THE PUTIN FILES

Ryan Lizza

THE PUTIN FILES

This interview with Ryan Lizza, a former Washington correspondent for The New Yorker and an on-air correspondent for CNN, was conducted for the FRONTLINE documentary Putin’s Revenge. After the film aired, The New Yorker announced that it had fired Lizza for what the magazine described as “improper sexual conduct,” a charge Lizza denied. CNN also announced that it had suspended Lizza pending an investigation. The network reinstated Lizza in January 2018, saying that based on the findings of the investigation, it "found no reason to continue to keep Mr. Lizza off the air.”

This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore conducted on Aug. 9, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.

The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister2008-2011

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So when Obama comes in, you know, you’ve gone through this period of time that the Bush administration had given up on the relationship with the Russians and Putin. But Obama comes in, and they have this reset. It’s sort of this idea, very idealistic idea, possibly naïve, about moving forward, that Putin is no longer president. What's going on, and why does that go south quickly?

Well, I think there's some optimism with Obama that he can solve all of these tricky international problems in a way that Bush couldn’t, because Bush was this, you know, hawkish Texas bumpkin that alienated so many of our allies around the world, especially after the Iraq War, where there was obviously a big difference of opinion between Russia and the United States on that; that at the U.N. Security Council, you know, Russia had continued to play a very adversarial role, blocking Bush-era objectives. Obama came in and thought, well, this is another relationship that was probably a victim of the neoconservative foreign policy, so let’s take a look at it and let’s repair it.

He overstated how much of the problem in the U.S.-Russia relationship was about Bush and Cheney and their aggressive foreign policy and how much of it was just structural, long-term differences between how Russia and the United States saw the post-Cold War world. But every new administration takes a look at adversarial relationships and thinks that they can fix them anew.

How quickly does it go south, leading up to [Russian Ambassador Sergey] Kislyak’s statements by 2015?

Well, what really makes it go south is Russia’s meddling in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, right. After Ukraine, after Crimea, the relationship falls apart. And by 2015, Kislyak has said this publicly. By 2015, the Russians were looking beyond the Obama administration. There was no chance for a rapprochement in the last two years of the Obama administration. And Kislyak, being a very smart and gifted ambassador in Washington, understanding American politics as an ambassador is supposed to do, he starts looking to the future, to the post-Obama, perhaps post-Clinton future, and trying to see who might be on the horizon.

The animosity to Clinton just gives us a little background on that.

Well, the animosity to Hillary Clinton is largely about the color revolutions in Eastern Europe, and it’s about when she was secretary of state, U.S. support for these pro-democracy movements that Putin opposed. To Putin, Hillary was trying to interfere in Russia’s space in Eastern Europe. It’s partly about that. It’s partly about NATO expansion in Europe. And he believes that Hillary was pushing and supporting—the United States was supporting movements that were a threat to Russian interests. And if you're Putin, an insecure autocrat who is looking at neighboring countries that are being swept up in these populist democratic revolutions, he has to always fear that something like that could sweep through Russia itself. So to him, Hillary was threatening his rule in Russia at the end of the day.

To the extent?

As you know, from the intelligence community’s reports, this was a core reason that Putin despised Hillary. The intelligence community’s report, at least the unclassified version, suggested it was personal with Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t just that American foreign policy was at odds with Russia on several issues; it was that this person in particular, Hillary Clinton, took actions that threatened Putin’s rule.

Putin and Trump2016-2017

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… Tell us a little bit about the early interest in Trump, to the fact that Kislyak ends up at the Republican convention, and then meetings that occurred and folks within the Trump campaign who had had close ties. Talk a little bit about why the interest and some of the details about what the proof is that there were connections of that sort.

So if you look at it from the Russian perspective, if you fill in some of the dots that we now can fill in from that period in 2015 and ’16 they see, one, a candidate like Trump who is talking about the U.S. pulling back from certain spots in the world, pulling back from Iraq, questioning, probably most important to Putin, the usefulness of NATO, right? So already you just have an ideological alignment between Putin and Trump, especially on two big issues, how overstretched America should be in the world and specifically its commitment to security in Europe through NATO.

Then, if you're Putin, you see him hiring and reaching out to a series of political advisers who have similar sympathies and/or links to Russia. So [you see] this relatively obscure national security adviser named Carter Page, who has visited Moscow, and his view of U.S.-Moscow relations is much more amenable to Moscow than some of the hawks in the U.S.national security circles.

You see the campaign manager, later on, Paul Manafort, who worked for pro-Russia Ukrainian parties, and had spent years in Ukrainian politics, became close to Russian oligarchs. This is someone, again, if you're Putin, you're saying: “Huh, OK. This is a whole new team. This is not Hillary Clinton and her circle of anti-Putin hawks. This is a group of people that knows that region, is skeptical of NATO, and is probably willing to reach out to Moscow.”

You add into Michael Flynn, the national security adviser, who Putin had dinner within Moscow. And then you add into that the Trump team’s own sort of interesting forays into Moscow, with the beauty pageant and the fact that you know, as one of Trump’s kids once said, most of them—that the money coming into their the Trump Organization is Russian money. So it’s, you know, lots of Russians buying Trump real estate in the United States. So even if there's nothing nefarious, just all of those links, from Moscow’s perspective, they had to be thinking, wow, this is someone, at the very least, we can do business with.

The fact of Kislyak being at the convention and all that, that leads to some later controversy over people rejecting the idea that they had ever met him.

Yeah.

Just talk a little bit about that.

If you look at Kislyak’s very aggressive diplomacy, I guess you would call it, during the election, he clearly—as least as far as we know—he’s clearly given up on the Clinton campaign. Doesn’t seem like he’s doing much outreach to the Clinton people, because he doesn’t think it will go anywhere. But he seems to believe that there's this opportunity with the Republican Party and with Trump, which is very unusual because, in recent history, the Republican Party has been much more hawkish on Russia than the Democratic Party. Famously, in the 2012 debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, Mitt Romney described Russia as the number one geostrategic threat. Obama mocked that idea. And you know, lo and behold, he was probably right.

Well, you fast-forward to 2016, at the Republican convention, and Trump has now overthrown the hawks in the Republican Party when it comes to Russia. And this actually plays out in the platform committee at the convention in Cleveland, where—look, on Capitol Hill, it is standard policy among Republicans that the United States should arm Ukraine in its war on its eastern border with Russia. Obama never did that. He didn’t think it was a wise strategy. But that was Republican policy.

At the Republican convention, there's a debate about this, and language is offered just to support this policy, which all the Republicans in Congress support, that the United States should actually give lethal aid to the Ukrainians. And through some machinations of the Trump campaign, that language is stripped from the party platform. So again, if you're Moscow, you're seeing that, and you're saying: “Wow, this is a campaign with all of these advisers who are more open to having a relationship with us. This is a candidate who talks about NATO and talks about international affairs in a much more—in a similar way to Putin, where he doesn’t talk about democracy and human rights. He just talks about each country, each nation’s own interests.” And now, at the convention, the Republican Party, which were always such hawks on this issue, they're now overthrowing the idea of arming the Ukrainians. So from Moscow’s perspective, it’s getting better and better by the summer of 2016.

Intervention in the U.S. Election

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