Washington Post reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Greg Miller spoke to University of Maryland faculty and staff on Thursday to discuss his book “The Apprentice: Trump, Russia, and the Subversion of American Democracy,” coinciding with the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

Miller, who, as a national security correspondent, had been following President Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia since the 2016 election, spoke about the series of events that led him to hone in on Trump’s speculated interference with the Russian Probe.

“Mueller already told us that he did not see enough evidence to prove collusion, and for some reason refused to decide whether there was enough evidence to make a case against the president on obstruction, but Mueller is not going to answer what or what isn’t in the rest of those pages,” Miller said.  

“He’s not going to answer how we became so partisan and paralyzed as a country, he’s not going to tell us how we became so susceptible to Russian disinformation and he’s not going to tell us how to recover our senses,” Miller added.

Maggie Attridge, a freshman journalism major, said that she’s not sure if she believes whether or not Trump obstructed justice in the 2016 election.

“I honestly don’t know.  My thing is, I want to be able to read the whole [Mueller report] to find the truth and I can’t. [Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress] is just a short summary of a 300-page document and that is just not sufficient enough,” Attridge said.

The book traces the Russia story from the beginning, starting with the hack of the Democratic National Committee.

According to Miller, it then goes deep into the Mueller probe and “ends where we are now, in Washington, waiting to see the full contents of the Mueller report, wondering what it will say.”

Miller described the events that occurred at the Helsinki summit in 2017 as a backdrop for the last chapter of his book.

After Trump, as Miller described, “derailed the FBI, denounced the press and said that he would take Vladimir Putin’s words over the advice of his own intelligence agencies,” a reporter had asked why the president chose to be faithful to the foreign leader instead of the intelligence agencies.

Putin responded, “As to who is to be believed, who is not to be believed: you can trust no one.”

Miller used Putin’s response to point out what he believes are similarities between the two presidents’ ideologies.

“And that is Putin’s ideology at its essence. No independent authorities are legitimate, there is no objective truth, reality is what I say it is,” Miller said.

He said that we cannot move forward as a society if we are not working from a shared set of facts.

“We have legitimate crises in our country – gun violence, opioids, even perhaps arguably a flawed immigration system.  Instead of focusing on those problems, we’re told that the real national emergency is a distant caravan of migrants,” Miller said.

In a time where social media is overcome by political debate and “bombarded by false postings on Facebook and Twitter as part of Russian propaganda,” Miller said that he worries for the health of American democracy as a result of the political polarization that Trump’s presidency caused.

“My question is, how did this happen?  How did millions of Americans end up on the same side as Russia? How did they become so distrustful of facts, science and the press, and more importantly, what do we do about it?” Miller said.

Rin Aljas, a first-year journalism graduate student, said that there is a higher demand for journalistic involvement now than ever.

“I think it’s more important to be journalists than ever before, not only because of the current political climate but also because of the way the role of journalism is changing.  The need for a gatekeeper with this flow of information is greater than ever before,” Aljas said.

Miller said that our problems cannot be fixed by fighting on Twitter or with in-laws, but rather the greatest source of optimism lies within college campuses and among young generations that have the ability to view politics in a different perspective.

“Unfortunately, it will be part of your job to figure out answers to some of these questions we’re raising. How do we recover our senses and salvage our democratic principles in a time when things are so divided?  I’m not sure, but I don’t doubt for a second that you guys can do it,” Miller said.

Miller, who, as a national security correspondent, had been following President Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia since the 2016 election, spoke about the series of events that led him to hone in on Trump’s speculated interference with the Russian Probe.

“Mueller already told us that he did not see enough evidence to prove collusion, and for some reason refused to decide whether there was enough evidence to make a case against the president on obstruction, but Mueller is not going to answer what or what isn’t in the rest of those pages,” Miller said.  “He’s not going to answer how we became so partisan and paralyzed as a country, he’s not going to tell us how we became so susceptible to Russian disinformation and he’s not going to tell us how to recover our senses.”

Maggie Attridge, a freshman journalism major, said that she’s not sure if she believes whether or not Trump obstructed justice in the 2016 election.

“I honestly don’t know.  My thing is, I want to be able to read the whole [Mueller report] to find the truth and I can’t.  [Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress] is just a short summary of a 300-page document and that is just not sufficient enough,” Attridge said.

The book traces the Russia story from the beginning, from the hack of the Democratic National Committee, deep into the Mueller Probe and “ends where we are now, in Washington, waiting to see the full contents of the Mueller report, wondering what it will say.”

Miller described the events that occurred at the Helsinki summit in 2017 as a backdrop for the last chapter of his book.

After Trump, as Miller described, “derailed the FBI, denounced the press, and said that he would take Vladimir Putin’s words over the advice of his own intelligence agencies,” a reporter had asked why Trump chose to believe the statement issued by Putin that Russia did not intervene in the 2016 election over the evidence that U.S. intelligence agencies provided.

Putin responded, “As to who is to be believed, who is not to be believed: you can trust no one.”

Miller used Putin’s response to point out what he believes are similarities between the two presidents’ ideologies.

“And that is Putin’s ideology at its essence. No independent authorities are legitimate, there is no objective truth, reality is what I say it is,” Miller said.

He said that we cannot move forward as a society if we are not working from a shared set of facts.

“We have legitimate crises in our country – gun violence, opioids, even perhaps arguably a flawed immigration system.  Instead of focusing on those problems, we’re told that the real national emergency is a distant caravan of migrants.”

In a time where social media is overcome by political debate and “bombarded by false postings on Facebook and Twitter as part of Russian propaganda,” Miller said that he worries for the health of American democracy as a result of the political polarization that Trump’s presidency caused.

“My question is, how did this happen?  How did millions of Americans end up on the same side as Russia? How did they become so distrustful of facts, science and the press, and more importantly, what do we do about it?” Miller said.

Rin Aljas, a first-year journalism graduate student, said that there is a higher demand for journalistic involvement now than ever.

“I think it’s more important to be journalists than ever before, not only because of the current political climate but also because of the way the role of journalism is changing.  The need for a gatekeeper with this flow of information is greater than ever before,” Aljas said.

Miller said that our problems cannot be fixed by fighting on Twitter or with in-laws, but rather the greatest source of optimism lies within college campuses and among young generations that have the ability to view politics in a different perspective.

“Unfortunately, it will be part of your job to figure out answers to some of these questions we’re raising.  How do we recover our senses and salvage our democratic principles in a time when things are so divided? I’m not sure, but I don’t doubt for a second that you guys can do it,” Miller said.