book. a ten secret document the special counsel argues the president showed four people in the room. a writer, publisher and two of his white house aides. these are bad, sick people. that was your cue, you know, against you. started talking about oh, we re going to try to no, they were trying to do that before you even were sworn in. that s right. with millie, i ll show you an example. he said that i wanted to attack iran. isn t that amazing, a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. look. it was him. they presented me this. this is off the record, but they presented me this. this was him. this was the defense department and him. we looked at him. this was him. this wasn t done by me. this was him. all sort of stuff. pages. let s see here. yeah. isn t that amazing? this totally wins my case, you know. except it is highly confidential, secret. this is secret information. look at this. attack. hillary would print that out all the time. she send it to
and now prigozhin says his intention was never to overthrow putin. he said this in an audio released yesterday, but it did give russians along with the rest of the world, what happened on saturday, a glimpse at what the end of putin could look like. joining me now, the author of why coups fail, brian kloss. thanks for being here. again for a moment, it looked like prigozhin was leading a coup yesterday. what got him to turn around? why didn t that work? well we don t know for sure but we can speculate because dictators tend to use whatever leverage they have during coups and that can be family members, death threats. simply a menacing amount of force to show they re going to lose. that s because coups are not really about who has the superior force. they re basically pr battles where you re trying to create an
aura of inevitability. it s like a sports team. you have empty stadiums when the team is performing badly. as soon as it looks like they re going to make a run for the championship, everybody joins. that effect happens in successful coups. so what prigozhin was probably tieing to do was to create this aura of inevitability, i m going to win, and hope all these elites were going to defect and join him and that could have caused putin s regime to collapse or for prigozhin to be able to extort concessions from putin. obviously that didn t happen and the longer it dragged on and the more it became likely that prigozhin was going to die, i suspect more leverage they had against him. there was talk about putin setting up a coup proof system. explain what this is. yeah, so two-thirds of dictators since world war ii have been toppled in coups. so when you have a dictator, the first thing you think about is
interview. he said he spoke to putin on saturday morning and talked about what to do with the wagner chief including potentially killing him. but lukashenko says he told putin not to rush his response. he then says he spoke with prigozhin and told him putin would quote squash him like a bug. state media in belarus says the now exiled wagner head is within their borders. joining me from moscow is keir simmons. that s quite a readout from lukashenko. what do we know about what prigozhin stands in the eyes of putin and what about the men he was leading? reporter: yeah. it s an interesting readout and makes sense, some of it. for example, president lukashenko talked about starting to reach prigozhin then finding him through the deputy defense