Trump's Troubles and Gorbachev's Legacy

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. If you didn't think judges work on Labor Day, well yesterday, siding with former President Trump, Judge Aileen Cannon ordered the appointment of an independent arbiter to review the thousands of government records the FBI seized in its Mar-a-Lago search last month. The independent arbiter, known as a special master, will be appointed by the judge to review the materials in search of anything that may be protected by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege as former President Trump is claiming.

Joining me now to explain the latest as well as get into some of the details of what was actually seized in that search and talk about some global political headlines as well is Fred Kaplan, Slate's War Stories columnist and the author of many books including The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. His latest. Fred has also written recently on Slate about the legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev who died last week at 91. If you didn't hear that, we'll talk about that, and the latest on the war in Ukraine. Also what Fred calls in one of his articles, the most ridiculous part of Jared Kushner's new memoir. Fred, welcome back to WNYC.

Fred Kaplan: Always a pleasure, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get into some of the background of Judge Cannon and how she came to her decision on appointing the independent arbiter, the special master, can you explain what that term special master means? I know you're not a lawyer. You're more of a military and national security journalist, but you have probably enough experience with this to explain it a little bit.

Fred Kaplan: Well, it's usually someone who's appointed in cases that are very complex involving technology or very complicated antitrust provisions where the judge says, "You know, this goes beyond my competence. I'm bringing in some people who understand these issues more thoroughly and who are also judges." In this case, I'm really baffled by this whole thing as are people who know more about the law than I do. An ex-president does not have executive privilege anymore. Not even a current president has executive privilege to retain certain documents.

Then if you read this decision, the judge says that, she talks about the extraordinary damage to Trump's reputation that this case might be. Well, you know, everybody who undergoes a criminal trial there's a danger that the reputation is going to get shot, right? Are we saying that all politicians, all ex-presidents, are somehow exempt from this provision? It doesn't make much sense. In any case, I think the national security investigation being launched by the Director of National Intelligence, that will go forward. I can't believe that even a criminal investigation will be completely holed up by this. It's a speed bump.

Brian Lehrer: My understanding, for what it's worth, of the criminal investigation is that it can go forward. They just aren't going to have access for a while at the Justice Department to the documents that were seized from Mar-a-Lago, but they can still interview witnesses and do other things in the criminal investigation. Since national security is more your beat, explain that to a lot of listeners who may not realize there are separate criminal and national security investigations going on. What is the national security investigation?

Fred Kaplan: Well, the national security investigation is Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, is being told to do an investigation of the national security implications of the pilfering and very sloppy handling of these documents. Has this affected our national security at all? Brian, I wrote a piece a couple years ago saying that every intelligence agency in the world has probably bought a membership at Mar-a-Lago. It's not that much money in the scheme of intelligence agency budgets. You have somebody who can be walking around overhearing the president talking about things and now we know people were walking around this place.

There's video footage, apparently, of people walking in and out of this room where the boxes containing, perhaps, some of those highly classified documents in the US government were being stored without no lock and key, much less any other provisions that are usually laid aside for documents of this sort. There have been stories. A couple of years ago there was this Chinese woman who showed up at Mar-a-Lago saying she was there for an Asian American Women's Conference. She got by two layers of Secret Service. She was stopped only at the front desk by a Mar-a-Lago employee who looked at the sheet of paper and noticed there was no Asian American Women's Conference going on that day [chuckles] and found it strange that this person wasn't carrying a bathing suit. What other people did get through? Where did they go? What have they been looking at? It's just appalling.

Brian Lehrer: Although if they determine that there has been no actual harm to national security, like no enemies of the United States or anybody like that has actually seen these documents, that Trump kept them, maybe sloppily, maybe recklessly, in a closet mixed with medical records and all of this other stuff that they say is there, then is it no harm, no foul, or at least a really small potatoes thing to bring a former president up on criminal charges for?

Fred Kaplan: Well, I would say two things. One, if any White House aide or a State Department employee, whatever, if they've been caught with this stuff in their homes, regardless of whether they'd never left the room, those people would be in jail right now. I've talked with former White House officials who they were not allowed to bring out personal diaries. Anything that was property. It kept there. It's an interesting point. It's a big politically risky thing to go after a president or an ex-president.

There are laws on the books that make it unequivocally clear that this is a criminal offense. Even if the documents are not classified, but especially if they are. We should maybe talk about just how classified some of these documents appear to have been. One thing. I don't know myself, but a couple of quite respectable and not terribly political ex-CIA agents have noted that some of our sources, some of our spies, have been disappearing lately. They raise the question of whether the handling of these documents has anything to do with this. I don't know. These concerns are being expressed by the kind of people who are not the sort of people who bring up these sorts of things randomly.

Brian Lehrer: Judge Cannon, who ordered the special master, is a Trump appointee. You retweeted James Fallows from the Atlantic who wrote, "The judge who ruled in Trump's favor in the special master delay case was confirmed by Mitch McConnell's Senate after Trump lost the 2020 vote and is a member of the Federalist Society. These are realities worth noting in mainstream reports of the pro-Trump ruling she just made," wrote James Fallows. I have a theory on the other side that this could actually help the credibility of the investigation.

If they appoint a fair special master, and that's a whole other topic that I want to get into a little bit, but if they appoint this independent special master who is appointed by this Trump-appointed judge and then there turns out to be serious breaches of either just handling documents law or anything worse, then it's going to be hard to impossible for the Republicans to shoot darts at the US Justice Department when they've gone through this extra layer of independence and there's all this stuff there. The judge already ruled in appointing the special master that she saw no kind of abuse of power by the Justice Department giving them more credibility.

Fred Kaplan: I think that's a fair point. The judge even brought that up in her ruling which is something that I don't think any judge should bring up in the ruling. It's extra judicial, but yes, you're quite right. There are hardcore Trump supporters who won't believe-

Brian Lehrer: Ever.

Fred Kaplan: -anything against him is credible, but yes, there are a lot of people in the middle or Republicans who are getting a little tired of this guy, and yes, it could boost the credibility. You're quite right. It depends how quickly this is done. I guess it looks like, in terms of immediate impact, it looks like there wasn't going to be any prosecution before the midterm elections in any event. That's why I said at the beginning that it could be that this is just a bump on the road. A speed bump.

Brian Lehrer: It could be that it's not so bad for the Justice Department to have this as an excuse, almost, to not make a decision about prosecuting or not prosecuting between now and election day. They don't like to do that in the couple of months before a general election day anyway and now they can't. I guess they could with other evidence if they had enough other evidence, but it makes it a lot more unlikely.

Now the judge did set a deadline of this Friday for the two parties, meaning the Justice Department and Trump, to recommend who might be this special master. Of course, I'm thinking, oh, well Trump's going to recommend Rudy Giuliani. [laughter] and the Justice Department, I don't know, maybe considering some of the things that William Barr, Trump's former Attorney General, has said about Trump recently, including this taking of the documents, maybe they'll suggest William Barr. I'm joking but they're obviously going to be four very different kinds of people. How will the judge decide on somebody? Do you know how that works?

Fred Kaplan: Actually, I'm afraid I don't.

Brian Lehrer: It's all right. We will follow that. That's an honest answer. We always like when somebody who doesn't know the answer to something doesn't fake it and just says, "I don't know." Let me go on to a whole other topic because you did write about, on Slate, the legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union. Your take was kind of how Mikhail Gorbachev, in dissolving this Soviet Union or allowing other people to dissolve it, allowing the other countries to just walk away from it, helped set the stage for Vladimir Putin. Is that your take?

Fred: I think you could say that. Two things about it, the two main points. First, he was a great figure. He was one of the handful of truly consequential figures of the 20th century. He brought his two main policies that he instituted in the Soviet Union. Glasnost which means openness. Perestroika, the restructuring of the economy. That changed everything. I was in Moscow as a reporter on Reagan's the end of the Evil Empire tour, and glasnost was in full swing and it was the spring.

The newspapers were printing historical documents that had been suppressed ever since Stalin's time, and the newspapers were sold out instantly. People were lined up to read them on little billboards outside the newspaper offices. Free private markets were being opened up. Then, of course, I was a reporter there from in the early Yeltsin years and there truly was free speech. There were newspapers and even TV shows that were much more politically brutal than anything on American television at the time.

It was a heyday, but at the same time, Gorbachev's big problem, and a lot of Russians who clearly benefited from his reforms, hated him for this, just detested him for this, is that he destroyed the old system without creating anything new. He had the illusion, he suffered under the illusion, that he could institute these reforms and yet keep the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a monopoly power over Soviet and Russian politics. That was just impossible. At some point, the reforms broke apart the system and for quite some time there was just anarchy.

There were some people, especially in the larger cities, who knew how to take advantage of this situation, who rose to their potential in taking advantage of free markets and so forth, and there were other people who just lost their savings, lost their shirts, were completely befuddled. This created the setting for someone like Putin to come along and say, "We were going to restore the greatness of once was the Russian Empire."

It also had international impact. There were leaders in China and other places looking at this Russian experiment and they came to the conclusion, and the Chinese most of all, that okay, no, no, no, no. We loosen up economic reforms, but we don't touch politics. We keep control of politics because if we don't do that then the whole thing is going to fall apart, our power, and so China became in some ways economically much more liberal, but politically much more authoritarian.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Your article is called How Mikhail Gorbachev's Successes and Failures Foretold the Tragedy of Modern Russia. One of the lines that jumped out at me was that you wrote, "The only thing more remarkable than his towering accomplishments while in office may be his utter irrelevance in the decade since." Yes, when I heard the news that Gorbachev had died last week at the age of 91, my first thought was, "Oh, Mikhail Gorbachev was still alive?"

You also wrote, "Just a few years after his reforms got underway, a widespread consensus took hold among the citizens who supported him the most that he had gone both too far and not far enough." What does that mean?

Fred Kaplan: Well, the context of this was when I first became a reporter in Moscow for a few years in the summer of '92 I went to a press conference that Gorbachev had and I noticed that some of the most liberal western-leaning reporters were just mocking him, I mean really laughing at him, and this shocked me. It was because, again, at a key moment you might recall that toward the end of Gorbachev's period in the December of '91, he was kidnapped by some right-wing, some very extreme communists, who wanted to lead a coup. It failed. He came back to Moscow.

Yeltsin, meanwhile, had risen as a major figure in resisting the pooch, and he started talking about the redemption of the Communist Party and how it will stay in charge of everything. He was seen as an old hat figure. So much had changed in Russia in just a matter of two weeks. In some ways he had gone too far, maybe, in opening up free speech without- I mean the economy. -without also opening up everything. He kept too much control, or tried to remain too much control, in the hands of the Communist Party and in the big factories that were run by the Communist Party.

He set forth a revolution without changing the underlying structure that where you needed to really have it affect the lives of people and it led for a few years time to a serious depression in the Russian economy which, as we know from many experiences in history, if you have extreme depression and inflation and free speech, a lot of people will give up that free speech to be able to put some food on their table.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT FM, 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netkong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey public radio and live streaming @wyc.org. A few more minutes with Slate's War Stories columnists Fred Kaplan on various things including the Trump Mar-a-Lago post-search ruling by a judge yesterday. Yes, judges sometimes do work on Labor Day. Appointing a special master to review those classified documents.

Fred, who used to be a Moscow correspondent, as he was just recalling his take on the passing of Mikhail Gorbachev and his legacy. Before we run out of time, Fred, I want to ask you about your take on Jared Kushner's memoir which is kind of amusing. Maybe both the memoir, but certainly your take on it. You talked about putting food on the table in Russia and I have to point out that your article about Gorbachev referenced a 1998 Russian Pizza Hut commercial which exemplifies how his supporters came to think he went too far and not far enough. Do you want to tell this?

Fred Kaplan: Well, it's an ad for Pizza Hut. It's a commercial. It's in Russian with subtitles. Gorbachev walks into the Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut, by the way, when Pizza Hut opened up in Moscow--

Brian Lehrer: Sounds like the beginning of a joke. Mikhail Gorbachev walks into a pizza hut.

Fred Kaplan: Gorbachev walked into a Pizza Hut with this young nephew or something. The Pizza Hut, like McDonald's, was just an extraordinary phenomenon in Moscow. People were lined up to eat there. They'd never had anything like it before. Gorbachev walks in and so at a few tables the customers are arguing, they're saying, "This man brought freedom," and somebody else says, "He brought disorder. He opened up everything. It's a mess. Then some woman said, "[unintelligible 00:20:00] , Gorbachev created many things including Pizza Put which we all love."

They all nod their heads go, "Tsar Gorbachev," to Mikhail Gorbachev and he beams and smiles. Yes, it was the real Gorbachev doing a Pizza Hut commercial in 1998. It looks to an outsider like a ridiculous thing but, in fact, it summed up the first few years after Gorbachev. I remember walking into a typical Muscovite's home. I was complaining about how horrible things were, the shortages, and lack of jobs, and I look around. He's got a Toshiba refrigerator over in the corner. he has a Sony television set over here. [chuckles] The whole place was a series of contradictions.

There was a saying that goes, "Moscow, a city of miracles, a city of wonder." It was a very odd few years of my life to be spending in a place where you would see a few decades of political and economic and social development happen in the course of a month, and yet, on the other hand, you could walk around a corner and there would be a woman leading a goat someplace. It was such a mesh of centuries all coexisting.

Brian Lehrer: Just for historical accuracy on the Pizza Hut commercial, yes, the father says, "Because of him we have economic confusion," and the son says, "Because of him we have opportunity." The men disagree until the woman in the family interrupts to say, "Gorbachev gave them Pizza Hut," and everyone cheers, as you write it, but that didn't actually air in Russia. That was distributed internationally but not there. Do I have that right?

Fred Kaplan: Well, I'm going to be honest again, Brian. Actually, I don't know that.

Brian Lehrer: I read that elsewhere and it's possible that was for consumption-

Fred Kaplan: It could well be.

Brian Lehrer: -by people who would've liked Gorbachev more than the Russians did by 1998. All right, last thing. You wrote a piece just the other day called The Most Ridiculous Part of Jared Kushner's New White House Memoir. What was the most ridiculous part of Jared Kushner's new White House memoir?

Fred: Well, that was not my headline, and I think it's a little misleading, actually. I wanted to call it the most and the least ridiculous parts of, but they left out the least. I think here's the thing. Look, I did it partly in response. There was that wonderful Dwight Garner review in the New York Times which was one of these classically vicious hilarious reviews.

Brian Lehrer: Breakdown.

Fred Kaplan: They called it Soulless and said reading Kushner complimenting his father was like watching a cat lick the eye goo off of a dog. This kind of thing. I go, "Yes, he's right." Half of the book was like that. A third of the book was just boring, but I thought, and this was my take, my novel takes, I thought a fifth of it, about a fifth of it, in other words, about 80 or 90 pages, were actually pretty interesting. Mainly his sections on the Abraham Accords. Leading up to the handful of Sunni Arab nations that formed official normal relations with Israel.

This is something that I've heard from my own sources that Kushner actually was very much involved in. He underplays the degree to which it was instigated by the Arabs and that they were playing him. It's absurd. It's a little embarrassing. He quotes these people saying, "Jared, you were doing things that no American diplomat in history has ever done." He seems to take this seriously as opposed to just complimenting the president's son-in-law. It's a very interesting story how these Accords came about.

I don't think there has been any comparably detailed account in English of what happened. I checked with a couple of people who know more about how this happened than I did. They think that it's a fairly accurate account. The other thing is Kushner had some enemies early on and they included some of the worst people in the early Trump White House, and he dishes them. It's some pretty entertaining dish, and they all got fired, so that's also entertaining. Look, I'm not, I'm not suggesting anybody go out and spend whatever it is to buy this and read this. I'm just saying there are two parts of the book that are actually genuinely interesting which some of the more entertaining pans neglected.

Brian Lehrer: Can you say in 30 seconds, which is what we have left, what those Arab countries got from recognizing Israel? Obviously, it's good for Israel to be recognized by Arab countries. What did they get from that, from whatever deal Jared Kushner helped to broker?

Fred Kaplan: Technology, imports, exports, tourism, and something he leaves out, the US threw in, especially to Oman, several billion dollars worth of F-35 stealth fighter planes. The thing that was revealed in this is, and this has been true and some scholars have noted this for some time, a lot of these Arab countries have never really cared that much for the Palestinians. They used the Palestinians as a cudgel to beat up on Israel and to distract attention from their own domestic problems. This was a few of these countries admitting this to the disgraceful detriment of the Palestinians who remain in as dreadful of shape as they ever were.

Brian Lehrer: Well, judging from the sirens in the background, I think the authorities are now coming for you, Fred, based on this interview so-

Fred Kaplan: [laughs] Yes, that's right.

Brian Lehrer: -we will have to wrap it up because we don't want to obstruct law enforcement like some people. Fred Kaplan is Slate's War Stories columnist and the author of many books, including his latest, The Bomb: Presidents' Generals, and The Secret History of Nuclear War. Thanks as always.

Fred Kaplan: Sure. Anytime. Thank you.

 

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