We are very happy to do that. As much as we love it we have been there for 15 years we look forward to our move and if you dont know next year the museum will not be 100 meters from here. Where across the mall in the plaza area in which case we actually will be able to have a new the new Museum Without having to go somewhere else. Its not going to happen for another year or so we used 2018 as our new museum and we will have the program before he do a grand opening around this time next year. Be on the lookout for that. You were given a program for this evening. Definitely take a look at it. Includes a communique for the offense we have at the museum. This is an example with the partnership of the news york times for the two events throughout the spring. Theres a lot of stuff going all the way through the end of march march. One of the highlights of the spring as a Development Event we are doing later this month with the former director of National Intelligence jim clapper who has been in the news a little bit lately but something you may want to check out. Im going to introduce and make sure i get it tonight, first i want to say how much we enjoy have the opportunity to work with our partners at the news york times. We truly love doing it. We worked together with scott shane at the International Spy museum. We look very much forward to working with Michael Schmidt in the near future. These three extraordinary journalists will be introduced more formally by jennifer and a few moments. My friend john jimenez who has been covering it so let me get on with introducing jennifer. Jennifer is a New York Times editor in washington d. C. She first started working at the times which was called at the time a copy girl and since then she has covered numerous and broke chief most recently prior to her current gig she covered capitol hill preparing for anything anyone does away so pleased join me and welcoming jennifer. [applause] good evening. Thank you for coming this evening to want to give a special shout out to the news york times we thank you for helping making our journalism happened we have an Interesting Times interesting and davos program for you tonight. As want to do a couple of housekeeping things. Please turn off your cell phones phones. We are being broadcast live tonight on cspan, cspan2 say you can tell your friends to watch it right now. This is the first of New York Times life events for 2018 and we are excited to bring you more programming. Check out our web site for more later this year. Would love to introduce our panel. My esteemed colleagues who im honored to introduce trademark mazzetti is a correspondent for the news york times where he covers National Security since 2006. Mark has been in charge of editing a lot of the coverage of the russia issue this year and scott shane at the news york times where he has written about National Security and other topics. The vote are part of a pulitzer prizewinning team and he served as a correspondent in russia. Michael schmidt is a correspondent for the news york times. He has times has worked at our baghdad parent before that he was a sports reporter. He has broken some of the biggest stories in the last two years of the news york times and they are joined by Board Members from the spy museum John Menendez and retired officer with over 25 years of service. When she retired she was the chief and hopefully she can put some of this russian information into context without further ado please welcome our panel. [applause] thank you jen and thank you all for coming tonight. Thank you for being at the first time life events 2018 and after what happened in 2017 we thank you for coming back for more. [laughter] tonight, first of all its a great honor to be on this panel tonight with two friends and colleagues who seems to a lot of battles together as long as a new friend. I have excellent authority critical information that after being a Washington Post member for decades recently decided that she couldnt do without the news york times and became a paid subscriber to the news york times. [applause] thats all you need to know for tonight. We already love her. Tonights topic as jen mentioned his trump in the russia investigation and this consuming competitive maddening story that youve all been part of over the past year some as reporters and some his readers. No doubt everyone here has been following this quite closely. I dont know if by the end of the night it will all be clear and if it is please tell us because we would love clarity on anything. Hopefully we will be having a lively discussion. To start, i thought i would first of all say its been a year, almost exactly a year since the Intelligence Community assessment about what happened in the 2016 election about russian hacking and campaign disruption. This was the official Intelligence Community product. I wanted to start out with scott and say okay so its been a year since that came out and there has been a whole lot of reporting and revelations and investigations by journalists, federal investigators etc. What do we say about the Russian Campaign as we know it now . Before lets separate collusion, the famous work collision from what the russians are known to have done and everybody here has been reading about this daily but it might help to just sort of run through quickly and remind ourselves of what the russians did, why they did it and what its impact may have done. So this is the lightning tour of what happened. Basically i think you can divide the Russian Operations into hacking and leaking and the social Media Campaign essentially creating safe americans on facebook and twitter to repeat messages and then there was an element of over propaganda which i think is much less significant where they were just expressing their preference in the president ial race. Why did it happen . I think there was a personal motive on the part of Vladimir Putin. Hillary clinton had publicly sort of spoken to the rights of people demonstrating in moscow in 2011. I happened to be there at the time. It was really an precedented. Hundreds of thousands of people get out on the streets of moscow and they carried white ribbons and they said very unkind things about Vladimir Putin. He took that very personally and i dont think for her it was very much an american politician thing to say you know we support democracy, we support people who are demonstrating for democracy but he took that to heart and then there are other things that certainly from putins point of view were american operations against russia, i dont think we would view it that way. One would be a for example the outing of doping in sports. Its kind of hard to for us to see it that way but for putin it was an attack on russia and with a large american component and another thing we wouldnt see in this way the pentagon papers which of course exposed this old buddy of putins who is a cellist who suddenly it turns out had 2 billion hidden away in offshore accounts. It turns out Classical Music is extremely lucrative in russia and so but i mean he incorrectly saw that as a cia operation. In that sense it was personal. The results are strategic. Russia did not appreciate the socalled Color Revolution in youth crane and georgia. Is so tangled up that nobody would ever say we want to be like them. I have to say we have had some success with that. Finally, did it matter . You can re people say this was insignificant. They spent 100,000 on facebook ads compared to tens of millions by both the clinton and Trump Campaign. That is true. But as social media has unfolded and you look back at the impact of the leaks lets remind ourselves of what the impact was. One thing that happened was that debbie had to resign as chairwoman of the Democratic Party the day before the Democratic National convention. Any message the democrats had was stepped on. It disrupted the national convention. That was from 20 million emails being leaked from wikileaks. Then john podesta it was dribbled out by wikileaks starting on october 7 which happened to be on the day of the access Hollywood Tape became public. They started dumping these Podesta Emails and they kept going after day up to the election. One thing i did is that i looked at some of candidate trumps speeches. Go to his speech in pennsylvania. 225,000 people, rousing speech which he has the crowd in the palm of his hands. In a way, the centerpiece of that speech 0. Is so tangled up that is exerts from little phrases Hillary Clinton speeches that she refused to make public. Unfortunately for her they were included in the Podesta Emails. His literally reading from these things. At the time i dont think they are thinking about the russian operation but if you think about the russian contribution is pretty striking. So i think theres a lot of emphasis on the ads on facebook. If you look at the pages and the many accounts on Twitter Facebook was reluctant to come up with this. Eventually 26 million americans had been served the pages created by russians. Thats a remarkable number. Tweets from russian related accounts were almost 1 of all election related tweets. With a margin of the hundred thousand votes in three states, its impossible to say that activity made a difference and made the difference in the election. But its also hard to say it did it. That was a Successful Campaign on their part. Thats before we get to anything related on the Trump Campaign. Thats what were talking about tonight. One thing will get to since you spent time in russia what a lot of people have thrown around someone say the russians could never have done this without some help. They didnt have the political knowledge and what states to target. Someone say thats absurd. But dont answer that yet. Think about it. I want to move to mike to address the other part of the issue. Theres a question of collusion of the other side of the coin is the question they spend time focusing on what Robert Muellers looking at is what has trump done since becoming president. Was there obstruction of justice and the actions of the president to try to derail the investigation . Would that be something potentially is threatening to the president is any question of collusion. If you look at muellers investigation you can imagine it was like two buckets. You have a collusion bucket and obstruction bucket. With trump theres more things to look at in the obstruction bucket. Theres not a lot of things we know about on the collusion side. Your say that with trump specifically. Theres a lot of things hes Done Since Taking Office that raise questions about what his motivations and intentions were. On february 14 being the biggest one. He went to comey and asked him to end the flynn investigation. Was that trying to impede an ongoing act of the investigation. The firing of comey. What were the true intentions of getting rid of him. Was he trying to obstruct the Russian Investigation . Or was he trying to hold them accountable for Hillary Clinton during the campaign. The statement they came out from an air force one flight over the summer when his return in response to a story or colleagues are coming up about a meeting that happen in 2016 between the Trump Campaign and russians were promising dirt. In that case, was he throwing sand in the gears of the investigation by throwing out information that wasnt true. Another broader question is obsession with loyalty. Why is it that he was so obsessed with Jeff Sessions running the investigation. These are these large its that mueller has been journaling down on. He spent a lot of thing looking at handwritten notes what was somebodys mindset of the larger body of things so can he make an obstruction case. Saw obstruction are very difficult cases to bank because you have to approve that it happened. But is a president of the United States you can fire the fbi director. He has power over the Justice Department to do those things. Was he exercising his executive power . Or was he trying to cover something up . What make it easier is if there be something outside the normal power of the president bill clinton was impeached we dont have any of that on the president that we know about on our side. Based on whats publicly available on questions of obstruction theres not a clearcut case. Youre actually the real expert here, having been in this world for 25 years, is the anniversary of a lot of things. One year out from the revelation of the infamous steel dossier which the matter how much it is examined, its almost gained in prominence as a political issue. Republicans are trying to attack it as a political document. And to smear donald trump. Democrats see it as a result a stone, this is the map that we get to the collusion case. You are a professional intelligence how do you see that document a year later. How would your former colleagues at the cia have looked at the steel dossier . It was a year ago tomorrow when it became public. I stayed up and read that thing like three times. Ive been interested in this thing from the very beginning. The first thing that i thought in my colleagues thought was that look like the real deal. They look like an Intelligence Report would look. Its not one long continuous 35 page document. Its a series of reports typically he draws no conclusions. Is bringing forward facts and cited sources and he shouldnt name them. But as raw intelligence some of it will always be right. Selecting intelligence is not a science. Yours going to have to go and look through. Youre always evaluating that way. Because of that most intelligent officers who read the report initially would have been a little suspicious of how true it would be. Overtime whats interesting is well they have not been able to corroborate every detail of the report. Im unaware of any details of the report that may be truthful. You know Vladimir Putin is in the background with a big eraser. Is doing everything he can to undercut the report. Everything he can do includes assassinating investigative journalists. So be glad you are on the right side of the world on that one. They take extreme measures. Im sure he has taken extreme measures. Im not sure it will be totally substantiated. It just rang true. Its how you do it and intelligence investigation. The format, the way he worded it was clearly a professional Intelligence Officer was trying to nail down a series of facts. So what is true or not true. I would say there if it does if it is untrue than theres a lot of people lying over the past year. If you look at one citation, setting aside some of the more entertaining aspects of the dossier is michael was Donald Trumps longtime lawyer he talked about a meeting in prague in 2016 with the russian official operative thing cut out for the Kremlin Michael said im the record ive never been the prop so that is factually wrong. Then the question is maybe theres a date wrong or a masking a process question, where might that come from . How might a professional officer acting in good faith have sources who make it somethings wrong in this world . I believe the quality of his sources have proven to be high. The people he validated by putting them in his report he felt strongly theres truth there. I read parts of that report allowed to my husband who is a fairly wellknown counterfeiter forger. The fact that Michael Cohen said he was not a product that day at that time doesnt carry a lot of water. If you siding there is no plane ticket showing my arrival, theres no passport stamp, that was tonys business for good part of his life. Its possible for Michael Cortez been there and another name, not coming across border control. See question everything. Its their business. I think using some of the comment in Communications Intelligence from our allies in europe from the dutch and british were picking up incidental intelligence with their electronic intercepts has been a way they been able to push some facts forward in that document. To round out the first part on what we know now the one outstanding question is this, was there collusion or not . My colleagues have been working on this. Our answer is, there is certainly a lot more after your reporting that we know about contacts between trump advisors and Campaign Officials russian government officials and operatives. Theres more suspicious evidence and there was an hard evidence of meetings that were denied. Go back to the beginning of last year there is a categorical denial from the president that anybody in the campaign had anything to do with russia. Has been proven not to be the case over the last year by millers investigation and others. What still remains is was there a systematic attempt by the Trump Campaign and the president to work with the russians in what is now known as a Distraction Campaign that scott laid out . Some of the questions may push back on that. Weve had to be careful in what we know and dont know. In my min