There Is Nothing for You Here, page 29
This was a telling difference, and a critical one, because Vladimir Putin was only too happy to unleash the Russian security services to exploit America’s divisions, playing up the many Americas and playing them against each other, all with the goal of weakening the United States. In this respect, Trump played right into Putin’s hands.
After 2016, Trump was accused of being the “Manchurian candidate” or “Russian candidate”—a puppet run by Vladimir Putin, who had stolen the election for him. But despite the similarities in their approaches and Trump’s autocrat envy, I don’t believe Trump was intentionally doing something for Putin or for anyone else. Trump was only ever concerned with himself, as would become strikingly clear after the November 2020 election.
Of course, this is not what many people thought for most of his tenure. Outside the White House—perhaps until the revelations from Bob Woodward’s tapes—it seemed hard for people to imagine that Trump was fixated on authoritarians in general, not Putin in particular. I saw in multiple settings how deference to the strongman was a persistent pattern across all of Trump’s interactions with world leaders. It was only against the backdrop of Russian interference in 2016 that people outside the White House thought it applied solely to Putin.
One episode in Trump’s term, his meeting with Putin at Helsinki in July 2018, was broadly seen as the proof of Trump’s complicity and collusion with Putin and the Russian security services in 2016. For me, it was instead another example of Trump’s autocrat envy, as well as the vulnerabilities inherent in his personal vanity and fragile ego. That distinction, however, did not make the spectacle any easier to watch and endure.
The Big Summit
The Helsinki meeting with Putin was supposed to be Trump’s big arms-control summit, like the encounters between Gorbachev and Reagan in places like Geneva, Switzerland, and Reykjavik, Iceland, in the 1980s. George H. W. Bush had met with Gorbachev for a summit in Helsinki in 1990, and the Finns were glad to oblige again. They quickly got into the spirit of hosting an old-style high-level meeting.
President Sauli Niinistö lent his Presidential Palace in the heart of the city by the Helsinki port for the occasion. Crowds lined the streets from the airport to the city when the Russian and U.S. presidents arrived. It was very different from the “working visit” in London just a few days before. There were fewer insults and protests directed at President Trump, no baby Trump balloon, and more enthusiasm for the possibility of another U.S.-Russian security breakthrough. Images of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush meeting with Gorbachev for arms negotiations were shown on screens in a continuous loop in the state rooms where we sat. The Finnish president gave Trump a few tips on speaking to Putin and things to look out for, in a breakfast meeting just before the summit. It was one of the few times someone managed to penetrate with a bit of useful, objective advice.
When it came to nuclear weapons, Trump always had a pattern break with the norm, which showed that he really cared about the topic. He was genuinely interested and paid attention when nuclear issues came up, be it with Russia, Iran, or North Korea. Here and there, when something like this resonated with him and fit his personal interests and worldview, he would perk up. Countering terrorism, striking back against al-Assad when he used chemical weapons against the civilian population in Syria, trade tariffs, and dealing with China fell into that category.
Trump cared so much about the nuclear issue, indeed, that at times it seemed to take the Russians by surprise. At Helsinki, in his one-on-one meeting with Putin, Trump caught the Russian president making an inaccurate assertion on the terms of extending the 2010 New START agreement. President Trump brought it up at the lunch with cabinet members. Putin was slightly embarrassed and had to walk his comments back and clarify. His foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, glared at him. The Russians had clearly hoped to trip Trump up. By now everyone knew that Trump never paid attention to his brief.
Even minor victories such as these were few and far between, however. Trump’s failure to read his briefs or to stick to the policy plan (even if he had come up with it in the first place) was a major liability in every aspect of national security affairs. Whenever he got to meetings and the conversation started, it seemed like the first time he was hearing things from world leaders. Having skipped the background notes, and sometimes even the bullet-pointed notecards, Trump gave Putin or whoever was with him the opportunity to promote his own version of history and events and seize the policy advantage.
Some leaders, like President Erdoğan of Turkey, would get angry in meetings or on calls when Trump obviously had no idea what they were talking about. Erdoğan would complain on the spot about the “bad American advisers” who weren’t giving Trump the “right information,” or he would presume that Trump was strategically feigning ignorance. Eventually Erdoğan would bypass the NSC and the White House staff to talk to Trump directly. He would call the president when he knew none of the “bad advisers” were around, as on Thanksgiving, when Trump was golfing with a skeleton staff. Erdoğan and his staff even joked to journalists and others about the appropriateness of calling on “Turkey Day” and bragged that they kept tabs on Trump’s schedule.
When Trump was winging it, he could be persuaded of all kinds of things. If his foreign visitor or caller was one of his favored strongmen, he would always give him the benefit of the doubt over his advisers. After meeting Viktor Orbán in May 2018, for example, Trump cut off U.S. defense secretary Patrick Shanahan, who was trying to make a point in the cabinet meeting. Trump told Shanahan in front of everyone else that Orbán had already explained this very issue to him in their Oval Office meeting. Orbán knew everything better than Shanahan did. The autocratic leader simply had more authority than the people who worked for Trump. The leader was his equal, his staff members were not. For Trump, information trickled down from him, not up to him. He would listen only to someone he considered to be at his level, or close to it—like his host, Finnish president Niinistö, and then just for a moment over breakfast.
This tendency of Trump’s was lamentable when it played out behind closed doors, but it was inexcusable—and indeed impossible to explain or justify—when it spilled out into public view. For instance in Helsinki, where it played out in spectacular fashion in a mortifying press conference.
Before the press conference, Trump was pleased with how things had gone in his one-on-one meeting with Putin. He had finally had his proper sit-down with the Russian president. The world was watching. It had not only been a big show, but the two presidents had agreed to get arms-control negotiations going. They had also approved meetings between the two national security councils as well as potentially a joint business roundtable.
Of course, Putin had thrown a few curveballs that would complicate these modest achievements. Trump never took notes. He usually was not paying attention as everything was translated. He focused on the overall impression—the mood music rather than the lyrics—as I had seen him do the first time in the May 2, 2017, Oval Office phone call when he thought I was the secretary. Trump habitually threw dealing with the details over to his staff. He would do this by telling the leader in their personal meeting that “your guys should talk to my guys” and then deputizing a cabinet member or the national security adviser as the point person to follow up when he came out. Other times Trump would ask the world leader to repeat what he had said for general discussion and notetaking in an expanded meeting.
This was Trump’s tack with Putin at Helsinki. Trump asked “Vladimir” to “repeat what you just told me to my guys” in the lunch with the two delegations after their sit-down.
In between the one-on-one and the lunch, Joe Wang and I, along with one of the NSC lawyers, Michael Ellis, had quickly debriefed the American translator so we could check to make sure everything tracked with expectations and to see if there was something we would have to deal with. This debriefing alerted us to the fact that Putin had tried to pull another fast one.
At this time, Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation was still under way. The question of whether Trump’s campaign had colluded with Russian agents and Putin had stolen the election for Trump hovered above everything. As a result of the investigation, a U.S. Department of Justice grand jury had just—on the very eve of the summit—indicted twelve Russian intelligence agents for “hacking offenses” during the 2016 election interference operation. It was the FBI’s shot across the Russian president’s bow.
Putin had been quick to shoot back. In their conversation, Putin suggested to Trump that the U.S. and Russia could invoke an existing bilateral mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) to address this development. The treaty would enable U.S. law enforcement to interview the twelve Russian intelligence operatives accused of election interference. The rub was that as the MLAT was mutual, Russia would also like to have its own interviews.
Putin said that “some Americans” had been involved in “corruption” cases in Moscow. He mentioned businessman Bill Browder, the American-born son of the former head of the U.S. Communist Party, who was now a British citizen living in London. In the 1990s, Browder had made millions investing in Russia, but he had lost his fortune when Russian rivals seized his assets. He was accused of tax evasion and deported. Browder’s Russian accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested and died in jail. Browder related all of this in a best-selling book, Red Notice. He also lobbied Congress to impose sanctions on the Russian officials involved in the episode. The bill was named the Sergei Magnitsky Act after his Russian associate. Putin had an ax to grind against Browder for the Magnitsky bill.
It was immediately apparent to the translator that President Trump had no idea what the Russian president was talking about, who Browder was, or what the MLAT entailed. Trump did not probe the offer in more detail. The idea that the FBI might get to interview some Russian agents sounded generally promising. It might also draw attention away from the scrutiny of his campaign. So Trump declared it “interesting.”
This was an understatement. Putin’s offer was a clear effort to distract attention from what Russia had done in 2016 by stirring up outrage at the mere suggestion that Americans could possibly be subject to Russian interrogation. It was glaringly obvious to us that Putin had carefully laid a trap—one that his American counterpart had been only too happy to walk into.
Putin raised the MLAT again during the lunch. Secretary of State Pompeo, already forewarned from the debrief, shut the idea down. President Trump, still not grasping the Russian president’s intent, gave Putin another opening to elaborate on it at the press conference. But Putin would not wait that long. He had already seized the initiative. While the Russian leader was dangling the MLAT idea at Helsinki, he had evidently instructed officials back home to announce a full list of the Americans that they would like to interview. Although Putin never mentioned this list to Trump or at the subsequent press conference, it included—in addition to Bill Browder—several U.S. officials, congressional staff members, and the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul.
This was a classic Putin ploy. I had witnessed him do this repeatedly. He would make people complicit in something nefarious by first introducing it in a deliberately vague and innocuous way. Putin said it. The other person heard it. Putin then created guilt by association when he later added new and damning details.
Putin obviously intended to tie American diplomats up in knots after Helsinki dealing with the fallout from his suggestion. At the end of it all, he no doubt imagined the U.S. government would find its pursuit of Russian agents even more complicated than before. Mission accomplished.
Trump was oblivious to all this. He thought the general atmosphere of the conversation was upbeat. He was visibly thrilled and satisfied at the lunch. But then came the press conference.
Agony in Helsinki
I had questioned the idea of having a press conference in the first place, but it was a summit and Trump loved press conferences. I had instantly been overruled.
This was the first stand-alone summit meeting between Trump and Putin. After Russia’s 2016 election interference, the mere idea that Trump would talk to Putin at all—on the phone, on the margins of meetings, anywhere, anytime—sent the U.S. and international press corps into a frenzy. Everyone was convinced that if Trump met with Putin “alone,” even at large international meetings, some secret undertakings could easily be made. There was little consideration of the fact that everything had to be interpreted back and forth, which took some time; and with interpreters in the room, the two leaders were hardly alone.
During Putin and Trump’s first face-to-face, in Hamburg at the G20 meeting in July 2017, Foreign Minister Lavrov and Secretary of State Tillerson had sat in on the meeting. This was in the period when Trump’s lawyers were still harping on him to let people take notes, and a mini-scandal had been generated by Trump taking the U.S. interpreter’s notes and stuffing them in his pocket. Never mind that interpreter’s notes were usually in shorthand—quick word and phrase prompts to make sure they caught everything accurately in a sentence. They were never intended to be verbatim notes for the record.
Even without his notes, the U.S. interpreter had debriefed me and acting assistant secretary of state John Heffern on the content of the Hamburg meeting. Secretary Tillerson had also made some notes for himself. Tillerson had an excellent recall of the conversation, as one might imagine of the former CEO of ExxonMobil, who had been dealing with Putin and Russia for many years. The secretary gave a readout to me and General McMaster, among others, as well as relating the main points at a press conference.
Nothing that had emerged about the first Trump-Putin meeting implied that Trump was the “Russian candidate” receiving secret instructions from Putin. Nonetheless, the idea persisted. And it returned with a vengeance at the Helsinki press conference.
Things went wrong immediately. As Trump and Putin stood behind their separate podiums in front of a crowd of journalists, it quickly became clear that the press questions would be focused on probing Trump on what Putin might have said or not said regarding 2016 and election interference. U.S. reporters wanted Trump to denounce the Russian interference in front of Putin. For his part, President Trump was still thinking about nuclear weapons and 1980s summitry. He was in an entirely different headspace from the U.S. media. Trump expected their praise for meeting with Putin and tackling the nuclear threat, which he kept referring to, to no avail.
From where I sat, all this was both farcical and tragic. Naturally, when the question was put to him, Putin denied any involvement in the 2016 election. One journalist, Jonathan Lemire from the Associated Press, finally asked Trump outright whom he believed, Putin or the U.S. intelligence agencies, which had concluded that Russia interfered. Lemire pressed Trump hard: “Would you now with the whole world watching tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?”
Trump balked. He really didn’t want to answer this. Of course he did not want to take on Putin, his fellow strongman, in front of the U.S. and world media. He had hoped to bask in the glory of the two of them doing what U.S. and Russian presidents used to do in the 1980s—hold high-level diplomatic summits. So, as he usually did, he tried to turn the question around. He attempted to fold into his answer a convoluted conspiracy theory that he was particularly fond of but that had repeatedly been debunked by his own White House staff. This centered on a supposedly missing computer server for the DNC, which was purportedly taken by the FBI as part of its 2016 investigation and might even have ended up in Ukraine. The server, according to President Trump, contained thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
It was Trump’s routine deflection from what the Russians had done. But the conspiracy was so convoluted, even for Trump, that he got tangled up in the narrative threads and ended up with a muddled, rambling, and at times nonsensical answer:
Where is the server? I want to know, where is the server and what is the server saying? With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, [Director of National Intelligence] Dan Coats came to me and some others and said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have confidence in both parties . . . I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails. So, I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. And what he did is an incredible offer [the MLAT]. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people [indicted Russian operatives]. I think that’s an incredible offer. Okay thank you.
This was the kind of head-spinning, incoherent monologue that I had tried on numerous occasions to document for the presidential record as notetaker. It was a word fog, in which you stumbled around looking for meaning. Somewhere in the haze, however, President Trump had said that he believed Putin over his intelligence officials. The telling lines for me were that “Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial” and “He just said it’s not Russia [so] I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Putin was Trump’s counterpart, which in Trump’s mind meant that Putin was therefore more likely to be right than anyone else. But for Trump, answering media questions about Russian interference or siding with the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies was also tantamount to admitting that he hadn’t won the 2016 election. The questions got right to the heart of his insecurities. If he said, “Yes, they interfered” and “Yes, they interfered on my behalf,” then he might as well say, “I am illegitimate.” Indeed, he made a point in a further elaboration of his Helsinki response of referencing his “brilliant campaign” in 2016 as proof that he had won on his own, without an assist from Putin.
