Page 17 - Kurt Eichenwald News Today

Hitting at his family business. >> kurt, you have done, just to your point, extraordinary, extensive reporting on all of this for months. and donald trump won. hes the next president of the united states. despite all of that reporting, all of the conflicts you speak of. is he doing anything or any of these activities hes engaging in illegal and would actually call for legal action? because as it relates to the american people, they seem to be saying, or at least if you look at the electoral coll...

The united states as a threat, potential threat to their own national security. >> now, kurt, in general the feeling has been that the reason that dawned trump doesnt want to do it. look, hillary clinton has said hes putins puppet. but does your reporting suggest that, no, actually, russias motivation is more about hurting clinton who they have antipathy for rather than boosting trump? >> well, its interesting because it did start -- putin despises clinton. and it did start out as an attempt to ...

His tear, attacking the kahn family, the goldstar family where the father had spoken at the democratic national convention. their son had died. >> yeah. >> fighting in iraq. and when trump started off on that tear, the folks in the kremlin came to believe that he would have to withdraw from the race because he was showing himself to be psychologically unfit. at that point, they decided to stop distributing hacking information that they had until they could get a sense of who the next candidate w...

The reason, american officials tell nbc news the u.s. government believes hackers from russia or elsewhere may try to undermine the elections results. at the same time, theres a brand-new report out this morning about russias links to donald trump. joining me now is the author of that article, newsweek senior editor kurt eichenwald. you wrote american intelligence officials know that russia used cyber attacks and misinformation to interfere with elections in western europe. what have you learned...

Lot of documents that had been hacked, but they stopped distribution of them. they decided to hold off and see if things stabilized both if trump personally stabilized and if the polls stabilized. and at that point, when they did, they resumed the campaign. i mean, people cannot underestimate this. this is a horrifying development. this is an effort by a foreign enemy trying to break the nato alliance, trying to splinter the nato alliance, and we have a presidential candidate whos going along wi...

Agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks come from the highest levels of the kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. i find that deeply disturbing. >> secretary clinton -- >> she has no idea whether its russia, china or anybody else. >> i am not quoting myself. i have 17, 17 intelligence -- do you doubt 17 military and civilian agencies. >> yeah y doubt it. i doubt it. >> why was donald trump so determined on keeping...

Those entities may have certain conflicts, they may have certain interests, there may be debts that are owed to people, they might be in league with unsavory folks, kurt eichenwald has documented that. we all knew nothing. its a black box as we step towards what could be the entirely unprecedented situation of the president of the united states operating the family business essentially out of the white house. michael? >> yeah, well, a couple things. first of all, i think theres two sort of takea...

It to the court, they tell the court, oh, we made a mistake. in some instances, the court expresses disbelief. in another instance, they impose sanctions. in one where they had the server, the disappearing server that reappeared, court came to distrust the trump organization and donald trump by so much that they said, we are sending an independent investigator into the trump companies and theyre going to do the search. were not going to rely on donald trump to produce the documents and found eve...

Course of decades, donald trumps companies have systemically destroyed or hidden thousands of e-mails, digital records, and paper documents demanded and official proceedings often in defiance of court orders. kurt eichenwald, senior writer for "newsweek" wrote that article. over decades. thats a time frame that predates e-mail. what did you find? >> thats why it has documents. back in the 70s, they were destroying documents when the federal government was seeking access to them. they were playin...

>> they tend not to respond to my questions, but i did have one instance. i had the general council of the trump organization in an instance where they failed to produce a document to the other side and then later acknowledged that the document existed. he said that was my fault. trump wasnt involved. >> kurt eichenwald. senior writer, "news week." thank you. >> thank you for having me. paul ryan casting his early vote in the latest republican to draw fire and apologize for outrageous comments...