Ball of Collusion Read online

  When Did It Start and Who Was the Target?

  Even if we just consider the investigation led by the Justice Department and the FBI, there has been sleight of hand about how things got rolling. Politicized misdirection, of course, was a signature feature of the Obama Justice Department. Recall the Clinton emails probe: the Justice Department was a de facto Clinton campaign adjunct (and a not very subtle one), camouflaging the existence and criminal nature of the probe, with Attorney General Lynch ordering FBI Director Comey to describe the effort as a “matter” rather than an investigation. Similar dissimulations marked the Trump–Russia probe.

  Before there was a Trump angle, the FBI was conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s cyberespionage. That evolved into an investigation of Russia’s influence operation against the 2016 campaign—which, for transparently partisan purposes, has been tirelessly described by the media, Democrats, and government officials as an “investigation of Russia’s interference in the election,” notwithstanding that there was no tampering with the voting process. This inquiry came to include the Trump–Russia angle, thanks to the exertions of CIA Director Brennan and his counterparts in British and European intelligence services—likeminded in their transnational-progressive alarm at Trump’s NATO-bashing and overt infatuation with Putin.

  Many informed people refer to late July 2016, when the FBI formally opened a counterintelligence investigation code-named “Crossfire Hurricane,” as the commencement of the probe. That, however, is just a bookkeeping entry—sheer form over substance. The truth is that Trump–Russia investigative activity, even by the FBI, was ongoing well before an investigative file was established.

  The FBI is cute about this too, drawing untenable distinctions between when key “evidence,” such as the Steele dossier, was given to the Bureau, versus when the dossier purportedly first came to the attention of what the Bureau calls its “closely held investigative team” at headquarters. For example, FBI leadership long maintained that its headquarters team did not learn about the Steele dossier until mid-September 2016, less than a month before it sought the Page FISA warrant. This claim is regurgitated by Democrats, who maintain, to quote Rep. Adam Schiff (now the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee), that the dossier “played no role in launching the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation” (bold underlining in original).5

  Nonsense. Steele began supplying his reports to the FBI on July 5, 2016—ironically, the same day as Director Comey’s Hillary Clinton press conference. In London that day, Steele gave the “intelligence” he had by then compiled to Michael Gaeta, the Bureau’s Rome-based legal attaché, whom Steele knew from the FIFA soccer investigation. Huddling with Steele was so important to Agent Gaeta that he took pains to get the green light from his superiors and the State Department for this sudden trip to Britain. Steele proceeded to tell him that the Republican presidential nominee was in Putin’s pocket. Is it possible that Gaeta decided to sit on this astonishing information rather than alert his chain of command? Not at the FBI I worked investigations with for almost twenty years.

  But even if you buy that unlikely story, Steele and his dossier coauthor, Glenn Simpson, informed Bruce Ohr, a high-ranking Justice Department official, of their Trump–Russia allegations that summer. As we’ll see, these conversations occurred both before and after the FBI formally opened “Crossfire Hurricane” in late July. The allegation against Trump cannot have been much of a surprise to Ohr: not only were Steele and Simpson longtime acquaintances of his; Ohr’s wife Nellie—a Russia scholar, CIA contractor, and Hillary Clinton supporter—had been hired by Simpson as a Fusion GPS contractor. She was collaborating with Simpson and Steele on the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump project.

  Steele dilated on his Trump–Russia allegations at a breakfast meeting with Bruce and Nellie Ohr in Washington on Saturday, July 30—just one day before Crossfire Hurricane was formally opened. After the meeting, Ohr promptly called FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (an old friend and colleague from their days investigating organized crime in New York) to pass along Steele’s alarming claims. Within either hours or a few days (Bruce Ohr’s congressional testimony is murky on the timing), Ohr was at FBI headquarters, meeting with McCabe and the latter’s counsel, Lisa Page—who had worked for Ohr at the Justice Department for several years, investigating international organized crime (particularly the Russian variety). McCabe and Page put Ohr in touch with lead the Trump–Russia investigator, Agent Peter Strzok. Over the ensuing months, the FBI both took information directly from Steele and used Ohr as a conduit for information from Steele.

  Who started which investigation, when and why? These are unsettled questions. So is the most significant question: Exactly who was under investigation? Common sense tells us that the principal subject was Donald Trump. It is risible to suggest that the immense international investigative effort here was triggered by concerns over Carter Page, whom Russian spies dismissed as an “idiot” when dealing with him in 2013; twenty-eight-year-old George Papadopoulos, who was still touting participation in the “Model U.N.” on his paltry résumé; or even Paul Manafort, whose labors for Russia-friendly Ukrainians had been well known for years. The fact that Donald Trump could become president, and then did become president, was what animated the Obama administration and allied governments. But this obvious fact was the subject of gamesmanship before and after the 2016 election.

  Democrats and the media assert that Page parted ways with the Trump campaign weeks before FISA surveillance was authorized on October 21, 20166 (though they conveniently avoid noting that what prompted the severance was the recent push by Brennan, Simpson, and Steele to draw the attention of Capitol Hill and the media to the dossier’s allegations). Put aside that the Trump campaign was so chaotic and disorganized that it was difficult to tell whether low-level supporters were “in” or “around” it. Page was surveilled precisely because of his connection to the Trump campaign. The FBI’s Page warrant applications explicitly stated the Bureau’s belief that “Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #1’s [i.e., Trump’s] campaign” were collaborating in Russia’s espionage. The Bureau was relying on Steele, who claimed that Page was an emissary running messages between the Trump and Putin camps in an elaborate scheme of campaign influence operations and corrupt payoffs.

  More to the point, once a court authorizes eavesdropping, agents may not only intercept communications prospectively. They may also seize past communications—such as stored emails, text messages, and social media posts. Manifestly, the FBI hoped the warrant would help them go backwards. Of particular interest was Page’s July 2016 Russia trip, during which, according to the dossier, he met with high-ranking Putin confidants—a claim that Page vehemently denies and that has never been verified. Page was the subject of the surveillance, but he was never the objective. Investigators saw him as a window into Trump’s ties to Russia.

  After the election, the Obama administration confronted a different challenge: how to keep the investigation alive after Trump took office, at which point he would have the power to shut it down. This was done by telling him he was not under investigation—notwithstanding that he was the central figure in the investigation. The probe was structured so that, even though Trump’s name would not formally appear on any investigative file or list of targets proposed for court surveillance, by pursuing the investigation of the named targets, the FBI would incidentally gather evidence against Trump. The Bureau disingenuously elevated form over substance, telling the president he was not a suspect (which merely meant, “we haven’t opened a case file on you”) even as it homed in on his campaign in hopes of proving the Trump–Russia conspiracy of Steele’s imagination.

  Then, a few days after Comey’s May 9, 2017, firing, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe formally opened a criminal investigation against Trump for suspected obstruction—even though, inconveniently, two days after Comey’s firing, McCabe testified to Congress that no one had attempted to ob
struct the Bureau’s Russia investigation. In essence, McCabe’s action merely caused the FBI’s files to reflect what had long been reality: under the guise of the Russia counterintelligence probe, and in the absence of any hard evidence of criminal activity, the FBI was examining whether the president (a) had been in a criminal conspiracy with Russia and (b) was covering it up. A few days later, however, when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller, the Trump–Russia investigation was effectively wrested from FBI control and entrusted to the special counsel. Adopting Comey’s public announcement of the probe (in March 2017 testimony), Rosenstein described it as a “counterintelligence” investigation … although Rosenstein also adopted Comey’s slippery caveat that the “counterintelligence” probe would include an “assessment” of whether any crimes had been committed—i.e., it was an investigation hoping to find a predicate crime, even though no one dared call it a criminal investigation.

  When did the investigation start? Why did it start? What kind of investigation was it? It has proved impossible to get straight answers to these questions.

  The Investigation … and the Narrative

  Why is so much time and energy spent on fixing the origination of the Trump–Russia investigation? It is not just that the government is withholding documentation. The “when it all began” question is driven by the political battle to dictate the narrative.

  That should never be the case. Questions about when and why an investigation starts involve matters of objective fact. Here, though, the cone of top-secret intelligence hides that information. Trump antagonists want the probe to be seen as triggered by an episode that colorably raises suspicions of a Trump–Russia espionage plot. This would attest to the investigators’ good faith and paint Trump as the villain, even if there was not enough evidence to prove criminal collusion. Trump partisans, by contrast, want the font of collusion to be a fraudulent episode. This paints the president as a victim and the investigators as perpetrators of a hoax, even if there is evidence of unsavory but non-criminal collusion.

  If the media has now decided that the president’s fans are overemphasizing Carter Page and the role of the Steele dossier, that is a self-serving case of amnesia. It was Trump antagonists who started that game.

  “Trump Adviser’s Visit to Moscow Got the F.B.I.’s Attention.” That was the page-one headline The New York Times ran on April 20, 2017.7 There followed a breathless report that “a catalyst for the F.B.I. investigation into connections between Russia and President Trump’s campaign” was a July 2016 visit to Moscow by Carter Page. It was due to the Moscow trip by Page, dubbed a Trump “foreign policy adviser,” that “the F.B.I. obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court” during the stretch run of the presidential campaign.

  No fewer than six of the Times’s top reporters, along with a researcher, worked their anonymous “current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials” in order to generate this blockbuster. With these leaks, the paper confidently reported: “From the Russia trip of the once-obscure Mr. Page grew a wide-ranging investigation, now accompanied by two congressional inquiries, that has cast a shadow over the early months of the Trump administration” (emphasis added).

  Oh sure, the Times acknowledged, there might have been a couple of other factors involved. “Paul Manafort, then Mr. Trump’s campaign manager [i.e., at the time of Page’s trip], was already under criminal investigation in connection with payments from a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.” And “WikiLeaks and two websites later identified as Russian intelligence fronts had begun releasing emails obtained when Democratic Party servers were hacked.” But the trigger for the investigation—its main “catalyst”—was Page. George Papadopoulos? Somehow, despite this centipede of journalistic leg-work and this chorus of insider intel sources, the name Papadopoulos does not appear in the Times’s story.

  So imagine the dizzy spell seven months later—a slightly early case of New Year’s reverie—when the Times premiered its Origin Story 2.0, the Papadopoulos yarn, under the headline “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt.”8 This time, with a mere six doughty journalists (no seventh wheel researcher on this holiday weekend), the Gray Lady explained that it was actually young George who triggered the FBI’s massive probe by … wait for it … a night of boozy blather in London. Papadopoulos, an unknown figure back when he had pled guilty a few weeks before the Times’s new blockbuster, was now elevated to “the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration.”

  Wait a second, what happened to Carter Page? Well, if you were willing to hang in there through the first 36 paragraphs of the new 3,000-word story, you found a fleeting mention: “A trip to Moscow by another adviser, Carter Page, also raised concerns at the F.B.I.” You don’t say!

  What actually happened to Page is obvious. The dossier that was the script for the first media–Democrat Origin Story, starring Page, collapsed. Recall that Steele’s reports, based on anonymous Russian sources, alleged that (a) there was an explicit Trump–Russia conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 election; (b) the conspiracy included Russian hacking of Democratic email accounts in which Trump campaign officials, including Manafort and Page, were complicit; and (c) Page met with two top Kremlin operatives on the Moscow trip—operatives who discussed with him a quid pro quo arrangement to drop sanctions against Russia, floated the possibility of providing the Trump campaign with “kompromat” (compromising information) on Hillary Clinton, and warned that Trump better be careful because the Putin regime had a kompromat file on him, too.

  In the months after the Times’s big report on Page’s Moscow trip, we learned that the dossier was actually an opposition-research project paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.9 We found out that the FBI regarded the most notorious dossier allegations as “salacious and unverified”—and if this was true when former FBI Director Comey testified to it in June 2017, it had to have been true eight months earlier, when the Page surveillance warrant was first sought.10 It emerged that in England, where he was being sued for libel, Steele had explained to a court that the dossier was merely a compilation of bits of “raw intelligence” that were “unverified” and that he passed along because they “warranted further investigation.” The ardently anti-Trump former spy claimed to be worried that there might be national-security threats, not that there really were any such threats. That, he now says, was for the FBI to figure out.11

  Of course, the FBI hadn’t figured it out. In seeking court warrants, the Bureau had trusted Steele. As Judiciary Committee Senators Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) have recounted:

  When asked at the March 2017 briefing [of Judiciary Committee leaders] why the FBI relied on the dossier in the FISA applications absent meaningful corroboration—and in light of the highly political motives surrounding its creation—then-Director [James] Comey stated that the FBI included the dossier allegations about Carter Page in the FISA applications because Mr. Steele himself was considered reliable due to his past work with the Bureau.12

  Yet the Obama Justice Department and the FBI concealed from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court the Clinton campaign’s sponsorship of Steele’s work. Moreover, the Justice Department stonewalled House inquiries about whether dossier allegations were used in applying for the Page surveillance warrant … even though, shortly before the Times ran its April 2017 Page extravaganza, unnamed “US officials briefed on the [Russia] investigation” had leaked to CNN that the dossier had indeed been used to obtain the FISA warrant.13 And even when the Justice Department grudgingly acknowledged to the court that Steele had been officially removed from the investigation (over press contacts that the FBI had implausibly denied in the original FISA warrant application), the judges were not told that the FBI was still relying on him as an informant, using Bruce Ohr as their cutout.

  While the dossier’s
lack of heft became increasingly clear, Page—an Annapolis grad and a former naval-intelligence officer who has never been accused of a crime and has never met Donald Trump14—became a public fixture, vigorously and credibly denying Steele’s allegations. To be sure, Page’s views about Russia are accommodationist: he has been an investor in the Russian energy sector and blamed United States policies for tensions with the Putin regime. But while that might qualify him for a job at the State Department, we are talking here about a job as the point-man in a traitorous anti-American plot. Not only did Page insist he was unacquainted with Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin, the highly-placed Russians with whom Steele placed him at Moscow meetings; he also maintained that he had never met Manafort, who supposedly directed him in the Trump–Russia espionage plot. While the Justice Department and FBI had stressed to the court that Russia tried to recruit Page as an asset in 2013, they apparently low-keyed (if they mentioned at all) the fact that Page had cooperated with the Justice Department in the investigation of the Russian spies. To say the least, such cooperation would not exactly commend Page for later Russian reliance on him to convey corrupt messages between the Kremlin and Trump. Not only had information from Page been used by the Justice Department against Russian spies in the arrest complaint; Victor Podobnyy, the Russian recruiter, was quoted referring to Page as an “idiot.”15

  In the months after the Times’s big Page story, the dossier came to appear fraudulent. The notion that Page could have played the role assigned to him strained credibility, and even a cynic who believed Donald Trump was open to conspiring with Russia had to admit that the Kremlin had agents far better positioned than Page for an approach to him.16

  We will come to Papadopoulos in due course. For now, what is remarkable is that, in pivoting to Papadopoulos seven months after its Page story melted, the Newspaper of Record tut-tutted that it was not the dossier that “so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election.” This reliance on the dossier, the Times now said, was a false claim that “Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged.” Somehow omitted from the report were the inconvenient details that it was the Times itself that led the charge in claiming it was Page’s trip to Moscow that provoked the investigation, and that it was the Steele dossier that so alarmed the FBI about that trip.