Jane Mayer

... Tell me what you know about Roy Cohn.

… When [Donald] Trump first meets Roy Cohn at Le Club, Trump’s got a problem. The federal government is cracking down on him for discriminating in some of their rental projects that they run. I think it’s rental. Is it rental?

Right.

Yeah, OK. Sorry. So in the rental projects they run. And Trump’s regular lawyers, the ordinary kinds of lawyers, tell him: “Settle it. Just move on. Do the right thing. Do what you're supposed to do under the law." Trump’s not happy with that advice, and he asks Roy Cohn about it, and Roy Cohn says: “Don’t settle it. Fight. Fight. Fight. You’ve got to fight." And that becomes kind of his early credo and his approach to the law, which is, even if you're in the wrong, fight. Trump’s Showdown

He and Cohn become sort of a team, really. And Cohn, of course, you could hardly have a worse reputation in the legal world or in New York. I mean, he’s come from the House on American Activities Committee, where he was the legal counsel to Joe McCarthy, and they tried to ruin people’s lives by falsely accusing them of having communist ties. In the world of New York City, he’s considered a persona non grata, basically on the fringe, kind of a dirty player. But Trump loves him.

The arc from Cohn, who basically says to him, “Don’t tell me about the law; tell me who the judge is,” right, “F--- the law,” he’s one of those guys that basically says it’s all about the personalities; it’s all about the politics.

That, of course, is the world that, if you read Wayne Barrett, [author of The Deals and the Downfall], that’s the world Trump’s grown up in, which is, you know, it’s a world of connections and payoffs and backroom wheeling and dealing, and just kind of low-level politics that’s really scummy, kind of the outer borough New York politics. And that’s the world that his dad dealt in, and he grew up in. So I guess he felt right at home with Roy Cohn. (Laughs.)

The other thing Cohn does is get him hip to the tabloids, Page Six. Cohn worked for Walter Winchell as a tipster many years before. That was how he sort of made his bones. By the time he’s back in New York, he’s all about Page Six and the Daily News and playing them off against each other. He’s teaching Trump this. ... Let’s just spend one second on it, if you know anything about it, of course. The big thing is the Ivana divorce, and back and forth, and how it’s best sex ever. They play this war in the tabloids. Cohn has written a stingy prenup for her, and that’s battled out. He’s not the lawyer for the divorce; that’s Jay Goldberg, who we interviewed last week in New York. But just in terms of the tabloid world, Trump’s view of journalism in those days, around that divorce, do you have anything on that?

... The thing about it was just that people who were involved in covering that marriage, including Harry Hurt III, who eventually wrote a book about it, say that when Trump and Ivana were still married, they used to spend an incredible amount of time simply reading about themselves in the tabloids. The help, the people who worked with them, were just kind of astounded, because the Trumps, Mr. and Mrs. Trump, would start their day with the tabloids, reading everything about themselves, and then pass the papers back and forth between each other. They just lived on the gossip, and they could never get enough of it. It was kind of like their real life was what they read on Page Six, or at least that’s what they wanted it to be. So it’s very strange.

But they were obsessed early on. And I know when Tony Schwartz, who eventually wrote The Art of the Deal, wrote a really tough piece about Donald Trump very early on in New York Magazine, and he thought Trump would be mad at him, and instead Trump called and said: “I love it. Everybody’s reading it. It’s like a best-seller." This magazine was selling out on newsstands everywhere, and he said, “I want it framed." And it didn’t matter how nasty the stuff was, he just wanted so much attention. That was what I got from that....

They did fight back on the rape thing. He was threatening.

If you read Harry Hurt’s book, it’s very well-sourced. There's a lot of detail, and it goes right back to Ivana and a sworn deposition that she gave and that Harry Hurt had. She never denied what was in that deposition, and in fact, it would have been a legal problem for her if she had, because she was under oath when she gave that deposition. So she’s never denied it.

But what happened was, in the subsequent negotiations about what kind of settlement she’d get from Trump, she appended a statement to it that said that she hadn't meant “rape” in the “criminal” legal sense . Whatever the opposite sense is, is not clear. But she never said that she hadn't given the statement or that the statement wasn’t true. …

So they fight back. Anybody who’s tried to report it, including Tim Mak, who tries to write it in Wired a while ago, he gets threatened by Michael Cohen, right?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

It’s just—

And Michael Cohen basically just threatens this guy like some kind of lowlife thug. Trump’s ShowdownHe says to this young reporter, Tim Mak: “You’ll never work again. I'm going to ruin you so fast you won't be able to pay your rent,” or whatever. I can't remember every detail, but it jumped off the page when you read [it]. Tim Mak must have had his tape recorder running. Michael Cohen emerges as this character that sounds like he’s coming out of The Godfather or something, not from the New York Bar.

So the composite of the life in New York that we’re discussing here, from Roy Cohn to Michael Cohen through the Ivana divorce, through the threatened lawsuit, or the lawsuit with Tim O’Brien, [author of TrumpNation], for example, where it’s just a bloodbath. ... What's the composite picture of Donald Trump as he’s elected president, and leaving New York, and his perspective on law, lawyers and life’s travails?

Oh, I think that the view you get is that Trump views the law and lawyers as just instruments to get his way. It’s all about just another tool for getting power for him. It’s not about justice; it’s about how much juice you’ve got....

So he gets elected president, and he’s preparing to come here. And here is not—I mean, he will be a stranger in a strange land in lots and lots and lots of ways. But in the legal sense, in the world of the law and the rule of law, how out of it is he, really, when it first starts?

One of the issues that I look at with Trump legally is his attitude toward torture, which is one of the great tests of our era about the rule of law. He has absolutely no understanding of it or any appreciation for the idea that there's a Bill of Rights or that there is such a thing as human rights or that the Constitution might make it unconstitutional to perform torture on a detainee. In the campaign, he’s just saying, “We need to torture them more." He has no understanding of at least the culture of justice. He may see the law as a way to get what he wants, but I don’t think he has any understanding, ever, that the Justice Department stands for values.

When the [intelligence community] comes to visit him at the Trump Tower on Jan. 6—[then-Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, [then-National Security Agency Director Mike] Rogers and [then-FBI Director James] Comey, ... [then-CIA Director John] Brennan—what do you think a guy like Trump thinks they're coming there to do?

Well, I've read what he thought. What he felt, particularly when Comey briefed him about what was in the Steele dossier, the sort of dirty allegations about Trump, he thought that Comey was trying to intimidate him and say, “I've got the goods on you,” and use it as leverage. That’s what he thought, that it was just all about personal and political leverage that Comey was trying to exert over him.

To the contrary, what Comey was trying to do was [to] say, “People outside of our government, the Russians may be trying to exert leverage over you by using this to blackmail you, and you need to know this so that we can handle this issue for you and defang it,” basically. But that’s not at all what Trump understood. He was just looking at this as a power game between him and Comey.

Is it possible that he didn’t know about the Steele dossier? I mean, you knew about it. A lot of people knew about it. How was it possible that Donald Trump didn’t know about it until Jim Comey handed it to him?

Oh, I think he must have known something about it for sure, but maybe not all of the details. But to go back to what he was expecting at that moment, his understanding of the role of the FBI, it’s not as if it doesn’t have some corollary in American history. What he’s seeing in Jim Comey is J. Edgar Hoover, and in many ways, Trump is kind of a throwback to an earlier time, where it’s all about getting dirt on people the way J. Edgar Hoover did get dirt on people, including people like Martin Luther King, and using it for political leverage. And that’s what he thinks Comey is trying to do to him....

Let’s talk a little bit about the dossier, simply because you wrote the definitive journalism about it—...what it was, the veracity of it, the reality of what the dossier delivered to the FBI and others. What did you come to believe about the qualitative aspects of it?

You know, what I learned about it was that you have to look at it for what it is, which is, it’s raw interviews with sources. And Christopher Steele had a whole network of sources who reported in what they heard about Trump and his connections to Russia, and it was never purporting to be a final analyzed document that was carefully put together. It was raw source material, and that’s what it is. And it’s full [of] really interesting things that, if they are true, would be very upsetting.

But the experts who know intelligence look at a document like this, and they say, “You know, if it’s 80 percent true, that’s really good, because that’s kind of what you would expect for something like this if the CIA provided it."

And Trump’s response?

Oh, well, Trump just described it all as just nothing but lies. He immediately denied everything.

And he took it kind of personally in a way, I guess, partly, from what we can tell, because it delegitimized his victory and who he was....

It’s true. But what's interesting, if you look at Trump’s initial response to the Steele dossier, he only responds to one thing, really, which is the allegations about there having been prostitutes in Moscow that performed some kind of urination on a bed that Mr. and Mrs. Obama had slept in in a hotel. And what he says is, “That can't be true, because I'm a germophobe." And that’s pretty much the only thing he says at first is, “I'm a germophobe, so it can't be true." He doesn’t really address all the rest of the allegations right away.

And when he throws this lengthy press conference right after the BuzzFeed rollout—this is where he goes after [CNN’s] Jim Acosta—he talks about fake news, ... what is that telling us, at the beginning of his presidency, about him and the road ahead?

Well, it’s very much the Roy Cohn message, which is just fight back as hard as you can. I mean, just counterpunch no matter what. From the start, he always hits as hard as he possibly can, and harder than he’s been hit if he can. So you see that there. And he’s hitting the messengers. In this particular case, he’s hitting Steele, because he’s trying to undermine the credibility of the report Steele’s done, and he’s going after CNN because CNN has done the first big news story on it.

But I suppose, to me, one of the interesting things about Trump’s reaction to all this is, since the beginning, he’s gone after the people who have gotten the information on him that he doesn’t like, but he never comes up with a counternarrative that explains—there's no narrative of innocence that explains, well, what was he doing with all of these Russians? Why was he over there? He punches back, but he doesn’t really give a full explanation that ever satisfies anyone paying close attention.

There are those, of course, who we've talked to, who say the appearance by the [intelligence community], the private session with Comey, the release by CNN, the BuzzFeed, it is all, to them, the Trump side, a sign that there's war, that war is declared, that the deep state is in action.

Sure. From the start, the message out of the Trump world has been that this is a war on Trump, rather than that it’s Russia trying to attack the United States and our elections. It takes it all completely personally. And it’s interesting, because he doesn’t act like a president who’s concerned with the Russian intervention in the election, which the entire intelligence community is telling him took place. He’s only concerned that it seems to undermine him in some way and his victory in some way. It’s all about him from the start.

... At some point you just want to say, I think, that this investigation didn’t just start with Steele, and it didn’t just start in the campaign. But, you know, the FBI has been investigating [foreign policy adviser] Carter Page since 2013, and the FBI [had] been investigating [National Security Adviser Michael] Flynn ...Their effort to try to make this sound like it was all just about taking down Trump is really not factual....

Comey is in the [Blue Room’s] curtains, walks across, awkward moment. Followed by the dinner for two on the 27th, five days later. [Acting Attorney General] Sally Yates has been up to talk to [White House Counsel Donald] McGahn and says: “We've got Flynn compromised. I think you guys ought to think really seriously about whether you want your national security adviser to be in this posture." That evening, Trump has dinner with Comey and asks him for loyalty. But what are those events telling us, not so much the Sally event, but the other two? What are they telling us about Trump and how he’s approaching the job, and specifically how he’s approaching the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation?

Well, Trump sees the head of the FBI, and he sees really the whole Justice Department as its role is there to protect him. These are sort of his soldiers, as he sees them. It actually is also a message, from what I understand, that he conveyed to Obama, in conversations, private conversations with Obama, before Trump took office after he’d been elected. They’d had a few conversations, and at some point, I understand that Trump said to Obama, “You know, that Eric Holder,” who was running the Justice Department during the Obama administration, he said, “That Eric Holder, he did a great job for you." And Obama sort of quietly tried to say: “Well, he wasn’t really working for me. It wasn’t about what he did for me; he did a great job for the country." But Trump just then said: “Yeah, he did a great job for you. He really protected you." That’s how he sees that job. He sees the Justice Department as there to watch his back.

So when he says “loyalty,” what does he mean?

“Take care of me. You're going to try to make sure that nobody gets me on any kind of legal grounds."

And that’s, of course, what he’s gotten from life in New York, every lawyer, everybody. It’s all about me. ... He shows up in Washington. What does he really know about the Constitution? ...I mean, this is Donald Trump from New York.

Yeah. But the thing is, Trump’s previous legal life was all about private squabbles, having to do with private property or his own marriage. What you're asking of a president when they are elected is that they represent the whole country and that the Justice Department is not there to represent him on his legal squabbles; it’s there to do justice for the entire country. It seems as if he was unable to make that transition....

There’s this growing sense that he’s a guy in way over his head as Comey and others keep coming at him. And he says, “Just let me off the hook." He says to Comey, “Tell the world that you're not investigating me." It does feel like he is literally a stranger in a strange land.

Yeah. And I could see his frustration. If you’ve got Comey privately saying, “You're not a target of this investigation,” he’s a new president, and he wants the country to know this cloud it’s not over my head, necessarily. But of course, that misunderstands—just because he’s not a target then, Comey doesn’t want to say, “You're not a target,” because he might become one. He doesn’t know where this investigation is going to lead, and he can't give him a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, which is what Donald Trump is asking him for.

But I'm not sure I would give him as much latitude as you are in terms of saying that he is just naïve. I mean, how old is he?

72.

OK. I mean, he’s 72 years old. He’s toughed it out in one of the toughest businesses in one of the toughest cities in the world. He’s not a naïve person. He doesn’t have an interest in the law as representing principles. He could easily find out about it if he wanted to. He’s had a lifetime to learn about the Constitution, and it’s just that it hasn’t been his approach. His approach is all about power, just taking advantage of people, or not being taken advantage of, and that’s just how he sees everything....

... Comey has testified that there is an investigation. Trump is unhappy that he hasn’t been let off the hook publicly. It feels like he has had two or three real meltdowns in public, an unhinged moment after he’s had to fire Flynn. There have been tweets about the press is an enemy of the people. All of that has been said over the first three or four months of his presidency. Especially ... this struggle with the establishment, with establishment journalism, what's happening, and what is the fight over and about?

I suppose what he’s discovering is what all presidents discover, to some extent, which is that they don’t have complete power over everything. They can't control the message completely; they can't control the independent press; and they can't control the independent Justice Department. There's a bureaucracy that has knowledge of its own. You can get elected president, but you're not a despot, so you can't just get your way. There are a lot of checks and balances in our system, and he’s railing against them during this period. That’s what I think you see.

The allegation that Obama tapped his wires at the Trump Tower, how did that strike you when he said that?

Laughable. ... You immediately have denials from all the people who know how a surveillance works, saying, “This didn’t happen." And yet a big part of the country seems to still be buying into it. His base is buying into it. It’s creating a kind of a conspiracy theory that works for him, and he’s getting very spun up and spinning up a lot of the country on it.

When you look at his responses to justice, [he] fires Sally Yates early, and in a kind of inglorious way, [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions—

He’s furious with Sessions, right, because Sessions has recused himself, and he feels he’s done sort of the traditional thing that you do when you have a conflict of interest in our system, stepped aside. It’s exactly the opposite of what Donald Trump wants him to do, which is to be his guy in Justice and protect him. So they feel like he’s losing control right from the start....

So you're wondering about Sessions. I mean, people all around [Trump] seem to always disappoint him. Sessions has an old-fashioned sense of government in Washington. He’s been a senator for many years. He’s got friends on the Hill who kind of like him, and he knows how things are supposed to work in Washington. Trump is completely frustrated with him, because Sessions is not doing what he wants.

When he goes off for that weekend to Bedminster, [N.J., to the Trump National Golf Club], before, ... he’s got [son-in-law and adviser Jared] Kushner there, too, and Kushner is in the whirlwind, a little worried about whatever is going to happen to him at the hands of Comey at this time.

Kushner seems perfectly happy to go along with Donald Trump’s view that Comey’s got to go. In fact, he seems to be egging him on a little bit about it. And Kushner apparently provides the really poor political advice that no one’s going to care very much if they fire Comey, because Kushner reasons that Democrats don’t like Comey because of what he did to Hillary Clinton during the campaign, so they can just kind of jettison him, and it won't be a big deal.

... And the role of [U.S. Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein in the way they use his memo, then to Lester Holt [at NBC News], Trump takes credit/blame for the firing of Comey. What do you make of all of that, the way that it was rolled out, and the way that he did it and even why he did it?

... They’ve concocted kind of an elaborate cover story for why they’re getting rid of Comey, which is this idea that he had behaved badly in the way he’d handled the Hillary Clinton investigation during the campaign. They’d gone to this trouble to concoct something that makes it seem palatable to the public. The kind of amazing thing is that, as soon as Trump is asked about it by Lester Holt, he just subtly throws the cover story overboard, and just tells the truth: “I wanted to get rid of him because I didn’t like what he was doing on this investigation of me and the Russians,” basically.

What do you get from that? There's kind of an interesting candor on the part of Trump, and you certainly get to see the reality of his motives, which are he wanted to shut down the Russia investigation. And he’s not even trying to hide it. All the people around him see jeopardy in telling the truth about this, because it looks like obstruction of justice, but he doesn’t seem to care. He’s just going to tell Lester Holt and make them all look like liars for coming up with a cover story....

Bannon becomes a moderating force.

Bannon has more of a sense of history than a lot of the people who were in that White House, and he knows the history of Watergate and what happens with independent counsels and special prosecutors. He sees both the peril that they pose, but he also knows about obstruction of justice and what it could look like if Trump fires Comey. Trump’s ShowdownSo he keeps trying to stop Trump from doing things that historically would just ruin a presidency.

You wrote about the Donald Trump Jr. meeting at the Trump Tower.

A little bit.

You remember the story?

Yeah. What about it?

... [New York Times reporter] Matt Apuzzo calls the White House and says, “We’d like a statement about this meeting." This is one version of the way it starts. The president and [former White House Communications Director] Hope Hicks and the entourage, some of the entourage are in Germany for the G-20 summit. He’s just asked Putin if Putin did it, and Putin said no way, he wouldn’t do it. Now they're on the plane, and they need to craft a statement.

Right. So the president himself gets involved in coming up with an explanation for why it was they were meeting during the campaign with Russian emissaries who purported to be bringing dirt on Hillary Clinton that had been authorized by Vladimir Putin. So what they come up with is that this meeting was really just about adoption policy, because when the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia, Russia retaliated by stopping U.S. adoptions of Russian babies. This becomes the most palatable reason they can come up with for why they were meeting with a Russian emissary who claimed to have connections to Putin.

... At any rate, this unusual meeting is scheduled to take place in Trump Tower, in June, and there's much excitement. You have an email from Don Jr. saying: “If this is what I think it is, I love it. I'm hoping that there's going to be some dirt on Hillary Clinton." He sends this email back to his Russian connections, and the meeting takes place. Don Jr. is there. Jared Kushner is there. [Then-campaign manager] Paul Manafort is there. And Rob Goldstone, who’s kind of an unusual British publicist, who’s representing a Russian businessman who has connections to Trump, who—the family’s name is Agalarov. And there's a Russian lawyer, a woman lawyer, who sits down, and she’s supposedly going to be delivering the goods.

They all sit there with great anticipation, and it doesn’t take very long before they are very disappointed. She doesn’t really have anything that’s especially damning to say about Hillary Clinton. What she really wants is to get the U.S. sanctions lifted and to get the Magnitsky Act overturned, which is stopping oligarchs from being able to do business in the United States.

So why is this a big deal?

Well, it’s a big deal because you’ve got a foreign country, operatives from a foreign country, not a particularly friendly country to us, Russia, the Russian Federation, saying they’ve got some kind of dirt on one of the two nominees running in the presidential election in the United States. It’s illegal for foreign countries to be interfering in our elections, and the ordinary thing to do when you have foreign interference in democracy in this country would be to pick up the phone, call the FBI and say: “This is really strange, but you’ve got to know this. We think there's something strange going on, maybe some kind of dirty operation involving the Russians trying to meddle in our election."

But this just demonstrates to some people how naïve Don Jr., Kushner and Manafort really are. They didn’t really—

You know, that has been an argument that’s been made. If you really think that Paul Manafort, who’s worked in international affairs and elections and as a consultant to the Ukraine, and worked with Russians for many, many, many years, if you think he’s naïve, I think you might be naïve.

So why do the president and Hope Hicks draft a statement on Air Force One that is obviously not true ?

What they’ve done in the statement that they draft is what you see Trump doing a lot. It’s not completely a lie. There's a shred in there. The shred of truth is that the Russian lawyer, when she came over to deliver dirt on Hillary, what her motivation was, was to overturn this Magnitsky Act. The Magnitsky Act, one of the things that it does is interfere with adoptions in the U.S. of Russian babies. It was far from the reason why these people were meeting on either side, but it was a tiny sideline to that meeting, so they looked at what you could say publicly, and they found the one thing that sounded OK. I mean, who’s against adoptions?

So in the end, after three days of emails rolling out, suddenly—

Well, what happens is it turns out there’s a paper trail, and the paper trail shows that adoptions was not really the purpose of the meeting. And when Don Jr. realizes that there's a paper trail, and there are emails that are going to implicate him, then he gets out in front of it by about a minute and a half and issues a statement that is a little more honest about what was taking place.

There are lawyers, of course, all around. President Trump has brought Marc Kasowitz to Washington—one of his “killers” from New York—to represent him in the Comey situation now. When this breaks, Kasowitz is working the phones, trying to get Trump not to write a statement, not to do anything. “Stay away from this." But Trump is, as always, his own lawyer in so many ways, and apparently, according to every lawyer we talk to, a terrible client, in the sense that he doesn’t ever listen to anybody’s legal advice. The implications of the efforts by all? I mean, Jared has his lawyers. Everybody’s kind of lawyered up by this time in the Trump White House.

Well, what it results in is making it look like they're all lying about the true purpose of this meeting, which then gives it the aura of a cover-up, and makes everybody wonder, well, what was really taking place, and why are they trying to cover it up? The thing about Trump, ... part of the reason that he’s probably a bad client is, if you read The Art of the Deal, he thinks he can talk anybody into anything, and he thinks that it’s much less important to tell the truth about something than to—what is the term that he uses?

It’s not a rational— “Truthful hyperbole." What Trump embraces in The Art of the Deal is something that he calls “truthful hyperbole,” which, as Tony Schwartz, who really wrote the book, says is a lie. Trump thinks that people want to hear lies and that lying works. So if you're a lawyer, you have to be worried that your client is going to lie, particularly under oath, because it’s a crime when you lie under oath. But Trump has been practicing truthful hyperbole his whole life, so he’s crafting these cover stories, is what he always does. It’s about adoption, he says. You know, that’s because that’s always worked in New York and everyplace else he’s been. You come up with a good cover story and feed the people what they want to hear. That is his credo....

It’s only in the last I think two months or so that it feels like he makes a kind of decision—and if you were going to pick a decision or reason for a decision, it’s when you get the sense that [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller has crossed the redline. They're going for his business. They're subpoenaing the business. Something he has said: “Stay away from my family. Stay away from my business." Then they turn toward Michael Cohen through the Southern District of New York. It really feels like the noose is, at that moment, tightening, and he’s kind of losing his grip on all of it, in some way.

Is that when he brings in [Emmet] Flood?

It’s when he brings in Flood and Rudy Giuliani, and it’s when it really feels like ... he’s ramping it up against the press; he’s ramping it up against the Justice Department. He’s now openly saying things about the Federal Bureau of Investigation, all design[ed] to undermine the rest of our trust in those governmental institutions. And certainly Rudy joining the team is the declaration of a new phase of the war.

It is interesting that he did bring Rudy Giuliani on his legal team, because Giuliani famously was not chosen by Trump to be in his Cabinet. At the time, what people were saying that were reporting on this was that Trump didn’t have enough confidence in Giuliani. Giuliani wanted to be secretary of state, and Trump didn’t want to pick him, because he didn’t think he was reliable enough for whatever reason.

So the idea that he would bring him on as a lawyer at this point is interesting. To me, I think it suggests that Trump is running out of people that he can call.

... Instead, they make him the representative of the president of the United States in the battle of the titans for the legal battle.

Well, who else is he going to get, right?

I guess that’s right. You’ve got Flood for the inside game, but that’s all you’ve got. You don’t have anybody else.

You’d think you’d have any number of really ambitious lawyers who would want to do it. But again, I think you're right that he’s such a terrible client, people don’t want to work for him.

Eight different major law firms in Washington said no when he was looking for a lawyer, or so it was reported.

That’s just wild, isn't it?

... It’s a really interesting time for him now. He has taken a strategy on ... which really is the undermining of the rule of law, as we like to say in Harvard land. It feels like that’s the attack: that we’re going to undermine it all, so that when they finally write a report, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. It’s “fake news." It’s a “witch hunt." It’s whatever the drumbeat is now tossing off. And Congress may be joining in. A lot of people we've talked to say [it’s a] fearful time. Really, for the first time ever, it starts to feel like Trump could win, whatever “win” means. Your thoughts, the big thought about what's happening?

I think that he’s been waging a deliberate war on the whole idea that there is such a thing as independent justice from the minute he was elected. He’s gone after the Justice Department, after independent counsel. He’s gone out of his way to undermine the FBI. All of these institutions are built and exist to serve the whole idea of independent justice, and he’s done everything to undermine it because I think he sees it coming after him. It’s a personal threat to him, and he’ll destroy it rather than letting it do its job.

...What is this document that Comey has and knows about? What does it say?

... They’ve been very nervous about whether or not to tell Trump about what's in the Steele dossier, but they feel they absolutely have to, because it’s full of things that could undermine his reputation and that may be able to allow the Russians to blackmail him. Specifically, it has information about him using prostitutes. It has information about him involved in perverted sexual acts. Trump’s ShowdownAnd it also has information about a lot of wheeling and dealing that doesn’t look good about the Trump business in Russia and about help that they gave him in the campaign, giving him dirt on Hillary Clinton, and exchanged their effort to try to get deals back from him, lifting sanctions . It’s full of dirt on the relationship between Trump and Russia.

The problem is, Comey feels he’s got to let Trump in on this. He’s afraid it’s going to leak. He’s afraid the Russians might use it. There are all kinds of reasons why they’ve got to tell Trump. So he sits down and kind of grits his teeth and does it, kicks everybody else out of the room at the time, to try to make Trump feel more comfortable than having to face a group, and one-on-one goes through it with him. And Trump is predictably enraged.

How much credibility do you think Comey gave the document at that time?

Comey would not have briefed Trump on the dossier from Steele if Comey thought it was just garbage. They would never have brought it up to that level. And Comey would never have briefed President Obama on it, which he had done just a day or two before. The thing is, the FBI and the CIA had a lot of confidence in Christopher Steele. They knew him. They’ve worked with him in the past. Steele was a former spy for MI-6, the British intelligence agency, and he’d been working with the FBI on a number of cases. They knew his network of sources, and they thought that network of sources was credible. They thought he was reliable. And they thought there was independent verification, which they had been able to get, of a number of the items in his dossier. For all those reasons, they thought they had to tell Trump. They put a lot of weight on it. They thought it was quite credible.

... Can you give us a brief synopsis of what some of the other stuff was that was not in the Steele document that is important to put into perspective?

Yeah. What I think is worth remember[ing], what Trump’s trying to do is undermine the credibility of the Mueller investigation by making it look like it all depends on the Steele dossier, and Steele depended on Hillary Clinton. So he’s trying to make it look, by inference, like it was all just this whole Russia collusion story; it’s just a dirty trick that originated with the Clinton campaign.

The reality is quite different. One thing you have to keep in mind is that the FBI had been investigating Carter Page, who is an adviser to Trump on issues involving Russia, the FBI had been investigating him since 2013, long before the 2016 presidential campaign. They felt that he was either a dupe or some kind of Russian agent, so when he pops up in the campaign as an adviser to Trump, all these bells go off saying, “Oh, my God, this person we’ve been investigating in the past as possibly a Russian agent is now advising the Republican nominee for president."

So they have their own independent investigation of Carter Page, and they’ve also got a separate investigation that has nothing to do with Christopher Steele into George Papadopoulos. It develops in a totally different channel. And Christopher Steele doesn’t even know anything about George Papadopoulos. At some point, the FBI says to him, “Do you know anything about him?,” and he’s like, “No, who’s that?" So there are independent sources of information flowing into the FBI, some of which they’ve been looking at for years, that are making them very nervous about what Trump is doing with the Russians.