Former Moscow correspondent for 'The Guardian' Luke Harding joins TRNN's Aaron Maté to discuss what he knows about President Trump's relationship with Russia or Russians based on meeting 'Dossier' author Christopher Steele and speaking to other sources in Russia.
Harding said Trump's collusion with Russia is characterized better as a "transactional relationship" going back to a trip to Moscow in 1987. 'The Real News Network' host Aaron Maté pushes back on this claim, and Harding fails to provide any solid evidence.
"I'm sure this is something Mueller is looking at -- there is this sort of long-term relationship. That doesn't mean Donald Trump is an agent or a KBG colonel, but merely there has been this transactional deal going back a very long way indeed," Harding said.
Luke Harding is a Guardian foreign correspondent who has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. His book, Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House' was published in November.
Maté asks: "That is also an assertion of the infamous Steele Dossier, that there is a transactional relationship between Trump and the Kremlin, and that Putin has been cultivating Trump for many years now. But explain why you think that is, why you think there is evidence of a transactional relationship?"
LUKE HARDING: You just have to look at what happened. We had Donald Trump's trip back in the late Cold War period.
I talked to a whole number of sources for this book, some in Moscow, some in London, some in Washington, some defectors. I met with Chris Steele, the author of the dossier, as well.
I think what you have to understand is the fact that the Soviet State and its Russian successor is very keen on cultivating people, particularly Americans. And bringing Trump over for this kind of trip was pretty unusual. It was what is known in the intelligence trade as a classic cultivation operation.
We know from leaked KGB memos, the kind of person they were looking for during this period was someone who was vain, narcissistic, interested in money, perhaps unfaithful in their marriage. Basically, Donald Trump ticks every single box. and when I was researching this, I tracked down the daughters of the Soviet ambassador at the time, who went up to Trump Tower, flattered Trump, told him he'd built the most wonderful building in America, and so on.
It has gone through phases. Moscow has been interested in Trump, not interested in him. And most recently, according to the Steele dossier, became more interested in him from about 2012, 2013 onwards, at a time when Donald Trump was the foremost proponent of birtherism. Obama was in office. You have the famous trip by Trump to Moscow in 2013 for the Miss Universe beauty pageant.
AARON MATE: Where, then, is the proof of a transactional relationship?
LUKE HARDING: There are secret meetings, as the book says, we now know about, some of which we have discovered about in the last few months. We've got Donald Trump Jr. meeting with a Russian lawyer, now famous... having been promised information from the Russian government as part of its campaign to support Mr. Trump and to hurt Hillary Clinton. We have four indictments by Robert Mueller.
AARON MATE: Let me stop you there. IF we have a transactional relationship between Trump and Russia going back to 1987, as you said, why would they have needed a music publicist to set up this meeting? They wouldn't have needed an intermediary like this cooky [British] music publicist Ron Goldstone...
LUKE HARDING: You're right, the music publicist is a bit of a curious guy, Ron Goldstone, but nonetheless it worked, he actually managed to bring the Moscow lawyer to Trump Tower and set up the meeting. Which, by the way, the Trump team said nothing about until it leaked out almost a year after it happened.
AARON MATE: Their explanation is that the meeting had nothing to do with the emails that were later released by WikiLeaks, that the lawyer was promising compromising information about Hillary Clinton's dealings with Russia, and in return, she wanted the liting of sanctions, which has nothing to do with the whole WikiLeaks aspect.
LUKE HARDING: Donald Trump Jr. didn't know that when he took the meeting. Meanwhile, we have George Papadopoulos, who in May was running around... London meeting with a mysterious professor with contacts to Moscow, who tells --
AARON MATE: Hold on -- He tells Papadopoulos he has contacts to Moscow. We have no clue what those contacts are. His name is Joseph Massoud, he is a professor in the UK right now. Papadopoulos claims Massoud told him that he has high-level Russian government contacts, but so far there has been no proof of that.
LUKE HARDING: Well it is in the indictment. Either you live in the empirical world or you don't--
AARON MATE: No. In the empirical world, the indictment Papadopoulos says that Massoud claimed he had Russian government ties, but that doesn't mean it is true.
LUKE HARDING: A lot of very good journalists have tried to get in touch with Mr. Massoud, to try to talk to him, and we haven't had much luck.
But you have to understand the larger context of what happened in the U.S. [election] last year. It isn't divorced from other Russian influence operations, particularly where I sit in Europe. It is not a new movie, it is an old movie. There has been quite a lot of Russian intelligence activity over the years, including, most spectacularly in the 2006 murder of a Russian dissident called Alexander Litvinenko with a radioactive cup of tea. I wrote a book about this case which came out in the U.S. earlier this year... There is a lot of evidence to support this.
AARON MATE: To support what?
LUKE HARDING: To support the fact that essentially the level of espionage from Russia at the moment is comparable [to those levels] and in some ways might go beyond it... It doesn't say how effective it was, whether it pushed Trump over the line or he was going to win anyway, but I think that Russia played a role in last year's election is a matter of fact. It is certainly what U.S. intelligence agencies believe, and practically everybody recognizes it apart from Donald Trump.
AARON MATE: I have to say, just because U.S. intelligence agencies say something, it is not even all the intelligence agencies, it is a handpicked group assembled under the previous outgoing president by James Clapper, but they say something --speaking of empirical evidence, they've provided no empirical evidence-- so I don't understand why we're supposed to take that on faith.
LUKE HARDING: You don't take anything on faith, you seek to verify and to be evidential, and to kind of follow leads wherever they go, but when writing my book I talked to a lot of sources, one of whom was Steele, and I think people who are skeptical about the whole Russia thesis, and it sounds to me like you are one of those people, don't appreciate the nature of Vladimir Putin's state. I lived there for four years, I was there between 2007-2011. I was eventually kicked out for writing stories about kleptocracy, about Putin's fortune, about human rights, about journalists. I'm not sure you know, some of my friends in Moscow who are journalists have been murdered. This is not a nice or benign regime.
AARON MATE: I'm certainly not arguing Vladimir Putin is a nice person, or that he has great policies, but to me that doesn't automatically mean that he waged a massive influence campaign that got Donald Trump elected. There is still no actual evidence so far. There is a lot of supposition and innuendo.
LUKE HARDING: I'm a journalist, I'm a story-teller. I'm not the head of the CIA or the NSA, but what I can tell you is there have been similar operations in France, where Macron was elected.
AARON MATE: That is straight up not true. After the French election, the French cyber intelligence agency came out and said it could have been virtually anybody.
LUKE HARDING: Yeah. If you'd let me finish. There have been attacks on the German parliament --
AARON MATE: Do you concede that the France hack you just mentioned didn't happen?
LUKE HARDING: What, that it didn't happen?
AARON MATE: Do you concede that the Russain hacking of the French election that you just claimed actually is not true.
LUKE HARDING: The French report was inconclusive. You have to look at this contextually...
AARON MATE: Where else?
LUKE HARDING: Estonia. Have you heard of Estonia? It is a state in the Baltics which was crippled by a massive cyber attack in 2008... which European states think was carried out by Moscow. This is an ongoing thing.
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