course, they say, well, we can do that. There were many Bernie Trump voters Danica Rome, who's a transgender person, how did she win? She's trans, but she based her campaign on transportation, you know, and so that's what she talked about. And so that's an example of how, yes, you can come from the kind of left-wing base, but you have to connect with your voters. You can't

run a kind of left-wing A to Z campaign. to connect with your voters. You can't run a kind of left-wing A to Z campaign. But when it comes to outliers, she's definitely one of them. And I hear that same thing from Democratic strategists all the time. But when you ask the follow-up, okay, then how are you going to do it? They can't ever really answer. All right. So Mara, along with all the congressional races, there was another state-level special election last night where Democrats flipped a legislative seat. They've done more than 50 times this year. But at the same time, I feel like there's been a lot more Republican confidence in the last couple of weeks,

this week in particular, that maybe things will be fine after all for Republicans, that Donald Trump's getting more popular, that this year might not be a total disaster for them. What did we see when it comes to that? Yeah, look, there's definitely a herd mentality when you're in these elections, and we've kind of seemed to have gone from the conventional wisdom being Republicans, we're saying all is lost, we're going to lose the House, Democrats feeling super, super confident,

to, hmm, you know, generic ballot tightening, Donald Trump's approval ratings going up, Republicans getting tremendous amounts of money in a way that Democrats will never be able to match, you know, the $30 million check that Sheldon Adelson just cut. So once again, Republicans are feeling a little bit more confident that their structural advantages, their resource advantages might help them withstand a blue wave. All right. That's a lot for today.

We will be back in your feed tomorrow with our roundup of the week's news. You can always catch our coverage at NPR.org and on your local public radio station. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Kelsey Snell, congressional reporter. Can I tell you guys something very exciting? Yes.

I am flying Southwest Airlines and I am seat A1. Whoa. Not good. Are you next to the window? No, I can sit wherever I want, Mara. That's the point. Oh, because you're A1 in the position in the line. I'm sorry.

Yeah, the whole plane is at my disposal. Just sit on the aisle. I don't want you sucked out a gaping hole, to quote Dan Rather. The plane is your oyster, Scott. I'm excited for you. Thanks for that confidence, Mara. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.