"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: https://www.patreon.com/posts/32059046 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.c...
Dec 03, 2019•13 min
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. To hear the entire interview, please subscribe to our Patreon page. ...
Nov 26, 2019•11 min
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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Nov 25, 2019•13 min
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 t...
Nov 19, 2019•1 hr 20 min•Season 2Ep. 4
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. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy a...
Nov 16, 2019•10 min
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 Dmi...
Nov 12, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Season 2Ep. 2
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...
Nov 04, 2019•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 1
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 f...
Oct 29, 2019•6 min
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...
Oct 22, 2019•14 min
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 in...
Oct 10, 2019•35 min•Ep. 1
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. To hear the full interview, subscribe...
Oct 01, 2019•14 min
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 interfere...
Sep 20, 2019•12 min
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. ...
Aug 06, 2019•1 hr 40 min•Season 1Ep. 12
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 t...
Jul 23, 2019•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 11
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 conspi...
Jul 16, 2019•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 10
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. ...
Jul 09, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 9
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, ...
Jul 02, 2019•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 8
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 Ameri...
Jun 25, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 7
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 Russ...
Jun 18, 2019•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 6
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 Russ...
Jun 04, 2019•57 min•Season 1Ep. 5
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 ...
May 29, 2019•50 min•Season 1Ep. 4
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 ...
May 21, 2019•44 min•Season 1Ep. 3
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...
May 14, 2019•44 min•Season 1Ep. 2
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 Mit...
May 07, 2019•33 min•Season 1Ep. 1
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...
Apr 26, 2019•7 min
