Luke Harding
Luke Harding's new book is Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. From the transcript of his conversation with Fareed Zakaria:
ZAKARIA: Luke, let me give you a chance because you have you this book out where you believe that the leverage that Putin has over Trump is real. What is the strongest case you would make about that collusion, as you describe it in the -- in your book?--Marshal Zeringue
HARDING: Well, I think it's financial. I think Robert Mueller is looking very actively at what dealing Donald Trump did with Russia in past especially after 2008 when he was broke. I think that's the whole question that's being debated all year of kompromat, compromising material, alleged buggings of what may have happened during Trump's kind of Moscow visit in 2013.
And I think there's the sort of basic question of the sort of Russian influence on the Trump team. Wherever you look, whether it's Rex Tillerson, the U.S. secretary of state, who has an order of friendship from Vladimir Putin, or Michael Flynn who's now admitting lying to the FBI. He was taking money under table from Russian interests.
It seems almost as if Trump's Cabinet was put together from Moscow and we still haven't seen a single occasion when Trump has criticized Russia or Russian foreign policy or Putin personally. And I can confidently predict we will not see that.
ZAKARIA: That is really the central prediction. It would be so easy to dispel some of these rumors by doing that and yet...[read on]
