30 Issues in 30 Days: Justice and the Justice Dept.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're in the 2020 edition of our presidential election series 30 Issues in 30 Days, where we look beyond the headlines to underlying issues that matter to the country. We're up to issue seven today, Justice and the Justice Department. We already had a very relevant guest lined up for this Andrew Weissmann, one of the lead prosecutors in the Mueller investigation and a former head of the Justice Department's Criminal Fraud Division. He has a book out today called Where Law Ends.

Then the news broke on Sunday night about The New York Times obtaining and analyzing a number of President Trump's tax returns or data from tax returns. Obviously, you've been hearing coverage of that, here and elsewhere, and it turns out the tax returns could be relevant to one of the revelations in Andrew Weissmann's book, that the Mueller team decided not to closely scrutinize Trump's finances for reasons we'll get into.

One of the big questions the Time's story raises, to whom does President Trump owe hundreds of millions of dollars coming due soon, and could it be people in foreign countries who would then have leverage over US policy? Andrew Weissmann reminds us of this line spoken by Eric Trump in 2014. Eric Trump in the context of the Trump Organization buying all these golf courses at that time said, "Well, we don't rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia." Andrew Weissman tweeted out that clip to remind us of it over the weekend, that quote. Very interesting.

Let's see if we can connect the dots. They may connect or not but the issue raised by the tax returns, the Mueller team's limitations as revealed in the book, and the state of justice at the United States Justice Department all converged for the conversation we're about to have with Andrew Weissmann. These days a criminal and national security law professor at NYU, and a partner in the law firm of Jenner & Block. He was General Counsel for the FBI when Robert Mueller was director. Mueller was director for 12 years, people forgot.

Weissman directed the Enron Task Force if you remember that financial fraud scandal. Going back even further, he prosecuted police officers in connection with the attack on Abner Louima here in New York In the '90s. He was the lead prosecutor in the Mueller investigation and his new book out today is called Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation. Mr. Weissman, thanks for making this one of your stops on the first morning the book is out. Welcome to WNYC.

Andrew: Great to be here, Brian.

Brian: In your book, you argued that the Mueller investigation failed to do everything it could to determine the extent of Donald Trump's relationship with Russia during the 2016 campaign, and one of those failures was in not looking closely at Trump's finances. Could you start there, and take a few minutes if you need to, and describe what you wanted to look at regarding financial ties, and why you couldn't?

Andrew: Sure. I think the best place to start is to compare the limitations we were under. When you compare that to some of the other cases you mentioned, pursuing Enron or I also pursued organized crime figures in New York City. In Enron and in organized crime cases, the people that you're investigating do not have the power to pull the plug on your investigation. You are free to investigate them and to make decisions without worrying about whether you're going to have a job the next day.

In the Special Counsel's Office, because we were investigating the president for 22 months, there was no time that we were confident that we were going to be there the following day. One of the ways that played out was early on in the investigation, we issued a subpoena to Deutsche Bank, and the White House caught wind of that, and I described in the book what happened. They were irate and they wanted to know were we investigating the president's finances. Obviously, that's a huge red flag for any investigator. If you've nothing to hide, why are you so upset about that?

It turns out, we were-- that subpoena was actually issued out of the team I led, which is Paul Manafort's team, and we were pursuing an investigation regarding his finances. Special Counsel Mueller made the decision which is a difficult one at that point, which was, "Do you go forward with the financial investigation at risk of the whole investigation ending right there because the president says you're done, you're finished? Or do you say, 'You know what? We don't need to do this right now, let's go forward.'" Director Mueller made that decision that led, of course, to all sorts of benefits, which is we investigated and charged various Russians and Russian companies for hacking into the DNC for interfering in the [unintelligible 00:05:37] election.

Out of my team, we learned with the cooperation of Rick Gates that Paul Manafort had been sharing internal Trump campaign polling data with a Russian intelligence operative. There were lots of benefits, but my issue is that although that you can defend the decision early on, not to cross the line into a financial investigation, I think it became harder and harder to not revisit that, and that's where I have an issue with what we did.

I think that that decision needed to be revisited. As I've described in my book, my view and other people's views were, "You know what? The worst thing that happens is, we get fired, but at least we're doing our job," which was to pursue all reasonable avenues that we were tasked with pursuing. We never looked at the president's finances and followed the money in the way that we did actually with respect to Paul Manafort.

Brian: Interesting. The Mueller team ultimately pulled its punches out of fear of getting fired all together by the president and that's a central tenet of the book, and you give a number of examples of that, and you cited Deutsche Bank. I wonder if you can go to the content of that, and tell us what your best understanding is from the evidence you have about any relationship between Trump and Russia through Deutsche Bank because I've seen it described as perhaps a conduit for money from Russia, I'm sorry, to Trump without Russia's fingerprints being on it, but what can you actually tell us from what you were able to learn?

Andrew: The bottom line, Brian, is not a lot because we did not do that investigation. Things that you would be interested in knowing are both money that would go to candidate Trump or in the past, or even Russian money or any foreign money that would go into the campaign, but using fund companies, we were able to see some of that during the inauguration where we said that Ukraine oligarchs had actually had used a front person to pay money into the inaugural campaign, I mean inaugural fund.

We don't know the answer, and that is one of the reasons that I take us to task and I was trying to be as clear-eyed as I could about what I thought we did right, and the challenges we faced, but also trying to be level with the American public as to what we didn't do and set out some facts and some guidance for how I think this should be done in the future.

Brian: You also mentioned specifically in the book that the same business account that sent money from Trump to Michael Cohen to pay Stormy Daniels hush money regarding the alleged affair. That same bank account had received payments linked to a Russian oligarch. Is this a place where you can connect any dots to questions raised by the tax returns?

Andrew: There definitely are places including the one that you mentioned where Michael Cohen has got money going into the same account that was then used to pay off Stormy Daniels. You also see it in The New York Times reporting in something that struck me as an oddity which was, an oligarch, a Russian oligarch named Agalarov, is the person who fronted the money for the 2013 Miss Universe pageant which happened in Moscow. As the Times reports, although he spent a lot--

Brian: Run by Trump. He fronted Trump the money for that, right?

Andrew: Yes.

Brian: Trump ran that thing.

Andrew: Exactly. Trump ran the Miss Universe pageant. The Agalarovs are fronting the money. According to New York Times reporting, there are a couple of oddities. One, that Miss Universe pageant seemed to be unusually profitable but the Agalarovs apparently did not make any money even though they were the ones who were putting up the money but you have Trump making a couple million dollars off of the Miss Universe pageant.

One of the questions you have is, "How did that happen, and is this a way that money was being funneled from the Agalarovs to Donald Trump?" It's worth noting that the Agalarovs are the same people who orchestrated the Trump Tower meeting in June of 2016. It was their emissaries who came to the Trump Tower meeting saying that they have dirt on Hillary Clinton and famously Don Jr. responded that you have dirt on Hillary Clinton, we love it. That's also a connection that is worth exploring.

Brian: What do you make of that infamous Trump Tower meeting, June 2016? Because for all the media focus on that, during the investigation, it seems like they failed to deliver on Clinton, and the Trump administration once in office did not lift those particular sanctions that they were asking them to lift. Is the nothing-burger that the Trumps assert actually the case or am I missing something?

Andrew: I think you are missing something because the way I look at it is what it tells us in black and white is that Russia was trying to help Donald Trump. They were offering to provide information that would help him get elected. You know that there is an effort by a foreign government to help one side of the United States presidential election and they say that in black and white. This is one of our efforts of the Russian government to help.

On the other side, you have Don Jr., the president's son, saying that he is happy to accept such help. He doesn't say, "Wait a second, I can't do that because guess what? It is illegal under United States law for me to accept anything from a foreign source that would help a presidential campaign." Where there is less than meets the eye is that while the Russians came and said what we would like is we would like the Magnitsky Act to be rescinded. They didn't have the goods, meaning they came saying that they had dirt on Hillary Clinton, but they didn't.

One of the reasons that, that did not go forward is there was no ability to make a deal because one side didn't have anything to offer. One of the things that we did based on that is continued looking for interceptions between the Russian government and the campaign, leading to what I think is the critical meetings our investigation, which was on August 2nd, between Paul Manafort and his right-hand man in Ukraine, a man named Konstantin Kilimnik who the Senate Intelligence Committee has identified as a Russian intelligence source. That I think is really the critical meeting to keep your eye on if you're trying to figure out what was going on.

Brian: Listeners, if you're just tuning in my guest is Andrew Weissmann, who was the lead investigator in the Mueller investigation, was a lead investigator at the US Justice Department on financial fraud and other things for many years before that. He has a brand new book out today called Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation. I would give out the phone number, but Andrew, you're one of those rare guests who all the lines have failed to ask questions of before I even can give out the phone number. You're a very popular guy with our listeners. For the record or as people finish up, our number is 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280. Let's take a phone call from John in Manhattan. John, you're on WNYC with Andrew Weissmann.

John: I was wondering if he could address Trump's acting or not acting in large areas in order to manipulate interest rates and therefore benefit the payment of his own debt over the national interest.

Brian: Interesting. John, thank you very much. We know Trump always is lobbying the Fed for lower interest rates. Usually, it's assumed to maximize economic growth on his watch so he looks like he's successful at running the economy. I guess John's asking whether it can be for his own personal gain as well.

Andrew: John, that is a really good question. One of the key obvious questions that you have when you learn that somebody has $420 million in debt or alleges that he does, is one, the people who have that debt, what is it that they want? What leverage do they have on the President of the United States? The second question is the one you had, which is, is the president going to take positions that benefits him personally, even though it may not be in the public interest? One of the ways that one tries to assure that that doesn't happen is by transparency.

That's the reason that presidents for decades have revealed their tax returns so that the American public has the ability to make an assessment about what are the interests at stake and whether the president is doing something as he is required to do in the public interest, not in his personal interest. To tie it to the special counsel investigation, one of the reasons that I'm critical of the decision not to eventually revisit the issue with respect to the financial investigation is precisely the one that you hit on. If you're trying to figure out if there is a foreign government that has influence over the president, you really need to follow the money. This is not rocket science.

Everyone who's watched the movie All the President's Men or studied Watergate knows that's a classic way in which you do an investigation. It is true that that could have resulted in us being fired. At some point, you need to just say, "We have to do our job and if we get fired, we get fired."

Brian: The Times reporting does not tell us to whom Trump owes these hundreds of millions of dollars coming due soon. Is that why you tweeted this weekend that Eric Trump quote from 2014, in which he said to a golf reporter of all things, "We don't rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need from Russia."

Andrew: Yes, it is because that's one clue that we have with respect to who potentially is behind this, but there's a second reason, which is that statement from Eric Trump gave us what's called predication. That gave us a reason to be looking at this issue because we were tasked with looking for all links between the Russian government and Trump and the Trump campaign. You have the statement in 2014 from Eric Trump. Although it's usual to do an investigation involving motive and financial interest, here there was more reason to do it because you did have the president's son who was involved in the business making the statement.

Brian: Jack in Queens. You're on WNYC with Andrew Weissmann. Hi.

Jack: Hi. Mr. Wisemann, I've just got your book, but I haven't found the answer yet. Do you explain why Mueller let Barr get away with mischaracterizing the report for weeks and weeks? Certainly, he could have stepped in and stopped it. Barr said that you had failed to identify the possible redactions so he could have sped up the clearing of it. Was that true? Did you let that happen? Otherwise, why did Barr let it happen?

Brian: Jack, by the way, obviously an Andrew Weissmann superfan owning the book on the day of its release. There are not many people like that yet. Andrew, go ahead and answer his question.

Andrew: Thank you, Jack. That's a terrific question. One of the things it's worth remembering, and this is how the book starts as you may have seen, which is on March 24, 2019, that is the day that we saw that the Barr so called four-page summary, which was anything but a summary. The Attorney General Barr that we know now who has done many things to undermine the rule of law that Brian goes to your 30 things that you're covering.

That's something that's a commonplace now. We can all look at what the Attorney General's doing and as somebody who worked at the Department of Justice, it's heartbreaking to see the rule of law being, to put it bluntly, trashed. This was at a time that people thought that the attorney general was an institutionalist, and would understand that the department was independent of the White House. In addition, he was also a personal friend of Director Mueller. It was not anticipated that he was going to issue a letter that was completely misleading and at times outright false with respect to what we had found.

Then, why didn't we do anything? We, under the special counsel regulations, I proposed at the end of the book ways in which I think the special counsel regulations need to be changed. Under the special counsel regulations we operated under, we were part of the Department of Justice. We reported to the attorney general. We did not have the unilateral right to go and speak publicly about what we did or did not do. Our report, for instance, went directly to the attorney general and it was his decision what to do with it. While we protested and as has been reported, sent two letters to Barr strongly critical of what he had done, we were not free under the special counsel rules to go to the airwaves to say, "No, no, no, this isn't what happened."

The attorney general essentially played us because he was allowed to spin the report in a completely misleading way for weeks. We, inside the special counsel office, were now aware of something that the public was not aware of, not just that the report did not say what he said, but we also were now aware of what we were dealing with which was an attorney general who was not an institutionalist, who was political and had proved himself time and again since then to be really operating as a lawyer for the White House and a lawyer for the President of the United States, and that is not what the attorney general is. The attorney general is supposed to be a lawyer for the people of the United States. He is not a personal counsel to the president.

Brian: Let's go even deeper on this existential issue of justice and the US Justice Department, which is supposed to be above politics and for the rule of law, as you've been indicating, so central to calling ourselves a democracy at all. It looks to many people now like Attorney General Barr is devolving it to the legal arm of the Trump legal team and Trump's attempt to be a leader above the law like an authoritarian country, but to listen to Barr, he seems to genuinely believe the politicization of the department is from the Democrats or from blind spots in the department itself for going so hard after Trump and his people criminally because they despise what he stands for, Barr would assert and the two sides to this story. I guess my question is, are there two sides to the story, in your opinion, regarding factions in the Justice Department who each feel aggrieved and each believe they are upholding the rule of law?

Andrew: It won't surprise you Brian that I do not think there are two sides to this story. I don't think you can have an equivalence. Not to make this complete analogy, but I think the same could be said in Charlottesville. We were tasked by the acting attorney general to investigate and were given specific things that we were supposed to look at and that's what we did.

Again, you can just follow the facts. It doesn't matter whether we are Republicans or Democrats. The facts proved that Paul Manafort was guilty. Rick Gates was guilty. There were a slew of convictions based on what we did, either where the person admitted it out of their own mouth or where the jury beyond a reasonable doubt concluded that we were right. That goes without question given those findings.

For Attorney General Barr then to take up the language of rule of law and when he says that he was right to lower the sentence of Roger Stone or to seek to dismiss the Michael Flynn case. That is just simply not true. He has taken positions that are favorable to people who are affiliated with the President of the United States, but those same standards, the standards-- This is what's fundamental to the rule of law. You're supposed to be applying those same standards across the board. It shouldn't matter that it's Roger Stone or Michael Flynn.

In fact, as judges have pointed out and there's a hearing today on Michael Flynn, those are positions that the Department of Justice has not applied to people who are not friends of the President of the United States. To your point, this concept of real meaning to follow the rule of law and not giving favorable treatment to friends of the president or unfavorable treatment to enemies is what separates us from autocracies, is what separates us from Ukraine, for instance, where President Yanukovych had imprisoned his political opponent. As my college classmate, Marie Yovanovitch pointed out, we're now taking positions in the United States that are antithetical to the values that we've been trying to inculcate in other parts of the world.

Brian: Barr now has this investigation to investigate the Russia investigation, as you know, led by Connecticut's US Attorney, John Durham. Durham has gotten one guilty plea already from former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, who admitted to changing an email he got from the CIA when Clinesmith then submitted it to a court to keep getting surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page as possibly working for Russia.

This is deep in the weeds for people who don't follow this, but the CIA email said Page had been a CIA asset, something that would work in Page's favor. To the CIA, however, Clinesmith said he had not been an asset-- To the court, sorry, Clinesmith said that he had not been an asset, something that would increase suspicion about Carter Page. Isn't that a big deal if an FBI lawyer is flipping an email from the CIA on its head or that detail from it to surveil an American citizen?

Andrew: The answer to that is, yes, it is a big deal that an FBI lawyer would change an email but the facts as stated in the plea allocution are slightly different, Brian. It's quite odd because Kevin Clinesmith did not submit the email, the email where he added in the language that said he was not a source. He did not submit that to the court. In fact, he submitted the unaltered email to the FBI and DOJ attorneys who were dealing with the court so they had the full accurate information.

As I understand that the issue is really much more minor. That's not to say that it's not wrong. It's just that the issue was that a supervisor said, "Did the CIA put in writing that he is not a source?" Kevin's mistake and a serious one was to say, "Essentially, yes, they did," and put it into the email. Kevin Clinesmith when he was pleading guilty, told the judge that he actually understood that Carter Page was not a source. In other words, that the information that he was adding was actually accurate. It is a big deal. It is a mistake and something bad that he did, but it isn't something that misled a court.

Brian: You see how the other side can take that, can take some things with respect to Michael Flynn, who you mentioned before, a few other things, and come to the conclusion that there are at least factions in the Justice Department that are out to get them.

Andrew: This is where what I think is really important are facts matter. I think that we're in a period where adjectives tend to masquerade as reasoned judgments. This is one where if you actually look at the facts, I think it's a way of trying to bring both sides at least a bit closer to understanding each other as opposed to labels.

Brian: We have just a few minutes left with Andrew Weissmann, former lead prosecutor, a lead prosecutor in the Mueller investigation whose new book is called Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation. Let me take one more phone call for you that goes back to the question of what you learned as an investigator with Mueller and how it might relate to Trump's tax returns as revealed by The New York Times this weekend. Ms. Lory in Queens. You're on WNYC. Hi Lory.

Lory: Hi, thank you for taking my call. My question is, is that since Trump is being investigated by the attorney general for fraud in the use of getting loans saying that he had assets that he doesn't have, having this show on these tax returns, that he's, on one hand, taking huge losses while at the same time saying he has money when he's applying for bank loans, isn't this part of that case that the New York State is trying to bring?

Andrew: Terrific question, Lory. This is, to me, what is going on in the New York State Attorney General's Office and the Manhattan DA's Office. That's where the civil case and the connection with the Attorney General's Office and a criminal case in connection with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. It seems to me to be a classic case involving tax fraud and money laundering. One of the things that you look at, as we did when we were investigating Paul Manafort, is seeing whether someone carried through with their financial incentives, let's put it that way. Which is, when you don't want to pay a lot of taxes, you inflate your losses and deflate your income so that you can end up paying bizarrely $750 in taxes, which one thing that's striking to me as it just so happens in two years. It just landed on that exact number, which seems like a red flag.

At the same time, when you're trying to get loans from a bank and from people to invest, you have the opposite incentive where you want to say you have lots of income and you have very little debt. One of the things I suspect is going on at the state level is that they have the state tax returns that were submitted by Donald Trump and his organization. One of the reasons they're fighting so hard to get the accounting documents is they want to compare what it is that the accountants knew and were being told by Donald Trump and the Trump Organization to what they told the New York State tax authorities and what they told banks in trying to get loans. It seems like a classic investigation. I think you're seeing both sets of law enforcement agencies acting appropriately, aggressively to get the information.

Brian: Do you think that The New York Times' revelations could actually become evidence in the New York prosecutors cases? It seems like The New York Times knew more as of two days ago than the New York State Attorney General or the Manhattan DA.

Andrew: I'm confident that both sets of state lawyers have poured over The New York Times reporting looking for leads. Having said that, one of the things that The New York Times reporting does not give them is the actual underlying data, and as prosecutors, that's the thing that you need. While you have leads coming from The New York Times reporting, you don't have all of the information, but of course, one of the things that the state has is they have subpoena power, which is something that The New York Times, as good as their reporting is and remarkable, does not have. You could expect that you will see additional efforts on their part to get information.

Brian: Last question. Do you conclude in the book or do you come any closer to concluding on the basis of this New York Times tax return reporting that any foreign country has leverage over Donald Trump?

Andrew: The answer to that is we don't know. We don't know the answer to that. The way I look at that issue is very much the way I look at the question that many of us asked when we were finding deplorable what James Comey did in October of 2016 by injecting into the election the issue of the Clinton emails. Everyone there, as I know, was asking, "Did that affect the election or did it not affect the election?" My take was always, we're all entitled not to have to ask that question. We shouldn't be in a position where Americans have to wonder whether that did or did not have an effect.

That's my take on your question, Brian, which is, I think that we should have looked at the financial records. I understand the initial decision not to, but I don't agree with the decision to continue with that position throughout the investigation. We're in a position where we don't currently have the answer to your question and I feel like Americans are entitled to know that answer.

Brian: Andrew Weissmann was a lead investigator on the Mueller team. His new book out today is called Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation. Thank you so much for giving us so much time and--

 

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