SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
President Trump is in Scotland this weekend for a five-day trip. He's due to discuss trade with EU Chief Ursula Von der Leyen and spend some time at several of his golf clubs. If Trump thought he might catch a break from some of the scandals consuming Washington, well, that wasn't going to happen. Several hundred protesters gathered outside the U.S. Consulate in Edinburgh today, including bagpipers, demonstrating against Trump's position on immigration, Gaza. Some even held Jeffrey Epstein posters. As soon as Trump landed in Scotland, he was asked once again about documents about the convicted sex offender and had this to say.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Talk about all of his friends. Talk about the hedge fund guys that were with him all the time. Don't talk about Trump.
DETROW: The pressure on the Trump administration has continued to intensify over its handling of the documents and the broader questions of who knew what, when. And as those calls have ramped up, so has messaging from the administration about a range of other issues, including a rehashing of the 2016 election and Russia's involvement in it. Trump has lobbed serious claims like treason at former President Obama and what the outgoing Obama administration claimed about what Russia was trying to do in 2016 and why they made those claims.
So we're going to take a few minutes to talk about this, to get at why these two complicated and dated stories are intersecting, to fact-check what we've actually learned that is new about Russia in 2016, and to understand what we can learn from all of this about the president's governing style and how he is dealing with his political enemies. To do all of this, we've got NPR's senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Hey, Domenico.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey, great to be with you.
DETROW: As well as cybersecurity correspondent Jenna McLaughlin - hi, Jenna.
JENNA MCLAUGHLIN, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: Quickly, for those who do not remember the 2016 election as much as people like you and I do, can you first quickly recap what this was all about? - Russia and Trump and Clinton and the DNC and all of that.
MCLAUGHLIN: Good for those people. But yes, to remind everyone of back many years ago now, in 2017, the intelligence community put out a wide-reaching assessment that concluded that Russia had attempted to interfere, that they tried to influence the outcome of the election, that they wanted to change the way people thought about what was going on. They wanted to influence people's confidence in the election and its outcome.
DETROW: And that, of course, really politically harmed Trump. He's been dwelling on this for nearly a decade. That brings us to recent news. What supposedly new information has been published about Russia and the 2016 election?
MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, Scott, July appears to be the month for reliving years-old controversies, so bear with me for a minute. Let's go back first to early July. CIA Director John Ratcliffe published a so-called lessons-learned review of the CIA's role in that 2017 intelligence community assessment of Russian election meddling. And then last week, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, put out about 100 pages of emails between Obama administration officials, and then she declassified the entire 2020-era House intelligence review of Russian election interference. Here's Gabbard talking about that release.
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TULSI GABBARD: There is irrefutable evidence that detail how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false. They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true.
MCLAUGHLIN: In contrast, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who has overseen the intelligence community for years, said that there was really nothing revelatory published in all of these many documents. But he did point out the fact that fully declassifying this information could actually expose intelligence sources and methods in Russia, and that could be more dangerous than anything.
DETROW: What is actually in these documents, and how does that square with what Gabbard and Ratcliffe are saying or in those documents?
MCLAUGHLIN: So both Gabbard, Ratcliffe, other cabinet members, Trump allies - they've been all over social media and Fox News. They're claiming that there's been a coup. It's the scandal of the century. They finally have the proof that Obama went after Trump during the election, and they're calling for criminal charges. Tulsi Gabbard says that she referred everything to the Justice Department.
But in actually reading the documents, I think a different picture emerges. The CIA review was done by career officers who did give some recommendations and criticisms about process mostly, including removing political appointees from potentially politically sensitive analysis. But at the end of the day, they said that the conclusions made by the intelligence community in 2017 that Russia tried to interfere in the election - those were defensible.
Gabbard, meanwhile, is arguing that there's a contradiction in what the intelligence community analysts said before and after the election. She said the emails she put out in particular showed that intelligence officers were talking about how before the election, they really felt that Russia hadn't and probably could not hack the election at scale. That means changing vote tallies, taking over voting machines.
She says that directly contradicts the ultimate assessment that they put out in 2017 that concluded Russia had tried to interfere and influence the election and tried to damage Clinton's campaign and help Trump in the process. She nitpicks on some things where there was some disagreement between intelligence community agencies and, of course, raises some critiques that have been made about how the Russian investigation proceeded, the media coverage at the time.
But ultimately, the intelligence community never said that Russia hacked the election. This is all stuff that we knew. It's just, frankly, being rehashed and reframed to make it look like a conspiracy against Trump.
DETROW: Domenico, I want to talk about the political context because clearly, this is a tactic, a choice by the Trump administration. What stands out to you about what he's doing here?
MONTANARO: Yeah, I mean, look, it's an attempt to distract and deflect from the Jeffrey Epstein files, which is political pressure that he hasn't really been able to get out from under. He's tried everything in this past week to try and get away from this, whether it's this briefing by Tulsi Gabbard or even saying that he's releasing more documents on the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination from some 60 years ago or even trying to wade into controversies about professional sports team names that we've been talking about for a long time. So many times, he's tried to shift the focus from talking about Epstein to pointing back to Russia and former President Obama. Even on Friday morning when he was leaving for Scotland, he deflected, and here's what he said.
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TRUMP: People should really focus on how well the country's doing, or they should focus on the fact that Barack Hussein Obama led a coup.
MONTANARO: There's Trump for you, talking about the Russia investigation, which really has nothing to do with what people have been focusing on - in his base, by the way - about wanting to get more information and more transparency about the Jeffrey Epstein files and his association with Epstein, as we've seen drips and drabs of reporting over the past week, where Trump's associations have come more to light.
DETROW: Right. You're talking about, most notably, Wall Street Journal reports that Trump was briefed that his name was mentioned in these files and that his signature appeared in a book given to Epstein for a birthday. These are both reported by the Wall Street Journal this week.
MONTANARO: Yep. And his name being mentioned isn't evidence of wrongdoing, but it is keeping this story certainly alive and giving Democrats more fodder.
DETROW: Domenico, I wanted to just ask one thing. As Jenna was talking about, there's no real new information here, but you still have high-level Trump administration officials calling for investigations into things that President Obama did. I feel like you and I spent a lot of time talking about a landmark Supreme case that gave presidents immunity for actions they took in official office. Feels like that would apply here.
MONTANARO: Bit of an irony alert here because, remember, the Supreme Court last year controversially held that presidents, current or past, are immune from criminal prosecution from things that they did during official acts.
DETROW: Jenna, the Russia investigation and the ongoing political fallout has hovered over the intelligence community for nearly a decade now. What are the people you're talking to making of this latest twist?
MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, honestly, current and former intelligence community folks that I've been talking to, honest - they don't want anything to do with this. They don't want to talk about it for the most part. But I will say that there was this article in Foreign Affairs this week. General Michael Hayden, the former head of CIA and NSA, teamed up with an academic who studies the intelligence community, David Gioe. They argue Trump is breaking the American intelligence community.
In that piece, they start with an anecdote about Russia and how Putin's foreign intelligence chief was trotted out on television, asked to parrot Putin's reasons for invading Ukraine in 2022, pretty much repeating political talking points rather than speaking the truth. The intelligence community always talks about speaking truth to power, how their ultimate job is to inform the president and help them make the best decision possible given the unvarnished truth. But when intelligence agencies get into trouble is when their purpose is subverted, when they start to try to please the No. 1 customer - the president, in this case - rather than actually inform.
I've covered the intelligence community for a long time, and when heads of intelligence agencies start knifing each other in the back to score points with the boss, it doesn't mean that they're operating with the best information or in a well-functioning system of government. It's not a good sign.
I'll say that Hayden and Gioe are not saying that we are Russia, but it's a cautionary tale of what happens when intelligence professionals essentially become mouthpieces for the president's whims.
DETROW: Domenico, how does this fit into what we've seen over the past six months and what this says about Trump's governing style this time around?
MONTANARO: Yeah, really, it's interesting because Republicans always talk about how Democrats having these grand conspiratorial plans against Republicans, you know, whether it's Obama and Russia or even Fed Chair Jerome Powell, some Republicans accusing him of keeping rates purposely high to spite Trump. I mean, none of that is true.
But what is true is that Trump promised retribution, and now he is explicitly going after political enemies. He's using all the powers he has, whether it's stripping former senior officials of security clearances, the Justice Department launching investigations into political opponents, trying to clear out federal workers and replacing them with political appointees. Trump is really trying to consolidate power and quell dissent, and these are tactics used by strong men in autocracies to go after political foes - the media, academia, leaders in institutions and rooting out people in government he sees as disloyal.
And it's really very different from his first term in office when he had more people pushing back on him who had more Washington experience. And with Gabbard and others around him, this is no team of rivals, Scott - you know, the idea that a president benefits from having people around him who can tell him hard truths or give a blunt assessment and maybe a differing point of view.
DETROW: That's Domenico Montanaro along with Jenna McLaughlin. Thank you to both of you.
MONTANARO: You're welcome.
MCLAUGHLIN: Thanks. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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