The Daily - A Year in the Russia Investigation

At the start of 2018, the biggest threat to the Trump presidency was an investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia. As the year draws to a close, it’s his hush payments to women. We look at what’s behind that change — and how the threat may change again next year. Guests: Mark Mazzetti and Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times reporters who have been covering the special counsel investigation. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Duration: 20m
Broadcast on: 18 Dec 2018
Audio Format: other

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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Mark, at this time last year, you had just spent the first year of the Trump administration editing all of the Russia coverage that we did about the investigation, whether there was collusion, the appointment of Mueller. At the end of the year, you came back to being a reporter, and the story of the investigations into Donald Trump is focused on two things, on collusion and obstruction. Those are the two things that we were looking at. We had spent the first year of the Russia investigation compiling this catalog of contacts between the Trump team and Russians of different stripes. We didn't know then where those pieces fit together, whether it added up to any kind of conspiracy. At the same time, we ended last year with a mounting body of evidence that the president, at the very least, was leaning on his top aides to throw sand into the gears of this investigation. So there's sort of two big lines of reporting that we have. It's still trying to answer the Russia question and trying to understand whether the president has essentially broken the law by trying to interfere in that investigation. That's right. So early on this year, we learned from Mueller new information about what Russia had done during the election. What did Mueller tell him? Good afternoon. A grand jury in the District of Columbia today returned an indictment presented by the Special Counsel's Office. Mueller puts out an extremely detailed indictment in February that charges a group of Russians with a massive and very coordinated disinformation campaign of social media manipulation, fake news, attempts to basically suppress the vote by filling people's Facebook feeds with misinformation. The defendants allegedly conducted what they called information warfare against the United States with the stated goal of spreading distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general. It was a really extraordinary indictment because of the level of detail that Mueller's team had about this group of Russians. And I think it was, if people were still doubting that the Russians were behind this campaign, I think that indictment ended most of the doubts. The Special Counsel's investigation is ongoing. There will be no comments from the Special Counsel at this time. This indictment serves as a reminder that people are not always who they appear to be on the internet. So it's putting another layer on what the Russians were doing. It's helping to fill out the picture. Bob Mueller, as we know, does not speak publicly. But in his documents, he's telling the American public a story about what happened to the election. Right. I mean, if you look at the Russian campaign kind of is sort of three prongs, there was the intelligence campaign of outreach to Trump associates. There was the hacking and leaking of emails. And then there was the third prong, the social media campaign, and this indictment in February really spelled out in extreme detail the levels that the Russians went to carry out that third part. So what was in those documents from Mueller that really illustrated what the Russians were doing? It was pretty extraordinary. You had anecdotes about two Russian women who were sort of the advanced party who came to the United States scouting out different states and how they might be able to make contact with different political operatives to eventually carry out this campaign in the 2016 election. You had information of people in swing states like Florida who were paid unwittingly by the Russians to hold rallies in favor of Trump and against Hillary Clinton. You saw people who had been paid to dress up like Hillary Clinton and sit in a cage for a rally as people chanted lock her up. And it turns out

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