It gave no means of tracing this back to the source, but it had a lot of information in it about things that had been happening in trump tower. And it appeared to be from somebody inside the transition or inside trump tower who was concerned about what this person was seeing. And a lot of whats written or conveyed in this letter has sort of come become true over time. Its taken a while for a lot of this stuff to surface, including this detail about this discussion over a back channel or a private channel of communications with moscow. Again i just want to im trying to sort of bend over to read this as charitably as possible. So i mean is it possible that they were setting up lots of different back channels with lots of different foreign leaders . Well, we dont i mean i suppose its possible. Clearly they were in communication and meeting with a lot of leaders, a lot of foreign leaders. Most of them, as you point out,
were coming through the front door, not the back door. The behavior here is part of whats interesting and newsworthy, i think, right . The way this was all handled. The context here, of course, is that these are meetings with russian officials just weeks after an election that russia had spent months in an unprecedented sort of campaign, attempting to upend or interfere with. So i mean its really i mean on the one hand, you can argue sometimes that its appropriate for Incoming Administrations to have contact with foreign governments and so forth. Certainly. But this was extraordinary. Yeah. Greg miller, remarkable reporting. Thank you for your time tonight. I really appreciate you hopping on the phone. Absolutely. Thank you. Joining me now, sabrina siddiqui, political reporter for the guardian, and nicholas johnson, axious editor. Im almost out of words, sabrina. I dont know what to make of
this. This seems bizarre and certainly incriminating. Yes. I think that so far, a lot of the leaks have pretty much provided more specificity to what we already knew, that there were communications between members of the Trump Transition Team and russian officials. But this is the first time that were seeing one of the president s senior most advisers actively seeking a back channel with moscow and also deliberately you know, theyre saying it was an oversight, but we do know leaving this meeting off of his request for a Security Clearance. And the question is, was this just another sign of the complete inexperience that this particular administration had coming in, or was there something more nefarious going on . I think the investigators are really going to hone in on the fact that kushner did not disclose these meetings previously and also the fact that he has held other meetings
such as with a russian bank that was subject to u. S. Sanctions at a time when this administration, on its way in, was advocating for a shift in u. S. Policy toward russia. Nicholas, theres also to me, whats so important about this story is the centrality of kushner. Y yesterday theres reporting saying hes not the subject of investigation but being looked at. Weve had other names in the trump orbit that have been circulated. Flynn constitutionall flynn crucially. Manafort, carter page. This is the most central figure in the administration calling the shots here according to this reporting. Right. It doesnt get closer to the president. Thats exactly right. As my good friend wrote, there is no one like Jared Kushner who is as close to the president , who has his hand involved in so many issues with the president. The news that he was a Person Of Interest in this case means a huge time suck for the white house having to deal with these kinds of issues. Remember what the fbi was looking at was what was happening in that meeting. Now we know it was in the me meeting which only made it more interesting. I think the line the post quoted with the Russian Ambassador, that he was taken aback by this request is absolutely incredible. Yeah, using russian facilities. I mean you dont have the words for how anomalous that would be. Ni nicholas, let me ask you this because you do a lot of reporting about what happens in that white house. The story from the white house about general flynns calls to kislyak on sanctions day, calls that the white house and flynn did not tell the truth about, the nature of which they did not tell the truth about. The story from donald trump is that He Didnt Tell Flynn to talk to kislyak about sanctions, but it was fine, and he would have if he hadnt. Right . Thats the donald trump line. Given the relationship between
the president of the United States and his soninlaw, Jared Kushner, how plausible is it that Jared Kushner sets up a meeting with the ambassador to russia to set up a secret back channel without the knowledge of the President Elect . I dont know how plausible it is, but what we do know is that it wasnt on that form. They said it was an oversight. I think what were learning, that the white house is coming to deal with, theyre building this war room to fight against, as this investigative apparatus spins up to look at these kinds of things, theyre going to find all of these kind of discrepancies, every little oversight like this will be found by investigators and some of it might be leaked in the press. Thats going to become a steady drum beat every day at 5 00. Friday, holiday weekend, its still coming out, and the white house needs to be able to respond to it. I want to play what sean spicer said about kushners omission. This is really crucial. The Clearance Process is a serious process. People have to fill out those forms. At the top of the form it says very clearly if you omit knowingly or withhold the truth,
youre committing a felony. Jared kushner has very good, very adept, expensive lawyers. So he knows what hes doing. He omitted this meeting from that form. When they were caught omitting it, this is what sean spicer had to say about it. Throughout the campaign and the transition, jared served as the official primary point of contact with foreign governments and officials. Youre acting as though theres something nefarious about doing what he was actually tasks to do. Whats nefarious is that here you now have flynn and kushner in really intense contact with the Russian Ambassador. Right. Not telling lying about it. Lying about it. Right. You have both flynn and both kushner, while seeking Security Clearance, failing to disclose the extent of their contacts or communications with russian officials. As you note, that is a Felony Offense that is punishable by up to five years in prison. And i think that to sean
spicers point, on the question of whether or not theres something nefarious going on, this latest report that kushner was seeking this back channel in order to communicate with moscow directly undermines actually the rationale that the white house has put forward for a lot of these meetings. If you recall throughout the last couple of months as these revelations have come forward, they have said that, well, look, this is just a routine part of the job, that any Incoming Administration sits down with foreign dignitaries, and theres nothing nefarious or inherently wrong with doing that. Well, there is some things certainly nefarious or wrong with seeking to keep out of the to shield, i should say, your communications with officials in russia, and i think this truly is, compared to a lot of incremental updates weve seen in recent weeks, a significant development. I completely agree as someone following this full time, 16 hours a day at this point, and mapping little this is a very major development, an extremely
salient and important bit of information we learned tonight. Really, really remarkable. Sabrina siddiqui, nicholas johnson, thanks to you both. I want to give the context for the Washington Post report tonight. Because the meeting described between kushner, flynn, and the Russian Ambassador is one of several contacts between members of the trump team and russian officials both during the transition and the campaign, interactions they seemingly did not want anyone to find out about. Was there any contact in any way between trump or his associates and the kremlin or cutout they had . I joined this campaign in the summer, and i can tell you that all the contact by the Trump Campaign and associates was with the american people. Im just trying to get an answer. Yeah. Of course not. Why would there be any contacts between the campaign . Of course not. Why would there be any contacts . That claim made on the record, on air, by the Vice President of the United States, mike pence from january, is simply not true. It is false. Last week, reuters reported theTrump Campaign had at least 18 undisclosed contacts with russian officials. Jeff sessions met twice with the sim Russian Ambassador, sergey kislyak, who keeps popping up, last year. Sessions didnt disclose those meetings and had to recuse himself from the russia investigation after they became public. Michael flynn had repeated and largely undisclosed contacts with the same Russian Ambassador last year. He was eventually fired for lying about the content of their conversations. And Jared Kushner met with both the Russian Ambassador and a russian banker named sergei gorkov, a graduate of russias spy school, whose bank is controlled by members of Vladimir Putins government. Kushner also did not initially disclose those meetings. Even put ago side the disclosure issue, its just really weird for a campaign to have so many contacts with officials of the russian government. Last week, paul begala, who worked on bill clintons 1992 campaign at a very different time of u. S. Russia relations,
just asked how Many Campaign veterans had in their campaign. Romney 2012 Stuart Stephens responded simply, nyet. Joining me now, a former ambassador to nato, and malcolm nance, msnbc trim analyst. As someone who is familiar with diplomacy, familiar with international relations, and the protocols by which governments talk to each other, perhaps incoming governments may talk to each other, what do you make of this story . Well, its a remarkable story, and as the press and the investigators figure out what was happening, we will get to the bottom of it. It is true that during transitions, i was a member of the obama Biden Transition In 0809, that during transitions
it is not unheard of for incoming officials to have contact with foreign governments. Certainly that happened in our case. We did it with allies. We talked to the french and the brits and the germans, and it might be appropriate to have one or so conversations with other countries, including an important country like russia. The idea of establishing a separate, outside the mainstream communication channel, which is what is reported in the Washington Post, really is something different. It takes a President Elect who has no formal authority, none whatsoever, and starts the process of having relations and in this case secret relations with another country, presumably not only not because they want to hide it from the russians, but they want to hide it from the u. S. Government. And that is different to say the least, if not strange. Yeah. Malcolm, youve been covering this, and to me part of whats so incriminating really for lack of a better word and i dont want to say theres necessarily something underneath it all necessarily obviously. This is circumstantial, is the deception. You can say relationships with russia are important. Theyve become dysfunctional. Our administration ran openly and publicly on setting a new course of russia relations. That was clear. That was not hidden. And we want to talk to the russians, and we want to talk to the Russian Ambassador because we want to get off on a good foot. They could have done that in the open. Of course. They have the right to do that in the open because they are the incoming government of the United States. There is nothing wrong with that. Id like to put this into a better perspective for the audience because i understand that, you know, Everyone Wants to be a little cautious about this. And we should be cautious about it. It needs to have the amount of respect thats due, due to this Breaking News. But had any individual other than these individuals who worked immediately for President Trump, performed these actions at any time in the sf86 Security Clearance process, they would have immediately had their clearances pulled. They would have had their jobs terminated. Some of these contacts are so suspicious that they would have warranted their own counterintelligence investigation. This nation is in a counterintelligence investigation. They are in a spy hunt over at the fbi, and now we have this story. Should it prove true, of an american citizen who is the Senior Adviser to the president of the United States, attempting to establish what we call in the Intelligence CommunityCovert Communications with a hostile nations potential Intelligence Agency or senior leadership. That brings you that crosses the line to the espionage act of 1917. This cannot be explained. Put aside the other 18 contacts with moscow. This one incident requires Jared Kushner and all of his immediate staff to have their clearances pulled right now and to have the fbi descend on there and to determine whether this is hostile intelligence in the white house one step from the president. Have you experienced in your time when there have been revelations of someone omitting something as salient as this on their clearance form . Yeah. Ive had that happen, and not myself, but ive seen people who have inadvertently left off contacts with germans, who left off contacts, you know, with people in the course of their duties. Their clearances were temporarily suspended as a matter of course. The Counterintelligence Agencies and the Counterintelligence Divisions of all of the Intelligence Agencies take these omissions very seriously. Theyre almost as bad as leaving off very bad financial data, which is blackmailable, which is
why they take this seriously. Just because this is the office of the president does not give them a pass. And right now i am way beyond believing this is suspicious. I am pretty far beyond this to the point that this is now sinister. There is no way that this can be explained. I mean from the intelligence perspective. Yeah. You know. From the diplomatic perspective, perhaps. But there just is no way that if this is true that he wanted Covert Communications with the russian using russian Cryptographic Systems in the hopes that we didnt have those things broken, then this is now espionage. To go back to your point, having first hand experience of this, being in a transition, which, again, transitions are strange, right . At one level, its the incoming government, so theres some degree to which you have the capacity to talk to foreign governments, but also you have no formal vested constitutional powers. You would never, ever, ever have a meeting in which you would suggest to a foreign ambassador to use their diplomatic facilities to evade american
intelligence detection, right . No, because our transitions dont tend to be hostile takeovers from one government to the next. Theyre transitions and we move from a process of having one person elected and taking the time for the government to get in place and the idea of hiding from the from your own government what youre trying to do is definitely something new. And it may reflect a suspicion that clearly the President Elect and his team had for the intelligence services. Remember during the campaign and during the transition, he had some choice words for them. And it may be that out of naivete, they decided to do this. Im not prepared to come to any conclusion here. We have an investigation ongoing. The fbi for sure will look into this as well as everything else. But from a larger diplomatic standpoint, there is this very restraining time, the 72 days
between election and inauguration when one government is fully and 100 in control, but its leaving, and another team is has no control whatsoever, but it will on January 20 At Noon take full responsibility for everything that happens. Let me ask one more question. Malcolm, i want to come back to you on that. But let me just follow up one thing because you wrote, you know, part of the subtext here is that, you know, this candidate, candidate trump, was quite clearly more disposed to be proputin and prorussia and that we should get along with russia and that was a Public Policy stance he took while the russian government was engaged in fairly significant measures to engage in criminal espionage and sabotage. But you wrote about the nato meeting in which here he is, you know, six months after having become the president of the United States, st