From pandering to Putin to abusing allies and
ignoring his own advisers, Trump's phone calls alarm US officials
By Carl
Bernstein, CNN
Updated
1649 GMT (0049 HKT) June 30, 2020
(CNN)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.
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.
The White
House did not respond to a request for comment before this story published.
After publication, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews said,
"President Trump is a world class negotiator who has consistently
furthered America's interests on the world stage. From negotiating the phase
one China deal and the USMCA to NATO allies contributing more and defeating
ISIS, President Trump has shown his ability to advance America's strategic
interests."
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.
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.
President
Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan take part in a White
House press conference in November 2019.
President
Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan take part in a White
House press conference in November 2019.
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.
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.
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' poisonings of a former Russian spy and his daughter with
Novichok, a nerve agent developed in what was then the Soviet Union, 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'."
UPDATE:
This story has been updated with comment from the White House.
CORRECTION:
This story has been updated to correct the kind of poison used to attack a
former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury, England.
CNN's
Nicole Gaouette contributed to this report.
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