job. >> afterwards airs saturdays at 10:00 pm and sundays at 9:00 pm eastern and pacific on booktv on c-span2. our previous afterwards available to watch online and booktv.org. and here's a look at the next three programs on booktv on c-span2. .. that's a look ahead at the next three programs on book tv on c-span2. starting now here is greg miller on russian interference in the 2016 election. >> a rare occasion for me to not actually be the host, but a conversation with greg. i have never really sat in one of these chairs and you realize

how uncomfortable they actually are. anyway, good evening. i'm bradley graham, the owner of politics and prose along with my wife and on behalf of the whole staff, welcome and say thank you very very much for coming. the subject tonight is one of the biggest stories of our time, which is a course russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election resulting investigation of the trump campaign and trumpet administration and we are very delighted to have with us one of the journalists who has been very involved in covering this unfolding story, greg miller who is a national security reporter for the "washington post".

greg was part of the "washington post" team, won a pulitzer prize for investigative reporting this year for the groundbreaking coverage that they have done on the russia trump that. a second pulitzer craig shared in 2014, he was also part of the posted team awarded the pulitzer for public service for coverage of american surveillance programs revealed by edward snowden. now, as you might imagine the months and months that has spent with his colleagues on the russia trump story have been quite intense and overwhelming at times. of the story has come to encompass 70 elements and so many players in parts of the government, the white house, cia , justice department, robert mueller investigation, congress, media companies, the kremlin and keeping them all straight in the comments-- is immensely

challenging, even making sense of the connection of the pieces can be very difficult given the day to day struggle of reporting the volume of breaking news. that's why craig chose to step back a big write his new book which is called "the apprentice". he wanted to lay out what is known so far put together a detailed largely chronological narrative filling in some blanks connecting the knot-- dots where he could through additional reporting. of the result is a comprehensive, engaging and very very useful work. "the apprentice" contains fresh details and provides lots of quite helpful content. it's greater contribution to the growing list of books about the russia trump scandal is how well it synthesizes the available information describes for

readers the full scope of what has become an incredibly complicated tale. so, please join me in welcoming greg miller. [applause]. on going to be in conversation here for a little while with greg and then we will open it up for questions. how're you doing doing, greg? >> great. thank you so much for having me. >> you coming straight from the office? back reporting now? >> came straight from the office, actually filed my first byline since i took off for the book project just tonight to publish a story tonight. my colleagues and i about the khashoggi case. i was checking that edits on that until i pulled up in a romantic outside your door. >> russia has not been enough for you now you are going after the saudi's. i would like to talk tonight

about both substance and about process. substance because there are so many strands to this trump russia story that's helpful to the highlights of that which have as really the most significant, about process also because the media's role in pursuing this story has been such a central part of it and one of the things that your book does so nicely is play back the curtain of it on what you and the "washington post" and gone through and as i said in my intro and you wrote this book to try to draw together what's known so far to look for patterns and insights in to fill in some gaps in the reporting, so what were two or three of the main things that jumped out at you at-- in looking back at the story. >> sure. so, my background at the "washington post" has national security reporter as you said and specializing in covering us

intelligence agency, some as a cover the cia, director of national intelligence and nsa for more than a decade now, so when this a story really started to break in the latter stages of 2016, you know, i was at the center of a story that was really spilling out of what us intelligence agencies were learning and concluding about what to russia was doing, including not to fact that russia had been waging this interference operation in the 2016 race and had a very specific objective in the end, not just to spill chaos in the united states, but to help elect donald trump. i was involved in stories that broke background. we broke stories about michael flynn and his false statements about what he had told the russian ambassador in the late stages of money 16, but when i

set back to work on this book earlier this year couple things jumped out at me even though i was in the middle of the story there were so many moving pieces to it that there were parts i could not really even focus on and i would say some of the financial journals that i started reviewing when i looked at the timeline here and started to look at trump's financial connections, his empire, the structure of his real estate empire, strange and odd turns it had taken over the years, that was maybe the most eye-opening area for me because i had just not had time to absorb that kind of material until i sat down to try to understand this in a broader way. i think there are a couple moments that really stand out, some of which we only learn, connections we only see now

largely because of robert mueller's work and i will just mention one. everyone remembers the moment during the 2016 race when trump said russia, if your listing i hope you can find those missing hillary clinton e-mails, i mean, we now know because of robert mueller and extraordinary detail he built into these indictments he's delivered that russia was listening and within hours launched a fishing operation to gain access to printed computer servers looking for those e-mails. it was an interaction between presidential candidate trump and a foreign government that played out right in front of our eyes, but it also had this secret hidden component that we only learned about a year later. >> one of the things you do very well in the first part of the book is to retrace how it very gradually dawned on those in the

government and elsewhere the extent of russia's interference and election and really what the russians were up to. it becomes very clear in reviewing all of this history how many missed opportunities there were to stop this, to tell the russia's-- russians to cut it out. although, there were eventually some warnings delivered to them. could take us some of what were the biggest missed opportunities >> there are huge missed opportunities. when you look back and look at that now and replay it it's almost like one of those horror movies where you see the main character kind of moving into a vulnerable position on the screen and doesn't see this monster lurking behind and you just want to shout at the screen , turnaround and focus on what is around you.

the whole opening of the book on the first chapter is about the russian intelligence hacking penetration of the dnc computer networks, how early on the fbi learned about this through a tip that came in from the intelligence service in the netherlands and then how many months and months and months went by before they could get the attention of the leadership at the dnc, before they could convince the it team at the dnc that this was really the fbi calling, literally the it worker at the dnc didn't believe it when he got a call from an fbi agent say your network has been penetrated. thought it was a prank it took months for them to resolve this and this huge disconnect and throughout that time russian hacking operatives were rummaging through the dnc files for months and months and months and if someone had seen that in

time to shut that down and clean it up the damage would've been just so much less, so much more contained and there are cases after case like that in the story where for one reason or another the us or the entities in the us can't find it in their power to react in time. >> finally when the intelligence agencies in particular really got focused on this, then the challenge becomes convincing of the leaders to do something about it and you are right about that and there is a good amount of fresh information, fresh detailing your book and one of the scenes you described is john vernon, cia director who becomes quite seized by all this russian interference and combs through some very secret intelligence

and recognize vladimir putin was directing this and then he goes out to try to persuade republicans as well as democratic lawmakers as to say something about this and he runs into a lot of resistance from mitch mcconnell, the majority leader in it at the same time the department of homeland security that's trying to warn state officials that their voting machines could be vulnerable and the department offers federal help, but some republican officials like brian kemp who was recently elected the governor of georgia and was then georgia secretary of state said thanks, but no thanks and you write letter to put weapon eyes to intelligence. mcconnell and the gop weapon eyes denial, so what does this whole experience say about the ability of our political leaders to recognize or act on real and

present dangers to our national security? >> that's a great question. that stands out, it's one of those things that i think that future generations when they look back on this time will see it as a turning point in our country in the way it conducts its business and the way we behave as a society, as a political entity. i spent a lot of time with obama officials with this book, with trump officials were this book and intelligence officials from the cia and other agencies and so one of the-- there is a chapter where i described brennan basically closing the door on the office of the cia for a two-day stretch as he so worried with what happened with the election and he's trying to figure out what the hell is going on here, closes the door and stays into the wee hours of the night for two straight days

poring over everything the cia has on russia on the election and he comes out of that exercise so freaked out that he called dennis mcdonald at the white house and he said i need to see obama immediately and goes straight to the white house and they come up with a plan which is we need to respond, but the first thing we need to do is get everyone on the hill into this because we need to respond in a united way with a bipartisan response. we can be seen as the obama administration politicizing intelligence, reacting in a way that will look to be perceived as if it's how helping hillary so they go to mitch mcconnell with a one-on-one to deliver briefing with mcconnell which is pretty unusual when the cia director goes to the hilt it's usually in front of a group of senators and this time he's along with mcconnell. he's expected she's laying out the conflict and he expects mcconnell to say you are right we need to do something about

this and in the fact the opposite happened. mcconnell said you look like you are trying to screw my candidate you are trying to screw the republican candidate here and says to brennan, not only will i refuse to sign on to any condemnation of what russia is doing, but you guys go further with this i will accuse you with interfering of the election. he won't accuse vladimir putin, but he would accuse obama, i mean, there's lots to say about the obama administration failings here, but the reaction of the republicans to me-- mitch mcconnell in particular stands out as a disturbing moment in our history where this idea of-- that there are issues and threats from which we can all sort of come together as americans as opposed to partisan figures is gone. >> that's really something to worry about. one of the top trump people, of

course to fall early in the whole story is michael flynn, who was trump's first pick to be national security advisor and you devote a fair amount of space to him. president obama, one of his last warnings to then president-elect trump was don't give michael flynn on important job. trumped it anyway. why did that turn out to be such a fateful decision? >> you know, flynn had endeared himself to trump during the campaign by campaigning with trump in a way that was really astonishing. you covered the military, you know this. there were peers of mike flynn. he was a decorated army general, highly respected, rose through the ranks in a way that few intelligence officers do and

when he shows up campaigning for trump in such an open partisan and almost bitter and hostile way towards the clinton people given some of flynn's close associates, stanley mcchrystal trying to stage an intervention, trying to tell him you need to settle down, this is not helping this is not how flight officers, even retired officers should conduct themselves, but what happened is try ignored to this warning from obama, pics flynn. he's out of his depth in terms of his role as national security advisor. even in the transition there are officials around him who are so troubled by the eagerness and extent of visitor actions with the russians that they are trying to get him to slow things down uruguay are you doing this, why are you texting, why are you calling and speaking and meeting with the russian ambassador so

frequently? do you recognize anything you say will publicly be picked up by us intelligence and it didn't matter to flynn, i mean, he still makes this fateful call at the end of december after the obama administration trumpet limit-- the trump administration announces sanctions on russia that very day. use on the phone with a russian ambassador saying the sit tight we have you covered we will take care of this when we are in office, don't do anything. to me, now, i mean, we get this question a lot now that the focus out, what is the evidence, i mean, where is the smoking gun and so forth. having here you have decorated respected army general who spent his entire career serving the united states, turning against it in the end and secretly communicating with the russian ambassador, lying to the fbi about it which means fighting to his own government about it and

that was one of the first big huge developments in the truck russia investigation we've broke the story in the "washington post" and exposed his lies and he was out of office within a few days. >> his firing then made it all the more difficult for trump and others in the administration to dismiss all of this russia collusion, russia conspiracy talk as being make-believe, i mean, .-ellipsis real at that point. you know, the scoop that you and your colleagues had about michael flynn having to discuss sanctions with the russians ambassador came in the face of very firm, repeated denials to the "washington post" that he had actually done so and you write about what was going on back at the paper about whether to run with the story or not.

to you all had what, nine sources saying that this it actually happened? that's a lot of sources. want to talk a little bit about the decision to go with that story in the face of flynn's denials. >> absolutely. that was such a dramatic moment and i felt like-- i don't do it a lot. this isn't like all the presidents men, but i do to turn the camera back inside the newsroom and a few critical places and that is one of them because it was so dramatic just how things were unfolding for us as we were trying to get to the bottom of this, so needless to say when you are going to accuse the national security advisor of line to the american people and being in the league with russia you want it that right. you don't want to make a mistake i think we are accustomed to once you have something nailed

the there's a way these things unfold. the subject, the entity or individual you are writing about when confronted with the facts ultimately sort of acquiesces, so we had that weeks pursuing the story. we had a lot of officials telling us we were correct and i had a colleague-- i think you probably know caring well who had a previously scheduled interview with michael flynn at the white house and his new office in the west wing in the corner and we grabbed her on her way over and said when you get to the interviewer which you cover the subjects tell him we will publish the story and we need one last response from him on what he discussed with the russian ambassador, so she does that raises this with him at the end, asks him, the post is close

to publishing a story saying you told the russian ambassador that the trump administration was going to re-examine sanctions. denied it categorically. looked at her and said no, no, no, that did not happen. when she came back to the newsroom that night we thought we were ready to publish i mean we were literally on the verge of hitting publish, in the system ready to go when someone high up in the government pushes back that forcefully it makes you want to take stock and so it took us another-- we regrouped, re-examined all of our sourcing, had a meeting the next day where i went into marty baron's office , laid out our sourcing on this and that's where the number nine came from because marty was asking who do we have and how many and i laid out the sourcing for this story and by the end of the meeting marty said we are going to publish, go tell flynn

we are going ahead anyway despite his denials. i call the white house and they say give us five minutes. they call back in an hour now the story changes. flynn says can we take back that denial that we issued last night? >> not quite. >> can we modify that. he does not recall whether the subject of sanctions came up. >> for a story like this the sourcing is key, but not a day goes by it seems where the president is attacking the press and i would imagine it can be very difficult to get interviews with people you want interview with. on the other hand there must be many others who are very eager to pass information to you all. what is it like these days to

try to deal with sources? you have been doing this now, for a while. do you here for more or fewer people? >> i have never lived through anything quite like it at mean you are right, we are under attack every single day in a visceral way, a spiteful way often. not just as, fake news and stuff like that, but attacks on the tools of our trade, facts, truth, the idea you can get to the bottom of something and that there is a reality that exists somewhere you can uncover. this white house, you know, the vitriol and the press is off the charge-- charts, but so is the number of people who are talking every single day about what's happening inside this white

house or elsewhere in that administration and, you know the motivations are pretty obvious, really, i mean, it's one just utter dismay in many places with what they are witnessing inside the agencies where they work or inside the white house itself, but when you look at trump and the president and as an individual and how he treats his subordinates and how disposable they are to him all of the time with almost no exceptions except for immediate family, i mean, there is-- what loyalty could he possibly expect from those around him, i mean, they live in a world where they could be cashiered at any moment. they could be cut loose, fired in the most humiliating fashion with a tweet right or something like it. what loyalty could an executive like that expect. >> and big incentive for people to want to come talk to you

guys; right? i mean, you tell another story about how one of your colleagues, ellen, received an anonymous letter. this is late 2016 during the transition. it was a manila envelope, single space type from someone at trump tower involved in the transition discussion that was very concerned about meetings involving-- involving senior transition officials who sounded interested in establishing some kind of secret back channels with the russians and you can buy secret tips like that, can you? >> no. interesting case because it also

tells you something the public doesn't always understand about sourcing and how it works. there is this moment in late december, 2016, where ellen goes to her mailbox and pulls out what she expects to be usual junk mail and there's an envelope with a charlie brown stamp on and she pulled it out and it's a letter typed, no name, no return address-- address that lays out all these concerns that this individual has with things happening in the trump transition, mostly about russia and some about michael flynn. it-- as much as that document penned out over time it was not a source document for us. it was not anything in and of itself that we could rely on to build stories around. we could treated as a reporting map to pursue things, but we don't know who that is spirit we

don't know if it's really still have no idea who sent that to us here we've never been able to figure that out here we ran down a bunch of suspicions, never able to just-- discern who that was. >> maybe it's the person who wrote the anonymous op-ed. >> it falls into the category of astonishing things that have happened over the past year. it was only a few months after that i started getting from a source or sources transcripts of the president's phone calls with the leader of mexico, the leader of australia, accounts of his conversation with the russian foreign minister inside the oval office. i don't know if people understand, you could spend a decade in washington, decades in journalism and never see anything like that. >> you know, best or you ended up writing about those conversations with australian prime minister and the mexican president became a episode you

describe in the book as well because trenton james comey were very upset by your story and there's a memo that james comey subsequently wrote about his exchange with trump in the oval office about this because they were trying to figure out who leaked the story at trump talked about putting reporters in jail and james comey spoke about the value of putting a reporter's on a spike to send a message and you realize when you are reading this memo months later that that reporters had was yours, so now you say you cringed when you read that. i would have had may be a reaction than cringing. maybe you did to.

>> these days when marty baron talks to me or about me he likes to say he's glad my head is not on a pike. yeah, maine we get used to in journalism kind of-- we are so uncomfortable with thinking of ourselves as part of the story or thinking of consequences for ourselves that we spend a lot of time about protecting our sources and of course we all like to stay out of jail as well, but we are sort of never like it's the front of our minds are at least a reason for me, so it was chilling to read that mambo a james comey route. he wrote all these memos and anytime he had a interaction with trump he would respect to his car or laptop and write what happened and this was an account of what happened minutes later and as frightening as it is to hear trump urging him to put reporters in jail here is james comey going along with it, sort of laughing at it saying he would love to do it.

there's value in it. i mean, he is no hero of first amendment in that moment as far as i'm concerned. you know, i was telling the story when i learned of this thing it was while i was writing the book and those memos were released. i made a terrible mistake home because i-- we were having dinner and i have a 7-year old boy. resolve my wife over dinner, you're not to believe this, this memo came out today and here's what it said and i'm just treating it as just another incredible thing, can you believe a kind of category, but i look over and my 7-year old is crying because he's absorbing this in listening and wondering and he looks at me and said dad are you going to go to jail. is trump going to put you in jail? i failed as a parent on my end

to raise that subject with him, but it does tell you that it does touch as, these ideas-- the idea that those of us doing what we do could face consequences and it you would have officials at the highest level of government that would be that eager to punish you and not a for doing what you do. >> what source do you identify in the book as michael steele, the author of the infamous dossier. he secretly went to the "washington post" in september 2016 when he was trying to get word out about some findings and you met with a couple reporters for two hours. i don't think you were one of them, but two of your colleagues and he elaborated on the dossier some of the things in the dossier are proven true than other elements haven't been substantiated, at least not yet.

what do you think of the dossier overall? >> i think overall in its broadest-- most accurate and broadest most sweeping assertions and conclusions and the more narrow you get the more particular you get the harder it is to figure out whether it's on the mark. so, the very first memo that he writes is that it's now part of this collection of memos we call a dossier says russia israel waging a campaign to interfere hoping to elect donald trump your keys writing that wave before we are before the cia even reach that conclusion so he's way ahead now. you know, the thing i think people remember the most typically about the dossier is the idea there is a tape somewhere trump consorting with

prostitutes in moscow, i mean, could be given what we know about trump it certainly wouldn't be outside the realm of the possible that this happened but we have seen no evidence and it's not for lack of trying to mean there's other material in the dossier. we literally spent weeks and months trying to run down. there's an assertion in there that michael cohen went to prague to settle payments needed at the end of the campaign. we had reporters through every hotel in prague trying to-- just to try to figure out if he was there and came away empty. we talked to sources at the fbi, cia and elsewhere. they don't believe that happened >> we don't know if michael cohen maybe offering them. >> that's right. >> on another question or two. i want to get out and then we can turn the microphone over to the audience.

so, the end of the book you wonder as many of us continue to wonder what it is exactly that vladimir putin has on trump and you write even if the russian said steel dossier suggest there's a compromising image of trump in moscow that it may not be decisive leverage given everything else he's been able to survive, but we are left wondering, so what explains, you know, trumps continuing and bizarre submissiveness to the russian leader? where do you come out? >> i think i sort of look at these and categories and then i assigned them category of various levels of plausibility so i think the more we have seen with trump it certainly as i said seems plausible that the russians have some sort of

compromising tape of him, but it's impossible that it would get vladimir putin leverage, i mean, these things that would be fatal to any other politician just sort of seemed to roll off of him and i don't think tapes of prostitutes would do him any more than learning that he was cheating on him wife with a pornography star in lake tahoe, but the idea that i think the financial connection that are still so opaque, but so deep are that's a much more compelling series, the idea that he has deep financial ties to russia and the closer you look at truck -- trump real estate empire, the more it looks like a lot of his properties, a lot of the condos and that he has sold and towers in florida and elsewhere, the development deals he's done an sort of crazy places overseas rely extensively

on stranger sources of money and all debt directions that his empire has taken going from being the king of debt and borrowing to the hilt for everything suddenly throwing around again power is up cash buy golf courses. that makes that theory a lot more compelling to me that there are deep financial connections that we still don't understand completely and hope robert moore may help us to understand soon, but as i write in the book ultimately vladimir putin has this crazy thing on trump, which is the depiction that trump clings to most ferociously are the self creation myth. it's one that he is a self-made billionaire that his father loaned him a scant million dollars and he parlayed it into

this billion-dollar empire and that we know is just not true. "new york times" helped establish that definitively to the other one is that he won this election hands down. he talks about incessantly. he vanquished hillary clinton, not even close, describes his win in her role terms all the time and insists that russia's interference was a hoax largely because it would be so damaging to his ego to admit it were real, but here's vladimir putin who knows exactly how far russia went who in a place like helsinki would have been position to pull the rug right out from under trump and to say we absolutely interfered in this election and look what we accomplished. look what's happened since, i mean, that would actually destroy the last kind of leg or the only surviving leg of the trump narrative that russian interference was a hoax. >> let me ask you about the title of the book, "the

apprentice", obviously a play on the trump tv show. you meet trump as an apprentice to vladimir putin. >> the show makes him famous and even more wealthy and then he arrives in office as an apprentice in that he has almost no training for the job of the presidency. he's never held public office before, never held a classified document as far as we know, never had to manage a big agency and sort of only connected to politics with big donors and political figures and stuff bending off lawsuits and legal action by the justice department so i mean there is an indoor miss on the learning aspect to trump so he does have this sort of apprentice thing, but there is this enough-- inexplicable ability to vladimir putin wayside this past week in pair

semi look at the way he's carrying himself around other world leaders, pouting, solon, can even bring himself to look at them. vladimir putin strolls up, walks towards him and his face lights up coming the biggest smile you've ever seen on trump's face and many many months when he sees vladimir putin. it's just amazing to watch. >> you don't see trump smiling very often in office, do you? well, we are ready for questions from the audience. we have a microphone. just raise your hand and we will put the microphone and it. >> thank you for an interesting presentation. we see so much information about corruption among leaders, not just here, in other countries with populist leaders and

reading all the details about corrupt activity and yet nothing happens, so i start to wonder, do people really care? the theory is if you have transparency, that you force accountability, but we see document after document after front of people and yet the balance of power. there aren't any revolution caused by all of this information. what's your sense on that chimeric. >> i think there's a fundamental shift in at least the way our country evaluates information brought to us weather comes from us and news organizations or other sources. you know, sort of trump most potent symbol, i think, of a

broader phenomenon which is the discrediting of news organizations and institutions that we used to believe in and so it's easier now, i think, for people to just decide they're not going to believe something because it doesn't fit with their-- just there on political leanings or biases. i think the dynamics have changed pretty soon because i think trump and his administration have been protected for the first two years. so, house of representative and democratic control with committees able to subpoena officials from the trump administration to explain policies, to call attention to the corruption we have seen in many of these agencies i think

will be an upside down world for the president and a lot of people who work for him and i think it's not just confined here to the united states or broader consequences i think. i worry a lot about the possibility that the demise of my colleague jamaal shelby-- khashoggi was killed last month, i mean, how much was it to represent the sort of saudi royal family feeling like this is a cold terrorism, impunity we have never seen before here. we can get away with this. look what trump says about critics. locality treats the press. look how he treats people. look how close we are with jared kushner peer what bad can happen to us? we see that over and over again, abroad also. i worry about the signal and

campaigns to discredit the press, justice department so forth are just part of a playbook that autographs around the world can really take an image of. >> you just mentioned that now that the houses and democratic control there will be committees that have subpoena power. if you were advising those committees, i think, with oversight intelligence and ways and means on what documents they should ask for and what people they should call to testify either an open or call-- closed what would that be? >> i would love to see trump's tax returns like anyone else. i would love to see-- i think

there's still a lot we don't know about the before-and-after of the meeting at trump tower. donald junior making a call to a number in the middle of his meaning of trump tower that we still haven't been able to identify and there hasn't been a lot of vigor in the republican efforts to get to the bottom of those questions in the senate or the house and i have a feeling the house intel committee will start going after things like that. i think the house intel committee intends to dig into the financials interactions of trump's dealings with george bank which became an entity closely associated with money laundering out of russia and prominent wonder to trump after other banks started refusing to do business with him, but i also think robert mueller has already gone down a lot of these paths and i don't think it will be long before we kind of learn more about what he's already in trouble with.

>> when you are involved in trying to piece together so to mr. like this how do you avoid the dangers that come from sort of a following the same line that everyone else is following a meeting all of us learn this lesson from in the run-up to the iraq war when everyone was convinced that saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction. you deciding them. why else would he not what inspectors in, why else would he not want to essentially like the united states to invade and lo and behold it turns out afterwards that he didn't have weapons of mass distraction and there was an alternate explanation for why he was behaving the way he was.

have you thought about alternate explanations for why trump is behaving the way his? >> i have. to me i think that we look for-- you are correct, there is this sort of group think aspect to how we approach this question. why would you behave the way he's begging towards bottom air? there must be some hidden leverage that vladimir putin has over him because that's the only way that behavior makes sense to us, but there's another equally plausible and maybe even more compelling explanation, which is trump in his personality, and hissed this position believes that-- admires the autocratic type of model, the leadership, i mean, this was his approach to his own company turkey believed it would translate well to the united states, the greatest frustrations and the presidency are connected to his inability to just order things at shutdown

like a robert mueller investigation, to erect a wall along the border with mexico. he can't control these outcomes the way he would like to. i think that he sort of-- he wishes he could emulate vladimir putin in many ways in which that he had the arrangement vladimir putin had without a pesky press that was so troublesome without independent federal investigative branch and so forth. i think we-- i mean, i have never said look, there has to be -- all of this smoke has to lead to a gun somewhere. i'm not certain. i think it's still possibly could, but i also think that we just sort of have to look at trump's personality and the kind of person he is and that also tells us a lot about why he

emulates vladimir putin and why so devoted to him. >> can you hear me? thanks for a great talk and well moderated, but the press had something to do with trump's win at least in my perspective because, you know, what i read typical you nor-- "new york times", "washington post" it was a sense of inevitability that hillary clinton would win and many republican-- intelligent republicans that i know didn't like hillary, didn't want trump, but didn't want hillary to win by a landslide and just sort of because there was this perception she would win by a landslide and sort of them voted for trump as a backlash, so has where the post accounted for how it got the election prediction so wrong two years ago? >> you are right, i mean, that's

a completely fair question and it's not something we have even solved i mean when you look at the 2016 election now, it's hard not to be critical of the press and a look at how susceptible we were to exploitation not only by trump and his ability to generate headlines and is stress -- interest, but by russia itself. the russia interference in the hacking of the dnc come of the dumping of that stuff on wikileaks doesn't have a fraction of the impact without a bunch of reporters like me rushing into that pilot documents and writing the story that has hillary clinton and e-mail in them and its own imperfection in our system that i don't know how to solve. i don't how to reengineer, i mean, it's not solved. i mean, we saw in this past election the issue of immigration go from kind of way

on the back burner to on the front pages of my newspaper and many others because trump sends a bunch of 5000 troops to the border with mexico and starts talking about a caravan, invading caravan. you know, news organizations with the president of the united states sends an attachment of active-duty troops to the border what are we supposed to do? we cover it. we included all kinds of skepticism in the coverage. we described it as like all that said it was a political stunt and yet the day after day the images people see in the headlines people were consuming or about immigration, moving towards a border i mean all of these buzzwords that trial clearly decided worked to his advantage.

>> on glad mr. grant mentioned the concept of group think, when i remember also in thought about a lot. it seems like the time between the discovery of the hack, dnc office and the announcement that russia was the perpetrator was extremely short and i wonder how that identification was made so quickly. i wonder if either you or the fda got to examine the dnc's fervor to examine those characteristics that might have been left on their like download speed, sources of data, timestamp on the data appeared did you get an opportunity to look into those issues and confirm that story of the russia hacking? >> dnc immediately turn to

private security teams to try to assess this out and if you look at the work they did it didn't take much to sort of traces back to russia. operationally, the kinds of hacking tools that were being used were closely associated with the cozy bear and fancy bare teams, i mean, their signatures were all over it. these were not highly sophisticated hacks in many ways they were just pushing through open doors at the dnc and in fact the gr you hacking team was like you know, just like you know, clashing cymbals once they got inside pic they made almost all efforts to cover their tracks. everything we learned a sort of reinforces the accuracy of those determinations and one of the most astonishing things about what robert mueller has done so far is the indictment he has delivered includes such compelling detail that i've

talked to cia officials who really can't believe that he was allowed to include detailed that takes you right to the specific keyboard that gr u hackers were typing from, hammering away on specific keyboards in a specific building in moscow, the names of these operatives. the case was pretty strong from the outset and it's only gotten stronger. >> i think i heard from you the same thing don explained to people that she was around when the hack happened that all parties trusted this private eye teams determination and there was not the separate examination by the fbi. >> i didn't say that i mean trump has said what happened to

the server right and this is sort of a smoke bomb he likes to throughout the fbi was never able to get the server. the fbi never wanted the server because it had all the data it wanted i mean it replicated everything it needed from the dnc system to piece this thing back together. the fact the server itself, a piece of hardware is a sitting in the relic, at the basement of the dnc still is a material, i mean, that doesn't really disprove the russia complicity of the operation. >> we are going to take one more question here and that will be it. >> i went to squeeze one in. speaking of intelligence findings, this information or one of the items brennan was pouring over the summer, 2016, that included information that the cia had collected

establishing vladimir putin's direct involvement in this, i'm sure you wondered what exactly-- where did that come from, i mean, do you know anything more about it than what you put the boat? >> i do. if also the category of one of those things where we reached an agreement-- we have been persuaded i should say, the post has been persuaded by the us government and cia to disclose more would have risked exposing sources, so i do know a bit more, but it's a pretty compelling-- i want to circle back to the question a mended ago, the group think rushed about the fbi and russia culpability. i mean, if you remember at the time dnc started saying shortly after the wikileaks dump this is a representative at it-- russian operation the press was

skeptical, i mean, they were sort of mocking dnc officials, senior democrats. now they portray themselves as victims of russia, i mean, i don't think there was a real rush in the press to sort of pin this on russia or to believe the dnc and democratic officials and the obama administration never even mentioned russia publicly until october, and not even until after the election in january do they specifically say that this was a vladimir putin run operation designed to help elect on track. >> last question. >> my question is, how vulnerable do you think trump is to the robert mueller in the southern district of new york-- michael cohen? >> my god. i mean, based on his behavior how he reacts on twitter and as agitated as he seems at times i

think he feels vulnerable, but one of the weird things about trump as president is there's no transparency. i mean, he is the-- seems at times incapable of hiding or disguising his own insecurities or his own worries. they play out every day for all of us to see. of the things he's most upset with our pretty obvious and that's one of them. >> great, thank you very much. copies of greg's a book are available at the checkout desk and he will be very happy to sign copies right up here, so let's give him a round of applause. [applause].

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to all of these authors have appeared on booktv and you can watch them online. [inaudible conversations] >> good morning. we are going to get the program started now. buer