The Gray Area with Sean Illing takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. Each week, we invite a guest to explore a question or topic that matters. From the the state of democracy, to the struggle with depression and anxiety, to the nature of identity in the digital age, each episode looks for nuance and honesty in the most important conversations of our time. New episodes drop every Monday.
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episode 108: The most clarifying conversation I’ve had on Trump and Russia
What really happened between the Trump campaign and the Russian government? The investigation into that question has rocked American politics. The FBI director was fired over it. The attorney general might get fired over it. The president’s former campaign manager and his original national security adviser were charged with crimes as part of it. The president himself might ultimately be charged with obstruction of justice for his response to it. It’s also a devilishly difficult story to follow, with information coming out in half-true dribs and drabs, new names grabbing headlines and then disappearing for weeks, and countless threads that need to somehow be stitched into a coherent whole. Which is why I asked Susan Hennessey to join the podcast this week. Hennessey, a former lawyer at the National Security Agency, is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and managing editor of Lawfare, which has done extraordinary work both tracking and driving this story. And in this conversation, she pulls it all together in ways I found extremely clarifying, and occasionally horrifying. This is a conversation about the big picture of the Russia investigation: what we know and what we don’t know, what Robert Mueller has actually promised to deliver, what collusion really means, how Trump’s aides could have done what they’ve been accused of doing, and much more.
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