Manafort in the meantime continued to airbrush Yanukovych’s image in the West. To engage Congress on the Ukrainian government’s behalf, he hired influential Washington lobbyists—Mercury Public Affairs (a Republican-leaning outfit that does business with Deripaska) and the Podesta Group, run by Tony Podesta (the brother of Democratic powerbroker and eventual Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta). Both firms were on the radar screen of Mueller’s investigators, who were determined to put some enforcement teeth into FARA in order to nail Manafort—which meant it was no longer business as usual for other cars on the gravy train.44 Manafort also steered $4 million to a politically connected New York law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. One of its partners, former Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig, orchestrated the composition of a report that essentially whitewashed the Yanukovych regime’s civil rights abuses in Tymoshenko’s trial. Craig was eventually indicted by the Justice Department on a referral from Mueller’s office. Another lawyer at the firm, Alex van der Zwaan, pled guilty in Mueller’s investigation to making false statements about his consultation with Manafort’s team.45
Yanukovych’s moment of truth came in late 2013. He was poised to sign the Association Agreement with the EU, a framework for integration. Putin furiously turned up the heat: blocking Ukrainian imports, drastically reducing Ukrainian exports, bleeding billions of trade dollars from Ukraine’s economy, threatening to cut off all gas supplies and drive Ukraine into default if Kiev made its bed with the West. Manafort pleaded with his client to stick with the EU. Yanukovych caved, however, signing an alternative pact with Putin to assure gas supplies and financial aid. It was over this decision that the Euromaidan protests erupted. Yanukovych fled the country in early 2014, given sanctuary in Moscow. Subsequently, Regions renounced Yanukovych, blaming him for the outbreak of violence and for looting the treasury.46 The party disbanded, with many of its members reemerging as the Opposition Bloc, the party to which Manafort gravitated—along with Kilimnik and W. Samuel Patten—another political consultant protégé of Manafort’s.
Foreign Money and American Politics
While Ukraine was in revolt, Manafort had had enough success that he was a viable U.S. commodity again—at least for the Trump campaign, from which the Bush-connected network of consultants and activists was shying away. Manafort was anxious to return to U.S. politics and agreed to work for free. Not that he wasn’t planning to cash in—he was always planning to cash in, whatever he was doing and wherever he was doing it. Ever pressured by the ruinous debt he owed Deripaska, shortly after becoming Trump chairman he asked Kilimnik in an email, “How do we use [this] to get whole?” On July 7, he instructed Kilimnik to offer Deripaska information about Trump’s campaign—“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate.”47 But Deripaska denies ever getting any information about Trump’s campaign from the man he says swindled him, and Trump fired Manafort the next month when news broke of millions of dollars in secret payments allegedly channeled to Manafort by Yanukovych’s regime.
Lots of smoke. And not the end of it. Manafort also instructed Kilimnik to pass campaign polling data to two of his Ukrainian oligarch backers, Akhmetin and Serhiy Lyovochkin. Democrats claimed that this was part of the Trump campaign’s coordination with Putin—on the theory that the polling data would enable Russian propagandists to target campaign messaging at important voting districts. But there’s no evidence that the oligarchs actually got any of the data, much less that they had anything to do with the Kremlin’s cyberespionage—again, Trump’s opposition assumes Americans hear “Ukrainian oligarch” and think “Putin operative.” The likelihood is that Manafort, under increasing financial stress, was trying to impress his chief financial backers.48
The connections are disturbing nevertheless. Even allowing for the fact that Mueller dramatically altered the Justice Department’s indulgent approach to FARA enforcement, Manafort and Gates were charged and convicted of serious tax and fraud felonies. Kilimnik has been indicted for conspiring with Manafort to tamper with a witness.49 He is believed to be in Russia and, like other Russians Mueller indicted, he will never face an American trial, but Manafort admitted to the witness-tampering conspiracy in his prosecution. Patten, meanwhile, pled guilty for working as an unregistered agent of Ukraine. This involved scoring tickets to Trump inauguration events for Kilimnik, Lyovochkin, and an unidentified Ukrainian—tickets for which Lyovochkin, a non-American, provided the funds: a violation of campaign finance law.50
These actions are not “collusion with Russia.” They are influence peddling. They are a snapshot of the interplay of shady foreign wealth, American officials, and the lucrative Washington political industry that brings them together. It stinks. And it is a bipartisan odor.
CHAPTER FOUR
Intel … the Obama Way
In 2014, it surfaced that the CIA had hacked into the computer system of the Senate Intelligence Committee. At the time, the committee’s staff was investigating the agency’s controversial enhanced-interrogation program, in which high-level terrorists were subjected to physically and psychologically coercive questioning, including water-boarding. John Brennan, the CIA director, indignantly denied the hacking allegation. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he insisted, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. “I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.”
Brennan was lying. That’s what he does.
Obama’s CIA had indeed spied on the Senate. And Brennan knew it. An inspector-general probe established that the hacking had occurred. While maintaining that their actions “were lawful,” culpable CIA officials conceded that their actions were “in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan.” Cornered, Brennan apologized to senior committee senators. The mea culpa was about as sincere as the director’s original denial. Taking a page out of Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi book, the CIA director handpicked an “accountability board” to investigate the matter. As I’m sure you’ll be stunned to learn, Brennan exploited the pendency of the accountability board’s probe as a pretext to avoid answering Congress’s questions. Brennan’s board then dutifully whitewashed the matter, recommending that no one be disciplined.1
Welcome to intel, the Obama way. It is the author of the Trump–Russia narrative.
The Benghazi Fraud
No administration in American history was more practiced in the dark arts of politicizing intelligence than President Obama’s. Examples are legion. The most infamous involves the events during and after the 2012 Benghazi massacre, a jihadist attack in which four American officials were murdered: State Department employee Sean Smith, CIA security contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, and J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya—the first American ambassador to be killed in the line of duty since 1979.2
The atrocity, which occurred during the stretch-run of Obama’s re-election campaign, was a blatant, coordinated terrorist strike, quite predictably carried out on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The date itself is one al-Qaeda makes a habit of trying to mark by mass-murder attacks.
In this instance the warning signs were unmistakable. After Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan by American special forces in 2011, his longtime deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, took over as al-Qaeda’s emir. A little over a year later, on June 4, 2012, U.S. forces killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, the terror network’s Libyan leader. Immediately afterwards, Zawahiri called for vengeance, exhorting Libyan jihadists, “His blood urges you and incites you to fight and kill the crusaders.”3
Notwithstanding such neon-flashing danger signs, the Obama State Department permitted the ambassador to travel to Benghazi, a boiling cauldron of anti-American jihadism. The U.S. government compounds there—a State Department outpost and a CIA annex, the presence of which was never explained—were left woefully under-protected, and the jihadists pounced.
The attack exposed the administration’s security recklessness. It put the lie to fanta
sy Obama narratives that al-Qaeda had been defeated with bin Laden’s death, and that Libya was trending toward democracy—rather than dystopia—thanks to Obama’s war of aggression to remove Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi. As was customary, Obama officials conducted their actual policy (an unprovoked military intervention unauthorized by Congress) under the guise of a deceptive narrative: the administration spearheaded a U.N. Security Council resolution permitting the use of force only to protect civilians; it then abetted decapitation bombings against the regime and the arming of anti-Qaddafi jihadist factions. On October 20, 2011, some of these “rebels” captured, tortured, and killed the Libyan dictator (theretofore supported by the Bush and Obama administrations as a key counterterrorism ally). As the famously hilarious Hillary Clinton put it afterwards, “We came, we saw, he died.”4
While Americans were still under siege in Benghazi on September 11, Secretary Clinton consulted with President Obama at about 10 p.m. Immediately afterward, she issued a public statement portraying the violence not as a terrorist attack but as an overheated response to an anti-Islamic video—an obscure trailer for a movie called Innocence of Muslims. Virtually no one had seen the video until the Obama administration started calling attention to it.5 Meantime, in private conversations, Clinton confided to her daughter that al-Qaeda was behind the attack. State Department notes quote what she told Egypt’s prime minister:
We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest. Based on the information we saw today [September 12] we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this was affiliated with al-Qaeda.6
In the immediate aftermath, the Obama White House and top intelligence officials—in particular, then-acting CIA director Michael Morell, a close Clinton and Brennan ally—heavily edited the talking points originally generated by the agency. The word “attacks” was replaced by “demonstrations.” References to Islam and “ties to al-Qaeda” were excised. So was mention of the involvement of Ansar al-Sharia (an al-Qaeda affiliate). Pains were taken to remove the assertion: “The wide availability of weapons and experienced fighters in Libya almost certainly contributed to the lethality of the attacks”—after all, the wide availability of weapons and fighters was directly attributable to Obama’s lawless military intervention.7 Through a spokesman, the president later described the changes to the intelligence talking points as “stylistic.”8
The day after the attack, as survivors retrieved the dead and surveyed the wreckage, Obama proceeded with a campaign fundraiser in Las Vegas. There, he cheered supporters with the assurance that, “A day after 9/11, we are reminded that a new tower rises above the New York skyline, but al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat and bin Laden is dead.”9
Notwithstanding that an American diplomat had been killed in Benghazi, Secretary of State Clinton—already planning her 2016 presidential bid—was unwilling to be the public face of the administration’s Benghazi debacle. To make the rounds on the Sunday network television shows, then, Obama dispatched his trusted adviser, Susan Rice, at the time the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The spin in each of her five appearances echoed what she spun for ABC News’s This Week (a show hosted by former Clinton White House advisor George Stephanopoulos):
Our current best estimate, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous—not a premeditated—response to what had transpired in Cairo. In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated.
All of this was false, including the Cairo story. In point of fact, after Egypt was taken over by an elected government run by the sharia-supremacist Muslim Brotherhood—with the demonstrable support of the Obama administration—members of jihadist organizations became a menacing fixture outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo, threatening to raid it, burn it to the ground, and take hostages. This was part of a longstanding campaign to coerce the release from U.S. custody of the “Blind Sheikh”—i.e., convicted terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman, a globally renowned, Egyptian-born jihadist icon (whom I prosecuted after the 1993 World Trade Center attack). On September 11, 2012, hours before the Benghazi attack, mobs incited by these fanatics stormed the embassy, setting fires and replacing the American flag with the infamous black jihadist banner. Although mounds of intelligence indicated that such rioting was planned, the Obama State Department put out messaging suggesting that the video, which had gotten some limited exposure in jihadist rhetoric, was the sole instigator.10
In her television appearances, Rice relied on politically manipulated intelligence—a staple of the Obama years. The CIA’s original talking points that had been purged of terrorism references by Morell and the Obama White House. When Rice and Morell were pressed during a meeting with three Republican senators about why the talking points were altered, Morell falsely claimed that the FBI, out of concern for its ongoing investigation, had been responsible. Naturally, upon hearing that Morell was scapegoating the Bureau, FBI officials were incensed. An embarrassed CIA official fessed up to the senators that Morell “misspoke”—the Agency’s acting director now suddenly remembered that he himself had led the editing process. Memory can be funny that way.
Morell had also falsely told the senators that the Obama White House did not collaborate in the editing of the talking points. As a Senate Intelligence Committee report later recounted, he “emphatically” testified that the talking points were provided to the White House “for their awareness, not for their coordination.” To the contrary, an email paper trail proved consultation with the White House; there was an even an email authored by Morell himself, explaining that “Everyone else has coordinated” on the talking points and noting “tweaks” made by both State Department and White House officials. (Emphasis added.)11
Although the administration knew from the start that the Benghazi siege was a terrorist attack, President Obama told CBS News in the immediate aftermath that it was “too early to know.” Three days after the attack, a solemn ceremony was held at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to mark the return home of the remains of America’s dead. Secretary Clinton callously used the occasion to promote the administration’s politicization of the Benghazi intelligence:
We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.
Soon after, the Obama State Department released commercial ads crafted for Pakistani television, condemning the video: “We absolutely reject its content and message,” thundered Clinton, with Obama looking on. The president stuck to the script at his speech to the U.N. General Assembly on September 25, proclaiming, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”12
The gas-lighting did not stop there. In Los Angeles, three days after Obama’s U.N. speech, his Justice Department arrested the video producer who had slandered Islam’s prophet. Technically, fifty-five-year-old Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was cited for a violation of parole (what federal law refers to as “supervised release”) in connection with a prior, minor fraud conviction. The usual procedure in such a case would be a summons to appear in court. But Nakoula was grabbed by police in the dead of night. This stagecraft, accompanied by the soundtrack of heated administration rhetoric, suggested to Muslims worldwide that the real Benghazi culprit—the blasphemer—had been apprehended. As Nakoula’s family went into hiding, federal agents grilled him about his film production—running roughshod over his First Amendment freeexpression rights under the guise of monitoring his computer use due to his fraud conviction. Though his “offense” was minor and non-violent, Nakoula was detained without bail and sentenced to a year in prison. Patently aware of the constitutional improprieties, the Justice Department quietly dropped the parole “violations” related to the video.13
By May 20, 2013, when the CIA
held a memorial service for its officers slain in Benghazi, Obama had been re-elected and had named as the agency’s new director John Brennan—his 2008 campaign adviser and White House counterterrorism czar.
At the memorial service, four of the CIA officers who had fought to repel the Benghazi siege were discreetly approached by an agency representative and asked for a moment of their time. They were led through a maze of offices before reaching a room remote from the ceremony site. Once the door was shut, they were presented with small packets of papers, with instructions that they review and sign the documents. It was quickly apparent that the packets contained non-disclosure agreements. It was a gratuitous brushback pitch. As intelligence officers, these surviving Benghazi heroes were covered by pre-existing NDAs. The highly irregular presentation of new NDAs was the CIA’s not very subtle admonition that they remain silent. Brennan being Brennan, he first denied that anyone had been asked to sign a new NDA, then conceded that some officers may have been asked, but that this was standard procedure. Then he acknowledged that it might not have been standard procedure, but insisted that it had nothing to do with Benghazi. Finally, he admitted the connection to Benghazi but claimed the NDAs were necessary in order to process payments for the officers to attend the service.14
Ball of Collusion Page 9
