MARK ROZELL: Good
evening, everybody. Thank you for coming. I'm Mark Rozell. I serve as the Dean of the Schar
School of Policy and Government here at George Mason University. And I'm delighted to welcome
you to this special program of the Schar School's
Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy
and International Security. As many of you know,
the Schar School is one of 10 schools or colleges
at George Mason University. We operate both on the Fairfax
Campus here, and in Arlington. And we have done a number
of special programs through the Hayden
Center and other centers in the school on
both of our campuses. We're delighted to
be here in Fairfax. I know the weather was a
little bit challenging, so I thank you for
making the extra effort to come here for this
program, especially on the eve of a special day. So get out and vote tomorrow. I don't care which party
you are, or who you favor. It's just important to be
involved in the process, and we here at the
Schar School care about your participation
in the political process. So thank you for coming
tonight for this conversation. I guess this
continues, in a way, a relationship we've built
with the Washington Post. We have a national
security reporter for the Washington Post tonight,
to talk about his latest book. And you can check and see
whether the Washington Post Schar School poll is
actually accurate again, as it has been for the
past couple of years that we've done a number
of co-branded polls together on election
campaigns, both in Virginia and nationally. In this election cycle, we were
doing the battleground poll of the 69 districts
that we and others deemed as the most competitive
races for the House of Representatives
across the country, and made some
projections about what's likely to happen tomorrow. And we also had a little bit
to say, as well, about some of the races here in Virginia. So again, thank you for coming. And I would like to welcome
the executive director of the Hayden Center,
Larry Pfeiffer, who will open this evening's program. Larry? [APPLAUSE] LARRY PFEIFFER: Good
evening, everyone. Thank you very much for coming. As Mark said, a little bit of a
challenging evening getting out here with the weather
and the traffic. So double thanks for doing that. As Mark indicated, it's
an important evening. It's the evening before
a midterm election that's been described
by many media outlets and many politicians as
perhaps the most consequential midterm election that we've
seen in a generation or so. Vital to making any kind
of election decision is an understanding
of national security, and we here at the Schar
School and at the Hayden Center are dedicated to educating
and informing our students and the general public about
national security and the role intelligence plays
in national security. The Hayden Center is just
a little over a year old. We started last Fall. General Hayden is the founder,
and as Mark mentioned, I'm the director. Our goal is to help
inform the public, in as pragmatic and common
sense a fashion as we can, about the role
intelligence plays in policymaking and
decision making, or in some cases how it fails. We have two wonderful experts to
discuss tonight those aspects. First and foremost, of
course, is General Hayden, the founder of our Center. He requires little introduction
to the audience here, but for those who aren't
aware, he served prominently as the director of the
National Security Agency, and then as the director of CIA
before joining the faculty here at Schar School as distinguished
visiting professor. We also have Greg
Miller joining us. Greg is a national
security journalist of long standing
and some renown. He began his work at the
Los Angeles Times, which is where General Hayden and
I first met Greg, working, largely, the
intelligence community beat, and transitioned
about eight years ago to the Washington
Post, where he's continued to do excellent work. He has been a member of two
Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, one for public
service and one for-- I forget, I apologize. Greg can perhaps enlighten you. But two of them. The first one, back in 2014,
was as part of the reporting that the Washington Post did
on the Snowden disclosures about surveillance activities. We didn't like Greg
as much back then. And then subsequently,
and just this last year, he was part of the team that
did the excellent reporting by the Washington Post
on the interference by the Russians in
our last election, and the election
of President Trump and then the fallout
from those disclosures, and the FBI and
justice investigations into that activity. Before I continue, there
is a reception afterwards. We would ask all of
you to please join us for the reception,
because I think we're going to have
plenty of food and drink. So fill your pockets,
take it home. Whatever you'd like. So please do join us. We have books for sale. We have Greg's book,
which is, in my view, probably the most comprehensive
examination of that subversion of our election. It's entitled "The
Apprentice: Trump, Russia, and the Subversion
of Democracy". We have copies for
sale in the reception, and Greg will be there
to sign copies as well. The bookstore-- kind
of like Amazon-- if you like this book, you
may like this one, too. We also have copies of
General Hayden's book out there for anybody who
maybe hasn't gotten his book. And you can purchase that and
General Hayden will be milling around and I'm sure
would be happy to sign copies of his book for
anybody who'd be interested. So without further ado, please
welcome General Michael Hayden and Greg Miller to the stage. [APPLAUSE] MICHAEL HAYDEN:
Well, good evening. Thanks for coming. Greg, thank you,
absolutely, for coming. Looking forward to
the conversation. First of all, you need to know
that it's more than a decade, I've been waiting
for the opportunity to ask him questions, rather
than the other way around. [LAUGHTER] So let me begin. What don't you tell us
who all your sources are? [LAUGHTER] GREG MILLER: You don't
really want me to do that. MICHAEL HAYDEN: No, but
it is related to reality. Larry's comments, Greg,
were really quite spot on about being comprehensive. And I know, when you're
writing the daily, the folks who
practice your craft want to talk about the
first draft of history. This is a little bit more. This has got a lot more
content than you can get by just stitching together. It's actually, in my view-- and I'm out of
government, so I'm from the outside looking
in, like other folks-- this is a remarkably
richly-detailed story you've been able to put
together while events are still unfolding. How does that happen? What do you think has enabled
you to be able to do that? GREG MILLER: That's
a great question. Can I just take a second
and make a few thanks here? I'd like to thank Dean
Rozell and Director Pfeiffer for putting this event together,
having us out here tonight. I really want to thank
you, General Hayden, not only for tonight, but for
your patience and your help and insights over
many, many years now. I've known you for
probably a decade or more, covering you at
your various stops through the
intelligence community. I also wanted to
just note that one thing I know about
General Hayden is that he cares
about his country. He cares about the
intelligence community. And he cares a lot about
his hometown of Pittsburgh. And all three of
those things are going through difficult
times right now. And I know that they
benefit from having you as a spokesperson, and somebody
who's standing up for them. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Thank you. That's very kind. Thank you. GREG MILLER: To
answer your question, one of the hardest things
about doing this book was trying to keep my phone,
and all of the crazy stuff that was popping up
constantly from just derailing every single day when I
was trying to make headway on these chapters. Because, you know-- and I see
a few colleagues from the press out here in the
audience tonight-- I can tell you,
we've never lived through anything like this. This story has been all
consuming and really disorienting at times. And one of the
reasons why I thought it was important to try
to tackle this project was that, even for those of
us in the middle of it trying to make sense about why
we were covering it, it was an impossible task. There's just too much happening. You're learning about
things out of sequence, and so one of the
first things I did was create an enormous
chronology, or timeline. And man, when you do that,
and these connections start jumping out
at you, you had no idea were connected when
you were living through them. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I noticed in
the book, you sequence events. I mean, it's
chronologically organized. But you're right. You sequence events
and you now see connections that
actually didn't get reported in the daily coverage. GREG MILLER: They may not even
be connected, necessarily. But when you juxtapose them,
they have different meaning. And I'll give you one example. So we all know about
the Trump Tower meeting. We all know what happened
at the Trump Tower meeting, where Trump's inner circle is
receiving some Russian visitors who are offering supposed
damaging information on Hillary Clinton. That happens almost to the day-- almost to the day-- as a CIA officer is trying
to make his way back into the Embassy in Moscow,
and is tackled by an FSB agent right at the doorstep. They're wrestling. The guy is fighting
for his life, and manages to drag himself
across the threshold back inside the compound. Ends up with a broken
shoulder, sent home. I mean, so the idea that
here's the Trump campaign having welcoming this
help, as disappointing as maybe it was to
them in the end, while on the other
side of the Atlantic, you have a completely different
scene playing out that tells you a lot more about
Russia and its interest in working with
the United States. MICHAEL HAYDEN: So the title. I mean, obviously,
there is a play on the President's own history,
but what the hidden meaning? GREG MILLER: I don't
know if it's so hidden. MICHAEL HAYDEN: So, well, OK. If he is the apprentice,
who's the master? GREG MILLER: So, you know the
title works on three levels, right? I mean, so, the
Apprentice is obviously the show that propels
Trump to such great fame. He still talks
about it constantly. He's still talking about how the
ratings nosedived when he left. He was an apprentice
when he wins the election and arrives in the White House. He has no background. He never held public office. Probably never clutched
a classified document, far as we know. Had very little
meaningful interaction with government
agencies or officials, except adversarial ones, mostly. And so he's an
apprentice in the job. He's got a lot of learning. He needs a lot of
people around him to sort of explain
how things work. And then there's this
inevitable other aspect to the word, which is this sort
of subservience or servility, which I think is the real-- at least until now, has
been one of the biggest mysteries about him. I mean, his
relationship with Putin. Why does he behave this way
toward the Russian president? What could possibly explain it? He seems, at times,
as I say in the book, to sort of wish
to emulate Putin. And that feeds into
the play on words here, that he seems at times
to be Putin's apprentice. MICHAEL HAYDEN: OK. You spend a fair amount
of time in the first third of the book talking
about his almost preternatural
self-confidence, and how that gets him into trouble. And you spent a lot of time
with regard to the Comey firing. You want to-- GREG MILLER: Yeah. I mean, I think when
you look at a lot of-- and David Ignatius
picked up on this and wrote an excellent
column, largely sort of riffing on the book
about this-- how frequently it is that Trump creates
problems for himself when he relies on his own instincts. And firing Comey was definitely
one of those situations. I think I say in the book
that he botched that. For a guy who built his fame
off of the words, you're fired, this was a firing that
he botched horribly. Because he doesn't see around
the corner at what's coming. He does not see the way the
manipulation of Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General,
might come back to bite him. He doesn't see how removing
Comey doesn't really remove the problem here,
and in fact, leads only to the recruitment of this
prosecutorial beast, Robert Mueller. It's just time after time
after time, his inability to do things that are even
in his own self-interest is fascinating to me. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I'm intrigued,
because the book spends-- I wouldn't call it
character studies, but you spend a lot of time
in the fine print with regard to actions and the
sequence of actions, and it comes out looking
like a character study. So you talk about
Rosenstein and how he was played from
one side, and then played back on the other
side, with regard to the Comey firing. And one of the things I try
to focus on here in my class is, despite all the headlines,
despite all the structures, despite all the money,
despite all the power, it's a human enterprise. So can you talk about the
Deputy Attorney General and how this played for him? GREG MILLER: That's
a really great point. Trump is supposed
to be somebody who understands the
leverage of situations, of personal relationships
and so forth. And Rosenstein, you can see him
veering from his frustration and utter disagreement with
Jim Comey, and being eager, as many were in the
Justice Department, who were really frustrated with
Jim Comey and his inability to own up to his own mistakes-- MICHAEL HAYDEN: This is genuine
outrage over the Clinton-- GREG MILLER: It was the
handling of the Clinton email investigation. They just sincerely believe he's
really overstepping his bounds when he announces that there's
no basis for an investigation here. They really resent
that, and Rosenstein is right at the
front of that pack. His feelings there, I think,
feed into his willingness to go along with
writing this memo on why Comey should be fired. And here's a moment where
Rosenstein fails to see around the corner, fails to
see that submitting this memo to this White
House may not be in his best interest, long-term. And so then, when the White
House holds up that memo and says, well, this is why
we've got to fire this guy. The President wasn't really
even thinking about it until Mr. Rosenstein
told us this. We had no choice. Rosenstein is feeling
completely burned at a very personal level. And I think you've
got to hand it to him. I mean, the way he
handles this is, he goes into planning
mode secretly, keeping his boss, Jeff Sessions,
out of the loop, keeping the White
House out of the loop. Springs it on the White House
at the very last moment. In fact, Rosenstein is supposed
to be in a meeting with Trump at the Oval Office
and Jeff Sessions when he begs out
at the last minute. I got things I gotta
take care of here. Calls over to the White
House while they're meeting in his absence
and says, guys, I've just appointed Bob Mueller. Mr. Sessions, you need to go in
back in now and tell the boss. [LAUGHTER] I mean, he must have
considered that. I imagine he took some
satisfaction from that moment. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I guess. Do Mueller and Rosenstein
have a history? GREG MILLER: Well, they do. And they've known each other-- of course, Mueller knows almost
everybody in that building, and has a history with almost
everybody in that building. And in fact, Rosenstein had
been talking with Mueller about the FBI job. And Mueller had already
spoken with Trump about it when all of this comes about. MICHAEL HAYDEN: So in
keeping with the character study here, Jim Comey-- obviously, he's a
central character here. And you develop some
aspects of his personality that you and I
discussed briefly. You want to-- GREG MILLER: Yeah. I mean, Jim Comey obviously has
a very distinguished career, and a lot of admirers. And he might be at the front
of that line sometimes. You're right. These are leaders. These are respected individuals. But at the same time,
they're all individuals, and they all have
their own psychologies and their own motivations
for how they behave and how they respond to events. And Comey, arguably,
one of his blind spots is his sort of sense of
an over-developed sense of righteousness. And his handling of the
Clinton email investigation, his belief,
ultimately, that he is the one who has to
make these decisions, because everybody else around
him, including the Attorney General is too
compromised to do it. Only he has the wherewithal
to do the right thing and to make the right call. And even after he
left government, and wrote his own book,
it was hard for him to-- he sort of comes close to owning
up to some of this in his book, and some of his appearances
promoting his book, but it's still hard for him
to see himself that way. MICHAEL HAYDEN: One
more personality. You kind of made your bones
on this story back in August of '16, I think, writing
about someone we both know, Mike Flynn, who
comes out of this-- and I think in your writing,
Greg, some sympathy for what truly is a tragic turn
of events for Flynn. GREG MILLER: Yeah. I've been asked
a lot about Flynn in conversations about
the book and elsewhere. And I have to say, it really
has gave me no pleasure to be part of the
team at the Post that was writing the
stories that forced him out of office, that
forced him to resign, and exposed that he
had been dishonest. Because I had known
him for a long time, had known him for
more than a decade, had I think first met him when
he was a Colonel in the Army. And whatever you say
about him, he clearly was a devoted servant
to the US government. Many, many, multiple
tours in war zones and in both Iraq
and Afghanistan, had sacrificed a lot. And his family sacrificed a lot. And I covered him when he was
appointed Director of DIA, and met with him
from time to time, and I always thought that
he was really engaging. He was a friendly guy,
an affable person. He had the instinct,
which, perhaps he shares with you at least in
one way, which is that you want to have a public face. You want to interact. You want people to
see a little bit about how these agencies
work, and what they're about. And I think that's a good thing. He proved unable to manage this
sort of capstone assignment in his career, being given
the job as Director of DIA. It's just so
different than being in charge of a unit in a command
center in Afghanistan or Iraq. And it's a really
difficult thing. And not everybody's
cut out for that. And it didn't look like he was. There was a lot of turmoil
at DIA in his time there, and I think the Obama team just
got a little fed up with that, and pushed him out. I think that they cut him a fair
amount of slack in doing so, allowed him to stay in the job
to collect that one extra star. But boy, he seemed
bitter when he left. And everybody I've talked
to about him over the years thinks that there was
sort of a switch that flipped in that moment, and he
became almost unrecognizable after that. And especially when he shows up
at the Republican Convention, leading the "lock her up"
chants about Hillary Clinton. I mean, here's a guy who devoted
his career, in many ways, to trying to help plant
the seeds of democracy in difficult places overseas,
and just sort of turning against those institutions
and what they stand for, in a moment like
that when you're calling for the Democratic
nominee for President to be thrown in jail
with no due process. It's a remarkable turn. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Hard to write,
then, for you, because you know him personally. GREG MILLER: Yeah. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I try to
follow this pretty closely. I think I know something
about the storyline here. GREG MILLER: Something, yeah. MICHAEL HAYDEN: The part of
the book that really was fresh for me was the depth
of detail you were able to provide with regard
to the meeting with the Hill leadership. I guess it's October, maybe. GREG MILLER: September, October. MICHAEL HAYDEN:
September, October of '16. Mitch McConnell and the other--
you want to talk a little bit-- I mean, that, to me,
was a real break point. I suspect the administration
would have been more robust in its response with
any kind of suggestion of Republican support. But it was really
quite the opposite. But you put more detail in
this than I've read elsewhere. GREG MILLER: Yeah. I agree with you. I think it's a really important
point on the timeline here. And you know these players. So, what General
Hayden is talking about is that in the book, I trace
the sequence of events, beginning in late July, when
CIA director John Brennan begins really focusing on
Russian intelligence right after the Wikileaks dump,
trying to figure out what the hell is going on here. He spends two days
closing the door at his office at
CIA headquarters, not taking calls, not taking
visitors, pouring over all the intel, and coming
out of that so alarmed that he calls Denis McDonough
at the White House and says, I need to see the President
and I need to see him now. The plan that they come up with
when he goes to the White House is, oh my god, we need to get
the congressional leadership apprised of this right
away, thinking basically that their response is going
to be what the Obama team's response is. Oh my god, what are
we up against here? We need to come together and
figure this out in a hurry. And what happens is
sort of the opposite. And in particular, I write
about Brennan meeting with Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell, laying out for him-- I mean, this is an unusual
thing for a CIA director to do one on one briefings
with Hill leaders. Usually it's in a group. He's going to the
trouble of setting up individual appointments. He's in a private meeting
with Mitch McConnell. He's laying out this
classified intel on what's happening
in Moscow, how they know what they know
about Russia's plans for the US election,
thinking that this is going to lead to a reaction
from McConnell, oh my god, we need to
do something about this, and kind of leading
toward a request to have a bipartisan statement
of condemnation at a minimum. To have Republicans and
Democrats on the Hill to come together
and say, Russia's messing around in our election. We're not going
to stand for that. We're going to call it out. We're going to say what
we think about this and warn them that they
need to cease and desist. And instead, the
opposite happens. McConnell tells Brennan that
I'm not willing to do that. In fact, I'm not even sure
I believe this intelligence you're bringing to me. And not only will I not
condemn Vladimir Putin for election
interference, I will accuse you and President Obama
of interfering in this election if you go forward with this. If you try to take any
advantage of this information you're showing me today. I just have a feeling-- I don't know. I don't think it
was always this way. Where in a moment like that, a
leader of many decades standing on the Hill, reacts in a way
that it looks like it puts his party's interests
ahead of his country's. And I think that when historians
look back on this period, that that will be one of
those moments that tells you something has broken. Something has
fundamentally changed. There are other examples
in our history of going through difficult times-- Watergate, Vietnam, et cetera,
where opposition leadership didn't react that way. MICHAEL HAYDEN:
My reading of that was a real pivot point
in the whole narrative. There were roads we could
have taken, and we didn't. I mean this as a compliment. Stand by. I enjoyed the book. One of the reasons
I enjoyed the book is, you sound a lot like us. Seriously, you sound
like me and Jim and John. I mean, you're fact-based. You try to write a
compelling narrative. But the tone of the book
is pretty much the tone that you've been hearing from
former intelligence chiefs. GREG MILLER: With a
couple exceptions. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Yeah. But you work the intel beat. And way back in the day- -
I'm looking at my notes here to make sure I get it right-- you said that folks like
us had a sense of dread about a Trump presidency. What led you to that? What was that like? I mean, not who told
you, but in general, how were you learning that? GREG MILLER: I think that
when I wrote that story, I was out at the
Aspen Security Forum, and I was just sort of
interacting with people at the forum, asking
them what they thought about how this would go. The Aspen Forum at that
time was not that long after the Wikileaks dump, if
I remember this correctly. And I think Trump was
still seen as a long shot. In fact, he was seen as a long
shot up until the very end. One of the common
denominators in almost all of the bad decisions made in the
stories that are encapsulated here is an assumption, a
terrible, failed assumption that Hillary Clinton
would inevitably win. Actually, when I
look back on it now, I'm sort of interested that
even before it became clear that Trump would
lead the way he has-- I mean, this was at a time when
there was still an argument to be made that, look, once
he settles into office, and once he's
surrounded by experts and has gotten some training
on the job, he'll grow into it. You could still make that
argument at that point. There was still
a sense of dread, and you could pick up
on it from speaking with people about
whether they would even be willing to stick around
in a Trump administration. What he was saying
about the ICE, what he was saying about his
opponent, how he was treating the campaign, the issues,
the divisive issues that he was taking
advantage of made people really uncomfortable. And I think his aversion, his
difficulty, with facts, truth, would inevitably
come into conflict with a community like the
one that you come out of-- MICHAEL HAYDEN: And yours. GREG MILLER: That
thrives on those things. MICHAEL HAYDEN: So
when I describe it, I talk about the high friction
points of the administration being with intelligence,
law enforcement, the courts, science scholarship,
and journalism. And I generally then
point out to the audience. What do they have in common? They're all fact-based. And so what I experience
is, intelligence and your profession of
journalism, and scholarship, and science, global
warming and so on, pushing back against a
non-fact-based policy engine in the administration. But one of the problems
that folks like me have-- it was actually the topic of
our last Hayden Center event-- how do we push back-- the intel guys-- against
a norm-busting President without violating our own norms? And I use as an example the
fact that everybody on stage last time was under contract
to CNN is, at a minimum, nontraditional. So how do you do what
you do, reporting facts, without being, appearing
to be the opposition, or the resistance? GREG MILLER: That's a
really good question. And I think that's actually
a very similar dynamic in journalism right now,
and in news organizations, where it's harder than at any
time I can recall in my career, to hold your balance, to feel
like you can hold your balance. It's a very disorienting
time, because we are quite literally
under attack, day after day after day,
accused of being fake, accused of being the
enemy of the people. And so like we were
talking a few minutes ago, as professional as we
all are, we're all people and we have these personal
reactions to these allegations and accusations. You want to respond. But in responding, sometimes--
and this has actually happened. We've seen cases where
reporters sort of respond a bit too vigorously. We sort of get our leashes
yanked by our editors. You know, you're really
not supposed to be that. You do not want to
position yourself and feed into this narrative that
you're the enemy of the people, by being so antagonistic
toward the President and this administration that
you make the case for them. It's super frustrating right
now to care about facts, to care about truth,
to be accustomed to a certain sequence of
events when you expose a truth, when you uncover facts, and when
you lay them out for readers. You're accustomed to
seeing responses to those that we don't necessarily
see in this administration. I mean, the fact checker
at the Washington Post, which was created in the Obama
administration, actually, has tracked 6,000 plus
demonstrable falsehoods by the presidency, just in
his months in office so far. Ordinarily, you
would think that once you start tracking all of those
and calling them out publicly, that the political
forces usually bring people to heel, right? It's actually accelerating. We've seen a pace of falsehoods
in the past seven weeks that vastly outstrips the pace
during his first nine, 10, 11, 12 months in office. MICHAEL HAYDEN: But if
you and Glenn stay on it, you open yourself
up to the accusation of being the opposition, the
resistance, or at a minimum, obsessed with the President
when you've got all these other things going on. How do you balance that? GREG MILLER: Not only that. I think that we are struggling
with a deeper issue now, which is, doing what we do, which
is to cover news, which is this to sort of
survey the landscape and to see things
that are happening and to mobilize resources
to cover those things-- I mean, we're really having
uncomfortable conversations about, to what extent
do we become complicit in the messaging of an
administration like this one. And I'm thinking, of
course, about the coverage of the caravan. You know, this was
not an issue that we were finding on any front
pages six weeks ago. And now you've got
multiple news organizations with reporters embedded
in the caravan. You've got front page stories. You and I were talking
in the green room ahead of our conversation
here about the story we had in the Post this
weekend about retired three and four stars who just
don't see any reason-- MICHAEL HAYDEN:
And going public, which again is norm-busting. GREG MILLER: And going
public with their questions about this mission to send
15,000 American troops down to the border. And yet we feel like,
as news organizations, we are calling out the
inaccuracies in terms of the assertions about
this train of migrants. No evidence of any
MS13 gang element. No Middle Easterners
that anybody can find. But what you are doing is
putting out images of migrants moving toward the border,
day after day after day, raising an issue, giving
volume to an issue that this President
clearly believes works to his advantage. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I want to get
back to some of the themes that part of the
narrative of the book. But I just want to dwell for
a moment on our professions. I went up here with
intelligence, law enforcement, science scholarship, journalism,
and I made a nice tight hand puppet. You know, most of
our relationship has not been like this. I mean, yours and mine. It's been like that,
where journalism, and frankly, scholarship-- GREG MILLER: I thought you
were going to take it down to one finger and then-- MICHAEL HAYDEN: Afterwards. [LAUGHTER] Have been critical
of intelligence. I mean, one of your
Pulitzers has been-- GREG MILLER: I knew you
were going to bring that up. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Has been writing
about how we acquire data. Right? And all the Snowden revelations. That has been an
absolutely muted point for a couple of years
with folks from my tribe and your tribe having a
relationship I've never experienced before. And it's all because
we're data people. We'll get back to the
argument about how we get data after we get beyond this. But right now, we seem more
kindred than we ever have. Do you see that from your side? GREG MILLER: Um, I-- MICHAEL HAYDEN: I'm giving
you a moment here to be nice. GREG MILLER: Well,
I definitely see that the shared values, the
common set of values there-- I mean, you're right. For most of the time that you
and I have known each other, there has been a necessary
and a healthy tension-- MICHAEL HAYDEN: Yes. Both necessary and healthy. GREG MILLER: Yeah. And even adversarial at times. And I hope that you
would agree that we've tried to behave responsibly and
respectful most those times. It makes me uncomfortable
when you say what you just said, to even try
to think of us, as journalists, somehow on the
same team as national security professionals that
we're supposed to cover, even those who are
no longer in office. I mean, I definitely rely on
your expertise and many others. I've called you many times
for help navigating stories that I'm trying to figure
out, and things like that. But it is an unusual time. MICHAEL HAYDEN: It is. But the unifying
principle is that we're both fact-based
institutions in the face of a post-truth administration. And so we share
some of the same. And that's why I
pointed out, it's very unusual,
because usually it's been like this over
the questions of power of government, use of
that power, and so on. GREG MILLER: I think
that the moment jumps out at me from an event that
you participated in, I think it was last
year, where you were sort of holding
truth to power from your chair in retirement. You were on a panel with a
number of former CIA directors. It was almost all of you. And if you'll let me tell
the story for just a second, it was just a
fascinating moment to me. Sue Gordon-- I can't
remember what her position is right at the moment, but she
was moderating this panel of former CIA directors. You were there. MICHAEL HAYDEN: John. GREG MILLER: Brennan was there. Porter Goss was there. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Porter Goss. GREG MILLER: And Sue Gordon
is still in government. And she was doing her best to
try to defend the intelligence community's relationship
with this President, saying, oh, he gives us so much access,
we get no shortage of face time with the President, we get
what we really always want from a President with him. And you stopped her in her
tracks on the stage and said, yeah, well, did you
wiretap Trump Tower? MICHAEL HAYDEN: Many consider
it a low point in the afternoon, for the discussion. GREG MILLER: And
you know, that's a question that I think a
reporter in that position would have asked as
well, trying to get at the facts and the truth
of this situation that's being mischaracterized. MICHAEL HAYDEN: So,
you begin the book-- and actually the
excerpt from the book that played in the Post, with
a tour through Russia House. You want to talk a little bit,
for the audience, about what Russia House is, and then,
more importantly, what did Russia House discover
that Putin was doing? What was he up to? Why was he doing these things? Why did he think it would work? GREG MILLER: So I
do open the book. The book opens with
the sort of scene in Russia House in the
mid summer of 2016, in the middle of the campaign. Russia House is, of
course, the entity at CIA that is responsible for
collection on all things Russia. And I sort of spoke
with a lot of people who spent time there, and
described as much as I could what it looks like
inside, the sort of typical sea of cubicles. They have a big
conference room where they have these Stalin-era
posters around the walls and so forth. These things that people have
picked up over the years. And then I try to zero
right in on the work that's happening there. And the reason I picked that was
because I wanted to juxtapose that work that's happening
on one of the upper floors at the headquarters building
in the seventh floor, with what happens
on the ground floor, on Trump's second day in
office when he comes to the CIA and he delivers his speech one
day after his inauguration, in what many had
hoped would be a kind of making amends moment with
the intelligence community, and in fact it just
goes off the rails. So what happens is, in
late July time frame, CIA gets some pretty
impressive intelligence that this operation-- which there are already
glimpses of it, publicly. We've had the Wikileaks dump. And there's a lot of
speculation pretty quickly that this is Russia
up to something here. But what the agency
brings to this moment is intelligence that shows
that Vladimir Putin himself has authorized this operation,
is overseeing this operation, and therefore it is the
highest possible priority for the Russian government. And I think part of the
reason for Brennan's alarm, and the reason he calls
Obama in such haste, is that that raises
a whole bunch of very disturbing and troubling
questions about, what are we up against, and
we need to figure this out. We've got only several months
left before Election Day. Who knows what
could happen then. And I think the farther
we get from the election, the more people lose sight of
how Russia's objectives really evolved. The first order objective, just
reading from the intelligence community assessment, was
to sow disorder, confusion, to damage American democracy,
to make it look dysfunctional, to make America look like a
mess, to make it look weak, to look vulnerable. A second and equally
important objective, I think, was to damage Hillary Clinton. I mean, obviously, Vladimir
Putin sees the world as a former KGB officer would. He sees it probably a little
more conspiratorial than most, but truly believes that anything
that goes wrong in his country probably has America's hand
in it, and personalizes that-- sees Hillary Clinton as somebody
who is directly connected to things like protests against
his government in the 2012 timeframe in Russia. Then, when Trump emerges
as the Republican nominee, it's like, oh my god. We have the dream
candidate here. Somebody who is
singing Putin's praises from the very beginning
of his campaign is now the Republican nominee. And the Russian
campaign really pivots, to not only seeking to inflict
ongoing damage on Hillary Clinton, but to push
Trump as hard as they can. MICHAEL HAYDEN: And
so your belief is-- and I think we all agree,
that was a pivot, from hurting the inevitable
President Clinton, to saying this guy
could actually win-- but your belief,
it was the choice to make him win for
policy purposes, rather than just
a continuation of, this is the best guy
possible to continue to mess with our heads. GREG MILLER: I don't know. I think it's actually an
extension of the objective to sow confusion. MICHAEL HAYDEN:
Objective one, chaos. Right. GREG MILLER: I don't
know, actually. Putin-- you would know it a
lot more about this than me-- but Putin strikes me as somebody
who is control-obsessed, right? Even in Helsinki-- I
traveled to Helsinki to see, to watch the sort of body
language between Trump and Putin-- there were moments in
that press conference where Putin sort of
seemed to recoil a bit. Really uncomfortable
with Trump sort of launching off
into his diatribe that he delivered
in that setting. You could almost see
Putin's mind sort of turning and thinking, where
in the hell is this going? How is this going to end? And in fact, if he were able
truly to coach President Trump, if President Trump
truly were an asset, I think Putin would coach
him very differently. He would be saying, go ahead
and take your shots at me in public, so that you have
the political maneuverability to do what we want to do,
policy-wise behind the scenes. MICHAEL HAYDEN: So you
end the book in Helsinki. And you and I were chatting
right before we came on stage. You had a way of
describing what went on there that I
hadn't thought of, but I thought was quite good. The cover story. You want to-- GREG MILLER: Oh, yeah. So you know, there's
this question that we've all been
wrestling with-- what accounts, what explains
Trump's behavior toward Putin? And frankly, I think that maybe
Robert Mueller will tell us something new in the
next several weeks or months that will
illuminate this. But there are theories. And I would just sort of
assign them varying levels of credibility at this point. The idea that there
is a tape of kompromat that Russia has on
Trump, something incriminating,
perhaps, in consorting with prostitutes in the Ritz
Carlton Hotel in Moscow-- still possible. Wouldn't be completely out of
character for President Trump. But would it really
give Vladimir Putin definitive leverage on the guy? Hard to know anymore, right? Then there's the other theory
of financial entanglements. That one seems a lot
more compelling to me. But again, it's sort of still in
this kind of unproven category. We just don't know enough yet. But the one thing-- and I put it this
way in the book-- the lie that Trump
clings to most ferocious in his
Presidency is that there was no Russian interference. That this is all a hoax. This is all a plot to undermine
him, to discredit him, that he won this
election because of his own charisma and
strategic brilliance as a candidate. No other factor
played into this. And Putin sitting next to him in
Helsinki is really in position to give that the lie, right? I mean, he absolutely knows. MICHAEL HAYDEN: He
could actually say. GREG MILLER: And at
this point, the only leg that Trump has to stand
on in this argument-- I mean, the intelligence
community has concluded this, the congressional
investigations have all concluded that Russian
interference was real and it was there to
help Donald Trump-- I mean, Vladimir
Putin is the only one who's still making the case
that Trump is trying to make. Really? All right. MICHAEL HAYDEN: So
we have the President of Russia living the cover story
for the President of the United States. One final question,
maybe hearkening back to more normal times. And obviously, as you described,
the healthy and necessary adversarial relationship between
a free press and an espionage service that thrives on secrecy. It's hard for you, for
me, to make decisions as to what's in, what's out,
what can go public, what can't. One of the elements of the
early Trump administration story was again, back to Mike
Flynn, and the leak that I think you
suggest was first mentioned by your
colleague, David Ignatius, that Mike's name was mentioned
in dispatches, that he was included in the surveillance
of Ambassador Kislyak. Clearly, that's an
important story. Clearly, it's important
to your story. Clearly, it's important to the
broader public's understanding of this story. But then again, that's
an American's name mentioned in a report
on lawful intercepts. How do you make those
calculations as to what gets put in and what doesn't? This one seems fairly clear. It's not a story without that. But there are others that
are closer calls, right? GREG MILLER: There are many
that are close calls, right? And you and I have been involved
in negotiations surrounding some of those over the years. In the Flynn case, once again,
the administration itself really altered the dynamic. And I try to write about
it in this way in the book. When Ignatius writes
his column saying, look, we know that Mike Flynn has
this conversation at the end of December with the Russian
Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, we deserve an explanation
for what was said. Ignatius writes
that column saying, we're entitled to
know a little bit more than we do about
this at this point. Well, that turns
the tables a bit. That turns the sort of leverage. The White House, then, is
suddenly offering explanations. Sean Spicer comes
out and says, these were just holiday greetings. We've talked with
General Flynn about it. They're just holiday greetings. This was a meaningless
conversation. The Vice President comes
out on the Sunday shows and says something very similar. I know for a fact that
sanctions were not discussed. And again, just to
remind the audience, the Flynn conversation
with Kislyak comes right at the moment
when the Obama administration is announcing sanctions
against Russia for its interference
in the election. So the idea that hours
later, the Russian ambassador is talking with the designated
national security adviser raises some
interesting questions about what is that national
security adviser communicating there in that moment. What else could they
possibly be talking about? What could be more important at
that moment for Sergey Kislyak to report back to his bosses? So when Pence comes out and
says the same thing-- nope. Had nothing to do
with sanctions. There are a lot of people
in your former line of work, General, who knew
that that wasn't true. And truth matters
to these people. And I think you some
of these people. I can tell you that-- who we relied on to sort of
piece together the truth there. Their willingness to
tell us that truth was extraordinary,
because they are talking about a
piece of intelligence that in almost any
other circumstance, they would never
talk to us about. But here you have
this sense of alarm that you have a
White House that is lying to the American
public, or at least relaying the lie of one of
its senior officials to the American public. And the sense of
outrage starts to build. And then you layer in the
concern, the real concern, that many of these
same officials have about Flynn's
vulnerability to blackmail-- the longer that they cling to
this lie, the more vulnerable he becomes. You layer that in
and their motivation goes up another notch to want
to tell the truth about this. I'm not saying
that this was easy, and that there was a line
of intelligence officials out the door of the Washington
Post, lining up to tell us what was in that intercept. But it tells you a lot
about the environment and the true depth of concern
about what was happening and what was transpiring. MICHAEL HAYDEN:
Well, fascinating. One more quick question and
we'll open it up to folks. So what's all this
mean for tomorrow? GREG MILLER: Oh, my gosh. You know, I think that it could
be an upside down world very soon, for a President who has
benefited and been protected by the fact that his
party has had control of both houses of Congress. To lose control of one of those
would turn things upside down in a serious way. I mean, the President
was asked today, what if the Democrats
win and they come after your tax returns? You know, he tried
to be flip about it and say, well, they can do
whatever they want to do. They can come
after me, and I can do what I need to do to them. I think we'll see. It'll be a very different world
for the Trump administration, for the Russia
investigation, for Mueller to know that there
are committees out there waiting to dig in to
everything that he's turned up over the past year and a half. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Great. Thank you. Questions from the audience. OK. We have one right
up here up front. And the microphone
is on its way. AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you both for coming out. I have a question
for both of you about the general
Russia investigation. This investigation, since the
special counsel was appointed, has taken 18 months. And while we've seen some
smoke, we've seen some meetings, like the meeting at Trump Tower,
some financial transactions with Russian
oligarchs, there's yet to be solid proof of
what the media calls collusion or conspiracy
with the Russians. Do you think that the fact that
the Mueller investigation has taken 18 months, and even though
it hasn't produced anything yet, the fact that
it's taken so long suggests that there's
something big to drop? MICHAEL HAYDEN: That
there is something-- AUDIENCE: Big to drop,
because it's taken a while. GREG MILLER: I would
start by saying, every time Mueller has dropped
something it's been big, so far. He doesn't mess around. Every one of these
indictments that we've seen so far from
Mueller and his team has been breathtaking in the
detail that it's given us. I think even former
CIA people I know were really staggered
by the level of detail in the indictment of the Russian
intelligence officers involved in the hacking of
the DNC, for example. They couldn't believe
he got the clearance to get that much detail in
a public document like that. We can't predict for sure. To get to the heart
of your question, I think, what I would say
is, even at this stage, I am skeptical, and have been
for a while, that we're ever going to see what many in the
public might think is required, in terms of smoking gun
evidence of collusion-- some sort of memo that
has Vladimir Putin's signature in one corner and
Donald Trump's on the other. I just don't know that
we're going to get that. But, oh my god. I mean, when you lay out
this sequence of events, when you lay out not only
the Trump Tower meeting, when you lay out
Trump's infamous line during the campaign-- Russia, if you're listening-- and then you read through
Mueller's indictments and realize, yes, they
in fact were listening, and within hours
launched a spear phishing attack at the Clinton
computer servers. They're reacting to one another
in real time, out in the open, in a way that's hard
for us to process. I do this in the
end of the book. I ask readers to do this
little mental exercise. What if we had
learned months later-- what if Trump had never
said that in the campaign, and instead we had
learned months later that he had secretly,
via some encrypted app, asked the Kremlin to do this? And they in fact responded? We would know how
to interpret that. We would have really no question
about the coordination that was happening between
the Trump campaign and Russia in that moment. But because it happens out in
the open, it's so disorienting. And when people say,
you know, no collusion, Mueller hasn't shown
us anything yet-- you have the national security
adviser having lied to the FBI, to his own government. He's lying to his own government
about his interactions with the Russian government,
to cover up a signal that he is sending at the
culmination of that election, that we got you covered. I don't know. I have a hard time when people
are too dismissive of what we already know. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Me too. [LAUGHTER] Other questions. Here's one. Yes. Hey, David. AUDIENCE: Good evening. Hi, Greg. GREG MILLER: Hi, David. AUDIENCE: I want to
pick up on what you just talked about the
election tomorrow, because I think if you would
have told most Americans 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five
years ago, that we'd be talking about somebody who said
Russia, if you're listening, we'd love to get those
emails, and then it happened, and then there are
indictments, and then there's the national security--
all of these things happening. Normally, we think
would mean this would be a big deal
in the election, that this election might
be a referendum on that. Poll after poll shows
it ain't happening. It's health care. It's jobs. It's even immigration
in some districts. But you look across the country
and the Russia investigation is not often in the top three
issues voters care about. This book isn't
about the election. But how do you feel about
the fact that this, in a way your life's work building
up to this amazing reporting and story-- and the election comes and
people are almost brushing off, perhaps the biggest
national security impact on domestic
politics in our lifetime? GREG MILLER: That
really makes me mad. [LAUGHTER] From a sales point
of view among others. I wish Mueller would
hurry up and juice these numbers a little bit. But look. This is the climate
that we're in right now. And we've never been
through anything like it, where the level
of chaos and the ability to stay focused
on any issue more than a week or two or three,
is really hard to sustain inside news organizations. I mean, I don't know how many-- I think we've got eight or nine
people covering the Trump White House. We had three in the
Obama administration. And they can't keep up, because
there is just so much chaos day after day after day. And even then, despite
all these hires we've made at The
Washington Post, there's a whole layer, there's
a whole other world of stories that we don't even have time
to get to, that in normal times we would be all over. It's going to take I don't know
how long-- a long, long time to do the sort of journalistic
cleanup job that's required to really get at
everything that's happening in this moment we're
living through right now, is what I would say. And if I can plug
David's forthcoming book, he's got one coming soon that
Mueller might want to buy, about the impeachment
of Presidents. MICHAEL HAYDEN: It's even
broader than that, right? All right. Thanks, David. Who's got the microphone? Do we have a gentleman here? Yep. And then we've got-- why don't
you go ahead and preposition it up here. There's someone else
with their hand up. Yeah? AUDIENCE: You mentioned that
Mueller's indictment of the 16 intelligence officials. And then you said that Putin
was in charge of the operation. Why wouldn't Mueller
not indict Putin? GREG MILLER: Well, that might
be a sources and methods problem that even Robert
Mueller can't get past. I mean, I think that
would be pretty hard for them to lay that out. I mean, it's in the intelligence
community assessment that this operation
was approved. It's asserted at
the highest levels. But to detail the evidence
that you would need to there? And, I don't know. Perhaps it's also just
the idea that you're going to indict the head of state. Russia is just not something
that Robert Mueller sees as part of his remit. MICHAEL HAYDEN: OK. Right here. AUDIENCE: Yes, hi. As a former journalist,
if there is such a thing, I have a question related
to false equivalencies. I heard-- General Hayden,
you were saying something about how journalists
have this strike a balance between seeming as if
they work for the resistance, and speaking truth to power,
which is one of our jobs. I would argue that anyone
who trafficks in facts, truth, knowledge, and
understanding, even wisdom, is going to look
indistinguishable to opponents. And I've had a lot of us-- people in my circles, anyway-- get really upset
when journalists try to balance things, when
they're balancing something like all costs
denial to the truth. And I'd ask you to
kind of just maybe-- your thoughts on this whole
idea of false equivalency that I'm hearing out there. And I have a second
question, which is, given the Trump operative
history of relationship with the Putin operatives'
history, going back decades, there is this conspiracy
theory out there that Putin has been
actually grooming Trump for this for a very long time. And I'm wondering
whether you think there's any credibility to that. GREG MILLER: So on
the first question, the question was about this
false equivalency, which is basically, the idea that news
organizations, in their effort to be balanced in their
coverage of things, end up giving equal weight
to arguments or positions or even facts that
aren't of equal weight. And you know, there's some
merit to that criticism here. And I think we are
adapting the same way every other institution
is adapting to this era. You know, we are coming
out of an equilibrium that existed for decades
and decades, in terms of our coverage of politics and
of government and of the White House and so forth. And things are
changing more quickly than we can sort keep up with,
I think, is part of the issue. I think you're starting
to see corrections there. I mean, it took a
while for people to use even the word "lie" when
it comes to these assertions by the President. I think that restraint is a
good thing for the most part. As we were talking
about earlier, we don't want to overreach,
become adversarial. And it's hard in
this environment to make anybody happy,
let alone everybody happy. I think it was really
telling, a few weeks ago, when the New York Times
broke the story that Rod Rosenstein had considered
wearing a wire into meetings with Trump. The reaction from the
left, and the denunciations from the left, which
supposedly is supposed to be in love with the allegedly
liberal-leaning New York Times, really struck me, really
made me think, man, we are in such a polarized
moment right now that even the New York Times is getting
whipsawed from the left. You can't get far enough
left for these people. I think on the second
question, I don't know. I mean, we know that Trump
was pursuing business deals in Russia for many years. If Putin was really trying
to recruit him and develop a relationship, wouldn't
he have shown up when Trump was in Moscow for
the Miss Universe Pageant? I mean, there were
plenty of opportunities that looked like he didn't
take advantage of there. But I don't know everything
that the intelligence community knows, or that
Robert Mueller knows. So we could be learning
more about that pretty soon. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I'll
just add to that one. My pure instinct, no data, is
that Donald Trump would not have had to have been running
for President for the Russians to be interested in
such a personality. So in terms of development
of information, I think my instincts
are, there's a pretty long file,
which is quite different than trying to
create a source or an agent of influence. Where's the mic? Come on up. Yep. Yep. AUDIENCE: The New
York Times had Clinton at 99% chance of winning the day
before the election happened. The Washington Post
had similar numbers. How can you claim to have
credibility and objective truth, given that your
prediction of the election was so far off? MICHAEL HAYDEN: I
usually get that question on weapons of mass destruction. [LAUGHTER] GREG MILLER: Was it really 99%? Is that accurate? AUDIENCE: The poll was-- the
prediction was at 99% the day before. GREG MILLER: I
think that you have to make a distinction between-- objective truth and
reality is not predictive. I don't think any of us
claims to know the future. We only know what we
report in our stories, based on what we learn from
the sources that we talk to. And I think that there
was a lot of hand-wringing after the election,
and probably still is some lingering
hand-wringing, over how wrong everybody was about that. But I would just put those
predictive polls and stuff in a very different category. And I would just
argue that I don't think that that undermines
our credibility in terms of coverage of events
that have occurred, which is what our real jobs are. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Who's
got the last question? Who has the microphone? Here we go. Yes, ma'am. AUDIENCE: Thank you. On May 11th, 2016, Trump
signed the executive order on cybersecurity. And then in July he
tried to meet with Putin to create an unhackable
cybersecurity network. That, allegedly,
as far as I know, did not go through,
because people protested. Except for that, he's
given Putin almost everything Putin's wanted. What do you think Putin is going
to try to make Trump do next, or try to influence Trump to do? Let me rephrase that. GREG MILLER: So you think
the cybersecurity initiative between Trump and
Putin was a bad idea? AUDIENCE: I don't know why
I would think that, but-- GREG MILLER: You
know, I actually think that there's been a level
of disenchantment in Russia with Trump. I've been doing a bit
of reporting on this, and I know that my
colleagues in Moscow have done more reporting
than I have on this. I mean, the reality
is that you sort of have to look at the
aftermath of the election and what Russia got out of
this in two different ways. They got almost nothing,
and less than nothing, in some ways, in terms of
the most transactional things on their shopping list-- removal of sanctions and
progress on other fronts like that. The payoff, and the ongoing
payoff, is the dysfunction. As we were talking about, the
first order of this operation was the dysfunction
and the damage to the reputation of
American democracy, and the embarrassment,
and making it look bad on the world
stage, and sowing division in the United States. That's the gift that keeps
on giving, unfortunately. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Greg,
thank you so much. GREG MILLER: Thank you. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I
enjoyed reading the book. I highly recommend
it for everyone. [APPLAUSE] LARRY PFEIFFER: All right. I appreciate
everybody coming out. Please stay tuned to our
website or our Twitter feed or elsewhere for
a follow on event. Our next event will be
the tenth of December at the National Press Club. General Hayden will be leading
a panel discussion that's going to look at the law and
regulatory aspects of how we govern intelligence. It should be a very
fascinating conversation. I would ask your indulgence
in allowing General Hayden and Greg Miller to make their
way out of the auditorium, into the reception area. And there'll be plenty
of opportunities to stop and chat with them,
and ask questions in there. And with that, one last round of
applause for our special guest. [APPLAUSE]
