BROOKE GLADSTONE:  From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I’m Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD:  And I’m Bob Garfield. This week in Trump began on an atypically upbeat note. On Tuesday night, the president gave his first joint address to Congress.

  [CLIP]:

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice-President, Members of Congress, the First Lady of the United States.

  [APPLAUSE/END CLIP]

Many in the pundit class gave the president high marks for his use of the palliative presidential platitude.

  [CLIPS]:

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  The speech has gone a long way towards unifying a divided country.

CHRIS WALLACE/FOX NEWS:  I feel like tonight Donald Trump became the President of the United States.

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  I thought last night was unifying, I thought it was presidential.

  [END CLIP]

BOB GARFIELD:  It’s as if the president had one of those gizmos from Men in Black, making them forget everything unpresidential and divisive they’ve experienced for the past 18 months. Still, the president stood before the Congress and he did not embarrass it, and that was deeply reassuring for commentators who find comfort in the familiar, so they can say something – familiar. Pundits have their priorities, and no one knows that better than Trump, as Trevor Noah pointed out on The Daily Show.

  [CLIP]:

TREVOR NOAH:  You don't have to be a genius to figure out

that Donald Trump is playing you. You look at his record. You can study his previous actions. Or, or you know what else you could do? You could just listen to him when he tells you

that he's gonna fake it.

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  And I can act as presidential as anybody that's ever been president. Presidential is easy. You know what presidential is? I walk on, here’s a -

 [CROWD LAUGHING]

Ladies and gentlemen of Waterbury, it is a great honor to be with you this morning.

  [CONTINUED LAUGHTER]

TREVOR NOAH:  Yeah, fake like you're presidential

and people will believe you're presidential. This was the plan all along.

  [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But the president had barely a news cycle to bask in that presidential glow. On Wednesday night, he was menaced again with that perpetually falling piano, the Russian connection. This time, it landed on Attorney General Jeff Sessions who, in January, was asked by Senator Al Franken if he would investigate alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

 [CLIP]:

ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS:  I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn't have - did not have communications with the Russians, and I'm unable to comment on it.

  [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  On Wednesday, a rather different story emerged.

  [CLIP]:

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  The Washington Post now reporting tonight that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, when he was still a senator and an advisor to the Trump campaign, had meetings with Russia's ambassador to the US but did not disclose them during his confirmation hearing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Sessions settled for just making himself scarce.

ATTORNEY GENERAL SESSIONS:  I have now decided to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matter relating in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  The news about Sessions’ Russian rendezvous coincided with another revelation.

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  New reporting tonight about what the Obama administration learned in its final days about Russian interference in the presidential election.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  The report says the officials wanted to leave a clear trail of intelligence before the Trump administration took over.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  As The New York Times reported, Obama administration officials purposefully documented and spread information across the government about Russian interference in the election. They did this to alert future investigators and to ensure that the information would not crumble to dust in a presidential broom closet. National security and intelligence reporter Matthew Rosenberg co-wrote The Times story. Matthew, welcome to the show.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  Thanks for having me on.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So let's start with the “what.” Explain what information Obama administration officials scrambled to preserve.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  The actual details of that information are still really murky. You know, the stuff is incredibly classified. Even telling us that it exists risks going to jail.  We do know a few things. We know that there were contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials throughout the campaign. Some officials say they’re intelligence people but that's a pretty murky designation in Russia where even top business people, if they’re close to Putin they’re kind of in the intelligence world.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  They have many jobs to do.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  Exactly. And we also know that there were a  lot of conversations intercepted between officials in the Kremlin and other places in which the Russians themselves were debating how far to go with this.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You also had some information from American allies, the British and the Dutch, who described meetings in European cities.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  Some European allies – we believe there are a number of them – who were hearing about meetings through their own sources and tipping off the Americans and saying, hey, what's this going on here? We don't really understand this.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Now, you described a number of strategies that Obama White House officials used to create this paper trail of intelligence, for instance, simply sending packages to members of Congress?

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  I think we want to be clear that this was beyond the White House. These are senior officials in the intelligence community, in the national security world –

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  - some in the White House, and one of the things they did - we know of at least one instance and we believe there were others - a Senate committee requested information on Russian election meddling worldwide and a few days before the end of the administration they got delivered a cache of folders all stamped “Secret.”

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  We should mention that “Secret” is really not that high of a classification.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  It’s not and that’s, I think, where you get into what they were really trying to do. Step back and look at the context here. Through the summer into the fall, there’s hacking, there are the releases of the emails, there are questions about voter rolls being probed by hackers, but there’s no real sense of exactly how big a campaign this is going on. And it’s only into November and December that people in the administration say they begin to put all the pieces together and see the scope and depth and breadth of, of what they believe the Russians had done. They then engage in this very kind of almost last-minute rush to kind of get information out there in ways that it’s not just left there kind of on the cutting room floor and hard to find and hard to access.

And so, one of the ways you do that is you take the raw intelligence, the actual intercepts, human intelligence reports, and you process that into what they call a finished report and you try and get as low a level of classification on that finished report as possible and then move that around the intelligence community, as wide an audience for it as you can.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You also reported that Obama officials and, I guess, officials in other agencies asked questions of the intelligence agencies in order to get certain answers on the record.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  Yeah, and that was part of that, leaving a trail for investigators.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  You get a briefing every day, you ask your briefers the question to which you know the answer, but you also know the briefer is going to write that down, and that becomes part of an archive. And then any investigator in the House or the Senate is going to know to look for those archives, and it will lead them to information you want them to find.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And your sources within the administration made clear that the reason why they did this was to ensure that it would be very difficult for the new administration to come in and just completely bury it all.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  Oh, absolutely. Some of these sources were very upfront about this: we want this out there because we want people to know it’s there and they should go look for it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You write about how the intelligence collecting and documenting continued up until the final days of the Obama administration and you explained that it wasn't until they had thoroughly put the pieces together that the Russian government was trying to directly influence the election in favor of Trump.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  Yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And they didn't figure that out until that late.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  Yeah. We were pretty shocked by that. I think, you know, in the public’s mind there was a sense that there’s a big thing going on. But when you think about it, you know, what exactly our government thought it was, at least, wasn’t really clear until into December and January. You had the cyber attacks on the DNC, which took place a long time ago. Then you have another element in the campaign, which is the pushing of the stolen material out – WikiLeaks, Guccifer.

And the third element was the probing and hacking into state electoral systems and the stealing of the voter rolls there. And that happened in September, and that was really the first thing that truly alarmed the White House. But, at the time, they thought it was because the Russians were trying to find ways to muck around and raise questions about what would go on on Election Day, that they were going to try and disrupt the actual voting or cast doubt on that voting. That’s, obviously, not what happened.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  And the other thing throughout is they’re listening to Russians who are equally as convinced as most Americans were that Hillary Clinton was probably going to win. The Russians weren’t thinking that they were winning this for Trump. They were as surprised as everyone else.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But they didn’t like Hillary.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  The Russians really dislike Clinton. And so, this was a lot more about weakening the US, disrupting democracy and overcoming Clinton than it was about Trump.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  The meetings that the appointed Trump team had denied having with the Russians could have come out more directly. Why not just a more straightforward statement about these things from people who knew? Is it because the material is classified?

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  Yeah, exactly. As long as the material remains classified and you have a clearance, which means you can see it, you can’t talk about it. But we talked to a lot of people, and these are both political appointees and career officials - it’s not just a bunch of Obama partisans – who seemed very unsatisfied with the level of classification and the inability or unwillingness to declassify more information before they left office.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  I think they knew, and that’s one of the big problems here, is that what the public’s seen so far is not particularly satisfying. We’ve seen a lot of very strong language. We’ve seen some details, most of which have leaked out. But we don’t actually know what this evidence is, so we've got these competing claims.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Right, the Trump team has denied that the campaign had any contact with the Russians. They blame the intelligence agencies for cooking this up. Your story reports that the Obama administration was just concerned that this whole thing was going to be buried, so it left clues. And then there's the conspiracy theory that we saw on Thursday in the Daily Caller. The headline read, “CONFIRMED: Obama Administration Sabotaged Trump’s Transition to the White House.” [LAUGHS]

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  [LAUGHS] I love when the Daily Caller uses us to confirm what they want to confirm.

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

Look, I find conspiracies pretty hard to believe. Usually it’s

just incompetence. In this case, it’s a bunch of officials, some of

them probably working together, who were generally freaked out. I mean, and I spoke to these people. I’ve known them a while, some of them. They were really freaked out by what they were seeing, and they wanted to make sure –

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  - that investigations could progress. But the Trump campaign isn’t entirely wrong, either. You know, there is some sour grapes here.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Everyone has their motive. I mean, Deep Throat was annoyed that Nixon didn't promote him inside of the FBI. But the motives don't matter, right? It's the value of the information.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  Exactly. Look, sources are really imperfect people. I’ve had great sources who were right- and left-wing nuts who had detestable views of the world, but they provided incredibly valuable information. No matter how you feel about the people we’re talking to, and I wish I could tell you more about them, if what they’re saying is true – and there are a lot of them saying the same thing, independent of each other - what they’re providing is really stunning and really interesting.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But it's based on secret information that comes from almost entirely anonymous sources and, as you wrote, it makes an independent public assessment of competing Trump and Obama administration claims impossible.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  You know, it is the great frustration of reporting in Washington, and especially on national security matters, is that you’re dealing with stuff that is sensitive and that, again, your sources risk their freedom to talk to you about it. We’re careful explaining that we have a lot of sources on this. We’re careful in explaining why the sources are talking to us. We’re trying to kind of show as much as we can to give some confidence that we’re not just kind of making this up or talking to people who have no credibility to speak on these matters.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Well, the White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, kind of echoed the Daily Caller when he said, the only new piece of information that has come to light is that political appointees in the Obama administration have sought to create a false narrative to make an excuse for their own defeat in the election. There continues to be no “there” there. Are you convinced that there’s enough there, there?

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  I don’t know what to think. People, some still in the government, seem very convinced there’s something there. And if I were the Trump administration and there was no “there” there, I’d probably want a pretty thorough investigation to end this all.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  The fact is that no intelligence official seems to be claiming, on or off the record, that they have actual evidence of active collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, at least not yet.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  No. What they do tell us, though, is that, you know, stuff was pouring in until the day they left office and that it still is coming in, apparently. What they are absolutely, thoroughly convinced of is of this Russian campaign. They say there’s no doubt about it, at this point, in their estimation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  The Trump stuff’s murkier because there were a lot of meetings but you don’t know exactly what went on in all of them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So do you think that maybe we’re making too much of this?

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  No, because, you know, in the end, [LAUGHS] this is why you don’t have meetings like this and why you don't deny things, even when they’re apparent to everyone, is these appearances matter. This doesn’t look good, and I think the administration does owe the American people straightforward answers about what exactly is going on here.

And they say they’re being straightforward but, you know, it comes out in January that their former national security advisor Mike Flynn had been talking to the Russian ambassador the day that the Obama administration imposed sanctions, December 29^th. And the initial White House responses say it was one phone call, a text message and it was just about logistics for a call with Putin. It comes out a few weeks later that it was a lot of phone calls. It was about the sanctions and telling the Russians, don’t worry, we’ll be in power soon, and Flynn had misled the vice-president, and that the White House had known this for two weeks. They had known what they had told the public was untrue.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  Now we’ve got Jeff Sessions who told Congress he had never met with any Russians during the campaign. It turns out he had met the ambassador twice. Now he says, well, we weren’t meeting about campaign things. You’re getting this pattern here of they say nothing happened, then you find out something did. They say, well, it’s no big deal. Then you find out it was. And they say, well, the leaks are the problem.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  And I think until that kind of pattern ends or there are some answers about what exactly is going on here, these questions are going to persist, and they should persist. They absolutely should persist.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Okay, so now as we talk on Thursday, gratefully, Flynn is long gone.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  Yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Sessions has recused himself from any investigation into the Russian hacking or connections with the Trump administration. You have also reported that Jared Kushner, advisor to Trump and his son-in-law, was with Flynn at least during one of those meetings. So we have a couple of shoes that have dropped. Do you anticipate any more in the near future?

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  I suspect we’ll be finding out a lot more, unless this is some giant conspiracy and we’re all being played for the fool, which I don’t believe to be the case and I really hope it isn’t. I can say this much, that I’ve learned to stop predicting what’s going on over there -

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  - because we just have no idea. You know, me and a colleague were looking into some other totally unrelated story but it involved a very senior job for somebody. There was a lot of confusion about it. Eventually, the person who was the subject of our reporting, who was up for this very senior job, called us up to say, hey, you guys know what’s going on with this job because I’m getting a lot of mixed signals from the White House.

  [LAUGHTER]

So we’re just like, um, I mean, yeah, that’s not the way this is supposed to work, sir. You know what I mean? [LAUGHS]

  [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Matthew, thank you very much.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG:  Thanks a lot.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Matthew Rosenberg covers intelligence and national security for The New York Times.

BOB GARFIELD:  Coming up, media manipulations at home and abroad, as usual.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  This is On the Media.