Ball of Collusion
Page 15
Mind you: this is how Brennan speaks publicly. How do you figure he conducted himself while kibitzing with like-minded European intelligence counterparts he trusted?
Foreign Interference in Our Elections Is … Apparently Not So Bad
In late 2015, after Trump entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination (i.e., months before anyone had ever heard of George Papadopoulos), GCHQ began taking note of suspicious “interactions” between Trump associates and “suspected Russian agents.” This information was passed along to the American intelligence community as part of the allies’ regular exchange of information. Other European spy services followed suit. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Poland were all contributors, as was Australia. In Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, Obama National Intelligence Director James Clapper later confirmed this “sensitive” stream of European intelligence, originally reported by The Guardian’s Luke Harding.11 At least at the start, there was no targeted operation against Trump or his campaign; it is said to have been routine intelligence collection against Russia that was yielding “connections” of varying kinds. Again, there is nothing necessarily nefarious about “connections,” and U.S. politicians across the spectrum have had them with Russia for decades. But these were Trump connections, so they were presumed to be dark. No, GCHQ was not “tapping” Trump’s phone lines in Manhattan, but, Harding related, “both US and UK intelligence sources acknowledge that GCHQ played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation.”
Here, it is worth noting the dismal state of U.S. intelligence on Russia under Brennan’s watch. As Lee Smith catalogues, American spy agencies were caught off-guard by Putin’s annexation of Crimea and by the escalation of Russia’s military presence in Syria—which even included the transportation of weapons and personnel through the Bosporus, a strait controlled by our NATO “ally,” Islamist Turkey. Putin had taken Obama’s measure. Moscow realized the president so needed its “help” on the Iran deal, as well as on the growing ISIS and humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, that the American administration would consciously ignore any provocation. In an April 2016 CNN interview, Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), then Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, lamented that “the biggest intelligence failure we’ve had since 9/11 has been the inability to predict the leadership plans and intentions of the Putin regime in Russia.”12
That was long before there was a public Russia-gate narrative, even months prior to the publication of hacked DNC emails—which first took the Obama administration by surprise, then froze it into paralysis. With an information void about Russia, and with the Obama administration both hardwired to politicize intelligence and encouraging of our allies’ clear preference for the Democratic nominee, European suspicions about Trump resonated. It was the perfect storm: even if one suspends disbelief and credits the American intelligence community’s good faith, it seems clear that the paltry state of reliable information on Putin’s regime rendered the intelligence community unable competently to evaluate the outlandish allegations in the Steele dossier, or to protect itself against Moscow’s legendary expertise in peddling disinformation.
Carter Page
We’ll soon come to the dossier. Now, let’s focus on a man who would emerge as one of its main characters, Carter Page. He was first announced as a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser on March 21, 2016, but he had joined the campaign two months earlier.
Page is an Annapolis graduate and former naval intelligence officer who served five years in the Navy, working for a time in western Morocco as part of a U.N. peacekeeping mission. He had been a good student, qualifying as a Trident Scholar, which enabled him to spend his senior year as a researcher on the House Armed Services Committee. Throughout his career, Page has persisted in academic work in the fields of international affairs, commerce, and security, earning an MA in national security studies from Georgetown, an MBA from New York University, and a doctorate from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in 2011. He ran an international affairs program at Bard College, taught a course on energy and politics at NYU, and won a coveted fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Alas, Page’s post-Navy career as an investment banker has been less than stellar. He joined Merrill Lynch, working first in London and then for three years in Moscow. He seems to have exaggerated his role in the firm’s work. For example, when he eventually began his own investment firm after leaving Merrill in 2008, he reportedly told a U.S. State Department official in Turkmenistan that he had helped take Russia’s energy giant, Gazprom, from a run-of-the-mill state-run oil company to “super major status”—a claim he had apparently also made to Turkmenistan officials.13 In reality, Page had been a nondescript deputy office manager at Merrill, making little impression on the execs who actually handled the big accounts. “He wasn’t great, and he wasn’t terrible,” observed Page’s boss. “What can you say about a person who in no way [is] exceptional?” The private fund he started in 2008, Global Energy Capital LLC, was hoping to attract a billion dollars for investment in companies run by foreign regimes. The venture, however, has struggled since its inception. Page has continued to seek investment opportunities around the world, including in the Russian energy sector. That fact is said to have made the Obama administration suspicious—ironic, to put it mildly, given that the Obama administration encouraged energy commerce with Russia while laboring mightily to help create the Russian tech sector (see Chapter 1).14
Page was favorably disposed toward Donald Trump from the moment the mogul launched his presidential bid at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015. What heartened Page about Trump is exactly what rankled many conservative Republicans (like me): the candidate’s blandishments towards Vladimir Putin; his minimizing of Putin’s monstrousness; and his vows to prioritize improved relations with Moscow—if necessary, it seemed, at the expense of important American interests. Page has not been shy about his pro-Russia views, and has a history of pro-Kremlin statements. He has blamed the deteriorating state of Russo-American relations on “misguided and provocative actions” by the United States, which he has accused of “imped[ing] potential progress” through “often hypocritical ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.” Reasoning that aggressive responses only provoke more Russian belligerence, Page has opposed Western action (mainly sanctions) against Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and has criticized the Obama State Department’s purported fomenting of Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution that ousted the Kremlin-friendly government.15
These are noxious political positions. But they are political positions. In this country, Page is entitled to hold them. The Trump campaign was entitled to consider internalizing them, no matter how obtuse they may be—just as the Obama administration was entitled to posit that American national security was somehow served by lavishing billions of dollars in sanctions relief on Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, while obliging the United States to help the jihadist regime develop an industrial strength nuclear energy program—of course, for civilian purposes only, right?
Page decided to volunteer to work on the Trump campaign. He sought and got an entrée from New York Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox, who knew Page had supported fellow Annapolis grad John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid. Impressed by Page’s résumé, particularly his military and intelligence service, the state party chairman forwarded Page’s name to Trump’s team. In January 2016, Page joined the campaign after brief meetings with its then-manager, Corey Lewandowski, and with Sam Clovis, the former navy fighter pilot turned Iowa radio host and GOP activist, who was starting to formulate a foreign-policy shop for the candidate.16
Such a shop would not be easy to stock with experts. Trump’s provocative positions on NATO and trade, his solicitude toward Putin, and his tirades against the Iraq war and what he framed as President Bush’s ineptitude, had the Republican foreign policy clerisy shunning his candidacy.17
Trump’
s run through the GOP primary field was already looking like Sherman’s march through Georgia. Yet his advisers sensed a vulnerability as journalists peppered the campaign with questions about who was advising the would-be commander-in-chief on foreign policy matters. Feeling the need to brandish some names, the campaign announced a handful of obscure ones—probably as much unknown to Trump as to most. They included Page, as well as young George Papadopoulos, whom we will come to in the next chapter.18
Suffice it to say that Page got the FBI’s attention.
Politics Is Not a Predicate for a Counterintelligence Probe
Here, we come to why counterintelligence work can be so complex and difficult, compared to criminal investigations. This is not to say the latter are without their challenges. But when properly predicated, criminal investigations commence only after there is solid evidence that a penal offense has occurred or is underway. By contrast, the objective of national security is to prevent bad things from happening, to thwart foreign powers who might harm American interests and who do not have the legal protections of American citizens. Frequently, then, counterintelligence will involve the monitoring of people, including Americans, who may not have committed crimes, on the theory that they are serving the interests of foreign actors who may threaten us. The government is not required to wait until foreign powers have taken hostile action before engaging in countermeasures—depending on the kind of hostile action at issue, that could mean waiting until it’s too late.
On the other hand (have you noticed that when we’re talking law, there’s always another hand?), political dissent is never—by itself—a legitimate basis for the government to surveil an American citizen. This principle can be easier to state than to apply. Seditious action or espionage against our country is often inextricably bound up with political dissent against our government’s policies. It is not possible to separate the two entirely: to prosecute a person for criminal acts, it is necessary to prove criminal intent. Mens rea is often established by what a person says. Our words usually reflect the operation of our minds. The terrorism cases I prosecuted in the 1990s are a classic example: the suspects made many anti-American statements that freespeech principles entitled them to express, but when their conduct crossed the line into criminality (e.g., seditious conspiracy19), I was able to use their statements as mens rea proof. Yes, the First Amendment protected them from being prosecuted for making their political statements, but it did not insulate those statements from use as evidence of intent and motive for the crimes charged against them. Put another way, if a mafia don charged with murder is heard on tape telling the hitman, “Whack him,” you are not apt to find his lawyer mounting a free-speech defense.
But notice the salient word: conduct. Whether we are talking about criminal prosecution or surveillance for purposes of counterintelligence probes involving foreign powers, there must be some purposeful action before the government is justified in investigating an American. The PATRIOT Act, for example, stresses that First Amendment protected activity—mere speech, or mere association—is never sufficient by itself to trigger surveillance.20 FISA also instructs that to justify surveilling an American citizen, there must be probable cause that the person is knowingly engaged in clandestine activity on behalf of a foreign power. The statute elaborates that such activity involves intentional subterfuge, the commission of crimes at the direction of a foreign intelligence service, using false identities on behalf of a foreign power, or such heinous activities as sabotage and terrorism.21 Manifestly, speech that does not cross the threshold of incitement or unwitting action that happens to help a foreign power is not good enough.
When we consider those principles, it is easy to understand (a) why the FBI might have had some legitimate concerns about Carter Page (remember, having “legitimate concerns” is not the same as saying he had done something wrong), and (b) why having legitimate concerns is not the same as having an adequate predicate for an investigation—or, even more, as having an adequate predicate for the use of highly intrusive investigative techniques that the law reserves for cases involving concrete evidence of willful clandestine activity.
It is not for nothing that Russia hawks derisively regarded Page as Putin’s voice in Trump’s campaign, while the rest of the community of international-affairs thinkers ridiculed his selection as an adviser to a major presidential candidate. In assessing Donald Trump’s “baffling” array of foreign policy advisers, Politico noted that Page’s “discursive online blog postings about foreign policy invoke the likes of Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, and Rhonda Byrne’s self-help bestseller, The Secret.” To be sure, Page’s foreign policy views were naïve and strangely sympathetic to a hostile foreign power. That did not make him a spy. Was he the kind of thinker we would want whispering in a presidential nominee’s ear? Well, I certainly wouldn’t (and didn’t). That, however, is a separate question. And on that question, it’s not like the blame-America-first mindset—like its companion conceit that we should refrain from pursuing America’s interests in the world—is uncommon among Washington’s smart set, or among academics, such as Page, who are steeped in foreign relations studies and have spent lots of time abroad. (Why do I think that if Page, without changing any of his Russia views, had joined, say, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Center for Constitutional Rights, or the Bernie Sanders campaign, The New York Times would have been fine with him?)
What else was known about Page when he joined the Trump campaign? Well, apparently through no fault of his own—i.e., not by doing anything illegal, but by traveling to Russia, by interacting professionally with Russians, as well as by seeking business opportunities and participating in academic conferences that were Russia-related (you know, the things our bipartisan political establishment told us were totally cool for the last thirty years)—Page attracted the attention of all the wrong people. The Mueller report, for example, notes that in 2008, as Page’s start-up venture, Global Energy Capital, foundered, he recruited as a “senior advisor” Sergey Yatsenko, deputy chief financial officer of Gazprom (a Russian-regime-controlled global natural-gas conglomerate whose shares are publicly traded). At around the same time, he met a man named Alexander Bulatov, who worked at the Russian consulate in New York. Prosecutors say Page later learned that Bulatov was a Russian intelligence officer, but they don’t allege that Page actually did anything with Bulatov—the Mueller report makes pregnant mention of the fact that they knew each other and then … the matter is dropped.22
In January 2013, Page did stumble into an FBI investigation of Russian spies. At an international energy symposium in New York City, Page happened into a man he says he was led to believe was a Russian government official, attached to Moscow’s United Nations mission. Unbeknownst to Page (which is how this usually works) the man was actually a Russian spy named Victor Podobnyy. By Page’s own account, in the ensuing months, he and Podobnyy exchanged emails and met in person on occasion, with Page giving Podobnyy his outlook on energy industry prospects and some documents on the subject—including parts of a lecture Page had given, which was publicly available information.
Here it gets fuzzy. In the course of its investigation, the FBI monitored conversations between Podobnyy and another spy, Igor Sporyshev. In at least one, on April 8, 2013, they discussed Page. Podobnyy described him as “an idiot,” who was looking to “earn lots of money” in the Russian energy sector, perhaps with a Gazprom project. Podobnyy was trying to recruit Page as an asset—evidently, an unwitting one whom he would burn once Page had obtained whatever information he was looking for. (“I will feed him empty promises,” Podobnyy told Sporyshev. “This is intelligence method to cheat, how else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.”)
In June 2013, the FBI approached Page to ask about his conversations with Podobnyy. Page voluntarily cooperated with the agents, meeting with investigators several times. In fact, the Justice Department used Page’s information in its a
rrest complaint in the criminal case against Podobnyy, Sporyshev and another Russian spy, Evgeny Buryakov.23
Here, we must note, the Mueller report plays fast and loose with the facts to make Page look worse—presumably to justify the Obama administration’s eventual decision to monitor him as if he and the Trump campaign were a Kremlin front operation. A reader of Mueller’s report would conclude that Page, like everyone else, found out about the case against the Russian spies only in 2015, when Podobnyy was arrested. At that point, we’re told, Page read the public complaint, realized he was the person described in it as “Male-1” (about whom Podobnyy and Sporyshev spoke in April 2013) spoke, and was immediately moved to tell a Russian official at the U.N. that he “didn’t do anything” (under circumstances where no one was alleging otherwise). But that’s not all that happened. Mueller conveniently omits that Page cooperated with the FBI in the investigation and prosecution of the spies. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Agent Gregory Monaghan said under oath in the arrest complaint:
On or about June 13, 2013, Agent-2 and I interviewed Male-1. Male-1 stated that he first met VICTOR PODOBNYY, the defendant, in January 2013 at an energy symposium in New York City. During this initial meeting, PODOBNYY gave Male-1 PODOBNYY’s business card and two email addresses. Over the following months, Male-1 and PODOBNYY exchanged emails about the energy business and met in person on occasion, with Male-1 providing PODOBNYY with Male-1’s outlook on the current [sic] and future of the energy industry. Male-1 also provided documents to PODOBNYY about the energy business.[24]
Page’s interview by the FBI was not a one-off. Beginning in 2013, he was interviewed multiple times over the next three years about his interactions with Russians.25