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LUKE HARDING: I understand that. I mean ... Sorry. The lights just out here. I think if you'd read my book which unfortunately you didn't before you decided to do the interview, you would have seen that there's a whole history of the FSB and its kind of KGB predecessor doing these kind of entrapment operations going back to the Cold War, enticing American diplomats, British diplomats, and so on with kind of honeypots. The KGB even had a kind of term for the kind of attractive young women they would send to kind of seduce and try and compromise officials. They called them "swallows," which is a rather kind of pleasant and poetic title. Really anyone who knows Russia or has bothered to read books on the Cold War sort of realizes this is precisely what they do.Now did they do it with Donald Trump? We don't know. Steele thinks they did. Donald Trump will know the answer to that question for sure, and so will Vladimir Putin. I think one of the kind of themes through the last few months which I think probably you would agree on is that Donald Trump is incredibly nice about Mr. Putin when he's very rude about a whole host of other leaders including, for example, Theresa May, the Prime Minister in my town, in England or the Germans or Angela Merkel. We see this repeatedly.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: I agree, Luke. He has affinity for right-wing leaders. He speaks highly of Putin. He speaks highly of ... I've never heard him insult Netanyahu. I've never heard him speak critically of Netanyahu, but that doesn't mean that I think that Netanyahu controls [Trump]. Even though, by the way, there's more proof of collusion, right now at least, with Netanyahu than Putin because we know now from the indictment of Flynn that Netanyahu got Trump and his team to try to undermine Obama at the UN when Obama was going to let pass a UN vote critical of Israel.
LUKE HARDING: Yeah. I mean I understand that, but I think it goes beyond the sort of Trump-Putin relationship. It goes beyond a kind of affinity with kind of ultra-nationalist dictators. You can call it that, but I think there's more to it than that. I think Putin genuinely does have [inaudible 00:20:47] of Donald Trump.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: And my point is that just because Trump hasn't criticized Putin doesn't mean that he is Putin's puppet. By that logic, he also would be Netanyahu's puppet too. Let me ... In terms of the book ... Go ahead. Please.
LUKE HARDING: But I'm not saying that he's Putin's puppet, that's your word, that's not my word. But go on.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: Okay. Well listen. In terms of the book, I will ... I do want to quote you one part that I did read that I found interesting which is where you are talking about the potential connections between Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager, and the Russian government. You spoke to a Manafort associate. Hopefully I have his name ... Hopefully I can pronounce his name properly. Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik wrote you by email in response to your questions about his relationship with Manafort, and you recount that Kilimnik responded by telling you that the collusion issue was gibberish and then he signed his email off by saying "Off to collect my paycheck at KGB." Then he has an emoji smiley face with two parentheses. Okay.You write "The thing which gave me pause was Kilimnik's use of smiley faces. True, Russians are big emoticon fans, but I've seen something similar before. In 2013, the Russian diplomat in charge of political influence operations in London was named Sergey Nalobin. Nalobin had close links with Russian intelligence. He was a son of a KGB general. His brother worked for the FSB. Nalobin looked like a career foreign intelligence officer." You go on to write "On a Twitter feed, Nalobin described himself thus: a brutal agent of the Putin dictatorship, smiley face." So are you inferring there that because two Russians used a smiley face that that's proof that Manafort's associate was a tool of the Russian government?
LUKE HARDING: No. I mean really what you're doing is now rather a sort of silly exercise. You haven't read the book, but you're taking one small bit and jumping on that.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: Because you're using emoticons as proof of a Russian tie so I'm asking you about it.
LUKE HARDING: If you let me-
AARON MATÃ"degrees: Okay. Please. Yeah.
LUKE HARDING: Your kind of question and maybe you could read the rest of the book when you finish the interview, but I mean Kilimnik is the guy that Paul Manafort last summer emailed about trying to set up a kind of private briefing -- this is where Manafort is still Trump's campaign manager -- for a very famous oligarch called Oleg Deripaska. Now Deripaska more or less sort of sits at the right hand of Putin. He certainly has very close relations with him.I think it's perfectly kind of legitimate to ask what kind of role Kilimnik was playing. I emailed him. We're in kind of correspondence. He's still in contact, by the way, with Paul Manafort. He was emailing him a couple weeks ago. Manafort, I met. I mean there's a chapter about what he was doing in Ukraine, about his work for Victor Yanukovych, about how Yanukovych became a kind of kleptocrat. He's now been indicted with money laundering, with conspiracy against the U.S. by Robert Mueller. So I think it's perfectly legitimate to look at him.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: Luke, I'm not saying it's not legitimate. I'm taking issue with you writing "The thing which gave me pause was Kilimnik's use of smiley faces," as if the use of smiley faces is somehow evident of a nefarious Russian government tie. By the way, let me ask you about Manafort. What was Manafort doing in Ukraine? Because as I think you even acknowledge in the book, again, because I did read through it ... You even acknowledge in the book that Manafort was not even trying to steer Yanukovych towards a pro-Kremlin policy. I mean that's widely reported that he actually was trying to orient Yanukovych towards the West.
LUKE HARDING: Well I mean it's more complicated than that. I mean certainly some of the things he did were kind of pro-Western, but at the same time what Manafort really did was to take someone who was essentially a kind of post-Soviet crook and gangster and refashioned him into the image of a kind of modern Western-style politician. It was quite successful. When I met Manafort in 2008, he told me that Yanukovych believed in the rule of law, that he'd changed, that he was not a creature of Moscow anymore, and so on.This strategy worked quite effectively. In 2010, Yanukovych became president. Then when he did that, the first thing he did was to jail the main opposition leader, someone called Yulia Tymoshenko. Basically kind of suborn parliament, get rid of independent courts, and loot the state to the tune of billions of dollars. What I actually write in my book is that everything that Manafort told me during this 2008 period was essentially a lie. It was kind of untrue.Now we now know from Mueller that Manafort made about $75 million allegedly from his activities in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, and in Moscow. Of course his next client after Yanukovych who skipped after Russia with his billions was Donald Trump. One question that I've never been able to get a satisfactory answer for is how did Manafort end up running Donald Trump's campaign. You have to look at the constellation of people around Donald Trump, and very many of them, not all of them but very many of them, had a kind of Russian connection whether it's Wilbur Ross, the secretary of state, or Michael Flynn, or Carter Page, or George Papadopoulos who's been done for lying to the FBI, or Wilbur Ross, the Commerce secretary. I mean you can be benign and say it's a curious coincidence, but I think it's more than that.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: Well I think Manafort is a longtime Republican operative, and I don't think the answer necessarily is that, because he had ties to a Ukrainian president who he was trying to orient towards an anti-Russian policy essentially which, by the way, does not, I think, add weight to the argument that Manafort was in Putin's pocket if he's trying to get Yanukovych to steer towards the West, but I think we can move on from that point.Let's wrap, Luke. Can we agree then that there is no proof of collusion? There even is no proof of hacking. If I have it right from you, the main reason to question, to think that there is a tie between Trump and Russia is a.) the financial connections between people in his circle and Russians possibly, and also the fact that Russia has a history as we've heard you outline of cultivating foreigners.
LUKE HARDING: Yeah. I mean I don't agree. I mean this is your view of there's no collusion and there's no proof of hacking. I mean this is what you assert.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: I said there's no proof of it, yes.
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