Moyers: And Mueller's already obtained two indictments and one guilty plea.
Harper: Precisely.
Moyers: The indictments are for Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. But the indictments are not related to the Trump/Russia connection, are they?
Harper: I think the answer to that is it remains to be seen. That's clearly the way the Trump people are going to continue to try to spin it. But step back for a minute and think about the fact that a campaign manager [Paul Manafort] for a presidential candidate [Donald Trump] has been indicted for money laundering, tax evasion and all sorts of other wrongdoing arising from his work for Ukraine, where Putin and Russia were fomenting trouble. And shortly after he became the manager of the campaign, as we've learned, he was also offering to provide special briefings to a Ukrainian oligarch with whom he'd had business dealings. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see at some point some of these things merge into one another.
Moyers: You mentioned earlier that a new series of Trump advisers are under scrutiny. Hope Hicks is one of them. She's perhaps the closest staffer to Donald Trump. Not even 30 yet, keeps a low profile, been with him a long time, apparently spends more time with the president than anyone else on the White House team. We've learned Mueller wants to talk to her. What have you learned about her and what can she add to this?
Harper: She can add a lot, I suspect. And I suspect that Mueller thinks so too, because as you say, she's as close to the inner circle as you can get. She was also present at two really key points in this story -- and many others, I could add. One in connection with what ultimately led to the firing of James Comey in May of 2017 -- she was around for that. And as you may recall, we now have learned that it turns out that Trump had dictated to Stephen Miller, another close aide, what was apparently a four-page rant, or screed, of his real reasons for wanting to fire James Comey. So it's hard to imagine that Hope Hicks wasn't somehow involved in, or at least aware of, what was going on that weekend in Bedminster, New Jersey, when Trump was pouring his rage into that letter.
She was also aboard Air Force One -- and maybe the lesson is you just never want to be on Air Force One with Donald Trump -- when they were coming back from Europe, and Trump, as we learned much later, had a hand, a very heavy hand, in drafting a very misleading statement about what had transpired at that June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr., Manafort, Kushner and some Russians with ties to the Kremlin. Hope Hicks reportedly was advocating on behalf of transparency, but it appears that she lost out. And that's just what we know Ms. Hicks was involved in. Who knows what else she was involved in and participated in, but I suspect a lot.
I also think she's got a bit of problem because Carter Page revealed that she had been copied on those messages about what he had learned in Russia, or what he was planning to learn in Russia, when she had denied adamantly there had been no Trump campaign contacts with Russia. So she's got a bit of a consistency issue there, it would seem.
Moyers: You mentioned Carter Page. He and George Papadopoulos traveled the world, apparently representing themselves as able to speak for the Trump campaign, even though the Trump campaign later said they weren't. You've tracked down many instances of Papadopoulos in particular speaking to foreign leaders on behalf of Trump. Why is that important?
Harper: Well, he's given extraordinary access to some very high-level people. He was giving speeches in which he was representing himself as being able to speak on behalf of Trump at least with respect to certain policies. And you know, it's hard for me to imagine that he gets that kind of access unless there's some credibility to what he's saying about what his actual role in the campaign is. And of course we all know from the infamous photo taken at the Trump International Hotel that Papadopoulos was one of a handful of people seated at the table with Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump as Sessions presided over a meeting about Trump's foreign policy and Trump told the group that he didn't "want to go to 'World War III' over Ukraine."
And I believe that's what started the process of making clear to everybody who was on Trump's foreign policy team that easing relations with Russia by easing sanctions, would be something that Trump would be open to. And I think a lot of what happens afterward you can fit into this broader framework of the question: What is Putin's angle in all this? Well, Putin's angle in all this is if he can get the Russian sanctions lifted, he's a winner. And if Trump will help him do that, great. And even if Trump can't help him, even if Trump doesn't win the election, it can't hurt that he's created some chaos in a Western democracy, which clearly is what he intended and what happened.
Moyers: You mentioned Jeff Sessions. In his testimony to Congress last week, Sessions said it's hard for him to remember meeting with, and conversations about, the Russians because the Trump campaign was in constant chaos. The fact that the campaign was in chaos certainly seems accurate, but would his excuse play at all in a trial?
Harper: No. And remember what Steve Schmidt, who was involved in John McCain's campaign, said? He said he hopes that Jeff Sessions never gets a puppy because he's not going to remember to feed it, he's not going to remember to get it watered, he's not going to remember to let it out. That puppy's just going to be in terrible trouble.
But what's interesting about Sessions to me is this: What Sessions said in his recent statements was, I haven't remembered that Papadopoulos raised the issue of Trump meeting with Putin or members of the campaign meeting with representatives of Putin until I read about it in the news reports. But now that I've read about it, now I remember, and listen -- I pushed back really hard and I said that it would not be appropriate for anyone to be meeting with a representative of a foreign government. All of the sudden, it's like the light has gone on in Jeff Sessions' head. Now, you have a situation sometimes in trials where a witness in a previous setting had sworn that he couldn't remember something. And then six months or a year later, all of a sudden they have this epiphany and the memories came flooding out. And there's something counterintuitive about somebody who says they remember more now about a specific event than they did a year earlier when asked about that same specific event. That just doesn't play well with most juries.
And bear in mind, too, something else about Sessions that's worth remembering that I doubt would necessarily be obvious to non-lawyers. Going into those Senate hearings, going into each one of those hearings, Sessions had to know that he was going to be asked about all of this stuff. And he had to know that he needed to be as familiar as he could be with whatever he could learn so that what he gave was truthful, straightforward, candid and ultimately something that the public and Congress would believe. And yet despite that, at each subsequent appearance, somehow there's something new and the attorney general of the United States shrugs his shoulders and says, "Oh, I guess I did know that."
My problem is, I want Sessions to hang on. I don't want him not to be attorney general yet, because the minute that Sessions resigns or Trump fires him, then you have the door open to an acting attorney general, and I don't want to live to see Scott Pruitt [head of the Environmental Protection Agency] or [former New York mayor and Trump ally] Rudy Giuliani become acting attorney general, which is something that Trump could do without even Senate confirmation. It doesn't even have to be those two guys, because we know Trump has a plethora of cronies who will do whatever he says, because Trump says that's what he wants, and if Trump says he wants Mueller fired, that to me is the disaster scenario for the country.
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