Transcripts For CSPAN Media Coverage Of Russia Investigation

Tonight. Thank you for being at the first times live event of 2018. After what happened in 2017, we thank you for coming back for more. [laughter] is a greatof all, it honor to be on this panel tonight with two friends and colleagues that i have it through a lot of battles with together, as well as a new friend, joanna mendez, who i authority theent piece of critical information that, after being a Washington Post reporter for decades, recently decided she could not do without the New York Times and became a paid subscriber. [applause] thats all you need to know tonight. Trump and thec is Russian Investigation and this consuming, competitive, maddening story we have been a part of over the past year, some as reporters, some as readers. No doubt if you came tonight, you have been following this closely. I dont know if tonight it will all be clear, and if it is, please tell us because we would love clarity on anything. Hopefully it will be a lively discussion. To start, i thought i would first of all say it has been almost a year since the Intelligence Communitys assessment about what happened in the 2016 election came out, about russian hacking, Extensive Campaign disruption. This was the official Intelligence Community product. I want to start out with scott and say, ok, it has been a year since i came out, and there has been a whole lot of reporting andrevelations investigations by journalists, federal investigators, etc. Say about the contours of this Russian Campaign as we know it now . Separate collusion, the famous word, from what the russians are known to have done. Everybody here has been reading about this daily, but it might help to sort of run through it quickly and remind ourselves what the russians did, why they did it, and what its impact may have been. This is the sort of lightning tour of what happened. Basically, i think you can divide the russian operation into hacking and linking leaking, then the social media campaign, essentially creating fake americans on facebook and twitter to repeat messages. And then there was over propaganda, which was much more significant with rt and so on, ingre they were express their preference in the president ial race. Why did it happen . I think there was a personal motive on the part of putin. Hillary clinton had publicly spoken for the rights of people demonstrating in moscow in 2011. It was unprecedented in the putin area for large numbers of people to get on the streets of moscow. They carried white ribbons and said very unkind things about Vladimir Putin. He took that very personally, and she i dont think for her it was much of an american politician thing to say, we support democracy, we support people demonstrating for democracy, but he took that part. ,nd there were other things certainly from putins point of view, that were american operations against russia. I dont think we were seen that way. I think for putin, it was an attack on russia with a large american component. We would not have seen in this way, the panama papers, which exposed this old buddy of putins who, it turned out, had 2 billion hiding away in offshore accounts. For cellonot normal us. Cellists. It turns out Classical Music was lucrative in russia. He saw that as a cia operation against him. Appreciate the socalled color revolutions in ukraine and georgia. Whenever the u. S. Was seen as encouraging what we would consider to be a democracy in neighboring countries, or in they kindthink of take that as an attack. I think part of the strategic goal was to damage the brand of u. S. Democracy, make it so that the u. S. Looks so screwed up and tangled up that no one would ever say, we want to be like them. Matter . Did it you can read a lot of people saying, oh, this was completely insignificant. They spent 100,000 on facebook ads, compared to tens of millions by both the Clinton Campaign and Trump Campaign. Thats true, but as the social media part of this has unfolded, and you look back at the impact of the leaks, lets just remind ourselves of what the impact was. One thing that happened was Debbie Wasserman schultz had to resign as chairwoman of the Democratic Party literally the day before the Democratic National convention. That was the big story. Washe message democrats had completely stepped on. It disrupted the Democratic National convention. Emails, john podesta thing else of Hillary Clintons Campaign Chairman, were the emails of Hillary Clintons Campaign Chairman, were dribbled dayby wikileaks the same that the access Hollywood Tape of donald trump was made public. And keptped the emails going day after day after day, up until the election. At someack and looked of candidate trumps speeches. Look at his speech in wilkesbarre, pennsylvania. 20,000 or 25,000 people, a really rousing speech. Hes got the crowd in the palm his hand in a way that hes got the crowd in the palm of his hand. In a way, the excerpts of the included Hillary Clinton in the podesta emails. He is literally reading from these things. At the time, we did not think about is a russian operation, but if you think about it as a russian contribution to our election campaign, it is striking. I think there has been a lot of emphasis on the ads on facebook, but if you look at the pages that the russians created on facebook and the many accounts on twitter, facebook was very reluctant to come up with this, but eventually acknowledged that 126 million americans have been pages created by russians, about half the adult population. Thats a remarkable number. Tweets from russian related accounts, twitter estimated, were almost 1 of all election related tweets, which is significant. With a margin of a little over 100,000 votes in three states, it is impossible to say that that activity made a difference or the difference in the election, but it is also hard to say that it did not, because that was a pretty Successful Campaign on their part. Thats before we get to anything related to the truck campaign. But that is what we are talking about tonight. One thing to think about, since you spent a lot of time in russia, this question that is going around the russians could never have done this without some kind of help. They did not have the political knowledge to know which districts to target, which states to target. Someone say that is absurd, they can watch cnn to know. But dont answer that yet. Think about it, and we will get back. That gets to the issue of the question of collusion. I want to move to mike to sort of address this other part of the issue. There is this question of collusion. The other side of the coin here, which you have spent a lot of time focusing on, is what has trump done since becoming president. And was their instruction of justice in the actions of the president to try to derail the president . Something that is potentially as threatening to the president as in the question of collusion . Can you walk us through that . If you look at muellers investigation, you have a collusion bucket and an obstruction bucket. In regards to trump, there is a lot more to look at in the obstruction bucket. There are not a lot of things we know about on the collusion side. About trump specifically. But there are a lot of things he has Done Since Taking Office about whatquestions his motivations and intentions were. February 14 being the biggest one, where he went to comey and asked him to end the flame investigation the flynn investigation. What were the true intentions of getting rid of comey . Was he trying to obstruct the russia investigation, or was he trying to hold him accountable because he was too mean to Hillary Clinton during the campaign . [laughter] michael the other question being this statement that came out over air force one flight in response to a story our colleagues were putting out about a meeting that happened in 2016 between the Trump Campaign and russians who were promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. Trying case, was trump to throw sand into the gears of muellers investigation by putting out information that was not true . Among those things, there is a broader question about the president , which is his obsession with loyalty. He was sothat obsessed with his attorney general Jeff Sessions running the investigation . Why did he keep coming back to the question of sessions being disloyal to him by recusing himself from the investigation . These are sort of these larger, broader questions that mueller has been drilling down on in the interviews he has done. He has spent a lot of time with the White House Counsels Office , with the lawyers there. He has spent time looking at handwritten documents from people like wrights previous that get to, what was the president s mindset, and did he have corrupt intentions . Out of the larger body of things, there is a lot more there on the question of obstruction then there are on his ties to russia. Mark so can you make an obstruction case . Despite the evidence, does it mean molar is more likely to go after the president for obstruction . What is the hurdle he is trying to clear . Obstruction is difficult because you have to prove he had corrupt intent, but he is the president of the United States and can fire the fbi director. He does have immense power over the Justice Department to get instructions. Was he simply exercising his executive powers as the head of the executive branch, or was he trying to cover something up . What would make this case easier is if there were something outside of his normal powers as president. Did he destroy evidence . Impeached foras asking someone to provide false statements under oath. We dont have anything like that on the president that we have on our side. Based on what is publicly available on questions of obstruction, there is not really a clearcut case. Mark a lot more to discuss later on. Joanna, you are the real expert here. Having been in this world for 25 it is the anniversary of a lot of things. From the year revelation of the infamous steel dossier, which, no matter how has it is examined, it gained in promise, at least as a political issue. Republicans are trying to attack document totical smear donald trump. Democrats see it as a rosetta stone, this is the map that will get to the collusion case and get donald trump out of office. You are a professional intelligence veteran. How do you see that document a year later, and how would her former colleagues at the cia have looked at this dossier when they first saw it . Tomorrow a year ago when the thing became public. The 10th of january, 2016. I stayed up and downloaded that thing and read it like, three times. [laughter] i have been interested in this from the beginning. The first thing i thought, and my colleague that i spoke to who had read it thought, was it looked like the real deal. It looked like an Intelligence Report with look, like raw intelligence coming in from the field. It is not one long, continuous document. It is a series of two page, threepage reports that he provided from june through december of 2016. Typically he draws no conclusions. He is bringing forward facts, citing sources. He does not name them, he should not name them. But it is raw intelligence. A lot of it let me take that back some of it will always be wrong because collecting intelligence is not a science. You have to go through and find, that date was wrong, that person was you are always evaluating that way, and because of that, most Intelligence Officers who read that report initially would have been a little suspicious of how true it would end up to be. Over time, what is interesting to me is that, while they have not been able to cooperate every detail of the report, i am unaware of any details in that report that have been proven false. Is know that Vladimir Putin in the background in russia, with a big eraser, and he is doing everything he can to undercut the report. And everything he can do includes assassinating investigative journalists. Be glad you guys are on the right side of the world on that one. They take extreme measures, and i am sure he has taken extreme measures. It will never be totally substantiated, but i it just rang true its how you do on intelligence investigation, the format of the , itg, the way he worded it was clearly a former intelligence officer. Mark let me push you on this question of what is true and what is not true. If it does turn out to be true, there has been a whole lot of people lying over the last year, and we will find out what the case is there. But you take specifically one citation in the dossier, one critical piece of information, setting aside some of the more intense the more entertaining aspects of the dossier, which we wont get into tonight. There is this question a lot of people jumped on, which is Michael Cohen, Donald Trumps longtime lawyer. It talked about it meeting he had in prague with a russian official operative who was a sort of cut out for the kremlin, a member of the intelligence service. One question that has been raised is, first of all, Michael Cohen said, on the record, i have never been to prague. So that is factually wrong. The question is, ok, maybe there is a location wrong, a gauge wrong. A date wrong. I am just asking a process question. How might a professional officer with, acting in good faith, have sources who might get some things wrong in this kind of world that chris steele is operating in . Ofna i think the quality his sources has proven to be high. I think the people he validated by putting them into his report, he felt strongly that there was truth there. I have to tell you, i read parts of that report aloud to my husband, tony mendez, who was a fairly wellknown counterfeiter, forger working at the cia. That Michael Cohen does not say he was in prague at that day and time does not carry a lot of water with my husband. Nohe is citing, there is plane ticket showing my arrival, no passport stamped showing i , that wasgh control tonys business for much of his life. It is possible for michael to have not come to an airport, not coming across border control. Everything. It is the fbis business to try to run those things down. Of the using some comments, the Communications Intelligence from our allies in europe, from the dutch, from the britishk, who were picking up theirl intelligence electronic intercepts has been one way they were able to push some of that forward in the document. Mark to round out this first part on, what do we know now, the one outstanding question is this. Was there collusion . Was there not collusion . Whoolleagues at the times have been working on this for a re is our answer is the certainly a whole lot more after a year of reporting that we know about contacts between trump advisors, campaign officials, hangerson, and russian government officials, russian operatives. There has been a whole lot of more suspicious evidence than there was an actual hard evidence of meetings that had been denied. If you go back to the beginning of last year, there was a categorical denial from the president that anybody in his campaign had anything to do with russia at any point. That has been systematically proven to be not the case over the last year, by the reporting of a lot of people. The question is that still remains, was there a systematic attempt by the Trump Campaign and the president himself to work with the russians in what is now known as this Disruption Campaign that scott laid out . Hink that is going to be and some of you in questions may push back on that but we have tried to be careful in what we know and what we dont know, and what are some of the Big Questions. In my mind, there are still a lot of Big Questions out there. This may be the year it all becomes clear. We may be, five years from now, talking to the same group of people with the same questions. Scott, the questions i asked earlier about the russians with the russians need american help to do what they did and to carry out this kind of fairly sophisticated Political Campaign . This is kind of my opinion, and people can disagree with it, but i dont actually think the russians needed any help. I think it is somewhat to think that russians, many of whom is spent time in university here and have a good understanding of america, very good english, with the help to do would need help to do what they did. They did not need help with the hacking. They did not need help with the leaking, particularly because they went through wikileaks. Wikileaks has a volunteers who can advise them. Has a of volunteers who can advise them. But how against you have to be to dump emails on the eve of the Democratic National convention . It was not super sophisticated. We hear that there was a micro targeted Facebook Advertising at the level of precincts and so on. So much, andthat facebook has been so stingy with details. I went back to facebook last week and asked them again, and they said that there was no geographic as you probably know, facebook has a dropdown menu, and you can be specific in how you target facebook tags. Facebook ads. You can do women between 25 and 33 and live in these three states and vote democratic. In this case, there was ideological targeting,