Russiagate 2.0 -
Deep state votes for Biden? From pandering to Putin to abusing allies
and ignoring his own advisers, Trump's phone
calls alarm US officials
By Carl Bernstein
June
30, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - In
hundreds of highly classified phone calls
with foreign heads of state,
President Donald Trump was so
consistently unprepared for discussion of
serious issues, so often outplayed in his
conversations with powerful leaders like
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish
President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to
leaders of America's principal allies, that
the calls helped convince some senior US
officials -- including his former
secretaries of state and defense, two
national security advisers and his
longest-serving chief of staff -- that the
President himself posed a danger to the
national security of the United States,
according to White House and intelligence
officials intimately familiar with the
contents of the conversations.
The
calls caused former top Trump deputies --
including national security advisers H.R.
McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary
James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson, and White House chief of staff
John Kelly, as well as intelligence
officials -- to conclude that the President
was often "delusional," as two sources put
it, in his dealings with foreign leaders.
The sources said there was little evidence
that the President became more skillful or
competent in his telephone conversations
with most heads of state over time. Rather,
he continued to believe that he could either
charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign
leader into capitulating to his will, and
often pursued goals more attuned to his own
agenda than what many of his senior advisers
considered the national interest.
These officials' concerns about the calls,
and particularly Trump's
deference to Putin, take on new resonance
with reports the President may have learned in
March that Russia had
offered the Taliban bounties to kill US
troops in Afghanistan -- and yet took no action.
CNN's sources said there were calls between
Putin and Trump about Trump's desire to end the
American military presence in Afghanistan but
they mentioned no discussion of the supposed
Taliban bounties.
By far the greatest number of Trump's telephone
discussions with an individual head of state were
with Erdogan, who sometimes phoned the White House
at least twice a week and was put through directly
to the President on standing orders from Trump,
according to the sources. Meanwhile, the President
regularly bullied and demeaned the leaders of
America's principal allies, especially two women:
telling Prime Minister Theresa May of the United
Kingdom she was weak and lacked courage; and telling
German Chancellor Angela Merkel that she was
"stupid."
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Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of
state, including Saudi Arabia's autocratic royal
heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator
Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great"
accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of
his Oval Office predecessors, according to the
sources.
In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan,
Trump took special delight in trashing former
Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and
suggested that dealing directly with him --
Trump -- would be far more fruitful than during
previous administrations. "They didn't know BS,"
he said of Bush and Obama -- one of several
derisive tropes the sources said he favored when
discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and
Russian leaders.
The full, detailed picture drawn by CNN's sources
of Trump's phone calls with foreign leaders is
consistent with the basic tenor and some substantive
elements of a limited number of calls described by
former national security adviser
John Bolton in his book, "The Room Where It
Happened." But the calls described to CNN cover a
far longer period than Bolton's tenure, are much
more comprehensive — and seemingly more damning --
in their sweep.
Like Bolton, CNN's sources said that the
President seemed to continually conflate his own
personal interests -- especially for purposes of
re-election and revenge against perceived critics
and political enemies -- with the national interest.
To protect the anonymity of those describing the
calls for this report, CNN will not reveal their job
titles nor quote them at length directly. More than
a dozen officials either listened to the President's
phone calls in real time or were provided detailed
summaries and rough-text recording printouts of the
calls soon after their completion, CNN's sources
said. The sources were interviewed by CNN repeatedly
over a four-month period extending into June.
The sources did cite some instances in which they
said Trump acted responsibly and in the national
interest during telephone discussions with some
foreign leaders. CNN reached out to Kelly, McMaster
and Tillerson for comment and received no response
as of Monday afternoon. Mattis did not comment.
The White House did not respond to a request for
comment before this story published. After
publication, White House deputy press secretary
Sarah Matthews said, "President Trump is a world
class negotiator who has consistently furthered
America's interests on the world stage. From
negotiating the phase one China deal and the USMCA
to NATO allies contributing more and defeating ISIS,
President Trump has shown his ability to advance
America's strategic interests."
One person
familiar with almost all the conversations with the
leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and
western Europe described the calls cumulatively as
'abominations' so grievous to US national security
interests that if members of Congress heard from
witnesses to the actual conversations or read the
texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior
Republican members would no longer be able to retain
confidence in the President.
Attacking key ally leaders --
especially women
The insidious effect of the conversations comes from
Trump's tone, his raging outbursts at allies while
fawning over authoritarian strongmen, his ignorance
of history and lack of preparation as much as it
does from the troubling substance, according to the
sources. While in office, then- Director of National
Intelligence Dan Coats expressed worry to
subordinates that Trump's telephone discussions were
undermining the coherent conduct of foreign
relations and American objectives around the globe,
one of CNN's sources said. And in recent weeks,
former chief of staff Kelly has mentioned the
damaging impact of the President's calls on US
national security to several individuals in private.
Two sources compared many of the President's
conversations with foreign leaders to Trump's recent
press "briefings" on the coronavirus pandemic: free
form, fact-deficient stream-of-consciousness
ramblings, full of fantasy and off-the-wall
pronouncements based on his intuitions, guesswork,
the opinions of Fox News TV hosts and social media
misinformation.
In addition to Merkel and May, the sources said,
Trump regularly bullied and disparaged other leaders
of the western alliance during his phone
conversations -- including French President Emmanuel
Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison -- in the
same hostile and aggressive way he discussed the
coronavirus with some of America's governors.
Next to Erdogan, no foreign leader initiated more
calls with Trump than Macron, the sources said, with
the French President often trying to convince Trump
to change course on environmental and security
policy matters -- including climate change and US
withdrawal from the Iranian multilateral nuclear
accord.
Macron usually got "nowhere" on substantive matters,
while Trump became irritated at the French
President's stream of requests and subjected him to
self-serving harangues and lectures that were
described by one source as personalized verbal
"whippings," especially about France and other
countries not meeting NATO spending targets, their
liberal immigration policies or their trade
imbalances with the US.
But his most vicious
attacks, said the sources, were aimed at women heads
of state. In conversations with both May and Merkel,
the President demeaned and denigrated them in
diatribes described as "near-sadistic" by one of the
sources and confirmed by others. "Some of the things
he said to Angela Merkel are just unbelievable: he
called her 'stupid,' and accused her of being in the
pocket of the Russians ... He's toughest [in the
phone calls] with those he looks at as weaklings and
weakest with the ones he ought to be tough with."
The calls "are so unusual," confirmed a German
official, that special measures were taken in Berlin
to ensure that their contents remained secret. The
official described Trump's behavior with Merkel in
the calls as "very aggressive" and said that the
circle of German officials involved in monitoring
Merkel's calls with Trump has shrunk: "It's just a
small circle of people who are involved and the
reason, the main reason, is that they are indeed
problematic."
Trump's conversations with May, the
UK Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019, were
described as "humiliating and bullying," with Trump
attacking her as "a fool" and spineless in her
approach to Brexit, NATO and immigration matters.
"He'd get agitated about something with Theresa
May, then he'd get nasty with her on the phone
call," One source said. "It's the same interaction
in every setting -- coronavirus or Brexit -- with
just no filter applied."
Merkel remained calm and outwardly unruffled in
the face of Trump's attacks —"like water off a
duck's back," in the words of one source -- and she
regularly countered his bluster with recitations of
fact. The German official quoted above said that
during Merkel's visit to the White House two years
ago, Trump displayed "very questionable behavior"
that "was quite aggressive ... [T]he Chancellor
indeed stayed calm, and that's what she does on the
phone."
Prime Minister May, in contrast, became
"flustered and nervous" in her conversations with
the President. "He clearly intimidated her and meant
to," said one of CNN's sources. In response to a
request for comment about Trump's behavior in calls
with May, the UK's Downing Street referred CNN to
its website. The site lists brief descriptions of
the content of some calls and avoids any mention of
tone or tension. The French embassy in Washington
declined to comment, while the Russian and Turkish
embassies did not respond to requests for comment.
Concerns over calls with Putin
and Erdogan
The calls with Putin and Erdogan were particularly
egregious in terms of Trump almost never being
prepared substantively and thus leaving him
susceptible to being taken advantage of in various
ways, according to the sources -- in part because
those conversations (as with most heads of state),
were almost certainly recorded by the security
services and other agencies of their countries.
In
his phone exchanges with Putin, the sources
reported, the President talked mostly about himself,
frequently in over-the-top, self-aggrandizing terms:
touting his "unprecedented" success in building the
US economy; asserting in derisive language how much
smarter and "stronger" he is than "the imbeciles"
and "weaklings" who came before him in the
presidency (especially Obama); reveling in his
experience running the Miss Universe Pageant in
Moscow, and obsequiously courting Putin's admiration
and approval. Putin "just outplays" him, said a
high-level administration official -- comparing the
Russian leader to a chess grandmaster and Trump to
an occasional player of checkers. While Putin
"destabilizes the West," said this source, the
President of the United States "sits there and
thinks he can build himself up enough as a
businessman and tough guy that Putin will respect
him." (At times, the Putin-Trump conversations
sounded like "two guys in a steam bath," a source
added.)
In numerous calls with Putin that were described
to CNN, Trump left top national security aides and
his chiefs of staff flabbergasted, less because of
specific concessions he made than because of his
manner -- inordinately solicitous of Putin's
admiration and seemingly seeking his approval --
while usually ignoring substantive policy expertise
and important matters on the standing bilateral
agenda, including human rights; and an arms control
agreement, which never got dealt with in a way that
advanced shared Russian and American goals that both
Putin and Trump professed to favor, CNN's sources
said.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has touted the
theme of "America First" as his north star in
foreign policy, advancing the view that America's
allies and adversaries have taken economic advantage
of US goodwill in trade. And that America's closest
allies need to increase their share of collective
defense spending. He frequently justifies his
seeming deference to Putin by arguing that Russia is
a major world player and that it is in the United
States' interest to have a constructive and friendly
relationship -- requiring a reset with Moscow
through his personal dialogue with Putin.
In separate interviews, two high-level
administration officials familiar with most of the
Trump-Putin calls said the President naively
elevated Russia -- a second-rate totalitarian state
with less than 4% of the world's GDP -- and its
authoritarian leader almost to parity with the
United States and its President by undermining the
tougher, more realistic view of Russia expressed by
the US Congress, American intelligence agencies and
the long-standing post-war policy consensus of the
US and its European allies. "He [Trump] gives away
the advantage that was hard won in the Cold War,"
said one of the officials -- in part by "giving
Putin and Russia a legitimacy they never had," the
official said. "He's given Russia a lifeline --
because there is no doubt that they're a declining
power ... He's playing with something he doesn't
understand and he's giving them power that they
would use [aggressively]."
Both officials cited Trump's decision to pull US
troops out of Syria -- a move that benefited Turkey
as well as Russia -- as perhaps the most grievous
example. "He gave away the store," one of them said.
The frequency of the calls with Erdogan -- in which
the Turkish president continually pressed Trump for
policy concessions and other favors -- was
especially worrisome to McMaster, Bolton and Kelly,
the more so because of the ease with which Erdogan
bypassed normal National Security Council protocols
and procedures to reach the President, said two of
the sources.
Erdogan became so adept at knowing when to reach
the President directly that some White House aides
became convinced that Turkey's security services in
Washington were using Trump's schedule and
whereabouts to provide Erdogan with information
about when the President would be available for a
call.
On some occasions Erdogan reached him on the golf
course and Trump would delay play while the two
spoke at length.
Two sources described the
President as woefully uninformed about the history
of the Syrian conflict and the Middle East
generally, and said he was often caught off guard,
and lacked sufficient knowledge to engage on equal
terms in nuanced policy discussion with Erdogan. "Erdogan
took him to the cleaners," said one of the sources.
The sources said that deleterious US policy
decisions on Syria -- including the President's
directive to pull US forces out of the country,
which then allowed Turkey to attack Kurds who had
helped the US fight ISIS and weakened NATO's role in
the conflict -- were directly linked to Erdogan's
ability to get his way with Trump on the phone
calls.
Trump occasionally became angry at Erdogan --
sometimes because of demands that Turkey be granted
preferential trade status, and because the Turkish
leader would not release an imprisoned American
evangelical pastor, Andrew Brunson, accused of
'aiding terrorism' in the 2016 coup that attempted
to overthrow Erdogan. Brunson was eventually
released in October 2018.
Despite the lack of advance notice for many of
Erdogan's calls, full sets of contemporaneous notes
from designated notetakers at the White House exist,
as well as rough voice-generated computer texts of
the conversations, the sources said.
According to one high-level source, there are
also existing summaries and conversation-readouts of
the President's discussions with Erdogan that might
reinforce Bolton's allegations against Trump in the
so-called "Halkbank case," involving a major Turkish
bank with suspected ties to Erdogan and his family.
That source said the matter was raised in more than
one telephone conversation between Erdogan and
Trump.
Bolton wrote in his book that in December 2018,
at Erdogan's urging, Trump offered to interfere in
an investigation by then-US Attorney for the
Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman into
the Turkish bank, which was accused of violating US
sanctions on Iran.
"Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of
things, explaining that the Southern District
prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama
people, a problem that would be fixed when they were
replaced by his people," Bolton wrote. Berman's
office eventually brought an indictment against the
bank in October 2019 for fraud, money laundering and
other offenses related to participation in a
multibillion-dollar scheme to evade the US sanctions
on Iran. On June 20, Trump fired Berman -- whose
office is also investigating Rudy Giuliani, the
President's personal lawyer -- after the prosecutor
refused to resign at Attorney General William Barr's
direction.
Unlike Bolton, CNN's sources did not assert or
suggest specifically that Trump's calls with Erdogan
might have been grounds for impeachment because of
possible evidence of unlawful conduct by the
President. Rather, they characterized Trump's calls
with heads of state in the aggregate as evidence of
Trump's general "unfitness" for the presidency on
grounds of temperament and incompetence, an
assertion Bolton made as well in an interview to
promote his book with ABC News last week: "I don't
think he's fit for office. I don't think he has the
competence to carry out the job," Bolton said.
Family feedback and grievances
fuel Trump's approach
CNN spoke to sources familiar with the President's
phone calls repeatedly over a four-month period. In
their interviews, the sources took great care not to
disclose specific national security information and
classified details -- but rather described the broad
contents of many of the calls, and the overall tenor
and methodology of Trump's approach to his telephone
discussions with foreign leaders.
In addition to rough, voice-generated software
transcription, almost all of Trump's telephone
conversations with Putin, Erdogan and leaders of the
western alliance were supplemented and documented by
extensive contemporaneous note-taking (and, often,
summaries) prepared by Fiona Hill, deputy assistant
to the President and senior NSC director for Europe
and Russia until her resignation last year. Hill
listened to most of the President's calls with
Putin, Erdogan and the European leaders, according
to her closed-door testimony before the House
Intelligence Committee last November.
Elements of that testimony by Hill, if
re-examined by Congressional investigators,
might provide a detailed road-map of the
President's extensively-documented
conversations, the sources said. White House and
intelligence officials familiar with the
voice-generated transcriptions and underlying
documents agreed that their contents could be
devastating to the President's standing with
members of the Congress of both parties -- and
the public -- if revealed in great detail.
(There is little doubt that Trump would invoke
executive privilege to keep the conversations
private. However, some former officials with
detailed knowledge of many of the conversations
might be willing to testify about them, sources
said.)
In one of the earliest calls between Putin and
Trump, the President's son-in-law Jared Kushner
and Ivanka Trump were in the room to listen —
joining McMaster, Tillerson, Hill, and a State
Department aide to Tillerson.
"The call was
all over the place," said an NSC deputy who read
a detailed summary of the conversation -- with
Putin speaking substantively and at length, and
Trump propping himself up in short
autobiographical bursts of bragging,
self-congratulation and flattery toward Putin.
As described to CNN, Kushner and Ivanka Trump
were immediately effusive in their praise of how
Trump had handled the call -- while Tillerson
(who knew Putin well from his years in Russia as
an oil executive), Hill and McMaster were
skeptical.
Hill — author of a definitive biography of
Putin -- started to explain some of the nuances
she perceived from the call, according to CNN's
sources — offering insight into Putin's
psychology, his typical "smooth-talking" and
linear approach and what the Russian leader was
trying to achieve in the call. Hill was cut off
by Trump, and the President continued discussing
the call with Jared and Ivanka, making clear he
wanted to hear the congratulatory evaluation of
his daughter and her husband, rather than how
Hill, Tillerson or McMaster judged the
conversation.
McMaster viewed that early phone call with
Putin as indicative of the conduct of the whole
relationship between Russia and the Trump
administration, according to the sources -- a
conclusion subsequent national security advisers
and chiefs of staff, and numerous high-ranking
intelligence officials also reached: unlike in
previous administrations, there were relatively
few meaningful dealings between military and
diplomatic professionals, even at the highest
levels, because Trump -- distrustful of the
experts and dismissive of their attempts to
brief him -- conducted the relationship largely
ad hoc with Putin and almost totally by himself.
Ultimately, Putin and the Russians learned that
"nobody has the authority to do anything" -- and
the Russian leader used that insight to his
advantage, as one of CNN's sources said.
The Kushners were also present for other
important calls with foreign leaders and made
their primacy apparent, encouraged by the
President even on matters of foreign policy in
which his daughter and her husband had no
experience. Almost never, according to CNN's
sources, would Trump read the briefing materials
prepared for him by the CIA and NSC staff in
advance of his calls with heads of state.
"He won't consult them, he won't even get their
wisdom," said one of the sources, who cited
Saudi Arabia's bin Salman as near the top of a
list of leaders whom Trump "picks up and calls
without anybody being prepared," a scenario that
frequently confronted NSC and intelligence
aides. The source added that the aides' helpless
reaction "would frequently be, 'Oh my God, don't
make that phone call.'"
"Trump's view is that he is a better judge of
character than anyone else," said one of CNN's
sources. The President consistently rejected
advice from US defense, intelligence and
national security principals that the Russian
president be approached more firmly and with
less trust. CNN's sources pointed to the most
notable public example as "emblematic": Trump,
standing next to the Russian President at their
meeting in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2018, and
saying he "didn't see any reason why" Russia
would have interfered in the 2016 presidential
election -- despite the findings of the entire
US intelligence community that Moscow had.
"President Putin was extremely strong and
powerful in his denial today," Trump said.
The common, overwhelming dynamic that
characterizes Trump's conversations with both
authoritarian dictators and leaders of the
world's greatest democracies is his consistent
assertion of himself as the defining subject and
subtext of the calls -- almost never the United
States and its historic place and leadership in
the world, according to sources intimately
familiar with the calls.
In numerous calls with the leaders of the UK,
France, Germany, Australia and Canada --
America's closest allies of the past 75 years,
the whole postwar era -- Trump typically
established a grievance almost as a default or
leitmotif of the conversation, whatever the
supposed agenda, according to those sources.
"Everything was always personalized, with
everybody doing terrible things to rip us off —
which meant ripping 'me' — Trump — off. He
couldn't -- or wouldn't -- see or focus on the
larger picture," said one US official.
The
source cited a conspicuously demonstrable
instance in which Trump resisted asking Angela
Merkel (at the UK's urging) to publicly hold
Russia accountable for the so-called 'Salisbury'
radioactive poisonings of a former Russian spy
and his daughter, in which Putin had denied any
Russian involvement despite voluminous evidence
to the contrary. "It took a lot of effort" to
get Trump to bring up the subject, said one
source. Instead of addressing Russia's
responsibility for the poisonings and holding it
to international account, Trump made the focus
of the call -- in personally demeaning terms --
Germany's and Merkel's supposedly deadbeat
approach to allied burden-sharing. Eventually,
said the sources, as urged by his NSC staff,
Trump at last addressed the matter of the
poisonings, almost grudgingly.
"With almost every problem, all it takes [in
his phone calls] is someone asking him to do
something as President on behalf of the United
States and he doesn't see it that way; he goes
to being ripped off; he's not interested in
cooperative issues or working on them together;
instead he's deflecting things or pushing real
issues off into a corner," said a US official.
"There was no sense of 'Team America' in the
conversations," or of the United States as an
historic force with certain democratic
principles and leadership of the free world,
said the official. "The opposite. It was like
the United States had disappeared. It was always
'Just me'."
UPDATE: This story has been updated with
comment from the White House.
CNN's
Nicole Gaouette contributed to this report.
Carl Bernstein is an American investigative
journalist and author. While a young reporter
for The Washington Post in 1972, Bernstein was
teamed up with Bob Woodward; the two did much of
the original news reporting on the Watergate
scandal.
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