--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Support for the show today comes from Quip Electric Toothbrushes. Quip has found a way to make an electric toothbrush that runs on a single AAA battery. It has to be seen to be believed, and you can see it at getquip.com slash explained.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Today's negotiations reflected our joint wish, our joint wish with President Trump to redress this negative situation in the bilateral relationship, outline the first steps for improving this relationship to restore the acceptable level of trust and going back to the previous level of interaction on all mutual interest issues.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): President Vladimir Putin met President Trump for a summit in Helsinki today. And we've all seen that kind of thing before. But what followed the Trump-Putin summit was something totally new, something we haven't ever seen before.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): President Putin and President Trump held a press conference, and things got real quick.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Mr. President, you tweeted this morning that it's U.S. foolishness, stupidity, and the Mueller probe that is responsible for the decline in U.S. relations with Russia. Do you hold Russia at all accountable for anything in particular? And if so, what would you consider them that they are responsible for?
--:-- President Trump: Yes, I do. I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we've all been foolish. We should have had this dialogue a long time ago, a long time, frankly, before I got to office. And I think we're all to blame.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): The president of the United States blamed the United States, blamed the Mueller investigation and the Department of Justice for our fractured relationship with Russia. In front of the Russian president, in front of the world.
--:-- President Trump: I do feel that we have both made some mistakes. I think that the probe is a disaster for our country. I think it's kept us apart. It's kept us separated. There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): President Trump was given a second chance to hold Russia accountable. But just to say it one time again, and I say it all the time, there was no collusion. I didn't know the president. There was nobody to collude with.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): And then a third. Just now, President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every U.S. intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): What, who, my first question for you, sir, is who do you believe? My second question is, 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?
--:-- President Trump: So let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven't they taken the server? He started talking about a server. Where is the server? I want to know where is the server, and what is the server saying?
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): And with that being said, all I can do is ask the question.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): He sided with Russia. 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.
--:-- President Trump: But I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don't think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): This is dereliction of duty.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: He was undersecretary of state. He was a U.S. ambassador. I worked for five presidents, from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. I was also an advisor in the Obama administration.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Nicholas Burns, you worked for the George W. Bush administration in the State Department. I did. You've been around presidents. You've discussed certainly our relationships with Russia.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: What do you think the president wanted to get out of this meeting? Why did this summit even happen?
--:-- President Trump: The president has been consistent since he began his run for the presidency in 2015 in saying that it's a good thing that the United States be friends with Russia and have a positive relationship with Russia.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: And he's been trying to do that quite consistently since he was elected. There are times when the point of diplomacy, the object is not to have a good relationship, the object is to defend America's interest.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Ambassador Burns, you worked for the George W. Bush administration in the State Department. I did. You've been around presidents. You've discussed certainly our relationships with Russia.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: What do you think the president wanted to get out of this meeting? Why did this summit even happen?
--:-- President Trump: The president has been consistent since he began his run for the presidency in 2015 in saying that it's a good thing that the United States be friends with Russia and have a positive relationship with Russia.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: And he's been trying to do that quite consistently since he was elected. There are times when the point of diplomacy, the object is not to have a good relationship, the object is to defend America's interest.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): In this case, I think in approaching this summit, the president should have seen that the annexation of Crimea and the nerve agent attack against the U.K., and especially the cyber offensive against our election, all threatened the vital national security interests of the U.S.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: And therefore, he should have been in the mode of pushing Putin back. So the president fundamentally miscalculated on what he should have been trying to do in this meeting.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): The odd thing is, if you look at the administration, the cabinet officials and the sub-cabinet officials, these are patriotic Americans, many of whom have a long record of being hawks on Russia policy.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: You can imagine how difficult this is for them.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Is there any possible positive upshot of this? I mean, both leaders were talking about Syria, were talking about the Korean Peninsula, were talking about Israel and the Middle East.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: If you're looking for any kind of ray of hope, I think there were two issues where there's possible progress ahead.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): One is on nuclear weapons, where Putin mentioned that the two governments had agreed to look at the START agreement.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: This is the Tretic Arms Limitation Treaty, nuclear weapons, and to see how it could be extended or modernized.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): The second part of that was the Intermediate Forces Nuclear Treaty, which President Reagan signed with President Gorbachev in December 1987.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: The Russians have been in violation of that in recent years. And so there was apparently an agreement that the two governments would look at that.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): So there is a possible area of agreement.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: The second was on Syria, and it was really President Putin who talked about this, not President Trump.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): As President Putin termed it, Israel's security is in danger.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: And it's in danger because the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps fighters in Syria have been operating dangerously close to the Golan Heights, which threatens Israel.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Putin said we need to have a separation of forces along the lines of the 1974 disengagement treaty.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: That was a treaty that Henry Kissinger just negotiated in the wake of the October War in 1973 that separated Israel and Syrian forces, and it's been preserving peace since then between Israel and Syria.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): So I thought that was also another area of possible progress.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: I felt that it was worth having this meeting. You want to have a channel to President Putin.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): But frankly, I never imagined that President Trump would be so weak, so guileless, so much taken advantage of.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: I can't remember anything like this in American presidential history where our president was so outplayed by our strongest adversary.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Sad day for America.
--:-- Nicholas Burns: Nicholas Burns teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He's also a CNBC contributor.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Coming up next, why all of this matters, the Mueller investigation and those new indictments.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): This is Today Explained. Quip electric toothbrushes come with a suction mount that unsticks to use as a cover for hygienic travel.
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--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): And one more thing.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): I know you're very loyal to Today Explained and we put out five episodes a week.
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--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): It's hosted by David Axelrod, who was a former senior advisor to President Barack Obama.
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--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Thanks.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): I'm Andrew Prokop. I'm senior politics reporter, and I'm covering the Trump-Russia investigation.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What happened this past Friday? What did Rod Rosenstein announce?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So it was a big day for the investigation, one of those rare days, the first in months, where a bunch of new charges were brought by Mueller.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The indictment charges 12 Russian military officers by name for conspiring to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Viktor Borisovich Netokša. Boris Alexeyevich Antonov. Dmitry Sergeyevich Badin. They're part of the GRU.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What's the GRU? Is that like Russian CIA kind of?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Yeah. And what do they say?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The charges basically lay out something that we've basically heard for a while.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They are charges related to the hacking and leaks of Democrats' emails during the 2016 campaign.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That it was indeed Russian government officials who were behind the hacking and leaking of these emails.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Nikolai Yurievich Kazachok, Artem Andreevich Malyshev, Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Down to the exact identities of the people involved who sent out spear phishing emails, who researched terms that they could use to post the hacked material online and communications they had with WikiLeaks and tons of different Clinton campaign staffer and personal email accounts of those staffers who got hacked.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It goes into how state voter registration databases were hacked into.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It lasted for months, and it was really wide-ranging and carried out, apparently, according to Mueller, by this specific group of Russian officers.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Алексей Александрович Потемкин. Александр Владимирович Осадчук. Иван Сергеевич Ерманков. Анатолий Сергеевич Ковалев.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I think the purpose of the indictments is to tell the story in more detail of exactly what happened.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: A lot of these details have been kept classified until now.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They're not really about prosecuting these people because they're Russian intelligence officers and they're not going to be brought to the U.S. to face trial.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But this really matters.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Mueller's job is to investigate Russian interference with the 2016 election and any Trump ties to that.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And what we have here in the email hackings and leaks are the most visible known way that Russia was known to have interfered with the election.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We already had the indictment of a bunch of sort of Russian trolls a few months back.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But it was hard to make a strong case that that had much of an impact.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But the hacking and leaks of the emails indisputably had a big impact on the campaign.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I don't know if it changed the outcome, but it dominated the news for days on end.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: WikiLeaks released more emails that they claim are from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's personal email account.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The emails appear to reveal contents of Clinton private Wall Street speeches
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Many people wanted to know what was in those
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It forced the resignation of the chair of the DNC Debbie Wasserman Schultz
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It kept the word emails in the headlines for Hillary Clinton throughout the last month of the campaign, which is a word that was not good for her or her campaign.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And you can tell how meaningful they were from Trump's own behavior,
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Because on the campaign trail in that last month, as John Podesta's emails were being posted in little batches day by day by WikiLeaks,
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Trump would be out there telling people to read WikiLeaks,
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Saying that they exposed the corruption of the Clintons and that, you know, this was all scandalous and horrible.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There has never been so many lies, so much deception.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There has never been anything like this where emails and you get a subpoena, you get a subpoena.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And after getting the subpoena, you delete 33,000 emails.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Didn't President Trump literally ask at some point in the campaign?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Didn't he literally sort of call out to Russia saying, I could really use your help with those missing emails?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Well, this is really interesting because it's actually in the indictment itself.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: On July 27th, the DNC emails had been already hacked and were being put up on WikiLeaks.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And they'd been attributed to Russia, this hack.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And Trump was asked about it at a press conference.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And he basically said, What do I have to get involved with Putin? I have nothing to do with Putin.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I've never spoken to him. I don't know anything about him other than he will respect me.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And if it is Russia, which is probably not, nobody knows who it is.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So he said that on July 27th.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And then you look at the indictment and there's a really interesting paragraph, which seems to go out of its way to imply that a hacking effort happened after Trump said that.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The indictment says the conspirators spearfished individuals affiliated with the Clinton campaign throughout the summer of 2016.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: For example, on or about July 27th, the conspirators attempted after hours to spearfish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third party provider and used by Clinton's personal office.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Is Mueller trying to say that Trump essentially directed Russian intelligence to hack the DNC and Hillary Clinton?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I don't see any way to read this other than that this particular hack – and we should be clear, they had been hacking various Democrats months before this.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This wasn't the first hack.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But this particular hack and where it was aimed and the timing and the date of it, it's very hard to read this and think that – at least Mueller doesn't think that it was directly in response to what Trump said.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I can imagine a world in which a U.S. president finds out about these indictments on a Friday, has a meeting planned with the president of Russia on a Monday, and takes these indictments to him and says, Hey, look what your country did during our election.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Hand over these people to us. Extradite these intelligence officials.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Look, it's definitely very strange that Donald Trump has refused to believe publicly, repeatedly, the assessments for years that Russia was behind this hack.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That he's continuously disputed them, that he now disparages the whole Mueller investigation as a witch hunt into him, that he's just not taking this at all as something bad the Russian government did to the election.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He doesn't seem to think it was bad.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He seems to think that it helped him.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And so what's the problem with that?
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): It's worth remembering that Quip electric toothbrushes come with guiding pulses that remind you when to switch sides while you're brushing, and Quip delivers new brush heads on a dentist-recommended schedule.
--:-- Host (Sean Rameswaram): Your first set of those is free when you go to getquip.com slash explained.
