i was the russia person. i then went to the national security council to do the russia portfolio in 2009. we never spoke to ambassador kislyak once during that period. i got to know him pretty well when i worked in the white house. that was my job. the very fact that they were meeting with him already raises my eyebrows, let alone the content which you have just been talking about the last few minutes. you re saying the timeline, even in a normal environment, of using the transition period to sort of rush to meet with the russian ambassador and in this case also a banker strikes you as odd? very odd. i want to really underscore how extraordinary this is. we had one phone call between president-elect obama and president medvedev, a congratulatory call, and that was it. medvedev came to the country, a whole bunch of russians came for a g20 summit, and we chose deliberately not to meet with them because of the principle of one president at a time. right.
and he reportedly was working on this back channel for quite a while before he even got into the room that december with kislyak and kushner. we know one thing tonight. we know this is all weird, to say the least. now was it weird but uniform? did it stretch across all of the trump transition s ham-handed approaches? for example, do we have reports of a back channel to brazil or canada? or at this hour, do we only have a report about a back channel to russia? because, if so, it seems investigators are going to ask the obvious question. why russia? the country known to have meddled in our election, known to be a geopolitical foe in so many ways to the united states. why indeed? joining us now is adam entiss, the national security reporter for the washington post who helped break this story. thank you for joining us on what i know is a busy night. very good to be here, thank you. you write in the post that this was first alerted to your
because his name appeared on the flight manifest in abu dhabi before his plane took off. and so i don t know, again, i don t really quite understand the reason for the secrecy here with some of these engagements. later, keep in mind, the crown prince of abu dhabi is the host for that meeting in the seychelles that arab prince attends. officials told us the meeting in new york, which did not take place at trump tower, it took place at another location in new york. this subject of having this meeting in the third country did not come up. right. but you know anyways, that remains to be fully reported out. but the certainly there have been there were other contacts that were not being publicly disclosed and which were for some reason being cloaked. such as that uae meeting that i just mentioned. in addition to the kislyak communication. right. as you say, some of that is now of investigative interest. because of the nature and the approach to it. there are scoops, and then
november, with russian officials and kremlin-linked individuals, including six calls between ambassador kislyak and trump associates. we ve now shown that those contacts involve those calls involved both flynn and jared kushner. there s nothing necessarily wrong about these calls. what s troubling, again, is the lack of transparency. we know that the discussions that took place with ambassador kislyak were about finding ways to improve the relationship between the two countries. what is odd, according to former advisers to other presidential campaigns, is that these this many contacts, 18, during a campaign with different officials from another country, that are not about setting up a visit to that country or arranging speeches or meetings inhat country, but simply about policy matters. having 18, at least 18 contacts,
sure it was a d.c. postmark, but i d have to double-check the envelope. so just to understand, i really appreciate your breakdown of the meticulous reporting you ve done. are you basically saying that at you got originally was a kind of an unsourced im at you didn t attach a ton of credibility to, and over the coming months all these other pieces fell into place that made you think this letter was actually predominantly true? yes. i mean, basically, frankly, as we were doing the reporting and you mention the seychelles story. the reason we figured out the seychelles meeting was in part because of that line in the letter that i was trying to figure out, was there a meeting in the third country? we all heard the story about the prague so-called prague meeting that took place, which was a lot earlier. and this letter referred to a meeting that they were discussing, holding a meeting, this is a meeting taking place december 1st, december 2nd, in which they discussed wanting to have a