[Vision2020] Bill Moyers Interviews Veteran Prosecutor on Trump/Russia

[Nicholas Gier]

*This post first appeared at* BillMoyers.com
<http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-russia-story-coming-together-heres-make-sense/>
 *on November 21, 2017*.

*Editor’s Note:* The news is coming so fast and furious, from so many
sources and in so many fragments, that it takes more than a scorecard to
keep up with the Trump-Russia connection. It takes a timeline — a “map,” if
you will, of where events and names and dates and deeds converge into a
story that makes sense of the incredible scandal of the 2016 election and
now of the Trump administration.

For years Steve Harper produced timelines for the cases he argued or
defended in court as a successful litigator. Retired now from practicing
law, Harper has turned his experience, talent, and curiosity to monitoring
for BillMoyers.com the bizarre and entangled ties between Vladimir Putin
and Donald Trump and the murky world of Russian oligarchs, state officials,
hackers, spies, and Republican operatives. You can check out the over 700
entries right here. <http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-russia-timeline/> But
for an overview — and some specifics — of recent developments, I called up
Steve to give us a sense of the emerging story.


                                           *—Bill
Moyers*

------------------------------

*Bill Moyers: You’re the consummate trial lawyer with a celebrated
reputation for summing up the closing argument for the jury, but from our
work together on the timeline I know you also have the instincts of a
journalist. So write the lede to the story this far: What’s the most
important thing for us to know about the Trump/Russia connection as of
today?*

*Steven Harper:* Everything the Trump campaign told you about the
connections between Trump and Russia was a lie.

*Moyers: Go on.*

*Harper:* Well, there are a number of different dimensions to the issue,
but let’s just take the easiest one. The other day *The Washington
Post* published
a very good article that said for all of Trump’s denials during the
campaign of any connections between him, his campaign and Russia, it turns
out there were 31 interactions. And there were 19 meetings. Furthermore,
what Trump and his people have been doing since then is everything they can
to keep the public from being aware of the truth. And this feeds into the
obstruction story.

*Moyers: How so?*

*Harper:* Up to and including the firing of James Comey, Trump did
everything he could to try to shut down, slow down or stop the
investigation. First, he tried to shut down the investigation of Mike
Flynn. Then it turned out that Mike Flynn is probably just a piece of a
much larger problem, which is Russia. Trump admitted to the Russian
ambassador and to the Russian foreign minister shortly after he fired Comey
that now he’s got some relief from the Russia problem — in other words,
Comey’s gone! But what’s happened since then is the continuing effort to
interfere with the investigation, even in the form of tweets — all of which
sure look a lot to me like witness intimidation for some of the key players
in the saga.

And then there’s a third component, which is in a way the most insidious —
the willingness of the congressional GOP to be complicit in all of this.
We’re talking now about a prescription for disaster for democracy. It’s all
part of the same story. If you think about it, every single person who has
said something about there being no connection between Trump and Russia
during the campaign has been caught in a lie about it. Even with this
fellow George Papadopoulos, the talking point immediately became, “Well, he
didn’t get in trouble for anything that he did, he got in trouble for lying
to federal investigators.” Sure, and what was he lying to federal
investigators about? About whether or not there were any contacts between
the Trump campaign and Russia. And that’s the part that everybody glosses
over in terms of the talking points on the Republican side.

*Moyers: George Papadopoulos was the youngest of Trump’s foreign policy
team and not a prominent public figure. Now Trump loyalists say he wasn’t
taken all that seriously by the campaign.*

*Harper:* That’s another remarkable thing, of course — all the policy
advisers all of a sudden are relegated to the status of low-level, unpaid
volunteers, even though they sat in a meeting of foreign policy advisers
with the presidential candidate himself early on. When they turn out to be
suspects in this investigation, they all drop to the bottom of the heap,
and it’s as if Trump had never heard of any of them.

*Moyers: It’s usual in a case like this to move the paramount figures to
the expendable list, no?*

*Harper:* Oh sure, absolutely, and I fully expect before this is over,
you’re going to get to a point where Donald Trump will say, “Oh, yeah,
Donald Jr. — you know he was only my son for a very limited period of
time.” It’s absurd. And it started with Paul Manafort — the same Manafort
who actually delivered decisive delegates to Trump during a crucial period
of the campaign. When the heat was turned on Manafort, they all said: “Oh,
well, he played a limited role for a limited period of time.” Yeah, he was
only manager of the campaign, how about that?

*Moyers: Perhaps Trump, who aspired to be a great American president, will
confess: “And I was just a real estate guy.” [laughter] Robert Mueller is
moving quickly with the investigation now. We have new news almost every
day. What’s the most recent development that strikes you as most important?*

*Harper:* Three different strands have now begun to coalesce. There’s a
core strand running through it that I call the “follow the money” strand.
Perhaps most of what happened throughout the campaign, if you view it from
Vladimir Putin’s side of the transaction, looks quite reasonable and makes
a great deal of sense. Putin wants to eliminate sanctions on Russia, both
because they affect him personally in a financial way and because they
affect his country’s economy in a big way. So you dangle in front of Trump
the prospect of a Trump Tower in Moscow. We always knew that Trump wanted a
Trump Tower in Moscow, because Trump told us he did. But what we didn’t
know was that during the campaign, the Trump organization was actively
negotiating for such a development.

But two other strands have come together, and we need to understand them
for all this to become a cogent narrative. The second strand involves
political operatives. It turns out we’re hearing about people like George
Papadopoulos, who obviously was in communication with the Russians, and
that strand is now probably taking Mueller — certainly taking me — further
up the food chain. Papadopoulos implicated Sam Clovis, the former
co-chairman of the campaign. And with people like Stephen Miller and Hope
Hicks, you’re getting right to the inner circle of the Trump campaign. All
of a sudden last year, these low-level underlings, as they are now being
described to us, were getting remarkable access, and they’re getting
responses from within the campaign. They’re not sending emails off into
cyberspace that no one ever answers; they’re hearing back from some of
these higher-ups.

And the third strand is what I would call the “digital strand.” Cambridge
Analytica, the Kushners, WikiLeaks — they’ve started coming together in a
very dramatic fashion over the past two or three weeks. Pundits say they
keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Well, didn’t John McCain say
<http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/332707-mccain-trump-firing-comey-wont-stop-this-centipede-scandal>,
“This is a centipede. I guarantee you there will be more shoes to drop.” It
seems as though there is just no limit to the number of shoes that keep
dropping in this thing. Everyone thought the big bombshell was the June 9
meeting and the Don Jr. emails that had set up that meeting in Trump Tower
relating to dirt the Russians were promising on Hillary Clinton. And then
we just get this even more stunning series of interactions and
communications and exchanges that show the people that Kushner hired to run
the digital campaign going to WikiLeaks, and reveal Don Jr. having direct
Twitter communications with WikiLeaks about Clinton documents. It’s just
remarkable. If all of this had hit at the same time, it would have been
blockbuster, but because of the dribbling out of it, no one focuses on the
extent to which some of these three strands coalesce. And they sometimes
coalesce around what I call very hot dates in the timeline.

*Moyers: Let’s pause right there. There’s a beginning to a story like this.
So I hope you’re reading a new book out this week by Luke Harding, once the
Moscow correspondent for The Guardian of London. The title is Collusion:
Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and how the Russians Helped Donald Trump Win
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566132/collusion-by-luke-harding/9780525562511/>.
Have you been following coverage of the book?*

*Harper:* Yes. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve read a couple of excerpts
and summaries of certain portions of it.

*Moyers: Harding, who’s a very experienced reporter, quotes the British
ex-spy, Christopher Steele, who worked in Russia for years and compiled
that notorious dossier on Trump that mysteriously appeared last year. He
quotes Steele saying that “Russian intelligence has been secretly
cultivating Trump for years.” As you and I discussed in August, Trump
appears to have attracted the attention of Soviet intelligence as far back
as 1987, on his first visit to Moscow — a visit arranged by the top level
of the Soviet diplomatic service, with the assistance of the KGB.*

*Trump was of course looking for business in Russia. If you go to Trump’s
own book, The Art of the Deal, he acknowledges “talking about building a
large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin in partnership with
the Soviet government.” And he quotes a letter he got from the Soviet
ambassador to Washington saying the Soviet state agency for international
tourism is inquiring about his interest in that partnership. Now, one has
to ask: There were lots of ambitious real estate moguls looking for deals
with Russia in the mid-’80s; why did they select Donald Trump?*

*Harper:* And that’s the $64,000 question. It’s very interesting and
Harding notes this as well, and it also was an early entry on our timeline
— that in 1988, when Trump came back from the Soviet Union, he first made
noises about wanting to run for president. Which brings us back to the
second strand developing in this story, which is the personal contacts, the
personal operatives, involved in a pretty straightforward if not classic
Russian intelligence operation. Russian agents — the recruiters — look for
soft spots in their target — in this case, the US — and those soft spots
become points of penetration. The Russians must have been astonished at how
they achieved penetration in Trump’s circle — astonished at the success
that they were having across many different fronts simultaneously.

*Moyers: I remember from my own experience in Washington in the ‘60s that
the Russians were always trying to find “soft targets” — American citizens
— who were drawn to that sort of relationship.*

*Harper:* And what could be a softer target for a guy like Putin than a guy
who measures the world and everyone’s self-worth in dollars?

*Moyers: Much of what Harding reports in his book is circumstantial, but it
adds up to what is fairly damning evidence. You’re the lawyer — how much
can circumstantial evidence be introduced in an argument in a trial?*

*Harper:* Plenty. There are lots of people sitting in jail who were
convicted on circumstantial evidence. In fact, how often is it that there
is actually what you would call eyewitness or direct evidence of criminal
behavior, except in a situation where you can get one of the
co-conspirators to turn state’s evidence and squeal on the others? People
talk about circumstantial evidence as if there’s something terrible about
it. Circumstantial evidence is the way most people go about proving their
cases, whether they’re civil or criminal cases. And what separates
circumstantial from direct evidence isn’t even all that clear. Would you
say that the email exchanges between Donald Trump Jr. and the lawyer who
was supposed to come to Trump Tower with dirt on Hillary Clinton were
circumstantial evidence or direct evidence? It’s certainly direct evidence
of Donald Trump Jr.’s intent when he says, “If you have what you say you
have, in terms of dirt on Clinton, I love it.”

Some people keep saying there’s there’s no collusion. Trump’s favorite
expression is “No collusion. No collusion. No collusion.” All right, let’s
talk about something else. Let’s talk about something the law recognizes as
conspiracy or “aiding and abetting.” Let’s talk about a conspiracy to
obstruct justice. In that respect, Trump’s own tweets become evidence. So
it’s not as clear as I think some of the talking-head pundits would like to
make it, that no collusion means the end of the inquiry. That’s just wrong.

*Moyers: Suppose the circumstantial or direct evidence prove to be true;
does it have to be out-and-out treason for Trump and his team’s actions to
be impeachable offenses?*

*Harper:* No. In all likelihood, treason may be the toughest thing of all
to prove, because treason, at least in a technical legal sense, requires
that you’re actually at war. And a decent defense could be for Trump that
there’s been no declaration of war, so whatever was going on you’re never
going to get it past the threshold of treason. There are still plenty of
legal bases for concluding that Trump has some serious problems. One would
be the election laws, including the financing of elections. It’s pretty
clear you can’t accept help from a foreign government in order to win an
election, and it seems pretty clear, at least to me, that if they weren’t
actually using the help — and that’s a big if; I think they were, based on
some of the things that I’ve seen — there’s certainly ample evidence that
they were willing to be participating in whatever help anybody would give
them to help Trump win the election.

The second category — apart from election laws and related finance laws —
would be aiding and abetting computer theft insofar as there were illegal
hacks into the DNC computers, and WikiLeaks and/or the Trump campaign knew
that that happened, knew the hacks were illegal and knew they were willing
to do everything they could to take advantage of it in order to help Trump
win the election. That’s another fertile ground for illegality.

And the third category would of course be what I think will ultimately turn
out to be the easiest to prove: the obstruction issues, relating to some of
the behavior that we already know that George Papadopoulos, for one,
engaged in when he lied to investigators about the nature of the
connections between Trump and Russia.

*Moyers: On the money issue, The Atlantic magazine published a very strong
piece
<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/donald-trump-jrs-messages-with-wikileaks-point-to-campaign-finance-violations/545903/>
last
week by Bob Bauer, in which he argues that Donald Trump Jr.’s private
Twitter correspondence with WikiLeaks provides evidence of criminal
violations of federal campaign finance rules which prohibit foreign
spending in American elections, as you pointed out. He reminds us that
those rules disallow contributions, donations or “anything of value”
provided by a foreign national to sway an election. Those rules also bar a
campaign from offering substantial assistance to a foreign national engaged
in spending on American races.*

*Here’s a direct quote from Bauer’s article: “Trump Jr.’s messages not only
powerfully support the case that the Trump campaign violated these rules,
but they also compound the campaign’s vulnerability to aiding and abetting
liability under the general criminal laws for assisting a foreign national
in violating a spending ban. … The facts and circumstances here are without
precedent in the history of campaign finance enforcement, and it’s hard to
imagine that any truly neutral analyst informed about the law would
conclude otherwise.”*

*So he concludes that Trump and his campaign face a “whopping legal
problem.”*

*Harper:* I agree with him completely. And here we reach one of what I call
“the hot dates” when all these strands coalesce. You have these
September-October email exchanges between Don Jr. and WikiLeaks. But now
listen to what else you have: On Oct. 12, [Trump’s friend and former
adviser] Roger Stone tells NBC that he has a backchannel communication with
WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks’ private message to Don Jr. suggests that Trump
publicize the Clinton documents from WikiLeaks. Fifteen minutes later Trump
Sr. tweets about those WikiLeaks documents. That’s on one day. This is all
on Oct. 12. And two days after that, Don Jr. tweets the very WikiLeaks link
that WikiLeaks had already suggested that they publicize. That’s one point
where these strands coalesce. My point is that Bauer’s case is even
stronger than he may realize when you look at what you and I have called
circumstantial evidence of what other things were happening, and how other
layers of action were behaving at the same time.

*Moyers: As you know, American intelligence has identified WikiLeaks as a
conduit for information that Russian operatives stole from Democrats during
the 2016 presidential campaign, and now of course it seems there was a
connection between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, as you’ve just
outlined it. What do we know about why the Russian government would choose
WikiLeaks to release information hacked from Hillary Clinton’s computers?*

*Harper:* I think it was an outlet that would ensure publicity, maximum
publicity. It’s a notorious organization. And I think if you want bad stuff
to get out there and you want everybody to notice it, WikiLeaks would be
the way to do it.

*Moyers: Donald Trump Jr. reportedly has released all of his correspondence
with WikiLeaks. Does this indicate his lawyers don’t think it is
incriminating?*

*Harper:* I think it is probably more likely the case that his lawyers
assume that it’s going to come out eventually anyway. So the best way to do
it is to sort of dribble these things out, hope for an intervening scandal,
like Al Franken groping somebody or Roy Moore upsetting the Alabama
election, and then let the mind of the body politic move on to something
different. The good news is that Robert Mueller is not going to be
distracted by the intervening events, and he’ll put all this together.

*Moyers: But how significant is it that when Donald Trump Jr. had all of
this information from WikiLeaks, it’s now being reported that he looked
around the campaign to see if he could find someone who would act on
WikiLeaks’ information, and it doesn’t seem that anyone responded? His
appeals seem to have fallen on deaf ears.*

*Harper:* What makes you think no one responded? The fact that there’s no
email trail doesn’t necessarily mean that there wasn’t a response. We know,
for example, that what was happening throughout the campaign were
interactions and conversations and discussions in which certainly one of
the topics included granting Russia relief from sanctions. I don’t conclude
that because an email response to Donald Jr. has yet to make its way into
the public domain, nothing happened.

*Moyers: So when Donald Trump on Oct. 10, tells the crowd at a campaign
rally, “I love WikiLeaks,” and accuses the press of not picking up on what
WikiLeaks was publishing, he knew WikiLeaks had dirt on Clinton, where it
came from, and he wanted to get it out.*

*Harper:* You would think so. And I’m most happy, frankly, that Mueller has
such an extraordinary team of talented lawyers working with him, because
the case from the prosecutor’s side is a dream in terms lending itself to a
coherent, cogent narrative that strikes me as a really damning case.

*Moyers: Is Julian Assange of WikiLeaks in any danger of facing US
prosecution?*

*Harper:* Not as long as he stays in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Let’s assume he will stay out of the country for a while. I suppose Trump
could pardon him.

*Moyers: Is there any way that Assange could be viewed as an agent of a
foreign power at this point, or is he just a rogue player?*

*Harper:* My opinion is that during the election, he was an agent acting
for the benefit for Trump. He claims
<http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/346904-assange-meets-us-congressman-vows-to-prove-russia-did-not-leak-him>
 that he wasn’t dealing with Russian documents. I find that difficult to
believe. And certainly, as you said, the US intelligence community is of
the view that WikiLeaks was the vehicle through which Russia distributed
and disseminated its hacked documents. And I think he’s clearly acting on
behalf of interests that are Russian interests.

*Moyers: What do you make of Assange and WikiLeaks urging Donald Trump Jr.
to suggest to his father that if he loses the election, he should contest
the election? What was that about?*

*Harper:* Chaos. I think the goal was chaos. That’s what takes me back to
believing that at some level Russia was behind what WikiLeaks was
proposing. Because for Putin there are two ways for him to improve Russia’s
standing. One is to figure out a way to bring his country up. One easy way
would be to get some relief from the sanctions. But an equally powerful way
to do it is to bring Western democracies, especially America, down. So what
better way to foment chaos than a postelection trauma, if you will, in
which Trump is contesting election results in various states and doing all
of the things he certainly would have been capable of doing? And of course,
WikiLeaks feeds right into Trump’s soft spot by suggesting, in that same
email that you just mentioned, that this could be good for him too,
particularly if what he really wants to do is launch a new media network.
So it all fits.

*Moyers: What do you make of the fact that Donald Trump Jr. did not report
to the FBI that WikiLeaks was soliciting him last year? Does that put him
legally at risk?*

*Harper:* The mere failure to report doesn’t, but it certainly adds to the
question about what Trump Jr.’s true motives and the motives of the Trump
campaign were in pursuing the information WikiLeaks was offering. Now, let
me give you something else to think about, and see if your reaction causes
you some of the heartburn it causes me.

In June of last year — quite a month, no? — there was another “hot date.”
Jared Kushner — Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser — assumed control of
the digital campaign and hired the firm Cambridge Analytica. We talked
about Cambridge Analytica a moment ago. Well, Cambridge Analytica’s vice
president had been Steve Bannon. And about the same time that Kushner hired
Cambridge Analytica, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica is reaching out to
WikiLeaks with an offer to help disseminate hacked documents.

And then you get to July 22 and WikiLeaks is releasing hacked documents. In
August, George Papadopoulos is continuing to push Russia on the campaign
team, Roger Stone is continuing to talk about his communications with
Assange and WikiLeaks (and it certainly looks as if Stone is predicting
more WikiLeaks releases of documents) and the daughter of the part-owner of
Cambridge Analytica, Rebekah Mercer — who is also a Trump donor — tells its
CEO to reach out to WikiLeaks too. And then Donald Jr.’s email exchange
with WikiLeaks comes in September. See what I mean? There’s a ramping up of
the process that culminates in those email exchanges that Don Jr. had with
WikiLeaks and that becomes, I think, an important narrative to
understanding the story.

*Moyers: I need some Tums.* [laughter]

*Harper:* It’s good and bad, I guess — getting mired in all these details.
The good news is we learn more facts. The bad news is we learn more facts —
and it may not be possible for Americans to put it all together and
conclude that anything significant happened, when actually there’s a grave
threat to democracy.

*Moyers: Let me pause right there. As Josh Marshall points out at Talking
Points Memo
<http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/rumblings-on-the-russia-front>, the
Justice Department is directly overseeing Mueller’s investigation. It has
absolute power over the inquiry. Meaning that Mueller is now investigating
his overseers. Isn’t that certain to have some impact on the process?*

*Harper:* I don’t think so. Let me tell you why. I think the only thing
that will affect the process, and this is the thing frankly that I fear
more than anything else, will be if Trump fires Mueller. We know Attorney
General Jeff Sessions has recused himself. If he should resign, that would
be a great victory for Trump, who could then appoint someone else as an
acting attorney general who could then fire Mueller. Otherwise, the ball
bounces to Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein’s been on record a couple of times
saying that he hasn’t seen any basis for firing Mueller. And at this point,
I have competing views of Rosenstein in general, but I think on this issue,
he realizes that his personal interest and his professional interest and
even the country’s interest requires that if Trump were to issue an order
to fire Mueller or even if he were to try to interfere with Mueller’s
investigation in some way, allowing him to do so will be a very bad thing
for Rosenstein personally. I don’t think he’ll do it.

*Moyers: There’s a precedent for this, of course. Nixon went ahead and
fired the special prosecutor investigating Watergate.*

*Harper:* Yes, but he had to go through [Attorney General] Richardson and
[Deputy Attorney General] Ruckelshaus to do it. Trump would have to fire
Rosenstein, then he’d have to fire an associate attorney general named
Rachel Brand, who — based on everything everything I’ve read about her —
would likely balk and not be inclined to follow an order unless she were
satisfied that there was in fact good cause to do it.

*Moyers: What might provoke Trump to risk everything — firestorm,
constitutional crisis, even impeachment — to fire Mueller?*

*Harper:* I think he’ll do it if he thinks that things are getting too
close. I think he’s already been close to doing it in the past. And I think
at some point, and I think it’s probably a question of when [not if], he
will fire Mueller. I really fear that’s what’s going to happen. And of
course the irony is that for the amount of time Mueller has spent on the
job, he’s achieved remarkable results. He’s working very quickly, very
efficiently. The median life of a special counsel is just under two years.
The average is three years. The Iran-Contra investigation went for six and
a half years. Whitewater went for more than eight years. The Valerie Plame
NSA leak went for two years. We’re what? Just five months in?

*Moyers: And Mueller’s already obtained two indictments and one guilty
plea.*

*Harper:* Precisely.

*Moyers: The indictments are for Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. But the
indictments are not related to the Trump/Russia connection, are they?*

*Harper:* I think the answer to that is it remains to be seen. That’s
clearly the way the Trump people are going to continue to try to spin it.
But step back for a minute and think about the fact that a campaign manager
[Paul Manafort] for a presidential candidate [Donald Trump] has been
indicted for money laundering, tax evasion and all sorts of other
wrongdoing arising from his work for Ukraine, where Putin and Russia were
fomenting trouble. And shortly after he became the manager of the campaign,
as we’ve learned, he was also offering to provide special briefings to a
Ukrainian oligarch with whom he’d had business dealings. I wouldn’t be at
all surprised to see at some point some of these things merge into one
another.

*Moyers: You mentioned earlier that a new series of Trump advisers are
under scrutiny. Hope Hicks is one of them. She’s perhaps the closest
staffer to Donald Trump. Not even 30 yet, keeps a low profile, been with
him a long time, apparently spends more time with the president than anyone
else on the White House team. We’ve learned Mueller wants to talk to her.
What have you learned about her and what can she add to this?*

*Harper:* She can add a lot, I suspect. And I suspect that Mueller thinks
so too, because as you say, she’s as close to the inner circle as you can
get. She was also present at two really key points in this story — and many
others, I could add. One in connection with what ultimately led to the
firing of James Comey in May of 2017 — she was around for that. And as you
may recall, we now have learned that it turns out that Trump had dictated
to Stephen Miller, another close aide, what was apparently a four-page
rant, or screed, of his real reasons for wanting to fire James Comey. So
it’s hard to imagine that Hope Hicks wasn’t somehow involved in, or at
least aware of, what was going on that weekend in Bedminster, New Jersey,
when Trump was pouring his rage into that letter.

She was also aboard Air Force One — and maybe the lesson is you just never
want to be on Air Force One with Donald Trump — when they were coming back
from Europe, and Trump, as we learned much later, had a hand, a very heavy
hand, in drafting a very misleading statement about what had transpired at
that June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr., Manafort, Kushner
and some Russians with ties to the Kremlin. Hope Hicks reportedly was
advocating on behalf of transparency, but it appears that she lost out. And
that’s just what we know Ms. Hicks was involved in. Who knows what else she
was involved in and participated in, but I suspect a lot.

I also think she’s got a bit of problem because Carter Page revealed
<http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/06/politics/carter-page-testimony-released/index.html>
 that she had been copied on those messages about what he had learned in
Russia, or what he was planning to learn in Russia, when she had denied
adamantly there had been no Trump campaign contacts with Russia. So she’s
got a bit of a consistency issue there, it would seem.

*Moyers: You mentioned Carter Page. He and George Papadopoulos traveled the
world, apparently representing themselves as able to speak for the Trump
campaign, even though the Trump campaign later said they weren’t. You’ve
tracked down many instances of Papadopoulos in particular speaking to
foreign leaders on behalf of Trump. Why is that important?*

*Harper:* Well, he’s given extraordinary access to some very high-level
people. He was giving speeches in which he was representing himself as
being able to speak on behalf of Trump at least with respect to certain
policies. And you know, it’s hard for me to imagine that he gets that kind
of access unless there’s some credibility to what he’s saying about what
his actual role in the campaign is. And of course we all know from the
infamous photo
<https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/715725628465680386> taken at
the Trump International Hotel that Papadopoulos was one of a handful of
people seated at the table with Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump as Sessions
presided over a meeting about Trump’s foreign policy and Trump told the
group
<http://www.businessinsider.com/jd-gordon-trump-adviser-ukraine-rnc-2017-3>
that
he didn’t “want to go to ‘World War III’ over Ukraine.”

And I believe that’s what started the process of making clear to everybody
who was on Trump’s foreign policy team that easing relations with Russia by
easing sanctions, would be something that Trump would be open to. And I
think a lot of what happens afterward you can fit into this broader
framework of the question: What is Putin’s angle in all this? Well, Putin’s
angle in all this is if he can get the Russian sanctions lifted, he’s a
winner. And if Trump will help him do that, great. And even if Trump can’t
help him, even if Trump doesn’t win the election, it can’t hurt that he’s
created some chaos in a Western democracy, which clearly is what he
intended and what happened.

*Moyers: You mentioned Jeff Sessions. In his testimony to Congress last
week, Sessions said it’s hard for him to remember meeting with, and
conversations about, the Russians because the Trump campaign was in
constant chaos. The fact that the campaign was in chaos certainly seems
accurate, but would his excuse play at all in a trial?*

*Harper:* No. And remember what Steve Schmidt, who was involved in John
McCain’s campaign, said? He said he hopes that Jeff Sessions never gets a
puppy because he’s not going to remember to feed it, he’s not going to
remember to get it watered, he’s not going to remember to let it out. That
puppy’s just going to be in terrible trouble.

But what’s interesting about Sessions to me is this: What Sessions said in
his recent statements was, I haven’t remembered that Papadopoulos raised
the issue of Trump meeting with Putin or members of the campaign meeting
with representatives of Putin until I read about it in the news reports.
But now that I’ve read about it, now I remember, and listen — I pushed back
really hard and I said that it would not be appropriate for anyone to be
meeting with a representative of a foreign government. All of the sudden,
it’s like the light has gone on in Jeff Sessions’ head. Now, you have a
situation sometimes in trials where a witness in a previous setting had
sworn that he couldn’t remember something. And then six months or a year
later, all of a sudden they have this epiphany and the memories came
flooding out. And there’s something counterintuitive about somebody who
says they remember more now about a specific event than they did a year
earlier when asked about that same specific event. That just doesn’t play
well with most juries.

And bear in mind, too, something else about Sessions that’s worth
remembering that I doubt would necessarily be obvious to non-lawyers. Going
into those Senate hearings, going into each one of those hearings, Sessions
had to know that he was going to be asked about all of this stuff. And he
had to know that he needed to be as familiar as he could be with whatever
he could learn so that what he gave was truthful, straightforward, candid
and ultimately something that the public and Congress would believe. And
yet despite that, at each subsequent appearance, somehow there’s something
new and the attorney general of the United States shrugs his shoulders and
says, “Oh, I guess I did know that.”

My problem is, I want Sessions to hang on. I don’t want him not to be
attorney general yet, because the minute that Sessions resigns or Trump
fires him, then you have the door open to an acting attorney general, and I
don’t want to live to see Scott Pruitt [head of the Environmental
Protection Agency] or [former New York mayor and Trump ally] Rudy Giuliani
become acting attorney general, which is something that Trump could do
without even Senate confirmation. It doesn’t even have to be those two
guys, because we know Trump has a plethora of cronies who will do whatever
he says, because Trump says that’s what he wants, and if Trump says he
wants Mueller fired, that to me is the disaster scenario for the country.

*Moyers: So, to sum up for now: What’s the most innocent explanation for
everything we know? What if all of this was simply Trump’s inexperienced
people trying to establish diplomatic rapport with the Russians and hoping
to reset America’s connection with Moscow?*

*Harper:* Well, the most innocent explanation would be a level of
incompetence and ignorance and stupidity that I honestly don’t think anyone
could credibly believe, because the most innocent explanation is that
Russia was launching a very sophisticated, multipronged intelligence
operation and succeeded, but they succeeded because of the blind ambition
and greed of the Trump organization coupled with a lack of judgment and
intelligence and a fundamental failure to take into regard anything that
would remotely look like patriotism when it came to the defense of
democracy, subjugating all of that to the need to win. That’s the most
innocent explanation. And I just don’t think all of them are that stupid.

*Moyers: So what’s the most damning explanation for everything we know?*

*Harper:* The most damning explanation is that the Russians launched a
sophisticated intelligence operation. They found willing partners up and
down the line throughout the Trump organization. And up and down throughout
the Trump organization, as the details of that intelligence operation
became known, the participants lied about it, lied about its existence,
lied about their personal involvement in it and now they are all facing
serious criminal jeopardy as a result.

*Moyers: One more: I assume most people believe Russia’s interference in
the election last year is a bad thing, a serious offense, but is it
possible that by treating Vladimir Putin and his cronies as an existential
threat, we’re playing directly into Putin’s hands and making him appear a
more significant figure in the world than he really is?*

*Harper:* Well, he’s already achieved that, but the problem is, what’s the
alternative? Back in January, John McCain and Lindsey Graham were on
national television acknowledging the seriousness of the Russian
interference. McCain called it the cyber equivalent of “an act of war.” And
if you acknowledge and recognize the existential threat, do you sit back
and let the let the next thing happen in 2018 that Vladimir Putin wants to
do? Remember, we have elections coming up next year. The uniform view of US
intelligence is unambiguous, and if you don’t view it as an existential
threat then you’re willing, I think, to sacrifice democracy.

We keep hearing, “Yeah, but Trump was still legitimately elected, he won
the election fair and square.” Now we’re realizing that that may not even
be true. I don’t personally believe that to be true anymore. I rankle every
time somebody says he won fair and square, because that’s become less
obvious every day. So the last line of defense would be, “Well, even if he
didn’t win fair and square, he’s our president, so we’ve got to sit back
and let whatever Putin’s going to do to us continue to happen because we
don’t want our response to raise his standing in the world.” Well, I would
submit it raises Putin’s standing in the world even more to have an
accomplice in the White House.

*Moyers: Thank you, Steve Harper.*

-- 

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

-Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
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