National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien joined me this morning to update us on President Trump’s national; security briefing yesterday and the ambassador’s negotiations with the Russians last week in Geneva:

Audio:

10-05hhs-obrien

Transcript:

HH: Pleased to welcome back as my next guest a very good friend. Ambassador Robert O’Brien is the President’s National Security Advisor. He and I, as I always tell people, used to be law partners. We’re still good friends. You can account for the lie of the green, but we’re both retired from Larson O’Brien now. Ambassador O’Brien, welcome back and congratulations. You are now the latest gold medalist of Kosovo. Not in the Olympics, mind you, but you, I saw that picture on the web yesterday.

RO’B: Well, thank you, Hugh. It’s great to be with you, and it was very generous of the Kosovars to award the President the medal of freedom and to award Ambassador Grenell and me the presidential medal of merit. And you’re always a little humbled and honored by those sorts of things, but we were pleased to be able to work hard to try and bring some normalization to the lives of the Kosovar people and the Serbian people. So it was quite an honor.

HH: Now give us a quick update, if you can. I know you can’t disclose the contents, but how was the President during yesterday afternoon’s national security briefing?

RO’B: Oh, the President’s strong. He had his whole team, Secretary Esper, Secretary Pompeo, General Milley, the Vice President, myself. We spoke with him either from the Situation Room where Pompeo, Milley and I were, or from a plane where Secretary Esper was returning from the Emir of Kuwait’s funeral. We were able to give him a brief. The Vice President was up at his residence. We were able to give him a brief and take him around the world on every issue that we’re facing from a foreign policy/national security front. He was incredibly engaged. He had advice and laid out what his policies were to his team.

HH: Now I believe yesterday’s ride in the limo was a signal to our adversaries around the world that he is, as you said to Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation yesterday, fine and in control. And it seems to me that he is completely, but I want to go back to something you told Margaret Brennan yesterday. When she asked you how he was, you said you’d talked to him on Friday when you were in Geneva negotiating with the Russians. First of all, set the stage. What were you doing in Geneva with the Russians?

RO’B: Well, look. We’ve got to, you know, Russia’s a major power. We have a number of issues that are of concern to the two countries. One of the first is arms control. President Trump has made it very clear that he wants to see a, he believes nuclear weapons could be the most dangerous threat to the United States and to the American people, and we would like to see a good arms control deal, not a fake arms control deal, but a real one that has verification. And we’ve come to a logjam in our meetings with the Russians on New Start, and so we felt, the President thought it would be helpful if I went and spoke to my counterpart to break the logjam. We’re concerned about some American citizens who are being detained in Russia that have been in the news, and we’d like to get those citizens home. And he also wanted me to deliver a strong message that election interference just would not be tolerated if there was any sort of Election Day or change of the tallies or hacking of our Secretaries of State and that sort of thing. And I delivered a very strong message from the President. Going to your question, about midway through the negotiations, the delegation took a break, and I had a chance to call the President. By that time, he had been diagnosed with COVID but had not yet gone to the hospital. I spoke with him, gave him an update where we were, received, and I won’t get into the details, but I received his input on how we’ve got to frame the issues for the afternoon sessions, and he was very engaged and certainly, as I said to Margaret, firmly in control.

HH: Let me ask you for the benefit of the historical record. What time in Geneva did you call him? And do know what time that was in the United States? I always get confused. And how long did the conversation last?

RO’B: Yeah, so that, we broke probably at about Noon, Geneva time. There’s a six hour difference, so maybe it was 6:30, 7 Eastern time.

HH: In the morning.

RO’B: And…in the morning. And as you know, the President’s an early riser, and he goes to bed late and gets up early in the morning. I know that from experience having had for him calls on both sides of his whatever break he takes to sleep at night, which isn’t very much.

HH: So how long did you talk to him on Friday morning?

RO’B: We spent about 10-15 minutes, enough time for me to give him an update on where we were with the talks and to get his input on how we should proceed in the afternoon session.

HH: All right, now would you take us into who General Patrushev is? I didn’t recognize the name, but I gather he is the national security advisor to President Putin?

RO’B: So he is the secretary-general of the NSC for Russia. He is a long-time close confidant of President Putin. He’s a full four-star general like, he came up through the intelligence services, and he’s, yeah, he’s basically my counterpart in Russia. And so this was the first time I’d met him in person. I’ve spoken with him on the phone before, and we’ve exchanged letters on various issues, but this was the first time to meet with him in person. Because of his close relationship with Putin, we felt that he was the right interlocutor to see if we could, excuse me, get the logjam unstuck on arms control, but also deliver a very blunt message in election interference.

HH: Can you tell us what his response was to your warning not to interfere with our election, which probably would have been useful had Valerie Jarrett or Susan Rice delivered it to the Russians about the same time in 2016, what was his response?

RO’B: Well, look, they understand that President Trump says what he means and means what he says. I mean, this is not a situation like the prior administration where we’re going to tell him we can be more flexible after the election or that sort of thing. We delivered a tough message, and we said there’d be severe consequences. The Russians, for their part, said they had no interest in interfering with our elections, and asked us not to do the same when they have elections. And that was an easy answer for us, because we don’t interfere in other country’s elections. And I was able to say absolutely. So…

HH: Now you know, our left-wing friends are going to say that’s not enough. You have to do more. What more could be done? I mean, you didn’t pound your shoe on the table, obviously, like Khrushchev at the U.N. But how do you communicate we really mean this as opposed to the last group?

RO’B: Well, look, the Russians know that we’re serious. And the President’s shown, whether it was Syria or Iran or the massive number of sanctions that we’ve put on Russians and Russian oligarchs and Russian government officials over the past four years. I mean, no one has done to Russia, save for Ronald Reagan, what President Trump has, so they understand that we’re serious. And look, at the same time, there are areas of cooperation. We’d like to, you know, we’ve issued a statement with France and Russia on the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict. There are areas where we could cooperate on counterterrorism. So we’d like to have good relations with Russia, but they understand that there won’t be good relations if there’s any sort of election interference. And look, it was a tough message. It was blunt. They’ve said they’re not going to interfere, but you know, I take the approach, and President Trump takes the approach that Ronald Reagan did, and it’s trust, but verify. So you know, we’re not going to lessen our vigilance at all. We’re going to be keeping a very, very close eye on Russia, but also on China and Iran. And as Attorney General Barr said, China’s an order of magnitude greater of a threat to our elections than Russia or Iran. So we’re going to be watching all of our foreign adversaries and making sure that we have free and fair elections here in the United States.

HH: It’s interesting, you remind me of Secretary Pompeo’s message at the Nixon Library in the summer which was distrust but verify. Given that the President has now gotten, is apparently recovering quickly from a virus that originated in Wuhan, China, does that even, many world leaders have gotten this now. Does the world recognize that China lied? I mean, does the world have the same clarity about where this virus came from and the perfidy of the Chinese Communist Party as the United States does?

RO’B: Oh, there’s no question about it, Hugh. I can’t tell you how many world leaders we’ve spoken to, including world leaders that China thinks are their best friends who told us they don’t want to have anything to do with them. Unfortunately, the Chinese have great economic leverage over a number of countries in Asia and Africa, so it’s difficult for them to break free. But look, the Russians understand the issue that they’ve got a long border with China, that Russia has been hit very hard by COVID. Our British friends, Boris Johnson, as you know, had COVID. President Bolsinaro down in Brazil who I’m going to go visit with soon, understands the issue. So world leaders understand where this came from. They understand that the Chinese were at best reckless, and at worst witting in how this thing spread. So I think the whole world has gotten a taste of China. And look, this isn’t the first plague that’s come from China since the, you know, the last 20 years. We’ve had SARS, we’ve had H1N1, Avian flu, Swine flu. So we, China has a very serious public health problem, and they need to get it fixed immediately. They can’t keep unleashing these plagues on the world.

HH: Now Ambassador O’Brien, on this show on January 29th, you warned the world that it was a deadly virus, it was a dangerous virus. You said the President was being updated almost hourly, in some cases. So you were early to the bell as your deputy, Matt Pottinger was, and there was a debate. And you succeeded in persuading the President to bring down the curtain on inbound travel from China. Well done, and the President, good decision. My question is now, you’ve had the virus as well. You’ve had the virus. But we are seeing Sweden emerge a little bit different. Is there a discussion ongoing about maybe Sweden did it better than the United States given the untold costs of the lockdowns?

RO’B: You know, the issue with the virus is that this is such a nasty, resilient infection. Until we get the vaccines and until we get therapeutics, and I think the President’s quick response and his what appears to be a very rapid recovery shows that some of the therapeutics are working, that we’ve learned how to deal with this virus, although it’s still deadly for certain groups, people with co-morbidities and at a certain age. But until we get a vaccine and until we get a therapeutic, it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to avoid, over the long time, getting the virus, whether you’re going to get the virus or you’re going to get vaccinated. I mean, that’s what we’re going to have to do. The whole point of shutting down travel and the early lockdowns was to avoid a situation where our hospitals were overrun. There weren’t enough ventilators for patients. There weren’t enough therapeutics for patients. And we’ve succeeded there. The President’s succeeded there. Had he not done the travel ban, and had he not done some of the early things including the lockdown, the task force, and the Operation Warp Speed to get us a vaccine by the end of the year, and remember, there were those on the other side of the aisle and even some Republicans who opposed all of those measures. Had that not happened, we’d be looking at a very different death toll – hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions more, according to Fauci and Birx early on. So I think the President deserves tremendous commendation for the way he’s handled this plague that again came from China.

HH: Very last question, Mr. Ambassador. At any time in the last 72 hours, was the President anything other than completely in control of the government?

RO’B: Oh, no. Not, he was absolutely in control. As I said on Margaret Brennan’s show, he was firmly in control, and everyone knew that. And so our adversaries knew it, our friends knew it. And he’s got a terrific national security team with Pompeo and Milley and the Vice President and Esper and others. And the U.S. government continued to function without any sort of hiccup.

HH: Mr. Ambassador, thank you for joining me. Oh, one bonus question. How many hours total did you spend with General Patrushev?

RO’B: We were there for about eight hours during the day, and it was a pretty quick trip. We did an overnight outbound. We did the talks with our Russian counterparts, and then that evening, just given what was happening in Washington, I had planned to go to Brussels, but we made sure that we got the appropriate crew rest for the Air Force crew that had flown us, and once they were ready to go, we got wheels up about 9:30 that night out of Geneva and came back to D.C.

HH: Well, thank you for briefing us on that. I caught that little detail in the Face the Nation comment, and I wanted to find out how it went, and it sounds like it went well. Be well, Mr. Ambassador, good luck greeting the President back at the White House today.

RO’B: Thank you, Hugh. Great to be with you.

End of interview.