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, "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. 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 proves 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.
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