Exonerated
Page 10
The FBI does not believe that Source #1 directly provided this information to the identified news organization that published the September 23rd News Article.31
When it came time to update the FISA warrant in January 2017—because, as noted previously, the warrants are issued only for ninety-day terms—Steele’s relationship with the FBI had changed. The bureau told the court that it had “suspended its relationship” with Steele because of an “unauthorized disclosure” to the press—the leaked dossier. But the agency insisted this politicized behavior didn’t discredit the previous information it received. Here it is on page seventeen of the January FISA warrant application:
Source #1 has been an FBI source since [redacted]. Source #1 has been compensated [redacted] by the FBI. [Redacted]
…in or about October 2016, the FBI suspended its relationship with Source #1 due to Source #1’s unauthorized disclosure of information to the press. Notwithstanding the suspension of its relationship with Source #1, the FBI assesses Source #1 to be reliable as previous reporting from Source #1 has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings. Moreover, the FBI notes that the incident that led to the FBI suspending its relationship with Source #1 occurred after Source #1 provided the reporting that is described herein.
Source who now owns a foreign business/financial intelligence firm, was approached by an identified US. person, who indicated to Source #1 that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified US. person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s ties to Russia (the identified US. person and Source #1 have a long-standing business relationship). The identified US. person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified US. person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified US. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.32
But then the application gets really revelatory about why Steele went public with his dossier. Here:
…in or about late October 2016, however, after the Director of the FBI sent a letter to the US. Congress, which stated that the FBI had learned of new information that might be pertinent to an investigation that the FBI was conducting of Candidate #2. Source #1 told the FBI that he/she was frustrated with this action and believed it would likely influence the 2016 US. [sic] Presidential 1 election. In response to Source #1’s concerns, Source #1 independently, and against the prior admonishment from the FBI to speak only with the FBI on this matter, released the reporting discussed herein to an identified news organization. Although the FBI continues to assess Source #1’s reporting is reliable, as noted above, the FBI has suspended its relationship with Source #1 because of this disclosure.33
There it is, in black and white! Steele pushed the dossier on the public because he was mad that James Comey had reopened the email investigation on Trump rival Hillary Clinton just eight days before the election. He actually told the FBI he was afraid Donald Trump was going to win. And despite his overt, obvious bias, the FBI still refused to discount his reports. Instead, it continued to double down on his garbage reports. It doubled down on a double-dipping, anti-Trump source who may have been spun by double-agent informants, for all anyone knows.
In April 2017, Comey once again signed off on the second FISA warrant renewal. This time, footnote ten on pages seventeen and eighteen reveals that Steele had been fired:
[I]n or about October 2016, the FBI suspended its relationship with Source #1 due to Source #1’s unauthorized disclosure of information to the press. Subsequently, the FBI closed Source #1 as an FBI source. Nevertheless, the FBI assesses Source #1 to be reliable as previous reporting from Source #1 has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings. Moreover, the FBI notes that the incident that led the FBI to terminate its relationship with Source #1 occurred after Source #1 provided the reporting that is described herein.34
In other words, the FBI claims that despite Steele’s indiscretion, despite his inability to follow directions from his handlers, despite his clear-cut distress over the idea that Trump might win an election, despite his apparent anger at the timing of James Comey’s announcement regarding the reopening of the Clinton email investigation, and despite the fact the FBI suspended, and then ended, its relationship with its primary source, all the information that Christopher “Source #1” Steele provided to the FBI on Russiagate was still deemed worthy.
Is anyone surprised the FBI would say that? And that Comey would sign off on that multiple times? The bureau needed those reports because that’s all it had!
Luckily for the FBI, the FISA Court kept buying what it was selling.
And once the FBI had the FISA warrant, it was open season on Team Trump and the Trump presidency, given that the final two FISA warrant renewals happened when Trump was firmly established in office. The “two-hop” rule could ensnare most of the Trump operation. Agents could access email. They could interview suspects and the associates, friends, and family of suspects. And if people didn’t want to talk, the FBI could issue subpoenas forcing them to testify in front of grand juries.
With all this, the FBI could and did amass mountains of information. They could then quiz suspects like Papadopoulos. And if a date or detail was misstated or inaccurately recalled?
They could hit ‘em with a federal crime charge: lying—whether the person meant to or not—to an FBI agent.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Now that we’ve established the irrefutably shoddy nature of Christopher Steele’s dossier and his reports to the FBI, and how vital it was for the bureau to use his “intelligence” to obtain a FISA warrant in order to put the Trump campaign and administration under a legal microscope, we need to go back in time to examine what would normally be truly uncanny connections to the past.
But since these connections appear to have Glenn Simpson’s fingerprints on them, perhaps it’s not uncanny at all. Perhaps it is all of a piece.
If Steele’s reports begat the FISA warrant, then Glenn Simpson’s 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal begat Steele’s reports.
Yes, the article is largely about big-name Washingtonians lobbying on behalf of ex-Soviet billionaires—most notably about Republican stalwart Bob Dole’s being paid to help a Russian oligarch and about former FBI director William Sessions’s representing a Russian mobster. But an examination of the story reveals a familiar cast of characters.35 Dole had been contacted by Paul Manafort, who had been an advisor on Dole’s presidential campaign. Manafort was working for Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska was and still is reputed to be one of Vladimir Putin’s closest associates. The article also mentions Manafort’s working for Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yanukovych, another Manafort client. Guess what? Yanukovych wound up with multiple mentions in the Steele dossier as well, mostly in dispatches about how Manafort had received sizable kickbacks from him, which had been reported elsewhere in the media.
The subsequent story by Sara Carter in Circa that I cited in the first chapter spells out even more connections.36 Putin, upset by Deripaska’s visa troubles, deployed Russian deputy foreign minister Sergey Kislyak to lobby U.S. ambassador to Moscow William Burns to try to solve Deripaska’s U.S. visa problems. Putin eventually dispatched Kislyak to be his ambassador in Washington, where he got sucked into Russiagate for his contacts with Jeff Sessions. Ironically, Sessions’s failure to recall meeting with Kislyak—a brief, public encounter—is one of the reasons he recused himself from overseeing the Department of Justice’s inquiry into the Trump-Russia fantasy.
You can’t make this stuff up.
But let’s stick to Manafort and Deripaska. Glenn Simpson’s article reveals that he knew a good deal about both men as well as Yanukovych. As I noted earlier, this is the article in which he basically accuses Manafort of being an unregistered foreign agent with this line: “Mr. Manafort, who isn’t registered as a consultant to the Ukrainian leader, didn�
��t respond to requests for comment.”37
As it happens, Manafort and Deripaska also figured in a previous presidential campaign—and it raised flags for intelligence officers. I covered some of this earlier, but now, in the context of the Steele dossier, you can really see the plug-and-play in action.
Here’s what Simpson must have known: that Manafort’s pal and colleague Rick Davis had run John McCain’s campaign; that Davis, like Manafort, was in deep with the Russians, despite McCain’s growing distrust of the Putin regime; and that a significant sector of the McCain campaign considered Davis and his Eastern Europe connections toxic and hypocritical.
Here’s what Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and John Solomon wrote in a 2008 Washington Post story:
Within the campaign, Davis’s role has been controversial from the start, as some aides in late 2006 argued to McCain that the Davis firm’s work overseas conflicted with the senator’s record as a pro-democracy champion and an advocate of reducing the influence of lobbyists in Washington, according to two people familiar with the conversations. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of internal campaign conversations. The aides questioned whether Davis should be given an important title in the campaign because that would make him more vulnerable to criticism, the sources said.38
So Simpson likely knew that Manafort’s partner had been a divisive figure. And he had good reason to suspect that Manafort, with his well-known track record of running interference with a number of African strongmen,39 including kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and brutal Indonesian president Suharto, would be a divisive figure on team Trump. And if he wasn’t a problem within the campaign (although it turned out that he was; Corey Lewandowski, whom Manafort supplanted, did not go quietly), Manafort would make an easy target for Trump’s opposition.
It turns out that Manafort did try to join the McCain team, but his reputation raised flags, according to John Weaver, one of McCain’s top campaign advisors at the time. Here’s Sara Carter’s description:
“Davis repeatedly tried to bring Manafort into the McCain campaign and we were able to stop it and even have Davis removed for his ties to pro-Russian efforts,” Weaver said. “But this was short-lived as Davis actually and literally cried to the Senator every day for weeks until John relented and allowed Davis back.” 40
If Simpson knew that Manafort’s efforts to join the McCain campaign had caused a backlash, well, all the better—from his point of view. If McCain loyalists thought Manafort was tainted, no doubt law enforcement agents might want to investigate him. Remember, intelligence operatives did warn McCain. As the Circa article reports:
McCain’s office also was warned by U.S. intelligence about possible Russian military connections to one of his policy advisers at the IRI [International Republican Institute], causing aides to scramble to separate the Russian-born expert from the U.S. senator, U.S. officials and McCain aides said.41
This last fact is explosive, hypocritical, and vital to the manufacture of the Russiagate scandal. One presidential candidate—John McCain—was warned about the Russian connections and possible influencing operations that ran counter to U.S. policy. U.S. intelligence operatives working for the Republican Bush administration warned him. Another presidential candidate, Donald Trump, running for election while the Democratic Obama administration was in power, wasn’t warned about a guy with an even more controversial past and suspect connections—and who was also the partner of the guy whom McCain was warned about.
Did someone just drop the ball? Or was there a double standard, and corrupt Obama administration officials wanted to see Trump’s campaign tainted by a criminal element?
When Manafort talked his way onto the Trump team, Glenn Simpson knew all of this. This is his plug-and-play miracle. Now there was a red-flag operative within the Trump campaign. He could leak everything he knew about Manafort. He could channel it, which he evidently did, to his hired gun, Christopher Steele. Together, he and Steele could dish their Manafort dirt to the FBI and watch a crippling investigation play out.
But here’s the thing: just because Manafort was tainted doesn’t mean that the entire Trump team was—and, most important, it doesn’t mean Trump was.
So Glenn Simpson and Chris Steele went to town. They found “sources” to make explosive, frightening, mind-blowing charges. They used Russian disinformation specialists Trubnikov and Surkov. They located a source—Sergei Millian, according to the Washington Post—who claimed, falsely, to be close to Trump and said he’d heard about a plan to blackmail Trump. They “reported” something everyone who uses Twitter knew—that the Russians were trying to sow division in the U.S. They found another source who said the Russians were feeding material to the Trump campaign. They researched Carter Page. They grabbed widely reported information about the WikiLeaks email dump being tied to the Russians and rewrote it. They heard a bunch of hooey about former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen traveling to Prague to pay off Russian hackers. And then Steele wrote it up and reported it as bombshell “raw intelligence.”
All of it was plug-and-play. They plugged shocking allegations into the dossier, even though they knew it was the Mount Everest of horse manure. Then they fed it to Washington, which had been receiving reports from foreign intelligence services that also alleged connections between Trump and Russia. But those initial reports from intel services were problematic because you can’t spy on American citizens without a warrant and because the FBI can’t reliably discuss their provenance. But throw in explosive reports from a known and admired FBI informant like Christopher Steele and you now have the “evidence” to establish “probable cause” to start an investigation—an investigation that would leak and ultimately malign the Trump campaign.
Which was the goal of opposition research, and what I call Plan A.
Sure, George Papadopoulos, thanks or no thanks to Alexander Downer and U.K. intelligence, was in the FBI’s sightlines in the summer of 2016. But so, at exactly the same time, was the Steele dossier. Bruce Ohr knew about it. Andrew McCabe knew about it. Peter Strzok knew about it. Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele made sure they knew about it.
But the FBI management cabal running the Trump-team witch hunt said it didn’t discuss ongoing investigations—except via selected leaks or when updating Congress. And when, as the election neared and there was no news of operation Crossfire Hurricane or the other shocking charges from Steele’s reports, panic set in. It seems clear that Steele, and quite probably Simpson, began leaking. Michael Isikoff, Simpson’s pal, wrote about Carter Page in September. Steele shared the dossier with David Corn at Mother Jones magazine.
In the height of irony and deviousness, Steele even managed to get the dossier to John McCain—alerting the candidate who knew intelligence agents had raised Russian-influencing operations to him during his own presidential campaign. They got the senior senator from the Republican Party to alert the FBI—a shrewd, compelling move because, of course, McCain was wary of Russians and he was in the same party as Trump. It was a politically deft “nonpolitical” move. You’ve heard of counterintelligence? This was counterpolitics: using a member of the right to help the members of the left. Brilliant, yes, but truly sleazy.
The story of the distribution of the dossier to McCain led to the wide leaking of the document to the mainstream press. Here is how it played out.
Barely a week after the 2016 election, Sir Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Russia, traveled to Canada to attend the Halifax International Security Forum. There he approached David Kramer, a longtime associate of John McCain, and made his pitch. Kramer recalls that Wood “was aware of information that he thought I should be aware of and that Senator McCain might be interested in.” McCain was also at the conference. The three men met privately, and Wood briefed them on Steele’s collusion concerns and mentioned the possibility that there was video “of a sexual nature” that might have “shown
the president-elect in a compromising situation,” according to Kramer’s 2017 deposition for a lawsuit related to BuzzFeed’s publication of the dossier.42
At McCain’s request, Kramer flew to London. He met Steele on November 28, 2016, and read the dossier. Returning to the States, he picked up copies of the dossier from Glenn Simpson, according to his testimony. He brought the dossier to McCain, who asked him to show it to a State Department official and a National Security Council official and determine if it was being vetted. Meanwhile, McCain himself shared the dossier with James Comey at the FBI.
As for sharing it elsewhere, during his deposition, Kramer admitted he gave copies of the dossier to reporters at BuzzFeed, McClatchy news service, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and National Public Radio.43
McCain even addressed his decision to share the document with Comey.
“I had an obligation to bring to the attention of appropriate officials unproven accusations I could not assess myself, and which, were any of them true, would create a vulnerability to the designs of a hostile foreign power,” McCain writes in his 2018 memoir, The Restless Wave. “I discharged that obligation, and I would do it again. Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell.”44
McCain tried to make a case for raising his concerns. But unfortunately, he didn’t realize that he was spun like a top. And he never realized that the entire purpose of the dossier, when it was shown to him, had evolved; now it was being used to force an investigation to take down the president-elect. And if he and his associates were truly interested in verifying the information, then why did his associate shamelessly leak the unverified allegations to the media? Why not simply give them to the FBI?