Today, Explained - Vladimir's best day ever

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

Vladimir Putin flatly denied Russian interference in the United States’s 2016 elections and President Trump refused to call him out. Former ambassador Nicholas Burns says it’s a sad day for America. Then Vox’s Andrew Prokop digs into the fresh indictments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show today comes from Quip electric toothbrushes. Quip has found a way to make an electric toothbrush that runs on a single AAA battery. It has to be seen to be believed and you can see it at getquip.com slash explained. Today's negotiations reflected our joint wish with President Trump to redress this negative situation in the bilateral relationship, outline the first steps for improving this relationship to restore the acceptable level of trust, and going back to the previous level of interaction on all mutual interest issues. President Vladimir Putin met President Trump for a summit in Helsinki today. And we've all seen that kind of thing before.

But what followed the Trump-Putin summit was something totally new. Something we haven't ever seen before. President Putin and President Trump held a press conference. And things got real quick. Mr. President, you tweeted this morning that it's U.S. foolishness, stupidity and the Mueller probe that is responsible for the decline in U.S. relations with Russia. Do you hold Russia at all accountable for anything in particular? And if so, what would you what would you consider them that they are responsible for? Yes, I do. 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, a long time, frankly, before I got to office. And I think we're all to blame. The President of the United States blamed the United States, blamed the Mueller investigation blamed the United States, blamed the Mueller investigation and the Department of Justice for our fractured relationship with Russia,

in front of the Russian president, in front of the world. 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. Everybody knows it. President Trump was given a second chance to hold Russia accountable. But just to say it one time again, and I say it all the time, there was no collusion.

I didn't know the president. There was nobody to collude with. And then a third. Just now, President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every U.S. intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did. My first question for you, sir, is who do you believe? My second question is, would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin, would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?

So let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven't they taken the server? He started talking about a server. Where is the server? I want to know where is the server and what is the server saying? With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. And then finally, he sided with Russia. 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. 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. This is dereliction of duty. This is Nicholas Burns. He was undersecretary of state. He was a U.S. Ambassador. I worked for five presidents, from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. I was also an advisor in the Obama administration. He's a career diplomat. The president's duty is to defend our country. Our country has been under attack.

The Justice Department, the grand jury issued indictments against 12 Russian military officers just last week, saying that there was a criminal conspiracy launched by the Russian government against the United States. And our president failed on multiple occasions today to acknowledge it. In fact, when asked about the Russian cyber attacks, the president just reverted to rehashing the election and saying it's a witch hunt and never addressing the question, which is how do we defend the United States government, I found it to be tremendously dispiriting.

You can imagine being today a State Department career official or a CIA official or a member of the military and to have the commander-in-chief essentially act in a cowardly way with the Russian dictator beside you. It's about the worst image you can think of for a patriotic American who wants our president to defend the country. And for Vladimir Putin? It's his best day ever. Vladimir Putin has wanted to divide the United States from our allies.

He has wanted to weaken the U.S. And he's been struggling against us for the better part of the last 12, 13 years. And so if you look at the entire trip that President Trump just made, President Trump picked public fights with Angela Merkel and Theresa May, the German chancellor and the British prime minister. He was exceedingly critical of the NATO alliance. No American president ever done that before.

Yesterday, the president said that the European Union is a foe of the United States. No American president has ever said anything remotely resembling that. It's almost Orwellian, making out our best friends to be the problems in the world and giving a free pass to the government that is the big threat to us in the world. This has been an extremely disturbing day. I mean, what does this mean going forward for the United States' relationship with its allies, for the president's relationship with his own Department of Justice?

I think there's two things. One is, I would expect there would be some resignations within the United States government from people who are patriotic and who are working hard for our country and Have just been thrown under the bus by the president Second in terms of our allies a lot of our allies are beginning to say what the German foreign minister said this morning Hey, come on. He said Germany can no longer rely on the White House That's a revolutionary statement. It's a terribly depressing statement. Germany's relied on the United States since the aftermath of the Second World War. Ambassador Burns, you worked for the George W. Bush administration in the State Department.

I did. You've been around presidents. You've discussed certainly our relationships with Russia. What do you think the president wanted to get out of this meeting? Why did this summit even happen? The president has been consistent since he began his run for the presidency in 2015 in saying that it's a good thing that the United States be friends with Russia and have a positive relationship with Russia. And he's been trying to do that quite consistently since he was elected. There are times when the point of diplomacy, the object is not to have a good relationship. The object is to defend America's interest. In this case, I think in approaching this summit, the President should have seen that the annexation of Crimea and the nerve agent attack against the UK, and especially the cyber offensive against our election, all threatened

the vital national security interests of the U.S. And therefore, he should have been in the mode of pushing Putin back. So the President fundamentally miscalculated on what he should have been trying to do in this meeting. And the odd thing is, if you look at the administration, the cabinet officials and the sub-cabinet officials, these are patriotic Americans, many of whom have a long record of being hawks on Russia policy. You can imagine how difficult this is for them. Is there any possible positive upshot of this? I mean, both leaders were talking about Syria, we're talking about the Korean Peninsula, we're talking about Israel and the Middle East. Is there any possible good that can come out of this meeting? If you're looking for

any kind of ray of hope, I think there were two issues where there's possible progress ahead. One is on nuclear weapons, where Putin mentioned that the two governments had agreed to look at the START agreement. This is the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, nuclear weapons, and to see how it could be extended or modernized. The second part of that was the Intermediate Forces Nuclear Treaty, which President Reagan signed with President Gorbachev in December 1987. The Russians have been in violation of that in recent years. And so there was apparently an agreement that the two governments would look at that. So there is a possible area of agreement. The second was on Syria.

And it was really President Putin who talked about this, not President Trump. As President Putin termed it, Israel's security is in danger. And it's in danger because the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps fighters in Syria have been operating dangerously close to the Golan Heights, which threatens Israel. Putin said, we need to have a separation of forces along the lines of the 1974 Disengagement Treaty. That was a treaty that Henry Kissinger just negotiated in the wake of the October War in 1973 that separated Israel and Syrian forces. And it's been preserving peace since then between Israel and Syria. So I thought that was also another area of possible progress. I felt that it was worth having this meeting. You want to have a channel to President Putin.

But frankly, I never imagined that President Trump would be so weak, so guileless, so much taken advantage of. I can't remember anything like this in American presidential history where our president was so outplayed by our strongest adversary. Sad day for America. Nicholas Burns teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He's also a CNBC contributor. Coming up next, why all of this matters,

the Mueller investigation and those new indictments. This is Today Explained. Quip electric toothbrushes come with a suction mount that unsticks to use as a cover for hygienic travel. Does your toothbrush come with a suction mount that unsticks to use as a cover for hygienic travel? If not, you might want to pay a visit to getquip.com slash explained right now. Because if you go there right now,

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And you can also, while you're at it, rate and review Today Explained. Everyone goes home happy. Thanks. I'm Andrew Prokop. I'm senior politics reporter and I'm covering the Trump-Russia investigation. What happened this past Friday? What did Rod Rosenstein announce? So it was a big day for the investigation. One of those rare days, the first in months where a bunch of new charges were brought by Mueller. The indictment charges 12 Russian military officers by name for conspiring to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

Viktor Borisovich Nityokshin, Boris Alexeevich Antonov, Dmitry Sergeyevich Badin. They're part of the GRU? What's the GRU? Is that like Russian CIA, kind of? Yeah. And what do they say? The charges basically lay out something that we've basically heard for a while. They are charges related to the hacking and leaks of Democrats' emails during the 2016 campaign.

That it was indeed Russian government officials who were behind the hacking and leaking of these emails. Nikolai Yurievich Kazachok, Artem Andreevich Malyshev, Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov. Down to the exact identities of the people involved who sent out spear phishing emails, who researched terms that they could use to post the hacked material online and communications they had with WikiLeaks and tons of different Clinton campaign staffer and personal email accounts of those staffers who got hacked. It goes into how state voter registration databases were hacked into. It lasted for months, and it was really wide-ranging, and carried out, apparently, according to Mueller,

by this specific group of Russian officers. Alexei Alexandrovich Potemkin, Alexander Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermankov, I think the purpose of the indictments is to tell the story in more detail of exactly what happened. A lot of these details have been kept classified until now. They're not really about prosecuting these people because they're Russian intelligence officers and they're not going to be brought to the U.S. to face trial. But this really matters. Mueller's job is to investigate Russian interference with the 2016 election and any

Trump ties to that. And what we have here in the email hackings and leaks are the most visible, known way that Russia was known to have interfered with the election. We already had the indictment of a bunch of sort of Russian trolls a few months back, but it was hard to make a strong case that that had much of an impact. But the hacking and leaks of the emails indisputably had a big impact on the campaign. I don't know if it changed the outcome, but it dominated the news for days on end. Wikileaks released more emails that they claim are from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's personal email account. The emails appear to reveal contents of Clinton's private Wall Street speeches.

Many people wanted to know what was in those. It forced the resignation of the chair of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. It kept the word emails in the headlines for Hillary Clinton throughout the last month of the campaign, which is a word that was not good for her or her campaign. And you can tell how meaningful they were from Trump's own behavior, because on the campaign trail in that last month, as John Podesta's emails were being posted in little batches day by day by WikiLeaks, Trump would be out there telling people to read WikiLeaks, saying that they exposed the corruption of the Clintons and that, you know, this was all scandalous and horrible. There has never been so many lies,

so much deception. There has never been anything like this where emails and you get a subpoena, you get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena, you delete 33,000 emails. Didn't President Trump literally ask at some point in the campaign, didn't he literally sort of call out to Russia saying, I could really use your help with those missing emails? Well, this is really interesting, because it's actually in the indictment itself. On July 27th, the DNC emails had been already hacked and were being put up on WikiLeaks, and they'd been attributed to Russia, this hack. And Trump was asked about it at a press conference. And he basically said, I'd like to get involved with Putin, for I have nothing to do this hack. And Trump was asked about it at a press conference. And he basically said, I have nothing to do with Putin. I've never spoken to him. I don't know anything about

him other than he will respect me. And if it is Russia, which is probably not, nobody knows who it is. Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. So he said that on July 27th. And then you look at the indictment and there's a really interesting paragraph, which seems to go out of its way to imply that a hacking effort happened after Trump said that. The indictment says, the conspirators spearfished individuals affiliated with the Clinton campaign throughout the summer of 2016. For example, on or about July 27th, the conspirators attempted after hours to spearfish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third party provider and used by Clinton's personal office. Is Mueller trying to say that Trump essentially directed Russian intelligence

to hack the DNC and Hillary Clinton? I don't see any way to read this other than that this particular hack, and we should be clear, they had been hacking various Democrats months before this. This wasn't the first hack. But this particular hack and where it was aimed and the timing and the date of it, it's very hard to read this and think that, at least Mueller doesn't think that it was directly in which a U.S. president finds out about these indictments on a Friday, has a meeting planned with the president of Russia on a Monday,

and takes these indictments to him and says, hey, look what your country did during our election. Hand over these people to us. extradite these intelligence officials. Look, it's definitely very strange that Donald Trump has refused to believe publicly, repeatedly, the assessments for years that Russia was behind this hack, that he's continuously disputed them, that he now disparages the whole Mueller investigation as a witch hunt into him, that he's just not taking this at all as something bad the Russian government did to the election. He doesn't seem to think it was bad. He seems to think that it helped him

and so what's the problem with that? Andrew Prokop is a politics reporter at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos for him this is Today Explained. It's worth remembering that Quip electric toothbrushes come with guiding pulses that remind you when to switch sides while you're brushing, and Quip delivers new brush heads on a dentist-recommended schedule. Your first set of those is free when you go to getquip.com slash explained.