Exonerated

by Dan Bongino

  In fact, another leak—actually a leak about an investigation into leaks—further rocked Mueller and Rosenstein’s world. On July 27, Circa reported that James A. Baker, the FBI’s general counsel and Comey’s close pal, was under investigation “for allegedly leaking classified national security information to the media.”17 Details about the investigation were scarce—five months later, the Washington Post reported he was tied to a “probe of a leak involving the FBI, the National Security Agency and stories that appeared about a year ago involving surveillance techniques for a particular email provider”—and Baker still had not been charged with any wrongdoing. But news that one of the FBI’s most respected leaders was under the microscope must have stunned Mueller again. It was starting to look like the upper management staff of his beloved bureau was infected with some kind of sleazy virus.

  And yet, despite all this muck and mire, all this deviousness and duplicity, the tenuous evidence, the unverified sources, the raw intelligence that was so dirty you might get contaminated just by reading it, Robert Mueller decided that the investigation was worthy and he would continue to move ahead.

  Dumping this sham investigation would have been the standard thing to do. That would be the status quo method. But there were bombshells looming in the future. Scandals that might cripple his team involving Strzok, Page, and Baker. The FBI would have two black eyes and no way to defend itself.

  He needed a Plan C. He needed to prove that Christopher Steele’s reports—which resulted in the FISA warrant, which he had no idea was a plug-and-play scam—were more fact that fiction. He was going to use the threat of prosecution and the legal heft of the FBI and the special counsel to hit the suspects with charges that would put them between a rock and a hard place known as a federal penitentiary. This was his mindset, I believe. He was going to save the FBI and the DOJ. And he knew exactly how to do it.

  He decided to double down on Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele’s plug-and-play reports.

  The special counsel determined that the best defense for his beloved FBI was a good offense. Given the circumstances—the facts that Comey had been canned by the president, Strzok had just been exposed, and Baker was under attack—and given Mueller’s own long, illustrious background running the bureau, it’s really hard to see him playing this any other way. Admitting that the bureau had been tricked into the most controversial, damaging, unnecessary investigation in U.S. history wasn’t an option. If he did that, he would have to close the investigation without really nailing anyone. And that was never going to happen. The agency was teetering precipitously, but it wasn’t going to collapse on his watch.

  He was going to save the FBI by going to war against the Trump campaign.

  And if he had to, he was going to go to war against Trump. And it all went down in June and July of 2017.

  THE WRIT HITS THE FAN

  After months of no visible activity—except leaks and pompous, smug testimony from Comey—the Trump-Russia investigation got busy fast. Rosenstein and Mueller’s investigative team started moving in hurry-up offense mode, like the game clock was winding down and they needed to score a few touchdowns. But why the sudden rush?

  In the middle of June, George Papadopoulos was approached by an Israeli-American businessman named Charles Tawil. According to Papadopoulos, Tawil bragged to him about doing business with corrupt African presidents and mentioned doing business together. Tawil flew to visit Papadopoulos in Mykonos, Greece. He paid for Papadopoulos to visit Israel for meetings. There, he gave Papadopoulos a suitcase with $10,000 in it, and then paid for Papadopoulos to go to Cyprus.18

  The entire time, according to Papadopoulos, they had no contract in place. Eventually, Papadopoulos flew to Greece, left the money with a lawyer, and went to meet his future wife in Italy. Remember all this. We’ll come back to Papadopoulos in a second.

  Early in the morning on July 26, the FBI conducted a shock-and-awe raid on Paul Manafort’s home in Alexandria, Virginia. Agents arrived with a search warrant and seized a trove of tax and banking documents. The sudden, unannounced, predawn raid came after investigators had already issued subpoenas to Manafort and his associates demanding details about his income, the Washington Post reports.19 The message from the special counsel was crystal clear: investigators were ratcheting up the pressure on Manafort and they were looking for evidence of financial misdeeds that were not necessarily tied to the campaign investigation.

  The Post reported the obvious: “Manafort’s allies fear that Mueller hopes to build a case against Manafort unrelated to the 2016 campaign, in the hope that he would provide information against others in Trump’s inner circle in exchange for lessening his legal exposure.”20

  One day later, July 27, news broke that FBI lawyer James Baker was under investigation. That was the big breaking story in D.C. But something else went down that day. Papadopoulos was greeted by FBI agents at Washington Dulles airport, where they searched his bags repeatedly. According to Papadopoulos’s book, the agents appeared very frustrated after going through his bags. Then they arrested him on probable cause without a preapproved warrant.

  What were they looking for? Remember, Papadopoulos had been given $10,000—in cash—just weeks before by Charles Tawil, a mysterious businessman who took an interest in Papadopoulos out of the blue. That’s a serious amount of cash. If he had been given $9,999 and flown to Dulles airport from Europe, nobody would have blinked. But anyone bringing $10,000 or more in cash into America has to declare it to customs officials. Failing to declare it is a potential crime. If Papadopoulos had trucked in the full amount that Tawil had given him—and Tawil has confirmed giving him the cash—but not declared it, he could have faced possible civil and criminal penalties, including “a fine of not more than $500,000 and imprisonment of not more than ten years, are provided for failure to file a report, filing a report containing a material omission or misstatement, or filing a false or fraudulent report. In addition, the currency or monetary instrument may be subject to seizure and forfeiture.”21

  Luckily for Papadopoulos, he had stashed the cash with a lawyer in Greece. The next day, sleepless, bewildered, and without his lawyers, the former Trump campaign advisor was taken to court. Interestingly, Mueller’s dream-team prosecutors showed up late to court. Could it be they were counting on nabbing Papadopoulos on a “failure to report” charge? It seems entirely plausible that they had notified a U.S. attorney about their intentions in a predrafted arrest warrant application, but that any plan to hit Papadopoulos went awry when they discovered Papadopoulos was cashless—and that meant they were forced to scrap their intended charges in favor of an over-the-top probable-cause arrest.

  When they did finally arrive in court, they hit Papadopoulos with two charges—neither of which involved collusion. Instead, the man who supposedly kicked off the highest-profile FBI investigation in modern history was accused of lying to an FBI agent and obstructing justice. Both are crimes, and obstruction can carry serious potential jail time. But in Papadopoulos’s case, they appear to have been flimsy charges.22 As he documents in his book, Papadopoulos never had a lawyer present for his initial interview with the two bureau agents. He answered their questions without checking his calendar and email. He got dates and sequences of events wrong regarding Mifsud and his campaign work on meetings that had happened in a whirlwind seven months earlier.23 Can you remember work meetings from seven months ago off the top of your head? I don’t believe we are talking about devious lies here. And, remember, Papadopoulos never denied meeting Mifsud.

  The obstruction charge, which carried a maximum sentence of twenty-five years in prison, was even more ridiculous. Papadopoulos had asked his lawyers if he could delete his Facebook account and was advised that he could. So he did. The FBI charged that this was calculated obstruction. Obviously, since Papadopoulos sought advice from counsel, it seems pretty clear he never intended to obstruct anything. He got bad legal advice.
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br />   As Papadopoulos himself has noted, his arrest was hardly standard operating procedure for the type of charges he was hit with. As a former law enforcement agent, I can also tell you that nonemergency federal arrests for nonviolent offenders are typically made either in the early morning or during business hours. The reason for that is that the government, prosecutors included, typically work on a nine-to-five schedule. Yes, arrests are made 24/7. But if you are booking someone for a low-key charge, which lying is, you would typically plan it all in advance with the suspect. And when you’re trying to induce a nonviolent offender to cooperate in an investigation, making the process as painless as possible for his or her lawyer can be a bonus. Lawmen either set up a time for the suspect to come in and voluntarily turn himself or herself in, or if they’re going to hit a house, they do it early in the morning. But staking out Dulles when they knew the subject they were after was flying onward to Chicago? That’s not really the definition of a flight risk. I mean, he’s coming to America; he’s not bolting for the border.

  So either Mueller’s team had counted on nailing Papadopoulos with the money or they rushed into action, motivated by all the bad mojo surrounding the special investigator, and wanted to change the narrative in a hurry.

  Either way, Papadopoulos was given the nastiest, most intimidating treatment possible. He was arrested coming off a plane that arrived in the evening, then he was searched, questioned with hands and legs shackled, processed with a late-night mug shot, thrown into a grim holding cell, and then dragged to his hearing. It’s not like he was on the run or a threat. The FBI could have waited for him to get to Chicago, where his lawyers and his family were located. Instead, they went for the airport bust. It seems very likely the FBI knew about the $10,000 in cash—if they were monitoring his phone, they knew he had discussed the cash with his girlfriend and future wife, Simona—and hoped to nail him on an additional charge. So they went for intimidation tactics, trying to terrify the poorest, least-connected, arguably least-experienced person in the entire Trump-Russia investigation into making some kind of admission.

  It didn’t work. One day later, Papadopoulos was charged, released, and on his way to Chicago, any hopes of landing a job with the Trump administration utterly destroyed.

  So in two days, the prosecutors finally made some moves. They decided it was time for their writs to hit the fan, time to flex some muscle and put some pressure on two of Trump’s most suspect advisors.

  But what did they get out of all of this? Not much when it comes to the collusion investigation.

  They got all the Manafort files. All the computer equipment and records taken from the house in Virginia was far more likely to be about his other business interests than about Trump and Russia. They got information about his work with partner Rick Gates, his consulting gigs, his failed real estate ventures, and his previous work for Oleg Deripaska.24

  But about the Trump campaign and secret deals with Russia? Nothing.

  As for the Papadopoulos arrest, FBI agents seemed to have achieved only two things: they both infuriated and scared the hell out of someone on Team Trump. Papadopoulos writes that during the court hearing, he was surprised to hear the prosecutors tell the judge that he was “willing to cooperate with the government in its ongoing investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.” But here’s the thing about that: Papadopoulos never colluded or worked with the Russians. So his cooperation wasn’t going to help Mueller’s mission.

  On August 2, 2017, Plan C was officially encoded.

  Rod Rosenstein released a second memo redefining the scope of the special investigator probe. It’s called “The Scope of Investigation and Definition of Authority.” It’s four pages long, and nearly half of the publicly released document is redacted. But this section has only one part redacted:

  The May 17, 2017 order was worded categorically in order to permit its public release without confirm specific investigations involving specific individuals. This memorandum provides a more specific description of your authority. The following allegations were within the scope of the Investigation at the time of your appointment and are within the scope of the Order.

  [Redacted]

  Allegations that Paul Manafort

  Committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to intervene with the 2016 election for the President of the United States, in violation of Federal Law.

  Committed a crime or crimes arising out of payments he received from the Ukrainian Government before or during the tenure of President Viktor Yanukovych.25

  What was the purpose of this scope memo? Why was it released when it was? For more than a year, I’ve had two theories on this. The first involves the redacted sections, in which Rosenstein lays out other avenues for Mueller to investigate. I believe this section contains more charges from the reports Steele sent the FBI—which basically echo the dossier. Rosenstein was spelling out instructions in a sort of last-minute Hail Mary pass, hoping Mueller would find somebody who could vindicate the FISA warrant application and save the investigation from being exposed as a megamillion-dollar witch hunt.

  The second reason for increasing the scope memo is that Rosenstein wanted to make it crystal clear to Paul Manafort that Robert Mueller had a license to destroy him. Crimes relating to payments from the Ukraine? That could include money laundering, tax evasion, and undeclared income. And there have been numerous stories in the press about this stuff.

  With the release of the Mueller report, we now know this is exactly right. He comes clean on page eleven, writing that the August 2 scope memo:

  …confirmed that the Special Counsel had been authorized since his appointment to investigate allegations that three Trump campaign officials—Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and George Papadopoulos “committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.” The memorandum also confirmed the Special Counsel’s authority to investigate certain other matters, including two additional sets of allegations involving Manafort (crimes arising from payments he received from the Ukrainian government and crimes arising from his receipt of loans from a bank whose CEO was then seeking a position in the Trump Administration); allegations that Papadopoulos committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government; and four sets of allegations involving Michael Flynn, the former National Security Advisor to President Trump.26

  Rod Rosenstein released the revised memo to basically underscore his support. He had his own motives for this too, from where I sit. He is the guy who signed off on the fourth FISA warrant application. He essentially underwrote the investigation into a bunch of claims that have basically evaporated or, if not evaporated, have definitely not been confirmed in any way, shape, or form.

  At this point in August, the FISA warrant on Carter Page had been open for ten months and renewed four times. Was Page in line for an indictment in August 2017? As I write this now, it’s 2019 and he still hasn’t been indicted. The application Rosenstein signed was based on three ounces of hearsay, two tablespoons of paranoia, a quart of fear, three pounds of misinformation, and a metric ton of politicization. It was a recipe for disaster! The Strzok texts were proof that the whole thing was baseless. The lack of verified allegations was proof it was a fantasy. The fact that there were no emails, texts, or phone calls with Russia or Russian agents that definitively linked Team Trump to an ironclad conspiracy to steal the election was proof there was no there there!

  But there was proof that Manafort had lied and broken the law. And his own partner, Rick Gates, who had served as the deputy chairman of the Trump campaign, was facing substantial charges, too. There were reports about Manafort’s massive debt, about shell companies, and about laundering operations.

  So Rosenstein
needed to broaden the scope to include targeting Manafort. Manafort was definitely in the Steele reports that had been filed to the FBI and he was mentioned in the dossier. Taking Manafort down would be useful in two ways to Rosenstein and Mueller. First, it would give Mueller’s team leverage that could be used to pressure the former campaign chairman to roll on other Trump team members. That would be a huge win because that would prove there was a conspiracy and would justify the entire malevolent operation. Second, even if Manafort didn’t talk, nailing him on other charges would still provide him with cover: Manafort was a bad guy. His presence was suspect. Nailing him would prove—at least in Rosenstein’s twisted thinking—that the investigation wasn’t a corrupt, poorly thought-out extension of a political campaign. It would prove that the FBI hadn’t been duped by Simpson and Steele’s plug-and-play information-laundering operation.

  Rosenstein needed this to prove that everything and everyone who had gone before—the words and deeds of Simpson, Steele, Strzok, Comey, Brennan, and Clapper—were on the up-and-up. That the investigation had been pure of heart and pure of vision. That the FISA warrant application he had signed was legitimate.

  The revised scope memo may have had a third purpose, too: to instruct Mueller to investigate obstruction charges. As the Mueller investigation dragged on and on with no surprising indictments or bombshell revelations, I began to suspect that the scope had been broadened to focus on the president himself, and that Mueller and his witch hunters had been fully aware, since the inception of the probe, that the collusion story was a hoax.

  But if Rosenstein did instruct Mueller to probe obstruction charges, it would be a truly mind-boggling event. Why? Well, suppose Mueller decided to investigate the Comey firing and treat it as if it were to be part of an obstruction case. Since Trump and Sessions asked Rosenstein to write the memo that justified giving Comey the heave-ho, then the man in charge of the investigation—Rosenstein—would also be a witness to the supposed obstruction—which should have disqualified him from authorizing the investigation into obstruction.