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LUKE HARDING: Firstly, I don't accept that. I don't think that's the case. But what I was trying to say at the beginning was just to explain that actually what happened last year happens in a kind of wider context of Soviet and Russian espionage. We haven't really talked very much about Vladimir Putin, about the kind of person he is. I mean he's a former KGB agent who spent most of his career in an organization that regards the United States as an adversary, not just any old adversary, but what you say in Russian is called the glavnyy protivnik, the main adversary. He thinks about America in kind of zero-sum terms. He thinks that's what good for Russia is bad for America and vice versa.There's no doubt that he disliked Obama, that he loathed Hillary Clinton, and that he was very, very keen for Donald Trump to win. I mean you just have to look at Russia ... I mean, I speak Russian. Look at Russian state media in the run-up who were portraying Hillary as a kind of deranged mad woman warmonger and Trump as a kind of peaceful nice guy with whom Russia could do business. There were kind of clear preferences, but also there's this history of espionage which is still, whether you like it or not, whether you accept it or not, very much ongoing and I think we'll see again both in 2018 and in 2020.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: Okay. I guess I'll just say I think we're conflating the fact that Putin is not a nice person, that yes he does not like Hillary Clinton, he loathes the U.S. for many reasons including the expansion of NATO -- I think we're conflating that with evidence and a conclusion that that meant that he cultivated Trump and intervened in the election. I think those two things are different.
LUKE HARDING: That's your view. It would be great if you could go to Moscow, go to Kiev, go to the post-Soviet world, talk to people from the Russian opposition, talk to human rights activists, talk to journalists whose colleagues have been murdered, and perhaps understand a little bit better the kind of state that Vladimir Putin's Russia is. I think you'd be doing yourself a service and you'd be doing your listeners a service.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: I don't think I've countered anything you've said about the state of Vladimir Putin's Russia. The issue under discussion today has been whether there was collusion, the topic of your book.
LUKE HARDING: Yeah, I know, but you're clearly a collusion rejectionist. I'm not kind of sure what evidence short of Trump and Putin in the sauna together would convince you. Clearly nothing would convince you.
AARON MATÃ"degrees: But again ... No. But again, well look. This gets back to the issue. The question is whether there is any evidence so far, and I don't see it.
It looks like Luke has logged off. Is that true? Well we've lost Luke Harding. I'm not sure if that was intentional or not, but regardless we're going to wrap the interview here. The book is called Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. I'm Aaron Mate.
Thanks for joining us on The Real News.
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