The Asset

Now that Donald Trump's first Impeachment Trial has wrapped up, Max Bergmann and Peter Ogburn discuss what was lost and gained in the trial and the path forward to saving our democracy.

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Max Bergmann, the host of the Asset Podcast, assesses the Impeachment Trial to date and handicaps what's ahead, as the end of Donald Trump's trial before the Senate looms.

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In this teaser episode of This Week in Impeachment, Max Bergmann breaks down the the latest news of Parnas and Pence.

In the full episode available on Patreon, Max triangulates the Republican Senators' positions, projects the possible outcomes, and explains why any of them will be good for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.

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Max Bergmann, Executive Director of The Moscow Project and host of The Asset podcast, blazes the trail that could lead to a trial in the Senate with full witness testimony, something Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is working to thwart.

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Earlier in Season 2, we explained the backstory to the Ukraine scandal, tracing Trump’s efforts to extort a foreign government for his own personal gain. When a whistleblower complaint brought this scandal to light, it sparked the fourth impeachment investigation in our nation’s history.

In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, explains why Democrats finally moved forward on impeachment, and talks about how the Ukraine scandal grew out of an effort to shield Trump from the political fallout of his decision to collude with Russia in 2016.

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"Follow the Trail of Dead Russians" was the advice given by national security expert Clint Watts when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In this excerpt from our Patreon page, Max Bergmann continues down the mysterious trail that crosses the globe and is littered with the dead bodies of Russian diplomats, businessmen, and gangsters.

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"Follow the Trail of Dead Russians" was the advice given by national security expert Clint Watts when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In this excerpt from our Patreon page, Max Bergmann leads us down the mysterious trail that crosses the globe and is littered with the dead bodies of Russian diplomats, businessmen, and gangsters.

To listen to the full episode please subscribe to our Patreon Page here:

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Max Bergmann, host of the Asset Podcast, sits down with Calder Walton, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and general editor of the Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence, to discuss the long legacy of Russian espionage in the United States and the consistent pattern of current efforts by Russia to disrupt American politics and damage the standing of the United States around the world.

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Producer Peter Ogburn sits down with host Max Bergmann to find out what happened This Week in Impeachment. We discuss the stunning testimonies of Fiona Hill and David Holmes as well as the madcap antics of Devon Nunes and Gordon Sondland. To hear the full 40-minute roundup, sign up at https://www.patreon.com/assetpodcast

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On July 25, 2019, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and asked him for a favor: a public announcement of investigations into Trump’s political opponents. After he hung up, White House lawyers immediately sprang into action, burying the records of the incriminating phone call on a secret server and swearing those on the line to secrecy.

That call was part of a broader effort, a shadow foreign policy agenda in which a coterie of Trump advisers—including Rudy Giuliani, Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, and Special Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker—demanded political favors in exchange for first a White House meeting and, later, $400 million in desperately needed military aid. In this episode, host Max Bergmann outlines how that extortion scheme came to be, starting with the Trump administration’s attempts to build a relationship with the new Ukrainian government and leading to the infamous July 25 call that prompted a whistleblower complaint and launched impeachment proceedings. 

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Producer Peter Ogburn sits down with host Max Bergmann to find out what happened This Week in Impeachment. We discuss the testimony of Ambassador Bill Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs George Kent. To get the FULL episode, go to our Patreon page at Patreon.com/assetpodcast where we talk more about how the Republicans will continue to shelter Trump, Maria Yovanovitch and the conviction of Roger Stone.

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On October 9, 2019, two Soviet-born Florida businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested in Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C. It would soon turn out that these two men had been involved for months in Rudy Giuliani’s quest to find dirt on the Biden family.

In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann outlines the origins of Trump’s conspiracy theories surrounding Ukraine and Biden and explores the involvement of Parnas, Fruman, and exiled Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash in pushing these theories.

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Donald Trump’s efforts to extort the Ukrainian government for his own political gain are now at the center of the ongoing impeachment proceedings. But how did we get here? To understand that, we’ll need to go back to the former Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and explore his efforts to get closer to the Trump administration. 

In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, explains Ukraine’s mad scramble to develop relationships with Trump and his inner circle after the 2016 election. As Russia sought to weaken Ukraine, in part by fighting a war, running disinformation and cyber attacks, and funneling money to fuel corruption, Ukraine increasingly found itself stuck between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Trump administration.

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In 2016, Donald Trump conspired with a foreign government to become President of the United States.

 On July 25, 2019, with the 2020 election around the corner, he decided to do it again.

The first time around, it was collusion, aiding and abetting Russia’s attack on American democracy. This time, it was extortion, demanding the Ukrainian government manufacture dirt on Trump’s political opponents in exchange for help the country needs to fend off a Russian invasion and chart a democratic future free of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. 

But then, a whistleblower inside Trump’s own government sounded the alarm. The White House tried to cover it up, but Democrats called out Trump’s extortion scheme and moved to impeach him. And Trump did the unthinkable: He confessed.

How did we get here? We will provide the backstory to the scandal that launched the impeachment proceedings, from the original efforts by Ukraine and its former president Petro Poroshenko to cozy up to Trump’s inner circle, to Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to manufacture dirt on Trump’s political opponents, to the whistleblower complaint that blew the whole thing open. Join host Max Bergmann, the Director of the Moscow Project at the center for American Progress Action Fund and a veteran of the State Department under Secretaries of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry, for season two of “The Asset.”

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In order to fully understand the impeachment inquiry, the United States' relationship with Ukraine, and how "All roads lead to Putin," you must first understand the recent turbulent history of the region.

Max sits down with Franklin Foer, a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine and a longtime journalist covering Trump and Russia. In this exclusive interview with The Asset, Foer delves into Ukrainian politics and the oversized role Paul Manafort played in their elections before transitioning to the Trump campaign.

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On July 25, Trump had a phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the recently-elected president of Ukraine. According to notes on the conversation released by the White House, Trump asked Zelensky to do him a “favor” by investigating two conspiracy theories, one claiming that Ukrainian government officials conspired with the Clinton campaign in 2016 and the other alleging that former Vice President (and Democratic presidential candidate) Joe Biden improperly intervened in a Ukrainian investigation into a company on whose board his son Hunter sat. The call was part of an effort going back more than a year to pressure Ukraine into acting in Trump’s political interests.

Public reporting of Trump’s efforts to pressure foreign governments to investigate his rivals has captivated the public and led House Democrats to open formal impeachment proceedings against the President. To break down how we got here, The Asset’s Max Bergmann sat down with the team at The Tent podcast to discuss the Trump team’s longstanding ties to Ukraine, that July 25th phone call, what’s next for the impeachment inquiry, and what this means for U.S. foreign policy.

Just a little taste of what's to come in The Asset Season 2!

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Donald Trump's deep and complicated relationship with Russia goes back to the 1980's with his trip to the Soviet Union. In this excerpt of our exclusive interview with journalist and author Luke Harding, who was the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief from 2007 to 2011, we dive into the stories swirling around Donald Trump of assassinations, sketchy real-estate deals, money laundering, hacking and Russian espionage...and Paul Manafort's connection to the Ukraine.

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As an FBI Special Agent, Asha Rangappa specialized in counter intelligence investigations, pursuing threats to our nation's security. In that role, Rangappa tracked down assets of foreign governments and neutralized those threats. She also flipped foreign nationals into becoming assets of the United States government. In this trailer to our Patreon post of the full 45-minute interview with Rangappa, the former agent lays down the groundwork to analyze Donald Trump's role in the Russian interference in the 2016 election.

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Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report documents not only collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to win the 2016 election but also Trump’s frantic efforts to cover up collusion with Russia. In this week’s episode, host Max Bergmann, the director of the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, breaks down those efforts, from pressuring witnesses not to cooperate to pushing out his attorney general so he could rein in the Mueller investigation.

With help from experts like former FBI Special Agent Asha Rangappa and former CIA Operative John Sipher, we discuss whether Trump is a witting or unwitting asset of Russia. And finally, we break down what happened and how we are where we are – with Trump, a Russian asset, still in office, and posed to fight for reelection with Russia primed to interfere again.

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After the election, Russia sought to cash in for its efforts during the election. Collusion didn’t end with the 2016 election, as the Trump transition team and the Kremlin continued working together to plot ways the incoming Trump administration could deliver for Russia.

This week on The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress, analyzes the Trump transition team’s various backchannels to the Kremlin, from phone calls with the Russian ambassador to a rendezvous in the Seychelles to meetings right under everyone’s noses in Trump Tower.

For more than two years, Trump has acted like a Russian asset in the Oval Office trying to deliver for Putin. He sought to get rid of sanctions, push a Russian plan for Ukraine, attacked America’s allies, and undermined democratic norms at home.

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Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election is the most damning document ever published about a sitting president. But as much as it told us, the Mueller report said it found “insufficient evidence” to establish that there was a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Not that there was no evidence of a conspiracy, just not enough to prove it in court.

This week on The Asset, we sift through the evidence pointing toward a conspiracy and explore some of the questions the Mueller report didn’t answer. Why did Paul Manafort share confidential polling data with a suspected Russian agent? Why was a server for the Trump Organization communicating with a server for a Kremlin-linked Russian bank? What did Russia do with the data it stole from the Democratic National Committee that didn’t wind up on WikiLeaks? Where does Cambridge Analytica, the shady data-digital firm the Trump campaign hired, fit in?

With the help of experts like journalist Franklin Foer and Clinton campaign press secretary Brian Fallon, host Max Bergmann, the director of the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, breaks down what we know about the possible answers to these questions—and what we don’t.

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October 7th, 2016, was one of the most important days in American political history. At 4:03 pm that day, the Access Hollywood tape was released. Just 29 minutes later, WikiLeaks – at 4:32pm on a Friday –began releasing emails hacked by Russian military officers from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s account. The timing of this dump made no sense for WikiLeaks. But it made a lot of sense for Donald Trump.

Last week on The Asset, we talked about the five steps to collusion: Hack. Inform. Collude. Release. Campaign. This week, we take a deep dive into that final step and break down how Trump campaigned on the stolen email releases. Russia hacked in March, gave WikiLeaks emails in September, WikiLeaks released them in October 2016, and Trump ran on these emails through November, mentioning WikiLeaks more than 150 times in the final weeks of the campaign. The email releases from WikiLeaks were core to Trump’s campaign strategy in the home stretch of the election.

In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, breaks down how the Trump team ran their campaign of collusion all the way to the White House. The episode explores how these two campaigns, the Russian campaign and the Trump campaign, worked together in tandem. And if this sounds like the definition of collusion, that’s because it is.

The Asset tells the full story of Trump and Russia. Each week, we will examine the colorful characters and dirty deals that populate the story of how Russia helped the son of a shady real estate mogul became President of the United States.

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Friday, July 22, 2016 was the day it became clear that the 2016 presidential election would be like no other ever experienced in the United States. On that day, the Russian cut-out WikiLeaks released a massive trove of hacked emails from the DNC. And Russia had just shown that it was all-in in support of Donald Trump.

We break down Trump’s collusion with Russia into five easy steps: Hack. Inform. Collude. Release. Campaign. Throughout each of these steps, the Russians were looking for feedback, looking for access, and looking for assurance from the Trump campaign that they wouldn’t be left high and dry. And they got it, again and again.

In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, outlines how two campaigns worked to elect Donald Trump: one run by the Trump team, and one run out of the Kremlin. These campaigns worked in tandem, meeting and communicating to collude to elect Trump as president. This is how collusion occurred.

The Asset tells the full story of Trump and Russia. Each week, we will examine the colorful characters and dirty deals that populate the story of how Russia helped the son of a shady real estate mogul became President of the United States.

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We break down the beginnings of the two campaigns to elect Donald Trump: one run out of Trump Tower, and the other run out of the Kremlin. 

From the moment Trump announced he was running for president, he was unabashedly pro-Russia. It made no sense. Until we learned that throughout the campaign, the Trump Organization was actively seeking to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow.

 In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, details the early connections between the two campaigns. Trump surrounded himself with shady actors with ties to the Kremlin, including his campaign chairman Paul Manafort, national security adviser Michael Flynn, and campaign aides George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.

 Lastly, the episode breaks down the beginning of the Russian campaign to elect Donald Trump and the origins of its online efforts. Russia created an online army online designed to poison American discourse on social media and advance Trump’s campaign. The Russian efforts worked like a political campaign and we will break down their impact on the 2016 election.

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Join us as we go through the murky world of Russian intelligence. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the old-style KGB tactics didn’t go away. Instead, the Russian intelligence apparatus has been empowered. This episode goes through the story of the Russian “illegals” spy ring operating in the U.S., examining the back story of these deep cover Russian agents who would later become the inspiration for the hit television series “The Americans”. We also show how one of the American men recruited by a Russian spy, Carter Page, eventually rose up to become one of Trump’s initial foreign policy advisors.

In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, shows how Russia sought to infiltrate and cultivate the far right movement in the United States, locking in on guns and the NRA as the most effective way to do so. It breaks down the story of Maria Butina, a Russian agent currently behind bars.

This episode also hones in on Donald Trump’s reemergence on the political scene with his embrace of the birther conspiracy theory and shows how that conspiracy mirrors the same sorts of disinformation campaigns that Soviet and Russian intelligence love to push.

Lastly, the episode breaks down the idea of kompromat and examines Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow. This isn’t just the trip where that infamous tape took place. It is also where Trump once again was seeking to do business in Russia.

The Asset tells the full story of Trump and Russia. Each week, we will examine the colorful characters and dirty deals that populate the story of how Russia helped the son of a shady real estate mogul became President of the United States.

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The fight over Ukraine’s future is key to the Trump-Russia story. It is central to understanding why, in 2016, Russia undertook such a brazen and risky assault on American democracy.

 Russia’s attempt to reassert itself as a great power and exert control over Ukraine led to a collapse in U.S.-Russia relations. Color revolutions in former Soviet states, including two major uprisings in Ukraine, aggravated Putin’s suspicions of the West and made him determined to prevent similar dissent within Russia. When massive protests broke out in Russia following the December 2011 elections, he blamed then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

 In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, traces how Putin, in fighting for control of Ukraine, brought on a new confrontation with the United States. But Russia’s weak economy and inability to directly respond to US and EU sanctions, ultimately forced Putin to get creative and brush off the old KGB playbook. The target: American democracy.

 The Asset tells the full story of Trump and Russia. Each week, we will examine the colorful characters and dirty deals that populate the story of how Russia helped the son of a shady real estate mogul became President of the United States.

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Russian Money was pouring out of Russia into the US real estate market and Donald Trump was all about it. We follow the Russian money flowing into the Trump Organization, highlighting the shady cast of characters that surround Donald Trump and his businesses from the suspicious deals in the former Soviet Union, to “little Moscow” where Trump concentrated his properties in Florida, to the story behind Trump’s favorite bank. Trump may not have a lot of money in Russia but Russia sure has money in Donald Trump.

In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, shows how Trump changed his business model to tap into the Russian market. Suddenly the Trump Organization wasn’t really in the development business. It was in the real estate licensing business, hiring all sorts of shady brokers to help it tap into the Russian market.

Yet somehow after the worst real estate crisis since the Great Depression, Trump suddenly found himself with loads of unexplained cash. Trump went into the worst real estate market in real trouble and comes out on the other side able to spend absurd amounts of cash on golf courses, as well as having a new line of credit from Deutsche Bank, a bank that had just sued him for defaulting on his loans. This does not add up. Except, in many ways, it does. It just requires factoring in Russia.  

The Asset tells the full story of Trump and Russia. Each week, we will examine the colorful characters and dirty deals that populate the story of how Russia helped the son of a shady real estate mogul became President of the United States.

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To understand the Russian interference in the 2016 election, it is essential to understand Vladimir Putin. And to understand Putin, you need to understand his KGB past, his rise to power, his fight for control of Russia, and the system--The Sistema--he created.

The collapse of the Soviet Union set off a mad violent scramble to take control over its vast state-held industrial sector. Organized crime flourished and The Oligarchs were born: a new class of noveau-riche businessmen capturing all the wealth. They move their money abroad and are a force unto themselves. Until KGB drives its comeback with Vladmir Putin behind the wheel .

In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, shows how Putin goes from political unknown to president in a matter of months, setting his sights on taking control. One of Putin’s first priorities: Bring the oligarchs to heel and put them under state control.

As Putin’s power consolidates and strengthens over the ensuing two decades, an informal system or Sistema took root. This system is also staggeringly corrupt and makes Putin shockingly wealthy. A key requirement of operating in Putin’s Sistema is you have to be corrupt. That means that anyone and everyone in The Sistema is also compromised. The oligarchs become tools of Putin and the Kremlin. As Russian oligarchs went out into the world and spread their money around, bought property, made investments, built connections and developed relationships; they were also developing relationships and connections that could be seized and cultivated by Putin’s Kremlin. This would soon include a relationship being cultivated with an organization based in a tower on 5th Avenue in Manhattan.

The Asset tells the full story of Trump and Russia. Each week, we will examine the colorful characters and dirty deals that populate the story of how Russia helped the son of a shady real estate mogul became President of the United States.

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Donald Trump’s businesses failed; a lot. He bankrupted hotels, casinos, an airline and—even an entire football league. And when they failed Trump needed someone to bail him out. And up until the late 1990s that person was his dad.

Yet despite Trump’s businesses failures, he came to personify the image of American wealth and success in the 1980s. It was an era of a roaring stock market and Wall Street extravagance and no one seemed to embody the fabulously wealthy lifestyle more than Donald Trump. He cultivated that image and became a celebrity.

In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, shows that when Trump wrote The Art of the Deal, when he was on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, when he was being listed in Forbes as one of the wealthiest people in the world, it was all a fraud. It was an act. As everything was falling apart around him, Trump proved a master at keeping up appearances – at living a double life. He convinced the public, the media, and banks that he was a great businessman when in fact, he was bankrupt.

During this period Trump also rubbed shoulders with mobsters and even got on the radar of the KGB – even going to Moscow at the invitation of the Soviet Union’s Ambassador to the United States.

As the 1990s became the 2000s, Donald Trump’s dad was no longer around to bail him out. But traditional banks would not lend to him, coining the term “the Donald Risk.” Yet Trump was able to build project after project by turning to a new class of uber-wealthy buyers and investors from Russia and the former Soviet Union. The question would soon become: who was cultivating whom?

The Asset tells the full story of Trump and Russia. Each week, we will examine the colorful characters and dirty deals that populate the story of how Russia helped the son of a shady real estate mogul became President of the United States.

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The scandal of Russian interference became Topic # 1 in the first six months of 2017. In a whirlwind of bombshell stories and breaking developments, Trump’s Russia ties went from a fringe topic, ignored by the national media, to a national media obsession.

During the 2016 election, candidate Trump’s laudatory comments about Russia were, frankly, weird. For 70 years, the Republican Party had defined itself by being hawkish on Russia. In the previous presidential election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney said Russia was “without question, our #1 geopolitical foe.”

During the campaign, Trump had flip-flopped on a whole series of positions to align with traditional GOP values. But on the subject of Russia and Vladimir Putin, Trump remained steadfast. He unabashedly praised and defended the Russian leader.

In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, rewinds the tape and takes us through the blurred timeline from the launch of Donald Trump’s campaign to the beginning of the Mueller investigation. Max brings into sharp focus the details of the greatest political scandal in American history: the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia during the 2016 election.

The daily deluge of information makes Trump’s relationship with Russia seem even more confusing and complex. It is almost like reading a novel with the pages out of order.

The Asset puts the pages back in order, starting just as the FBI would if it were conducting a counter-intelligence investigation. We’ll follow the money. Each week, we will examine the colorful characters and dirty deals that populate the story of how the son of a shady real estate mogul became President of the United States with the help of a ruthless autocrat trying to undermine the United States and re-establish the glory of his fading superpower on the global stage.

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For decades, Donald Trump has cultivated Russian money and investment to keep his hotels and other business interests afloat. But as Trump was cultivating Russian money; Vladimir Putin’s Russia was cultivating him. With Putin consolidating power at home and trying to revive Russia as a great power abroad, he faced a challenge: democracy. “Color revolutions” – pro-democracy uprisings - threatened Russia’s rise and Putin’s rule. He blamed the United States and sought to hit back where we were most vulnerable: our politics. Donald Trump became the perfect vehicle; the ideal asset. As Trump’s campaign built up steam, Russia set up its own campaign to support him. These two campaigns shared the same goals, same tactics, and were in constant contact. In other words, these campaigns colluded. Since coming to office, Trump has continued to align himself with Putin, all while trying to obstruct the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and his own campaign’s complicity in that effort.

 Host Max Bergmann is a veteran of the State Department who worked on sensitive military and national security issues under Secretaries of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry. He now runs an initiative for the Center for American Progress Action Fund called The Moscow Project. For the past two years, he and his team have been examining Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Beginning with this trailer of The Asset, you will hear everything they have learned over the past two years to help you make sense of the biggest political scandal in American history, including elements of our exclusive interviews with:

Tim O'Brien, Executive Editor of Bloomberg Opinion and author of Trump Nation

Angela Stent, Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University and director of its Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies and author of Putin's World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest

Luke Harding, Foreign Correspondent for The Guardian and author of Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

Asha Rangappa, former Special Agent for the FBI, specializing in counterintelligence investigations in New York City

 John Sipher, former member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, Chief of Station and Deputy Chief of Station in Europe, Asia, and in high-threat environments, including Moscow

 David Corn Washington Bureau Chief for Mother Jones and co-author of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump

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