This article by Carl Berstein and CNN should be read by everyone - and distributed to friends
In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads
of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for
discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with
powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President
Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that
the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former
secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his
longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to
the national security of the United States, according to White House and
intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.
The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national
security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James
Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John
Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was
often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with
foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President
became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most
heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either
charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his
will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of
his senior advisers considered the national interest.
Congress demands answers from Trump
administration on Russia bounty intelligence
These officials' concerns about the calls, and particularly
Trump's deference to Putin, take on new resonance with reports the
President may have learned in March that Russia had offered the Taliban
bounties to kill US
troops in Afghanistan -- and yet took no action. CNN's sources said there were
calls between Putin and Trump about Trump's desire to end the American military
presence in Afghanistan but they mentioned no discussion of the supposed
Taliban bounties.
By far the greatest number of Trump's telephone discussions with
an individual head of state were with Erdogan, who sometimes phoned the White
House at least twice a week and was put through directly to the President on
standing orders from Trump, according to the sources. Meanwhile, the President
regularly bullied and demeaned the leaders of America's principal allies,
especially two women: telling Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom
she was weak and lacked courage; and telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel
that she was "stupid."
Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state,
including Saudi Arabia's autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North
Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great"
accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of his Oval Office
predecessors, according to the sources.
In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took
special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama
and suggested that dealing directly with him -- Trump -- would be far more
fruitful than during previous administrations. "They didn't know BS,"
he said of Bush and Obama -- one of several derisive tropes the sources said he
favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders.
The full, detailed picture drawn by CNN's sources of Trump's
phone calls with foreign leaders is consistent with the basic tenor and some
substantive elements of a limited number of calls described by former national
security adviser John Bolton in his
book, "The Room Where
It Happened." But the calls described to CNN cover a far longer period
than Bolton's tenure, are much more comprehensive — and seemingly more damning
-- in their sweep.
Like Bolton, CNN's sources said that the President seemed to
continually conflate his own personal interests -- especially for purposes of
re-election and revenge against perceived critics and political enemies -- with
the national interest.
To protect the anonymity of those describing the calls for this
report, CNN will not reveal their job titles nor quote them at length directly.
More than a dozen officials either listened to the President's phone calls in
real time or were provided detailed summaries and rough-text recording
printouts of the calls soon after their completion, CNN's sources said. The
sources were interviewed by CNN repeatedly over a four-month period extending
into June.
The sources did cite some instances in which they said Trump
acted responsibly and in the national interest during telephone discussions
with some foreign leaders. CNN reached out to Kelly, McMaster and Tillerson for
comment and received no response as of Monday afternoon. Mattis did not
comment.
What we learned from John Bolton's eye-popping
tale of working with Trump
The White House had not responded to a request for comment as of
Monday afternoon.
One person familiar with almost all the conversations with the
leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and western Europe described the
calls cumulatively as 'abominations' so grievous to US national security
interests that if members of Congress heard from witnesses to the actual
conversations or read the texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior
Republican members would no longer be able to retain confidence in the
President.
Attacking key ally leaders -- especially women
The insidious effect of the conversations comes from Trump's
tone, his raging outbursts at allies while fawning over authoritarian
strongmen, his ignorance of history and lack of preparation as much as it does
from the troubling substance, according to the sources. While in office, then-
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats expressed worry to subordinates
that Trump's telephone discussions were undermining the coherent conduct of
foreign relations and American objectives around the globe, one of CNN's
sources said. And in recent weeks, former chief of staff Kelly has mentioned
the damaging impact of the President's calls on US national security to several
individuals in private.
Two sources compared many of the President's conversations with
foreign leaders to Trump's recent press "briefings" on the
coronavirus pandemic: free form, fact-deficient stream-of-consciousness
ramblings, full of fantasy and off-the-wall pronouncements based on his intuitions,
guesswork, the opinions of Fox News TV hosts and social media misinformation.
In addition to Merkel and May, the sources said, Trump regularly
bullied and disparaged other leaders of the western alliance during his phone
conversations -- including French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison -- in the
same hostile and aggressive way he discussed the coronavirus with some of
America's governors.
Next to Erdogan, no foreign leader initiated more calls with
Trump than Macron, the sources said, with the French President often trying to
convince Trump to change course on environmental and security policy matters --
including climate change and US withdrawal from the Iranian multilateral nuclear
accord.
Macron usually got "nowhere" on substantive matters,
while Trump became irritated at the French President's stream of requests and
subjected him to self-serving harangues and lectures that were described by one
source as personalized verbal "whippings," especially about France
and other countries not meeting NATO spending targets, their liberal
immigration policies or their trade imbalances with the US.
But his most vicious attacks, said the sources, were aimed at
women heads of state. In conversations with both May and Merkel, the President
demeaned and denigrated them in diatribes described as
"near-sadistic" by one of the sources and confirmed by others.
"Some of the things he said to Angela Merkel are just unbelievable: he called
her 'stupid,' and accused her of being in the pocket of the Russians ... He's
toughest [in the phone calls] with those he looks at as weaklings and weakest
with the ones he ought to be tough with."
The calls "are so unusual," confirmed a German
official, that special measures were taken in Berlin to ensure that their
contents remained secret. The official described Trump's behavior with Merkel
in the calls as "very aggressive" and said that the circle of German
officials involved in monitoring Merkel's calls with Trump has shrunk:
"It's just a small circle of people who are involved and the reason, the
main reason, is that they are indeed problematic."
Trump's conversations with May, the UK Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019, were described as
"humiliating and bullying," with Trump attacking her as "a
fool" and spineless in her approach to Brexit, NATO and immigration
matters.
"He'd get agitated about something with Theresa May, then
he'd get nasty with her on the phone call," One source said. "It's
the same interaction in every setting -- coronavirus or Brexit -- with just no
filter applied."
Merkel remained calm and outwardly unruffled in the face of
Trump's attacks —"like water off a duck's back," in the words of one
source -- and she regularly countered his bluster with recitations of fact. The
German official quoted above said that during Merkel's visit to the White House
two years ago, Trump displayed "very questionable behavior" that
"was quite aggressive ... [T]he Chancellor indeed stayed calm, and that's
what she does on the phone."
Prime Minister May, in contrast, became "flustered and
nervous" in her conversations with the President. "He clearly intimidated
her and meant to," said one of CNN's sources. In response to a request for
comment about Trump's behavior in calls with May, the UK's Downing Street
referred CNN to its website. The site lists brief descriptions of the content
of some calls and avoids any mention of tone or tension. The French embassy in
Washington declined to comment, while the Russian and Turkish embassies did not
respond to requests for comment.
Concerns over calls with Putin and Erdogan
The calls with Putin and Erdogan were particularly egregious in
terms of Trump almost never being prepared substantively and thus leaving him
susceptible to being taken advantage of in various ways, according to the
sources -- in part because those conversations (as with most heads of state),
were almost certainly recorded by the security services and other agencies of
their countries.
In his phone exchanges with Putin, the sources reported, the
President talked mostly about himself, frequently in over-the-top,
self-aggrandizing terms: touting his "unprecedented" success in
building the US economy; asserting in derisive language how much smarter and
"stronger" he is than "the imbeciles" and
"weaklings" who came before him in the presidency (especially Obama);
reveling in his experience running the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, and
obsequiously courting Putin's admiration and approval. Putin "just
outplays" him, said a high-level administration official -- comparing the
Russian leader to a chess grandmaster and Trump to an occasional player of checkers.
While Putin "destabilizes the West," said this source, the President
of the United States "sits there and thinks he can build himself up enough
as a businessman and tough guy that Putin will respect him." (At times,
the Putin-Trump conversations sounded like "two guys in a steam
bath," a source added.)
In numerous calls with Putin that were described to CNN, Trump
left top national security aides and his chiefs of staff flabbergasted, less
because of specific concessions he made than because of his manner --
inordinately solicitous of Putin's admiration and seemingly seeking his
approval -- while usually ignoring substantive policy expertise and important
matters on the standing bilateral agenda, including human rights; and an arms
control agreement, which never got dealt with in a way that advanced shared
Russian and American goals that both Putin and Trump professed to favor, CNN's
sources said.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has touted the theme of
"America First" as his north star in foreign policy, advancing the
view that America's allies and adversaries have taken economic advantage of US
goodwill in trade. And that America's closest allies need to increase their
share of collective defense spending. He frequently justifies his seeming
deference to Putin by arguing that Russia is a major world player and that it
is in the United States' interest to have a constructive and friendly
relationship -- requiring a reset with Moscow through his personal dialogue
with Putin.
Putin leverages coronavirus chaos to make a
direct play to Trump
In separate interviews, two high-level administration officials
familiar with most of the Trump-Putin calls said the President naively elevated
Russia -- a second-rate totalitarian state with less than 4% of the world's GDP
-- and its authoritarian leader almost to parity with the United States and its
President by undermining the tougher, more realistic view of Russia expressed
by the US Congress, American intelligence agencies and the long-standing
post-war policy consensus of the US and its European allies. "He [Trump]
gives away the advantage that was hard won in the Cold War," said one of
the officials -- in part by "giving Putin and Russia a legitimacy they
never had," the official said. "He's given Russia a lifeline --
because there is no doubt that they're a declining power ... He's playing with
something he doesn't understand and he's giving them power that they would use
[aggressively]."
Both officials cited Trump's decision to pull US troops out of
Syria -- a move that benefited Turkey as well as Russia -- as perhaps the most
grievous example. "He gave away the store," one of them said.
The frequency of the calls with Erdogan -- in which the Turkish
president continually pressed Trump for policy concessions and other favors --
was especially worrisome to McMaster, Bolton and Kelly, the more so because of
the ease with which Erdogan bypassed normal National Security Council protocols
and procedures to reach the President, said two of the sources.
Erdogan became so adept at knowing when to reach the President
directly that some White House aides became convinced that Turkey's security
services in Washington were using Trump's schedule and whereabouts to provide
Erdogan with information about when the President would be available for a
call.
On some occasions Erdogan reached him on the golf course and
Trump would delay play while the two spoke at length.
Two sources described the President as woefully uninformed about
the history of the Syrian conflict and the Middle East generally, and said he
was often caught off guard, and lacked sufficient knowledge to engage on equal
terms in nuanced policy discussion with Erdogan. "Erdogan took him to the
cleaners," said one of the sources.
The sources said that deleterious US policy decisions on Syria
-- including the President's directive to pull US forces out of the country,
which then allowed Turkey to attack Kurds who had helped the US fight ISIS and
weakened NATO's role in the conflict -- were directly linked to Erdogan's
ability to get his way with Trump on the phone calls.
The US is more alone than ever, just at the
moment the world needs its leadership
Trump occasionally became angry at Erdogan -- sometimes because
of demands that Turkey be granted preferential trade status, and because the
Turkish leader would not release an imprisoned American evangelical pastor,
Andrew Brunson, accused of 'aiding terrorism' in the 2016 coup that attempted
to overthrow Erdogan. Brunson was eventually released in October 2018.
Despite the lack of advance notice for many of Erdogan's calls,
full sets of contemporaneous notes from designated notetakers at the White
House exist, as well as rough voice-generated computer texts of the
conversations, the sources said.
According to one high-level source, there are also existing
summaries and conversation-readouts of the President's discussions with Erdogan
that might reinforce Bolton's allegations against Trump in the so-called
"Halkbank case," involving a major Turkish bank with suspected ties
to Erdogan and his family. That source said the matter was raised in more than
one telephone conversation between Erdogan and Trump.
Bolton wrote in his book that in December 2018, at Erdogan's
urging, Trump offered to interfere in an investigation by then-US Attorney for
the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman into the Turkish bank, which
was accused of violating US sanctions on Iran.
"Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of things,
explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were
Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his
people," Bolton wrote. Berman's office eventually brought an indictment
against the bank in October 2019 for fraud, money laundering and other offenses
related to participation in a multibillion-dollar scheme to evade the US sanctions
on Iran. On June 20, Trump fired Berman -- whose office is also investigating
Rudy Giuliani, the President's personal lawyer -- after the prosecutor refused
to resign at Attorney General William Barr's direction.
Unlike Bolton, CNN's sources did not assert or suggest
specifically that Trump's calls with Erdogan might have been grounds for
impeachment because of possible evidence of unlawful conduct by the President.
Rather, they characterized Trump's calls with heads of state in the aggregate
as evidence of Trump's general "unfitness" for the presidency on
grounds of temperament and incompetence, an assertion Bolton made as well in an
interview to promote his book with ABC News last week: "I don't think he's
fit for office. I don't think he has the competence to carry out the job,"
Bolton said.
Family feedback and grievances fuel Trump's
approach
CNN spoke to sources familiar with the President's phone calls
repeatedly over a four-month period. In their interviews, the sources took
great care not to disclose specific national security information and
classified details -- but rather described the broad contents of many of the
calls, and the overall tenor and methodology of Trump's approach to his
telephone discussions with foreign leaders.
In addition to rough, voice-generated software transcription,
almost all of Trump's telephone conversations with Putin, Erdogan and leaders
of the western alliance were supplemented and documented by extensive
contemporaneous note-taking (and, often, summaries) prepared by Fiona Hill,
deputy assistant to the President and senior NSC director for Europe and Russia
until her resignation last year. Hill listened to most of the President's calls
with Putin, Erdogan and the European leaders, according to her closed-door
testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last November.
Breaking down Bolton's account of a White
House in turmoil
Elements of that testimony by Hill, if re-examined by
Congressional investigators, might provide a detailed road-map of the
President's extensively-documented conversations, the sources said. White House
and intelligence officials familiar with the voice-generated transcriptions and
underlying documents agreed that their contents could be devastating to the
President's standing with members of the Congress of both parties -- and the
public -- if revealed in great detail. (There is little doubt that Trump would
invoke executive privilege to keep the conversations private. However, some
former officials with detailed knowledge of many of the conversations might be
willing to testify about them, sources said.)
In one of the earliest calls between Putin and Trump, the
President's son-in-law Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were in the room to
listen — joining McMaster, Tillerson, Hill, and a State Department aide to
Tillerson.
"The call was all over the place," said an NSC deputy
who read a detailed summary of the conversation -- with Putin speaking
substantively and at length, and Trump propping himself up in short
autobiographical bursts of bragging, self-congratulation and flattery toward
Putin. As described to CNN, Kushner and Ivanka Trump were immediately effusive
in their praise of how Trump had handled the call -- while Tillerson (who knew
Putin well from his years in Russia as an oil executive), Hill and McMaster
were skeptical.
Hill — author of a definitive biography of Putin -- started to
explain some of the nuances she perceived from the call, according to CNN's
sources — offering insight into Putin's psychology, his typical
"smooth-talking" and linear approach and what the Russian leader was
trying to achieve in the call. Hill was cut off by Trump, and the President
continued discussing the call with Jared and Ivanka, making clear he wanted to
hear the congratulatory evaluation of his daughter and her husband, rather than
how Hill, Tillerson or McMaster judged the conversation.
McMaster viewed that early phone call with Putin as indicative
of the conduct of the whole relationship between Russia and the Trump
administration, according to the sources -- a conclusion subsequent national
security advisers and chiefs of staff, and numerous high-ranking intelligence
officials also reached: unlike in previous administrations, there were
relatively few meaningful dealings between military and diplomatic
professionals, even at the highest levels, because Trump -- distrustful of the
experts and dismissive of their attempts to brief him -- conducted the
relationship largely ad hoc with Putin and almost totally by himself.
Ultimately, Putin and the Russians learned that "nobody has the authority
to do anything" -- and the Russian leader used that insight to his
advantage, as one of CNN's sources said.
The Kushners were also present for other important calls with
foreign leaders and made their primacy apparent, encouraged by the President
even on matters of foreign policy in which his daughter and her husband had no
experience. Almost never, according to CNN's sources, would Trump read the
briefing materials prepared for him by the CIA and NSC staff in advance of his
calls with heads of state.
"He won't consult them, he won't even get their
wisdom," said one of the sources, who cited Saudi Arabia's bin Salman as
near the top of a list of leaders whom Trump "picks up and calls without
anybody being prepared," a scenario that frequently confronted NSC and
intelligence aides. The source added that the aides' helpless reaction
"would frequently be, 'Oh my God, don't make that phone call.'"
"Trump's view is that he is a better judge of character
than anyone else," said one of CNN's sources. The President consistently
rejected advice from US defense, intelligence and national security principals
that the Russian president be approached more firmly and with less trust. CNN's
sources pointed to the most notable public example as "emblematic":
Trump, standing next to the Russian President at their meeting in Helsinki,
Finland, in June 2018, and saying he "didn't see any reason why"
Russia would have interfered in the 2016 presidential election -- despite the
findings of the entire US intelligence community that Moscow had. "President
Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today," Trump said.
The common, overwhelming dynamic that characterizes Trump's
conversations with both authoritarian dictators and leaders of the world's
greatest democracies is his consistent assertion of himself as the defining
subject and subtext of the calls -- almost never the United States and its
historic place and leadership in the world, according to sources intimately
familiar with the calls.
In numerous calls with the leaders of the UK, France, Germany,
Australia and Canada -- America's closest allies of the past 75 years, the
whole postwar era -- Trump typically established a grievance almost as a
default or leitmotif of the conversation, whatever the supposed agenda,
according to those sources.
"Everything was always personalized, with everybody doing
terrible things to rip us off — which meant ripping 'me' — Trump — off. He
couldn't -- or wouldn't -- see or focus on the larger picture," said one
US official.
The source cited a conspicuously demonstrable instance in which
Trump resisted asking Angela Merkel (at the UK's urging) to publicly hold
Russia accountable for the so-called 'Salisbury' radioactive poisonings of a
former Russian spy and his daughter, in which Putin had denied any Russian
involvement despite voluminous evidence to the contrary. "It took a lot of
effort" to get Trump to bring up the subject, said one source. Instead of
addressing Russia's responsibility for the poisonings and holding it to
international account, Trump made the focus of the call -- in personally
demeaning terms -- Germany's and Merkel's supposedly deadbeat approach to
allied burden-sharing. Eventually, said the sources, as urged by his NSC staff,
Trump at last addressed the matter of the poisonings, almost grudgingly.
"With almost every problem, all it takes [in his phone
calls] is someone asking him to do something as President on behalf of the
United States and he doesn't see it that way; he goes to being ripped off; he's
not interested in cooperative issues or working on them together; instead he's
deflecting things or pushing real issues off into a corner," said a US
official.
"There was no sense of 'Team America' in the
conversations," or of the United States as an historic force with certain
democratic principles and leadership of the free world, said the official.
"The opposite. It was like the United States had disappeared. It was
always 'Just me'."
CNN's Nicole Gaouette contributed to this
report.
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