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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Evan Osnos, David Remnick and Joshua Yaffa on Trump and Russia
00:16:12
Evan Osnos, David Remnick and Joshua Yaffa on Trump and Russia
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- [00:00]
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- [01:17]
David Remnick
I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [01:18]
Evan Osnos
On today's Politics and More podcast, David.
- [01:21]
David Remnick
Remnick talks with New Yorker writers Evan.
- [01:23]
Evan Osnos
Osnos and Joshua Yaffa.
- [01:26]
David Remnick
They discuss the relationship between the US.
- [01:27]
Katie Drummond
And Russia and how it is developing.
- [01:30]
Evan Osnos
In the early days of the Trump presidency. Not since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 has Russia and its relationship to the United States been so much in the news. Like other precedents before him, Donald Trump promised to reset relations with Russia and make them better. But now the subject of Russia seems to be the source mainly of scandal, confusion and confrontation. I've been writing about the situation in Russia for, I don't know how long, since the late 80s. And I've been working now with two great reporters for the New Yorker, Evan Osnos in Washington and Joshua Yaffa, who's joining us from Moscow. Josh, we had the impression that Trump's victory was celebrated in Russia, initially at least by the Kremlin elite and therefore official state television. What about now?
- [02:22]
David Remnick
Now you've definitely seen a change in mood, the sense of euphoria, the sense of triumphalism is gone. Of course, it was always a bit tricky for the Kremlin and its various political and media mouthpieces to be overly triumphant, because this was officially and technically not Russia's victory at all. Russia had no hand in it. But certainly Russian officials weren't squeamish about celebrating what they saw as an electoral victory. That should have a whole cascading series of positive effects for Russia or for at least the Kremlin's list of political priorities, whether in Syria, Ukraine, sanctions or elsewhere. On the flip side, wait a minute.
- [03:07]
Evan Osnos
They must see also Donald Trump. Yes, it's true, he's complimented Putin for his strength and his resilience, and he's mocked Obama and Hillary Clinton in comparison. But at the same time, Vladimir Putin seems to me to be a political figure who prizes stability, who prizes predictability. Donald Trump does not offer stability and predictability, at least that I can see. The reason that so many people are upset is not just a matter of ideology. It's a matter of they don't know what's going to happen next or come out of the president's mouth. Why would Putin find Trump so congenial?
- [03:54]
David Remnick
Michael Kirk It's a good question. I think everything you listed as to the dangerous unpredictability of Trump for everyone, including for Putin, is something that the Kremlin is becoming aware of now at this point, relatively late date. But ultimately it's possible to look at Trump as a kind of win win if you're Putin. Either he follows through on his campaign promises, he really is this conciliatory to the point of being obsequious figure in his relationship with Putin. He makes nice with Russia, he cancels the sanctions, he makes some master deal about Ukraine, and he sits down with Putin like the presidents did at Yalta after World War II and divides up the world and Putin is happy, or he brings a measure of turbulence and disorder to US Politics, weakening and distracting the US Political system.
- [04:57]
Evan Osnos
Michael Kirk My understanding is that at a certain point very recently, the Kremlin told state television, which is what really almost everybody, where everybody gets their news from, said let's cool it on Trump. Enough with the celebration. Let's have our coverage be ratcheted back more subtle, more, maybe even handed might be the wrong word, but not the way it's been since the election. And I have to admit I'm a bit of a Russian nerd. So I'm watching these broadcasts on YouTube, the evening news, the Sunday review shows, and the rhetoric really is different. In the last week or so.
- [05:37]
David Remnick
You're right. And it seems like the turning point was the resignation of Trump's former National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn. And that was seen in Russia as a really pivotal and quite disturbing, I think, event and a sign for Russia that Trump was not going to be able to quickly, easily, with great impunity, force through a more conciliatory, quasi, pro Russian agenda. What also caused some discomfort is the way that Russia and this notion of Russian meddling, Russian interference, Russia having some sort of nefarious hand in both Trump's campaign and now his presidency, that that question is, isn't leaving the political scene.
- [06:28]
Evan Osnos
Well, that brings us to Washington, Evan. Let's start with first things. We have 17 intelligence agencies saying that Russia, in a Sense, hacked the 2016 election, hacked the DNC, hacked John Podesta, the campaign leader for Hillary Clinton. And yet the main report that we have in our hands, the declassified report, is not full of evidence. And that's led some people, some on the left, some on the right, to say, hey, wait a minute, we've been to this movie before. Remember Iraq, Remember weapons of mass destruction? Are we absolutely sure that this was something that was not only done by Russians, but was directed by the Russian leadership? What do we know about that?
- [07:19]
Joshua Yaffa
Well, frankly, I think the skepticism is healthy. The difference here is that in 2002 and 2003, there was a deeply divided intelligence community. This time around, the picture looks quite different. If you look at the report that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, released in January, what he said was that actually three agencies, the FBI, the CIA, and the nsa, had also reached their own conclusions about this broader campaign, beyond just hacking. That extended to what's now known as fake news or social media manipulation, and perhaps something beyond that. But what's important about that is that those three different agencies use very different tools. And since then, in the reporting, if you are in Washington and you're talking to people who are looking at these questions, you are not hearing, and it's not to say that there's not anybody out there who doesn't agree, but you're not hearing the kind of discord within the intelligence community that you would have heard around the war in Iraq.
- [08:21]
Evan Osnos
So then what happens next? What is the state of play in terms of investigations? How many will there be, and what are the limits on them? We do have a Republican president and a Republican Congress, and Jeff Sessions is the Attorney general, et cetera, et cetera. Are these investigatory bodies going to be able to go full tilt into what they want to do, or will there be a struggle?
- [08:45]
Joshua Yaffa
Well, there was and is a lot of concern, particularly among Democrats, about whether or not the investigative agencies, which are part of, of the executive branch, so the FBI, for instance, CIA, whether they would have the independence to be able to do a full fledged investigation that may lead ultimately to the doorstep of the president. But in this case, something has changed. And what changed is substantial. And that's that Mike Flynn, as we all now know, who was national security adviser, was driven out after 24 days in office because it turned out that he had misled the vice president, Mike Pence, about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. Why did that matter? Well, because for a lot of Republicans in Congress, or at least enough of the Republicans who have real power, people who run the Intelligence Committee, for instance, or the Senate Armed Services Committee, they began to say, well, hold on a second, this is really unusual that a national security advisor was having these kinds of contacts and then not being truthful about the nature of them. And for that reason, it has given a lift to these other processes outside the executive branch, like the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation, like the Senate Armed Services Committee, which in fact, may turn out to be as much of a source of energy and activity in getting to the bottom of this as the traditional law enforcement and intelligence agencies are. And what you're hearing from across the spectrum, before you even get to the Democrats, is that there is genuine concern here that this issue, which became sort of clotted up with politics and partisanship in the early, early days, right around the time of the election and then into the transition and over to the inauguration, that now that the more that the intelligence community has learned, the more serious this seems to be as essentially an insult to democratic institutions. And that's why you're seeing some of these folks in the Senate who regard themselves really as institutionalists, people who defend American structures and processes, not necessarily one present or another, that they believe that this has to be investigated thoroughly.
- [10:45]
Evan Osnos
What is the greatest peril for Donald Trump himself? In other words, where do you think he's most vulnerable? Is it the dossier that CNN and buzzfeed broke? Is it financial ties? Is it conversations? What is the deepest problem for Donald Trump in terms of the investigations and in terms of politics?
- [11:10]
Joshua Yaffa
The honest answer is it's too early to know. I mean, the truth is there are just a tremendous number of questions about his finances that we simply don't know the answer to because he won't release his tax returns. But one key point here that I think is important to recognize is that Donald Trump's comments about his relationship with Russia, if that's the right word, have evolved. And he started off by being very sort of flippant. You remember, during the campaign, he at one point said publicly, russia, if you're listening, please go ahead and paraphrasing here, but, you know, help us find Hillary Clinton's 30,000 lost emails. That was what he said. Later, he began to realize, I think it was pretty clear that as there was more attention on this subject, he began to be a little bit more judicious. And then in his press conference in February, he used a language that is recognizable to anybody who's ever covered an administration or an investigation as sort of legalistic language. He said, to the best of my knowledge, I don't know of any of my associates or anybody in my campaign who was in touch with representatives of Russia. Now, what this suggests is that he has drawn a very hard line on the idea that nobody in his orbit was in contact with Russia, when early indications are that, in fact, there were people who were in contact with Russians. Mike Flynn, for sure.
- [12:29]
Evan Osnos
But wait a minute. What's wrong with being in contact with Russians?
- [12:32]
Joshua Yaffa
Absolutely not. There's nothing wrong with it. I mean, this is the thing. So there's nothing legally wrong with being in contact with Russians in a whole variety of different circumstances. It's only problematic if, number one, you lie about it, either to the FBI or to your colleagues in the White House or to the American public. Or, number two, if the nature of your interactions are such that it's about being subject to influence or about the other side accumulating evidence that can be used against you to blackmail you. These are the things that the investigators are going to be looking at.
- [13:02]
Evan Osnos
Josh, sitting in Moscow, you're in a different media universe. You're hearing a different level of reporting and, let's face it, gossip, too. How do the Russian officials that you talk to and the people that you talk to think about these investigations as they start to chug forward? Is there any sense of foreboding there, or are they delighted?
- [13:23]
David Remnick
There's a slightly growing sense of foreboding going back to the summer, well before the election, during campaign season, when these allegations, both in regard to hacking and also this whole another kind of separate universe of supposed Trump Russian ties began to surface. All of those claims were batted away. You got a lot of eye rolling, a lot of laughter. Russian officials and people close to the state quasi officials didn't even really want to give those claims the time of day. And in a way, the dossier, the Steele dossier, with some of the.
- [14:05]
Evan Osnos
More Christopher Steele, who is an English intelligence agency, who was then working on behalf of Oppo research, opposition research for the Democrats.
- [14:16]
David Remnick
That's right.
- [14:16]
Evan Osnos
Who compiled this dossier.
- [14:18]
David Remnick
Some of the more colorful, shall we say, allegations in that dossier almost added to the circus like atmosphere of this entire universe of claims about Russia and Trump, Russia and the election. And Russian officials, I don't think they necessarily welcomed by any means the allegations contained in the Steele dossier, but they.
- [14:39]
Evan Osnos
Were able to or anybody who stayed at that hotel. Now, Josh, hang on for one second, Evan, what do we know about that dossier? Does it turn out to be complete nonsense or is there an element of truth in it, or what intelligence saying about that?
- [14:55]
Joshua Yaffa
Well, it was initially greeted with considerable skepticism by intelligence professionals because as one of them put it to me, this was a kind of nutty set of claims. Since then, which has now been more than six weeks, there's beginning to be a different mood. What you're hearing these days from some of the intelligence officers involved in this process is that actually the more they chase down some of the leads, the more that some of this is bearing out. Now, we don't know exactly what that means. It's not clear which pieces of it are bearing out. But it's worth saying that in my reporting and elsewhere in other reporting, it's been said that the most explosive, the most salacious elements of the dossier have so far not been proved. It's more about the underlying idea that there may have been a long running campaign going back months or perhaps more to try to really interfere with the US Election to a degree that most Americans had no idea about.
- [15:57]
Evan Osnos
Josh, how do you think this ends? And I know that prediction is the worst form of journalism, but why not?
- [16:05]
David Remnick
I think that it gets more uncomfortable for Putin and those around him in the Kremlin rather than less. And I think that's why we saw them react in the wake of the Finn resignation with this kind of pullback the way they did, because things are now getting specific and real and durable. And that's, I think, exactly what Putin didn't want and didn't expect from this operation. And you hear pretty uniformly from people in the Russian political class that the Kremlin expected Clinton to win. And what they were doing then is essentially trying to weaken her as a likely president and weaken the American political system as a whole that she would be ruling over. And so for them, Trump, and therefore the sustained attention that's lasted far past November on him. And Russia is something that they didn't expect, bet on, or want. And now that bill is coming due.
- [17:19]
Evan Osnos
That was David Remnick, Evan Osnos, and Joshua Yaffa.
- [17:27]
Katie Drummond
What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily bas. And maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [17:55]
Joshua Yaffa
I want a shark that that eats.
- [17:56]
Katie Drummond
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [18:00]
Joshua Yaffa
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
- [18:09]
Katie Drummond
Week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me. One day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.