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CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Hello everyone and welcome to “Amanpour and Company.” Here’s what’s coming up.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Today I’m proud to declare that the United States is in the midst of an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen before.”
AMANPOUR: In Davos, president Trump boasts about his economy. While in DC, his impeachment trial begins. The Nobel economist, Joseph Stieglitz tells me why he thinks the president’s figures don’t add up. Plus the Senate braces for another bitter partisan battle. I talk impeachment with constitutional scholar, Noah Feldman, and.
JOHN CARLIN: “What we need to do as a nation. It’s an urgent time and we need leadership from the commander and chief.”,
AMANPOUR: Former national security official, John Carlin on cyber fears threatening the 2020 election.
AMANPOUR: Welcome to the program, everyone. I’m Christiane Amanpour in New York. President Trump has escaped Washington for Switzerland today. As the Senate begins its impeachment trial. Taking the podium at the world economic forum in Davos, he touted a booming U S economy and trade deal signed with Mexico and China, and while climate and a sustainable world is the main theme at this year’s forum, the president took a customer jab at climate activists. Take a listen.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Fear and doubt is not a good thought process because this is a time for tremendous hope and joy and optimism and action. But to embrace the possibilities of tomorrow, we must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse.
AMANPOUR: Greta Thunberg is the 17 year old school girl who’s been leading the way and trolling the president and the president’s been trolling her. She responded,
GRETA THUNBERG: you say children shouldn’t worry. You say, just leave this to us. We will fix this. We promise we won’t let you down. Don’t be so pessimistic. And then nothing silence or something worse than silence, empty words and promises which give the impression that sufficient action is being taken.
AMANPOUR: Now, the renown Nobel winning economist, Joseph Stieglitz is in Davos, and he was listening to Trump speech and the other panels, and I asked him about the president’s America first victory lap.
AMANPOUR: Professor Stieglitz, welcome to the program.
JOSEPH STIEGLITZ: Nice to be here.
AMANPOUR: You heard the president’s speech today, Davos is focusing very heavily on the climate, and the president is really, again, lambasted when he calls the province of doom on this issue. Can you just tell me, because you have a different view in saying that a green economy could usher a massive boom, just analyze for me, you know, what the president’s been saying on this and what the opportunities could be.
STIEGLITZ: Oh, there are enormous opportunities. In fact, the countries like the United States that are not doing this much to create a green economy are going to be left behind. Uh, the green economy is a spurring innovation. Uh, it’s creating new jobs, far more jobs. And for instance, installing, uh, a solar panel was then in the coal industries, there are better paying jobs, uh, their jobs without the health hazards of the black lung disease. So except actually a more dynamic, uh, economy. We’re talking about economy of the future, not the economy of the past. The reality is there is we’re going to all have to move towards climate change and countries like the United States, that leg will be behind in this new, uh, economic revolution.
AMANPOUR: I just want to read what you’ve written about it. Um, just, just last year, last summer you said when the U S was attacked during the second world war, no one asks, can we afford to fight the war? It was an existential matter. We could not afford not to fight it. And the same goes for the climate crisis. We will pay for climate breakdown one way or another. So it makes sense to spend more money now to reduce emissions rather than wait until later to pay a lot more for the consequences. On the other hand, people also say that the so-called Gretta thunbergii baseline of immediately divesting from fossil fuel investments or immediately stopping the investment into fossil fuel extraction immediately going to the kind of green economy could actually cost a, it’s naive and unrealistic and would cost masses of jobs. Can you address that issue from the critics of this?
STIEGLITZ: Well, there has to be a transition, but you know, the world is on fire as as, uh, uh, was talked about before. President Trump gave his talk. Uh, and we know it from Australia. Uh, the United States in a recent year lost 2% of GDP in, uh, climate related events. Uh, so we are paying a price, but if we begin now to have a commitment towards climate change, we can make a smooth transition where everywhere along the way, we’ll be creating more jobs than we destroy. Of course, there are going to be lost as of jobs in the, you might call them the dirty industries in the fossil fuel industries. He will have to admit it. The issue is, will we be creating more than we destroy? We didn’t say, we’re not gonna create, uh, allowed the automobile to be creative because the buggy whips are going to go out of fashion. And the, uh, people who, uh, uh, who, who shoot horses are going to lose their jobs. We said, no, this is the way the economy’s going. Uh, now we’re in a, another turning point and we have to go forward.
AMANPOUR: Um, Professor Stieglitz, do you think if the president continues to, you know, not believe in what you’re saying and continues to deregulate and allow, you know, even more emissions and deregulate the EPA and, and, and give all sorts of investments to the coal industry and make those promises, is it then up to industry in the United States and the capitalist corporate bosses to actually lead the way? And the reason I’m asking you is because you’ve obviously heard that black rock, which is, I think the biggest asset management firm in the world has announced. And let me just say it. Uh, it’ll start moving away from fossil fuel investments. And just a few months ago though, it was one of the three companies responsible for overseeing $300 billion of fossil, you know, investments, you know, it’s black rock talking out of both sides of its mouth or is it really changing and what impact will that have?
STIEGLITZ: I have to believe it’s really changing. I talked to a lot of business executives here at Davos and it’s a common theme. Uh, they say, you know, they’re going ahead. These are global companies with global workforces, global customers, and they know they have to, you know, get on board the, uh, the train and they don’t want to be left behind. Uh, but I do think the United States as a whole is going to be left behind because we’re going to be left with, uh, an energy system that is still somewhat out of date. Even if those corporate giants move ahead, there’ll be lot of pockets where the United States will be behind.
AMANPOUR: So I look, I need to ask you then, what is the reaction there to president Trump this year of all years he’s been wants to Davos. That was in 2018 a year after he was inaugurated. And this is his second appearance and obviously it happens. His speech right on the day when the Senate starts the impeachment trial. And he said what he said about the climate part of this, but he’s also bigging up his economy. I just want to know what’s the reaction amongst people you’re talking to, to his presence there?
STIEGLITZ: Well, first, uh, you know, I’ve been coming to Davos since 1995, 25 years and the reception that he received was the coolest I’ve seen to a major country’s leader in that 25 years. Uh, yes, they clapped, but it was the most, uh, lackadaisical clapping I’ve ever seen. Now, in talking to people, everybody knows the president five times a day on average according to the Washington post, something like that. I think he outdid himself. Uh, his description of the American economy is not the American economy that I see in the numbers that I look at.
AMANPOUR: I’m going to play, cause you’ve led me right into this. So let’s just play a, what he said about the American economy, which of course is central to his reelection campaign. And then we’ll get you to, to, to break it down.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: America’s newfound prosperity is undeniable, unprecedented, and unmatched anywhere in the world. America achieved this stunning turnaround, not by making minor changes to a handful of policies, but by adopting a whole new approach centered entirely on the wellbeing of the American worker. Every decision we make on taxes, trade regulation, energy, immigration, education, and more is focused on improving the lives of everyday Americans.
AMANPOUR: Um, so professor Stieglitz, I know you disagree with some of his metrics, but it does seem to be working with the American people, the voters, because the latest poll of CNN poll says, and let me just get the figure, a new national poll, 55% of Americans say they approve of the job that the president is doing on the economy, while only 40% disapprove. And even, uh, you know, a more sort of, I guess, centuries professional economic poll, the ft and the Peterson Institute say the same thing while only 37% of American safe, that it’s improved for them under Trump. 51% say that his policies have either strongly or somewhat help the economy. Why are his metrics not valid, do you think? Because you obviously disagree, but that’s what people are saying. They believe him.
STIEGLITZ: Yeah. I look at the economy has continued to grow over the last three years. Uh, the question is, has it been growing faster? Uh, and has his policies contributed to a broad based prosperity? Let me just give you a couple of numbers. Uh, the growth rate in the latter part of Obama’s administration was 2.4% higher than in Trump’s administration. Uh, the, uh, job creation, the numbers of jobs created were higher in the latter part of the Obama administration. Then since Trump became the president, uh, since Trump has been elected, life expectancy has continued to go down every year. Now you talk about every policy being focused on the middle class. Let’s talk about his tax policy. Tax cut taxes were cut for the billionaires and for the corporations, but when the tax program is fully implemented, a majority of people in the second, third, and fourth Quintiles, that’s the vast middle class will see an increase in their taxes. I don’t call that a real, uh, working class tax policy. And you look at numbers of like what is happening to the real disposable income, uh, in the middle of the, uh, country, the median income, um, that’s basically stagnating and the most recent data that we have. So the answer is GDP is going up. It’s a continuation of the recovery from the deep, uh, uh, downturn. The deep recession that we had in 2008. What is remarkable to me is given that the magnitude of the stimulus from this inequitable tax bill, uh, the economy should have been done doing better. It’s actually doing very weak given the fact that we have a $1 trillion deficit this year, the largest peace time deficit in a country that is not in a recession.
AMANPOUR: What about manufacturing jobs, which she promised would come back. And what about you remember in his first election campaign you talked about bringing 4% to 6% gross to the United States. Has that happened?
STIEGLITZ: No, we’re growing at about 2.1% a forecast for next year. Um, majority are slightly short of even 2% so, uh, the fact is he’s uh, not lived up to his promise of, uh, of stimulating the U S economy and exist sounding given the low interest rates, given the stage of the business cycle we’re in and given the magnitude of the deficit that should normally have stimulated economy. And I think it’s testimony to a very badly designed policy that’s helped the top 1% the top one 10th of 1% but not helped the ordinary American. And if they’re not doing well, the economy is not going to do well.
AMANPOUR: You basically hold it that the DOW is not a good way. The stock market is not a good way to measure the health of the American economy for the vast majority of the American people. And you also say GDP is not necessarily the right way. Well what about unemployment? Because unemployment is down at historic lows and people seem to like that. I mean, look at the graph that we have of the unemployment figures and what people think about it in the very key swing States. And it’s, it’s pretty dramatic. Um, figures have gone up and down the question, do you have a job? Most people aren’t say yes. So how important is that for reelection hope and what actually does that mean for real people in real jobs?
STIEGLITZ: Well, it is an important, uh, thing that unemployment is down. It’s a continuation of the fall in unemployment that it’s gone on throughout the Obama administration. Uh, and the fact that it continued, uh, is good news. Uh, there are two questions though. One is how well paid are those jobs? Uh, and in terms of incomes, we’re still not doing very well. The income of a full time male worker in the middle median, uh, is still a blow what it was some four decades ago. And then, uh, the other issue is not the unemployment rate, but the employment rate, what fraction of the working age population in the United States is working? And it’s much below that in many European countries. And the reason is that, uh, many of our people are, are, are not healthy. 2 million Americans lost their health insurance. And that’s one of the contributors to the declining life expectancy. And when you see a declining life expectancy, it’s a symptom, a symptom that a lot of Americans are not in good health. And if you’re not in good health, you’re not a good worker and you may drop out of the labor force.
AMANPOUR: These trends that you’re talking about, the sort of deaths of despair, the, the mortality rate, I mean some of the worst figures in this country of all the developed democracies and it’s really hard for somebody, you know, to understand how such an important economy can, can have those kinds of figures at the heart of it as well. And I just want to read some of the euros, which is just stunning. You said the only time I’ve seen anything like these declines in health outside of war or epidemics was when I was chief economist of the world bank and found out that mortality and morbidity data confirmed what our economic indicators suggested about the dismal state of the post Soviet economy. I mean, that’s dramatic because the U S was considered to have won that war.
STIEGLITZ: Yes. And if you go to places, uh, and the de-industrialized parks of the United States, uh, you get a better feeling of these deaths of despair. Uh, if you look at the statistics and you ask what are the chances of these people, people, uh, people who are born in these places, making it from the bottom to the top or even to the middle. Uh, a striking fact of the United States is the American dream is a myth. The life prospects of a young person born in America, poor parents are well educated, have limited education of making it from the bottom to the top is worse than in almost any other advanced country. Uh, and it’s not getting better, uh, with Trump’s policies.
AMANPOUR: Okay. So you’ve just added that bit at the end. It’s not getting better, but in the same way you can say employment, GDP, the stock market, all of these are continuations of the Obama, um, years. You could also say that these deaths of despair and all these horrible things and the fight that the middle class keeps basically gouged is also a continuation of democratic and other politics as usual. I mean, what does another different party, a different president campaigning to be elected do differently?
STIEGLITZ: Well, if you go back to what happened in 2010, there was an attempt to provide healthcare to all Americans. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it succeeded in extending healthcare to many, many, uh, millions of Americans who otherwise didn’t have it. And what we’ve seen in the last three years is a rollback. Uh, I think you need a conservative set of policies that, uh, help workers increase their bargaining power, uh, that restrict the market power of monopolies. Uh, I think in the past, uh, the Democrats didn’t always get to this kind of, uh, uh, uh, they’re receiving in, in many people in the democratic party a belief in trickle down economics. If you just let the stock market do well, uh, just let the bankers do well, then everybody would benefit. Uh, but we know that’s not true.
AMANPOUR: You know, president Trump, America first, a lot of sort of unilateralism and we’ve seen how he’s dealt with China and Mexico and Europe on the trade from the UN report. Those says that this is a problem. Um, that, uh, 2019 ended up being the slowest year for economic growth, not just in the U S but in China as well. Since the crash of 2008. And the secretary general wrote this about the politics. He said, economic risks remain strong, aggravated by deepening political polarization and increasing skepticism about the benefits of multi-lateralism at a point when global cooperation is paramount. In other words, there’s much maligned idea of globalization. I think he’s saying we need that. It can’t just be each one for themselves and throw multi-lateralism out the window.
STIEGLITZ: Oh, he’s absolutely right. W we, we have to cooperate. Uh, climate change is the obvious example, but diseases go across borders. Uh, you know, they don’t carry passports, they don’t carry visas. Uh, uh, there are many other problems that are global in nature and we have to work together. One of the things I hear a lot from the business leaders here is not only their commitment to this kind of cooperation, but their worry about where is the U S their anxiety about what will happen
AMANPOUR: And uncertainty does what for economies in a macro way?
STIEGLITZ: Well, uncertainty discourages investment and it even discourages people making investments in their durable goods. They don’t know what the future is going to be. And you see though to, in all the forecasts, a lot of concern about global growth slowing down, um, and, uh, over the world in our globally integrated, uh, economy, uh, that kind of anxiety leads to, uh, less spending, less spending leaks to lower growth. And we can’t isolate ourselves from that. So the reality is that we are through our economic policies contributing to our own economic slow down. It’s really fascinating.
AMANPOUR: Uh, professor Joseph Stieglitz. Thank you for joining us from Davos.
STIEGLITZ: Nice to be here.
AMANPOUR: And Stieglitz’s latest book is called “Rewriting the rules of the European Economy.”
AMANPOUR: Turning down to a grave matter of us presidential history on Capitol Hill, a hundred senators began deciding whether to remove president Trump from office on charges of abuse, of power and obstruction of Congress. Here’s what the president had to say about being in Davos as the impatient impeachment process unfolds back home.
REPORTER: Why is it better to be here in Davos than in Washington DC?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well we’re here meeting with the world ladies, the biggest, most important people in the world, and we’re bringing back tremendous business in the United States and they’re all here to see. The others’s just a hoax. It’s the witch hunt that’s been going on for years and it’s frankly, it’s disgraceful
AMANPOUR: With me to discuss the anatomy of the impeachment trial is Noah Feldman. He was one of four legal scholars who testified before the house judiciary committee. You testified you were called, I guess by the Democrats. There were four of you. You talked for the Democrats. What do you think? Is there going to be a trial as we know it, we can see that there’s a big tussle on the first day of what kind of rules, what kind of evidence, what kind of process is going to be.
NOAH FELDMAN: There’s a big fight about this going on even as we’re speaking right now. And the core of the fight is about how fair the trial will be and really whether there will be any new evidence introduced at all and both sides are going all out. Each side is claiming to have a fair process. Uh, I, my own view is that the reality is that Mitch McConnell’s proposed rules for the trial are not sufficient to allow real evidence to be entered.
AMANPOUR: Okay. So Mitch McConnell, leader of the Senate Republicans. Chuck Schumer is the leader of the Democrats, the minority party in the Senate. This is what they both said about this rule situation.
MITCH MCCONNELL: The organizing resolution we’ll put forward already has the support of a majority of the Senate. That’s because it sets up a structure that is fair, even handed and tracks closely with past precedents that were established unanimously.
CHUCK SCHUMER: Unlike the Clinton rules, the McConnell resolution does not admit the record of the house. Impeachment proceedings evidence. So McConnell seems to want a trial with no existing evidence and no new evidence. No evidence.
AMANPOUR: Okay. Evidence. How important is that? And what if they don’t get any evidence? I mean, what do you expect, I guess to come out of this?
FELDMAN: It would be not ideal for the Democrats if no new evidence were introduced. In particular, the former national security advisor, John Bolton has said publicly he might be bluffing, but he said he’s prepared to testify and he probably has something significant to say about his conversations with president Trump.
AMANPOUR: So remind us again why it’s the, the instance of it is the conversations about Ukraine and the alleged attempt to get while the attempt to get, um, the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt or announce hearings on Hunter Biden who is at the heart of the…
FELDMAN: Exactly part of the drama is that we don’t know exactly what Bolton would say, but what we do know is that the Democrats have alleged, and many witnesses also alleged that president Trump froze crucial military aid to Ukraine in order to condition that aid and a white house meaning on the announcement of investigations that were designed to help him get reelected. As you mentioned, investigation of Hunter Biden. And we know that John Bolton was opposed to that from things that his subordinates have said. And we also know that John Bolton had at least one meeting with the president about that subject. So the speculation is that Bolton would have something significant to say about what Trump said to him when presumably he said to president Trump, national security is being violated here. Now the Democrats want that testimony. Republicans presumably intend to block it. And one of the dramas of the current trial is whether there will be a handful of Republicans. It would just take four of them who would agree to require testimony. Right now that doesn’t look very likely, but it’s not outside the bounds of possibility.
AMANPOUR: Schumer pointed out that there might be three who would be willing and a little bit sitting on the fence right now, three so-called moderate Republicans who might be willing. Um, you save costs for would be needed to make it actually matter. One of those three, according to Schumer is Senator, Senator Mitt Romney, but Romney has said today, you know, the Democrats need to watch it because you know every time they sh they scream about their house being on fire or something not being fair, you know, they, they can’t just keep saying it’s all sort of like that. Otherwise nothing is like that. Are the Democrats playing it strategically, smartly?
FELDMAN: I think they have to be because the Republicans are playing it extremely cleverly. So I’ll give you a concrete example. In his proposed rules. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, specifically said that instead of admitting all of the evidence from the house of representatives, all of the testimony that was heard over the course of weeks, that they will have to be a vote on whether to allow that evidence to be admitted at all right now. That’s a very strange thing for him to have said. It’s not the way they did it in the Clinton impeachment hearing 21 years ago.
AMANPOUR: Yet he keeps saying it tracks with precedent that use the Clinton.
FELDMAN: And this is explicitly not based on the precedent, so you have to ask why is he doing that and the clue is in Donald Trump’s lawyers account of their legal strategy, which they presented yesterday and specifically they have said that they think all of the evidence gathered by the house should be ignored by the Senate and should be excluded essentially on a technicality. It’s about the timing of when the house voted to start its impeachment inquiry. Now on the surface, that seems like a ridiculous thing for them to say, but it explains why McConnell wants a vote on whether to admit the evidence he wants a chance for the Republicans to say, no evidence will be admitted at all. Now that’s extremely subtle and clever and that’s why the Democrats have little choice but to do what we just heard Senator Schumer doing namely say, this is unfair. He’s trying to set that up. Now in case the Republicans pull off this plan.
AMANPOUR: I mean the idea of fairness, is it kind of blowing in the wind. I mean, we know that all the senators had to take the oath to promise to be impartial jurors. We also know that none of this has happened you know, across party lines. It is not bi-partisan. You heard what McConnell said about the last time around that the rules were agreed unanimously in the Senate. It was bipartisan. It’s just not the same throughout the whole process so far. Is there any way that the, the people of the United States watching this can feel that it is a fair process?
FELDMAN: Probably people’s sense of fairness is going to depend on which party they support. And that’s unfortunate, but it’s the reality and there’s actually a reason for that. And it’s a very strange thing. You know, in any other country in the world, if there was a procedure for removing the, the head of state, it would not be made up as a new procedure each time. Right? You’d have it written down. But the us constitution is very old and it’s very sketchy. And here it just says that the Senate shall engage in the trial and that has allowed the Senate because we don’t do impeachment very frequently to make up new rules each and every time. And you know that reality means each time there’s a fight about what counts as fair.
AMANPOUR: So let’s just talk about how it will play out given the rules that keep changing every time. Last time I remember that you could actually see the process unfold in the Senate. I know there’s certain processes that have to happen behind closed doors, but you, you saw the defenses, the, the lawyers for each side and then you saw the vote at the end. Um, you also had Ken Starr who had, well, well, let’s just first talk about, you know, this and it unfolded over a period of days. This, it appears that for whatever reason Mitch McConnell wants to get it done. Like immediately, you know, within a couple of, a couple of days or I mean obviously a little bit more, but not a very long time. Why is that an all the way into the night and six days a week?
FELDMAN: McConnell’s plan seems to be to get this done as very quickly as possible, unlike the Clinton case. And presumably the reason to compress the time, to make it fast is just to get it out of the headlines. That suggests his judgment, that it’s not in the interest of Republicans in the Senate and maybe according to him also not in President Trump’s interests for the public to keep on talking about this. The idea is the longer we talk about this, the more it’s a distraction from what president Trump and other Republicans believe are their, their benefits, uh, to other news stories that are out there. So the Democrats want more time at this point, or at least say they do and the Republicans say they want less time and it’s just a question of getting it off the, off the news.
AMANPOUR: Yup. So when, when it came to testifying about, you know, the constitutionality of all of this, when it was in the, in the, in the house, you, you know, you went before the house and this is what you basically said about the process. It’s kind of dramatic, let’s listen.
FELDMAN: Someday we will no longer be alive and we will go wherever it is we go, the good place or the other place. And you know, we may meet there Madison and Hamilton and they will ask us when they’re president of the United States acted to corrupt the structure of the Republic. What did you do?
AMANPOUR: So what do you think that they’ll tell you know, Madison and Hamilton, what, what would be said to them today? A few weeks after you said that, you asked that?
FELDMAN: they would be pretty nervous right around this moment until now. The house of representatives has done what it was meant to have done. They stood up, they held hearings, they got testimony, they impeached. There was a little bit of a hiccup as they got the impeachment done, but they got it done. Now it’s up to the Senate and the question is, will the Senate have a proper trial, a proper trial ordinarily has witnesses and an opportunity to hear from those witnesses and then a broader relaxed discussion of the issues. It doesn’t look rushed. It doesn’t look hurried and it ought not to be those things. And I think, you know, that really will will really be the judgment of history for the senators. And if they rush it, it will look rush and the judgment of history will be, this was a rushed and illegitimate process, which inappropriately, you know, allowed the president to get off the hook.
AMANPOUR: You basically said that, you know, the public watching this, if they, by the way still care by the way, as you see genuine question, we’re getting to that in a moment. You said, I mean it’s not going to be law and order either I. E. that sort of fantastic crime drama on television. It’s not going to be fireworks. Much of it might be out of public view, but there is an issue also about the Trump argument and his lawyers argument that this is not a crime. This is not a criminal trial. He may have done this, that and the other, but it didn’t violate the constitution. And most importantly it’s not a crime. A professor of law at Missouri says this argument is constitutional nonsense. The almost universal consensus in great Britain in the colonies in the American States between 1776 and 87 at the constitutional convention and since has been that criminal conduct is not required for impeachment. Now I can imagine people watching might be confused about this. So just explain why it doesn’t have to be criminal in the strict legal sense of it.
FELDMAN: Yes. So the constitution says that impeachment is for quote high crimes and misdemeanors,
AMANPOUR: The word crime.
FELDMAN: Exactly. So the confusion comes from the fact that the word crime appears there, but high crime and high misdemeanor had a very specific meaning to the framers which they inherited from great Britain. And what that meant was crimes that harm the state, crimes that harm the society. And in particular the breaking of the electoral process is a great example of that. They did not mean crimes that are found in the statute book or that are recognized by courts. High crimes was a special category. And so in essence, the Trump administration’s position is a kind of linguistic game. It’s a kind of language game of saying, well it says crime. So it must mean a crime that’s in the statute books. That’s never what it meant is not what it means now. And just to show you clearly the reason that that’s not what it meant is that this isn’t a trial where the president can be punished, you know, to be punished. He can be removed from office.
AMANPOUR: That’s the ultimate punishment.
FELDMAN: Well, I think the ultimate punishment is going to prison. Uh, you know, we’re in the old days you could even be executed, you know, at the end of a, of a parliamentary process in, in the United Kingdom. So, you know, I think the point is removal from office is a civil sanction. It’s a, it’s not good, but it doesn’t mean you go to prison, you don’t lose your liberty. And so that’s why high crimes exactly as that source says always meant wrongdoing that affects the nation.
AMANPOUR: And how, we talked a little bit about public reaction, you know, the numbers haven’t changed since the beginning of this whole process with very much along party lines. Very, very split. How does that differ to what was going on under the Clinton time and also under the Nixon time? I mean he left before he could be impeached, but nonetheless.
FELDMAN: Well the Nixon example is exactly what doesn’t seem to be happening thus far and that is a kind of slow burn as gradually first Democrats then moderate Republicans. And then ultimately all Republicans came to realize that the president’s conduct was so shocking that something like an impeachment would be required. And when that became clear, Nixon actually stepped down. And you know, in the Clinton instance, it’s not clear how much movement there really was. You know, many Democrats thought, okay, bill Clinton lied under oath, but it was about what they considered at the time to be a personal matter. And so they more or less forgave him and his poll ratings went up and his poor ratings ultimately went up here. Things seem to be more or less frozen reflecting the polarization in the country more broadly. I do think it’s worth asking, what if the transcript of Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine had not come out at the very beginning but had only come out at the end? If that had been the case, I think everyone would have treated it as a smoking gun. You know, as evidence of collusion. And I think in retrospect it was extremely pressured and clever as evidence of quid pro quo. Yes, version was the other one. You’re right. But that’s true. A collusion, a quid pro quo, the whole whole lot of it is Trump would probably say. Um, but in any case, I think it was very smart of Trump and his advisors to release that call early because then the public is sort of assimilated and say, Oh yeah, we know he did that and now their defense is basically, this was all fine.
AMANPOUR: It’s really fascinating stuff. Noah Feldman, thank you very much indeed.
FELDMAN: Thank you for having me.
AMANPOUR: So the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which is at the heart of president Trump’s impeachment trial, specifically because Hunter Biden, the son of the democratic front runner, Joe Biden, once sat on the board and then earlier this month we learned that Russia hacked into Burisma and now Ukraine wants the FBI to help investigate because of fears of more election interference here in the 2020 election. It’s the kind of stuff that keeps our next guest up at night. John P Carlin was the assistant attorney general for national security and he talked to our Hari Sreenivasan about the ever-rising cyber threat.
SREENIVASAN: Give us a lay of the land here who are the kind of nation, state cyber warfare players of consequence.
JOHN P CARLIN: I’d say there’s four major players, eh nation state players in cyberspace, North Korea, Iran, Russia and China. And that’s according to both the views of the intelligence community and the cybersecurity cybersecurity community that monitors these threats. The other one to call people’s attention to though is what I call the blended threat, which is we’ve seen an explosion, billions of dollars have funded it in the organized criminal groups that try to attack companies and individuals to make a buck. And increasingly we see a blend between the traditional nation state activity and those criminal groups in both directions. We see that the nation States at the direction of their leadership when they want to do an attack, use those criminal groups and their tools as proxies. On the other side, you also have corrupt government actors and they want to make a buck on the side. So they’ll use state tools to do a criminal activity and they really just want, they really just want a profit. So what kinds of capabilities are we talking about? Because it’s not just the computers that can be attacked. It’s also the computers that are in charge of real world infrastructure for example, and the kind of ripple effects that normal people could see on a day to day basis. And we certainly know that very sophisticated actors like Russia and China have repeatedly shown that they’re able to get access now. They don’t necessarily use the access they have when they get it in certain critical infrastructure. But in the event of severe tensions between the nations or war, you could see them exploiting it more worrisome as you see North Korea and Iran trying to follow suit and they would, uh, use that, use that capability. And I think it’s something we need to watch for now as tensions increase with Iran and others. Another just side point on that though, is that’s critical infrastructure the way we traditionally thought of it. So it’s regulated space, electric water. We’re increasingly moving what’s called the internet of things. So when we talk about that transformation of data and connecting it online, increasingly we’re starting to connect everything. So that’s the cars on our roads. We’ve already had an instance, and this is back when I was in the Obama administration, where there was a proof of concept hack and you could, so using the entertainment system, you could control the braking and steering system of a Jeep. And that caused the recall of 2.4 million Jeep Cherokees with the idea that, Hey, that’s just like the brakes not working. That’s a safety law. But they were already out on our roads. And then you do the recall.
SREENIVASAN: When we talk about these nation state actors, how do they prioritize and what are their interests? I mean, is it about disinformation? Is it about stealing money? Is it about wreaking havoc on the economy? What are they trying to do?
CARLIN: Yes, it’s about all of those, but it depends on the, it depends on the state, state actor. So, uh, Russia, in addition to to, uh, obtaining money, um, and it’s blend with criminal groups in some respects, they seem to think that just attacking American Western interests anywhere in the world is to their benefit. And so they are purveyors of chaos and they attack things like our institutions and democratic institutions and our trust and faith in them. China’s been more focused on, uh, traditional national security goals. So, uh, state actors from their perspective, human rights, uh, activists or others. And then there’s economic, uh, espionage. So theft of trade secrets, North Korea bank robber, they want to raise currency. They’ve literally conducted essentially a bank heist, this so called Swift hack that’s been publicly indicted and they also use their capability to bully, uh, and try to influence the world where they’re otherwise weak politically like they did with their attack on Sony where they didn’t like the content of a movie.
SREENIVASAN: Right now, Iran is the one that we’re most concerned about because we’re in an increased period of tensions with them. What has Iran already done? What are some examples perhaps of what their capabilities are?
CARLIN: And in some ways, Iran has been the most destructive nation state actor on the world stage with North Korea may be a close second. They’ve shown the most willingness to use. They don’t have the top capability. I still would put that with the United States, Russia, China at some sense Israel, but they’ve shown the intent to use the capability that they have and this dates back to 2011 inside the United States where they were the first nation state to use cyber to launch an attack against American institutions. And what they did is a, it’s called a distributed denial of service attack and it’s basically the idea is they gained access to hundreds of thousands of compromised computers and then using something called command and control, including, you know, your computer at home could be one of those compromised computers. They could access all those computers at once and caused them to bombard a public facing website with requests for data. They get overwhelmed with data and it doesn’t work.
SREENIVASAN: So it’s all those computers are trying to go to the same website at the same time and then nobody can get it. \.
CARLIN: Exactly. And that’s what they did toward the financial sector. So they targeted major banks. It was a time, another time of tension between our countries. They launched these distributed denial of service attacks against the public facing website or the bank, and you’re the customer. So much of us have moved online banking, you can’t access your account. It affected hundreds of thousands of customers and cost tens of millions of dollars to over 46 different financial institutions at the beginning of that threat. You know, I was at uh, FBI at the time and later in department of justice, you know, we hadn’t really, we still, our default was to treat these cyber threats as secret. And this is a nation state issue. It’s between nation States. We should do what we did with the cold war, which is monitor it closely, maybe take action against that state, but you don’t tell anyone about it in the private sector or otherwise. And I think we got better and then ultimately publicly prosecuted the individuals that did that and they, they were affiliated with the IRG see some, uh, called the Islamic revolutionary guard Corps. That is the group that Amani, who is recently targeted and killed by a American forces led. So the, those were the actors attacking our financial sector all the way back from 2011 to 2014 while we were doing that, we saw other destructive attacks by Iran. We saw them use what’s called a wiper. Now we’re in attack against a Saudi oil infrastructure. Aramco. It was very effective and disrupted their production for a period of time.
SREENIVASAN: That means it goes in and basically wipes the software or some of the data that’s sitting inside a computer off?
CARLIN: Yeah. If you think about it at home, if that, if that hit, it basically turns your computer into a brick, you know, your computer is it, it doesn’t do anything without code. And there’s malware that wipes all of the code from the operating system of your computer. We saw that overseas and issued warnings here, but we also saw that the first destructive attack on us soil by a nation state using that same wiper type malware was actually against the sands casino, not critical infrastructure, you know, gaming. Uh, and what had happened was the head of the Sands casino, Shelly Adelson, had made some provocative remarks about Iran turning them into a nuclear desk cloud. The Ayatollah was not amused and issued essentially a fatwa against and called for jihad against the, uh, Shelly Adelson and the Sands casino.
SREENIVASAN: So in this day and age that jihad translates into a cyber attack.
CARLIN: That’s right. This is a, you know, w I think the first instance, at least in the U S where we saw that happen and they launched that malware and actually was it, luckily there was someone quick thinking in the information technology staff at sands that essentially pulled the plug and kept it from spreading all throughout their network. So it took, it took out a more distinct, separate facility. How about China? We know that there’s corporate espionage that’s happening. Uh, American companies have said that out loud. Um, what are their capabilities? So we talked a little bit about this new, uh, new approach taking place, uh, led through the department of justice and FBI when I was there, but echoed by other parts of the government, of taking what used to be in the shadows or secret in terms of nation state behavior and starting to have a strategy of figuring out who did it when you see bad cyber activity, making it public and opposing consequences sometimes using the criminal justice system. Actually, the first case that we brought, and this was in 2014, was against China. It was against five members of the people’s liberation army, this specialized unit, six, one, three, nine, eight. And all that unit did was attack the private sector. So they would hit places like universities, they’d hop from there into companies, and then they stole massive amounts of data, intellectual property, trade secrets, billions of dollars worth of data. The former head of the national security agency, Keith Alexander called it the largest transfer of wealth in human history. So this was significant. It’s why president Obama declared it an economic, national security economic emergency. President Trump has has reauthorized that same, that same declaration, and China continues to be quite active at now. Maybe less stealing from a company for the direct commercial gain of its adversary, thanks to an agreement that had been reached between the two countries. They’re definitely still quite active at stealing from companies for the benefit of the state. And that’s a hard if from the U S perspective, we don’t see that distinction the same way. Same way they do. Right.
SREENIVASAN: Yelling, stealing.
CARLIN: Yeah. Right. And they also, in addition to tilling stealing state secrets or trade secrets and they do both. They also have been taking just bulk data. So you saw the attacks on Anthem, you’ve seen attacks on the hospitality sector and what they’re taking there is just as much data about you and me as they can. So if you have my, my, my Marriott travel habits and possibly healthcare records, what do you do with it? Is this something that you use to compromise an individual? So I can see some ways they would use what they’ve stolen now to try to track law enforcement agents or Intel operatives they disliked to target human rights activists. I also think though, we’re on the cusp of new developments and so-called artificial intelligence or machine learning that are collecting this massive repository of data and they may not know how they’re going to use it yet, but data is the new oil or gold for this age, the way oil gold had been for previous ages. They’re sitting now on this huge, um, pool of data and so it may be they end up generating insights or more effective algorithms or artificial intelligence. Five or 10 years from now.
SREENIVASAN: Let’s get to Russia. I mean, our concern primarily as Americans has been watching Russia metal in the U S elections in 2016. Um, is that continuing?
CARLIN: Yes. So we should be concerned about Russian activity heading into our 2020 elections. Russia is increasingly a rogue nation when it comes to its cyber activity. They view democracy as an existential threat and we’re not the first democracy that they’ve tried to attack or undermined confidence in. But they’ve also done things like unleash what’s called a ransom worm. And this was something called not Pecha. So this is, there’s a technique called ransomware that the crooks are using. And what that does is it puts malware on your computer. So when you go to log on, you get, often it’s a skull or something scary and it says all your data is locked up, it’s encrypted. If you want to access it, go here and pay a fee. And there’s a reason why that’s been just exploding and it’s because many people are paying and the criminal groups are making a lot of money doing it. We’ve even seen police departments, hospitals in municipalities in the U S pay these crooks ransomware. What Russia did in this ransom worm is, it was like ransomware, but it’s self propagated. And where it started was for specific national security purpose. They deployed it in Ukraine trying to attack Ukrainian institutions. But then it spread all through the world. And unlike the, the criminal version of it, there was no way to pay to get access to your data. Again, this caused, uh, over I think $500 million worth of damage. We’ll have it to a mayor’s shipping alone. It hit Merck. It hit a cost $300 million to FedEx. So it hit everyone, hit all of our allies. We did not do enough, I think, in response to that utterly irresponsible indiscriminant use of this tool to deter them from doing that type type of thing again.
SREENIVASAN: So our intelligence says that at least three voting system vendors were compromised. We’ve had another kind of investigation show that at least a few dozen different voting systems connected to the internet when we were told that they’re not right. Um, how safe are we from cyber meddling in the upcoming election?
CARLIN: We’re, we’re better than we were, but we still, uh, every state at this point should have a paper ballot backup system. There’s just no excuse for not having it. And a couple of States don’t. And, uh, just go drives a pro bono suit or we’ve sued the state of Georgia and it’s a year and a half, two years into the suit now to try to force them to adopt better protections and not use unsafe technology for, for voting. That’s one area. It was great that the federal government, uh, finally UN released funds because the problem, and we’re seeing this with the ransomware plague hitting cities like Baltimore and others, is it’s not just the election system. They’re generally their infrastructure that they rely on to provide city services. So, so our health and safety depend on it are, they don’t have the resources and they don’t have the technical skillset. And so they’re not hardened against even not particularly sophisticated adversaries. And people make mistakes as you talked about, and take systems that should be off, uh, off the internet and plug them in or put a thumb drive where it shouldn’t, shouldn’t be. And that’s the way to get code in. So we need to have a funding just like we do in other areas to help them get up to speed and protect their systems.
SREENIVASAN: Uh, recently a local reporter, uh, I want to say in Topeka asked, uh, the president, uh, a question about our cyber capabilities. Let’s take a look.
REPORTER: What is the administration doing to guarantee the, uh, the safety of, of our systems? Our banking systems are our grid. So our computer systems in this country.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, that’s a great question. Whole new thing. It’s a whole new field. We have some tremendous people. We’re better at cyber than anybody else in the world, but we weren’t really using that power, that intellect on cyber. We weren’t doing it. And now we are and we have, I have incredible people in charge of cyber. Uh, if we ever get hit, we’ll hit very hard. We’ll be able to hit very hard. But it’s a new form of warfare and I think we have it very well under control.
SREENIVASAN: Do we have it under control?
CARLIN: Uh, no. Uh, I think there have been improvements and there are some good, uh, excellent officials still at the department of justice, FBI, department of Homeland security and our military and intelligence services. But the problem is getting worse right now, not better. And a couple of reasons. One is we continue to move into vulnerable areas. And so right now the technology does not exist to keep a dedicated adversary out of a government or a company’s system, no matter how much you invest. Uh, and so that’s true. If it’s an internet connected system that’s true of sophisticated nation States and it’s increasingly true of these organized criminal groups. What we need to do as a nation, it’s an urgent time and we need leadership from the commander in chief on down is to say we’re at an inflection point. You know, before we move towards adding these billions of new devices on the internet of things using this insecure technology, we need to think about risk and price it into our decisions. There are major gains. I mean, having self driving cars might massively reduce traffic fatalities.
SREENIVASAN: Sure.
CARLIN: But we got to do so in a way that takes into account. It’s not just whether they work, it’s whether they’ll work. If a bad guy wants them to incentivize security by design. And we haven’t taken the steps yet to do that. It’s not forced by regulation. Congress hasn’t taken action to try to, uh, improve safety on it. I know when I wrote my book and talked about real cases that we did at the department, when I go around and talk about them, people think it’s science fiction. They don’t realize that it already already occurred. So we need to have a demand for action before we start putting new things into this vulnerable space. So we, so we do it safely.
SREENIVASAN: John Carlin, thanks so much for joining us.
CARLIN: Thank you.
AMANPOUR: And finally, just look at these pictures. Dust storm set off by the raging fires in Australia in Davos. Of course, Thunberg and Trump face off about the climate crisis. While this week, the UN rules that climate refugees cannot be forced to return home to life threatening conditions like Yoni Taytota who sought protection in New Zealand, claiming that he is at risk from rising sea levels at his home on the low lying Pacific Island of Kiribati. So while the politicians dither the cost of fleeing climate change will just outpaced the costs of mitigating it. And that’s it for our program tonight. Find out what’s coming up on the show by signing up for our daily preview, visit pbs.org/amanpour thanks for watching Amanpour and Company and join us again tomorrow.