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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Trump Asks, “How Did We End Up Here?” We Suggest: “Follow the Money”
00:20:55
Trump Asks, “How Did We End Up Here?” We Suggest: “Follow the Money”
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- [00:00]
A
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B
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, August 23rd. Dorothy I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. On Tuesday in the Eastern District Court of Virginia, Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign's former chairman, was found guilty on multiple counts of tax and bank fraud. At virtually the same moment, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York announced that they had reached a plea deal with Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer. Cohen said that Trump directed him to break campaign finance laws that thus implicating him as an unindicted co conspirator. Earlier this week, Rachel Maddow asked Cohen's lawyer, Lanny Davis, whether Cohen was cooperating with Mueller in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
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C
So I can't tell you the answer to that question about contacts between Michael and the special counsel. But I can tell you that Mr. Cohen has knowledge on certain subjects that should be of interest to the special counsel and is more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows, not just about the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election, which the Trump Tower meeting was all about, but also knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on.
- [02:56]
B
Adam Davidson joins me to discuss how the corrupt business practices at the core of the Trump Organization led to his legal liabilities as president. Adam, the Times reported on Trump's bewilderment in today's paper at his plight, and he asked, we started with collusion. How did we end up here? So I want to hear your answer to that question.
- [03:21]
D
I mean, in a sense, we always were heading here. And, I mean, I think that Trump and his defense team set up this explicit red line. There's something called Russian collusion, and that may or may not be legitimate to investigate, according to them. But then on the other side of that red line there is Trump's business, Trump's private financial activity, and that is off limits. Now, it's a nonsense assertion. There's no reason why any activity by anybody would be off limits to investigation. But that has been their strong belief. And weirdly to me, it's something that GOP leadership has strongly supported. Now, it has always been the assumption of people who cover the Trump Organization that there cannot be a red line, because the Trump Organization's private, unethical, possibly illegal activity and any possible collision with Russia would be the same activity. It would be part of the same group of people doing the same sort of thing. But we now know with the high degree of certainty that activities related to Trump's private business and activities related to the campaign were done in the same way, often by the same people in the same office doing the same thing. There is no red line. And now all of Trump's activity is not only fair game for investigators, it's an absolute necessity for Mueller and others to look into if they want to come to a full understanding of the Russia probes.
- [05:10]
B
So along these lines, what do you think could prove most damaging to Trump in Cohen's admission and Manafort's verdict?
- [05:22]
D
So I would say that there's sort of different buckets. So the immediate bucket is that Trump is now formally implicated in a specific crime related to the election. That is a game changer on its if we learn nothing else, that's huge. But the other thing in my mind that the Cohen guilty plea, more than the Manafort guilty verdict, tell us is that it is now not just an option for Mueller or other investigators to look at Trump's private business dealings. It is now essential there is no possible way to have a credible Russia inquiry that does not thoroughly investigate.
- [06:08]
B
Why do. How do you say that?
- [06:11]
D
So I talked to Alan Weisselberg. This is the longtime right hand man of the president, his chief financial officer, his money guy, the guy who knows everything. If we want to understand this crime that Cohen pled guilty to and implicated the President, we need to know what Allen Weisselberg's standard practices were. And we know from reporting that Trump's way of doing business is, at best, highly unethical and extremely risky and almost certainly illegal in some dimensions. So there is no way that we can have the president's former attorney pleading guilty to a crime, implicating the president, saying, the way we broke the law was the standard way that Trump's senior business official routinely broke the law or routinely hid money. And we don't then look into how Allen Weisselberg at the Trump Organization looked into money.
- [07:19]
B
And as you say, this is what Trump has always feared most. Tell us a little bit more about Allen Weisselberg, because he's really been sort of under the radar, and what you're saying makes it sound as though he actually could provide far more damaging and extensive information than Cohen has been able to and will continue to provide.
- [07:41]
D
Absolutely. Here's a strong prediction. You are about to hear this name nonstop. Allen Weisselberg, who has obsessively maintained his privacy, is about to become one of the most famous people in the history of the country. That is my prediction. Allen Weisselberg began working for Fred Trump, Trump's dad, in 1970. When Donald Trump started to enter the business in 1973, Weisselberg quickly became his financial deputy. He has been the money man for Donald Trump for his entire career. I have interviewed, as you know, many, many people who worked in the Trump Organization or work there now. And, you know, as a standard practice, as a reporter, I say who would really know everything. And every single person said, well, Allen Weisselberg knows everything, but he'll never talk to you. Alan Weisselberg is a man of enormous discipline, it seems, because he, you know, he. Far more than Michael Cohen or any other single individual, is why the Trump Organization has not previously been, you know, indicted for crimes, even though many, many people feel that it has committed crimes. So Weisselberg knows everything. There's not really been a way to get that information except by Weisselberg himself sharing it. That's why if he cracks and there is evidence that he's cracking, we really will know pretty much the full picture of how Donald Trump made money, how he spent money, and any crimes related to that.
- [09:27]
B
And Trump said in a taped interview with Fox News, he said a few days ago that he thinks the practice of flipping should almost be illegal. And, of course, now there's the prospect that Weisselberg will be flipping.
- [09:40]
D
In fact, it seems that Weisselberg has already, to some degree, flipped. He's already signaled that he will not fall on a sword to protect his wanton dad.
- [09:51]
B
How so?
- [09:53]
D
So there was. There's this ongoing civil lawsuit that the New York Attorney General has brought against the Trump foundation, and the lawsuit is truly damning. I mean, it shows that this was not a foundation in any sense of the word. It was really just a scam, a way for Trump to avoid paying taxes and to funnel money from cronies to other people who he wanted to funnel money to, including to sway the election. And Allen Weisselberg was deposed in this case. And it's not just that he protected himself. He seemed to almost go out of his way to undermine President Trump. So, for example, in the deposition, he makes clear that while he was in legal filings on the board of the Trump foundation for many years, that he didn't know he was on the board of the Trump Foundation. He had nothing to do with it. Nobody had ever told him he was on the board of the Trump Foundation. Then, even more damning, one of the key bits in the New York Attorney General's case against the Trump foundation, there's a really important scene that happens where the Trump foundation is used to give money to political groups in Iowa to pay off, you know, folks who will then hopefully support Trump. And the man who did the paying was Alan Weisselberg. And they say, who told you to pay that money? What is revealed is that there was a middle person, presumably maybe Trump's assistant or someone else who told him to go. But Allen Weisselberg went out of his way to say, well, I knew the order came from Trump. This was not just a person under deposition telling the truth. This was someone adding information that put Trump in jeopardy. If that is his approach to being interviewed by investigators, it's a strong signal that he is ready to be fairly forthcoming if his own freedom is in jeopardy.
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E
Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlemagne Tha God, and so many more. That's all on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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B
So, as these various inquiries continue and as we learn more about the Trump Organization, the way the Trump Organization did business, what kind of light will it shed on Trump's longstanding business dealings with Russia and his, what seems to be a particularly odd affinity for Putin.
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D
To an obsessive degree? The Trump Organization not only made much of its money over the last decade from doing business with Russians, and we should say people from the former Soviet Union in general, and we're going to get more and more of a vision of a New York real estate celebrity whose business is essentially dead in America and who becomes a vehicle for all sorts of activity from the former Soviet Union, as well as other parts of.
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B
The world, including oligarchs and Russian banks lending money to his organization at a time when American banks lending money to.
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D
Him or paying him to make highly suspect projects that bear all the hallmarks of money laundering and other financial frauds.
- [13:56]
B
Okay, so I want to stop you right there, because this is where we begin to understand Manafort a little bit better, and maybe you can help us through that. It's interesting that Trump promised to hire only the best, as he put it, and instead, what do we have? We have Manafort Cohen, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Rick Yates. So this is a man who surrounds himself with people who conduct business and politics in extremely questionable ways. So tell us about Manafort and his ties to Russia.
- [14:28]
D
So Manafort was somebody who had become somewhat well known in the US As a political consultant and found it was much easier to make obscene amounts of money working with some of the, you know, frankly, worst people in the world. The important thing to know in this context is the 1990s into the 2000s is a bizarre moment in global financial history. For most of human history, rich countries have a lot of money, and the money flows a little bit to peripheral developing economies. But for the first time in human history that we know of, it was reversed, where for a whole host of reasons, from the early 2000s on, there's a lot of money in poor countries, oil rich countries, China, Russia, that. That is capable of flowing back to the United States. And this created a condition where there was basically more money than capacity to spend it, to manage it, to invest it. And a huge number of Americans and Brits kind of flocked to these sketchy parts of the world and grabbed a bit of this cash.
- [15:46]
B
So talk about that in terms of Manafort's connections to Ukraine and Russia.
- [15:52]
D
So what makes Manafort and Trump stand out in that crowd is that they weren't just passive recipients of this money. They were actually going to the countries and helping the oligarchs in those countries figure out how to hide their money, how to use their money to acquire more power to disguise their illegal activity, et cetera. And I say Manafort far more than Trump. I mean, Manafort was frankly much more successful at helping oligarchs launder their money or whatever, the various things that he did. And there was no way to not know this about Manafort. When I said that there were three buckets. Bucket one, in my mind, is stuff that some people know already. It's simply a pattern and practice of business that is, at best, unbelievably unethical against the interests of the United States that both Trump and Manafort engaged in for many years. So Bucket one is sort of Donald Rumsfeld known knowns. Bucket two, in my mind, is the sort of known unknowns. If you look at Trump's behavior, if you look at the way the Trump Organization has operated, we know there's much darker stuff there, because they're acting in a way that suggests there's darker stuff, and they want to prevent anyone from looking at it, but we don't fully know what that is. And then there's the unknown unknown. We have a pretty strong picture of Donald Trump as an incredibly unethical businessman who flouted laws. To me, the unknown unknowns are to what extent was he not just aiding and abetting money laundering? To what extent was he not just kind of hiring dummy people because those are the people willing to work for him and doing business with scummy people because those are the people to do business for him? Or to what extent was he actually explicitly running a criminal organization? Was he setting up systems for money laundering for other things? You know, we know we're going to find a lot of dirty stuff, but is it possible? It's far, far, far dirtier than we realize. And then the explicit nature of the relationship with Russia is another major question mark that we still don't know the answer to. But there's no scenario in which the end of this is anything other than severely damaging to the president. And that makes it really hard for the GOP to continue to protect him.
- [18:29]
B
Okay, so I do want to ask you about that. So far, Republicans in the Senate have been mostly silent Sort of painfully so. In the House, though, party leaders are beginning to advise candidates running in vulnerable districts to speak out against Trump when they have to. And it's unfortunate for the party that two House Republicans are also facing corruption indictments, thus giving Democrats, you know, major talking points which somehow they didn't feel they completely had before this. So talk about that a little bit, and how this culture of corruption you're talking about can seem to be infecting the entire party.
- [19:13]
D
So, you know, the obvious thing to say these days, and everyone says it all the time, is the Republicans will never do anything and Trump's base will not change no matter what. And clearly that's true to some degree. And clearly the, you know, the safest prediction is, well, it'll just continue as it is, and nothing will ever change unless the Democrats win. That, to me, is why this third bucket of the unknown unknowns becomes very important. What are the surprises that are going to come out? And what are the actual criminal, explicitly criminal activity? So we now have, for the first time, Trump implicated in an actual and specific crime. If there were three more of those or eight more of those instances, I think it's going to be increasingly hard for the GOP to hold their nose. And then on top of it, I think the possibility of something that truly shocks the moral core of at least two GOP senators is a real possibility. Also, crucially, is that we are seeing in recent weeks that Mueller's poll numbers, sort of weird that people are taking polls about the favorability of Mueller, but they are, have gone way up. The feeling in the country that it's a legitimate investigation has gone up, and there's indications that there's a tiny softening of the bedrock support for Donald Trump. And so all of this news seems to make it further likely that Democrats take the House, which means we, in a certain sense, that the real investigation into Trump has not yet begun.
- [20:51]
B
Right. And so what you're saying, in short, is to cite one of the many Watergate phrases that are being bandied about, is follow the money.
- [21:02]
D
Follow the money. And remember, everything we know today is in the most hostile to knowing anything conditions imaginable. We have a compliant House and Senate. We have a hubbled Department of Justice. We have a president capable of driving the news cycle. You flip one of the Houses of Congress and you give Democrats subpoena power, investigative power that they don't have now. And, you know, I would expect the day after the new House is seated, we're going to see his tax returns very quickly. And we're going to see many different House committees competing with each other for who can more quickly and more publicly humiliate the president. So the details, the specificity, the richness of detail that I think does shock the conscience, we're going to get more and more and more of that.
- [22:03]
B
Thank you so much, Adam. To be continued.
- [22:06]
D
Yes, that's for sure.
- [22:09]
B
Adam Davidson, a New Yorker staff writer, writes the Swamp Chronicles column for new yorker.com this has been the Political Scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe by searching for the New Yorker in your page podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. This program is produced by Alex Barron and Hannibal Lentz. For newyorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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F
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 basis. 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.
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D
I want a shark that that eats.
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F
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
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D
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.
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F
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.
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D
From.
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B
PRX.