Of course, even if we and Page assume that this means the government regarded Page as a cooperating witness, at least by the time the spies were arrested, that would not necessarily mean the Bureau was completely convinced Page was on Team America. Let’s try to see things from the perspective of the FBI, which has the challenging responsibility of protecting our security without unduly intruding on our liberties. In 2008, Page met a Russian spy, which would reasonably have been regarded as significant, even if there was no known untoward interaction. Page was targeted for recruitment by Russian spies five year later. He provided information and documents to one of the spies. In that connection, investigating agents would probably not have known at first that (a) the information Page gave Podobnyy was public and harmless, and (b) Page thought he was dealing with a U.N. official, not a spy. The FBI may have quite reasonably worried that Page was feeding non-public business intelligence to clandestine Russian operatives. Until they could find out more, the Bureau may have regarded Page as a subject of the investigation.
But then they interviewed him and did enough follow up investigation to satisfy themselves that Page was harmless—perhaps even useful. Ultimately, it appears that he was regarded as a cooperating witness. That’s why the summary of his 2013 FBI interview is in the arrest complaint. Once a counterintelligence file has been opened, however, the Bureau has a habit of keeping it open. As I’ve stressed, counterintelligence is not prosecution-oriented; it is about information gathering—and while prosecutions end, you can never have enough information. The fact that the spies were prosecuted would not necessarily have meant the FBI was done with Carter Page for intelligence purposes—why else would agents have continued periodically interviewing him over the years?
That’s a long-winded way of saying that the FBI may very well have had an open case file on Page at the time he joined Trump’s campaign—i.e., the 2013 case may never have been closed, either because of bureaucratic inertia or because the matter was still considered active (perhaps because the Russian spy under indictment did not plead guilty until after Page joined the campaign).26
Once Page joined the Trump campaign, the Mueller report takes pains to recount, he championed the notion that Trump’s ingratiating posture toward Putin could have a “game changing effect” and bring an end to what Page regarded as “the new Cold War.”27 With due respect to Page’s naval service, for those of us who remember what the actual Cold War was, to have regarded Russo-American tensions—provoked by Putin’s aggression—as a “new Cold War” was asinine. But it was asinine within the bounds of political debate. Page also made no secret of the fact that he believed the anti-Russia sanctions in place were counterproductive—a position he’d been publicly vocal about. Again, a foolish position. But being an idiot (here, Podobnyy seems perspicacious) is not being a foreign agent.
And yes, as Mueller illustrates, Page touted that his years of experience working in Russia and its regime-dominated energy sector gave him “high-level contacts” who might be able to facilitate a meeting between Putin and Trump. He was no doubt inflating his connections, but so what? I’d be fine if the government wants to designate Russia as an adversary with which commerce should be severely restricted. (I’d rather it were done by a congressional enactment rather than a presidential proclamation under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act28—but that’s a different story.) Last I checked, though, the government was encouraging commerce with Russia (other than with sanctioned individuals and entities). More to the point, why single out Page? In Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton had a foreign policy adviser who not only could (and did) arrange meetings with Putin, but could (and did) score a big payday for himself to boot. That did not make him a foreign agent. To imply that Page, who had comparatively zero influence, should nevertheless have been seen as a clandestine operative is thin camouflage for what is essentially a political position, namely, that a Clinton administration could be trusted to manage America’s relationship with our adversary in Moscow but a Trump administration could not. Political outcomes are for voters to decide, they are not the business of prosecutors and FBI agents.
Then there was Page’s trip to Moscow in July 2016. Because of the Steele dossier (which we will come to in due course), it is well known by now that Page gave a commencement speech at the New Economic School (NES). There was nothing secret about the speech. It was scheduled well in advance. Page not only made the campaign aware that he had been invited to speak; he strongly urged that Trump go in his stead. That seems presumptuous on Page’s part (the candidate standing in for the advisor), except when one remembers that the NES was the same venue at which Barack Obama spoke in his first year as president—a speech that bears rereading since much of it sounds downright Carter Pagesque.29 In any event, Page’s superiors in the campaign gave him strict instructions that he was on his own, and was not to represent himself as appearing on behalf of the candidate.30
As we shall come to in more detail, the most indecorous aspect of the report prepared by Robert Mueller’s staff of Democratic partisans is its constitutionally repugnant shifting of the burden of proof. If you are a Trump associate, the prosecutor won’t leave it at “we have insufficient evidence to charge a crime, so we remain mum,” as prosecutors are supposed to do. Mueller’s approach is to taint with innuendo—exactly what a prosecutor is not supposed to do. Not “we don’t have proof to charge a crime”; Mueller’s staff says, in effect, “We can’t exonerate you—there are unanswered questions here”—as if it were an American’s burden to prove his innocence rather than the prosecutor’s to establish wrongdoing.
That is Mueller’s approach to Page.
Page is in the collusion vortex because of Clinton campaign operative Christopher Steele’s allegation that he engaged in corrupt meetings during his Moscow trip with Putin crony Igor Sechin and Putin regime official Igor Divyekin. Page has convincingly denied these meetings. He has openly bragged for years about Russian officials he knows, but he has never claimed to know either Sechin or Divyekin. He says he does not know them, he denies meeting them, and he emphatically denies discussing a quid pro quo scheme, as alleged by Steele, in which Trump, if elected, would drop sanctions in exchange for money. The FBI has been investigating for nearly three years, and Mueller still has no proof that these things happened. Yet he won’t say that. Nor will he simply say nothing, which would be appropriate. Instead, here’s the end of his Page section:
The [Special Counsel’s] Office was unable to obtain additional evidence or testimony about who Page may have met or communicated with in Moscow; thus Page’s activities in Russia—as described in his emails with the [Trump] Campaign—were not fully explained.31
In other words, Page failed to prove his innocence of the unsupported allegations lodged by a foreign spy working for the opposition political campaign.
In the emails to the campaign Mueller alludes to, Page claimed that before his NES speech, Russian Deputy Prime Minister (and NES board member) Arkady Dvorkovich made remarks expressing strong support for Trump’s candidacy and hope that the two countries could “work together toward devising better solutions in response to the vast range of current international problems.” Page added that this sentiment was widely shared, “based on feedback from a diverse array of other sources close to the Presidential Administration.” From this jejune observation, we are evidently supposed to imagine that this “diverse array” may have included Sechin and Divyekin, who, after all, are “close to the Presidential Administration” of Putin. Therefore, the implication goes, it was up to Page to prove that he did not engage in corrupt schemes to sabotage his country, notwithstanding that the prosecutor has no proof that he did.
That is not the way American citizens are supposed to be treated by the United States government, regardless of whether the matter in question is a criminal or a counterintelligence case, and regardless of whether one thinks Carter Page and Donald Trump are fools. If you want to say there has been no shortage of Russi
an smoke around Carter Page over the years leading up to his time in the Trump campaign, that is obviously true. If you think that may have rated some preliminary investigative steps, such as interviewing him (as the FBI did in March 2016), that certainly makes sense. But surveillance warrants on the theory that he was a Russian agent engaged in clandestine action against our country—based on his daft belief in appeasement and the uncorroborated blather of a foreign spy who couldn’t get basic facts right?
That’s wrong, the prosecutor’s insinuations notwithstanding.
Triangulating Manafort: Obama, Clinton and Ukraine
It is in connection with Paul Manafort that we encounter some genuine collusion targeting the 2016 campaign: willful collaboration among foreign governments, the Obama administration, and the Clinton campaign.
Just a week after the campaign introduced Page as a Trump foreign policy adviser, it announced that Manafort had been brought on board, too. Although the nomination was nearly in Trump’s grasp, his campaign still feared that the more organized campaign of Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas), the only viable competitor left, would succeed in cadging delegates Trump had won in state primary elections.32 Manafort was recommended to Trump by their mutual friend Thomas Barrack. The consultant was an old political hand, experienced managing the rough-and-tumble of a convention fight. And there were added attractions: Manafort badly wanted the gig and was willing to work for free (at least “free” in terms of salary; as we previously mentioned, he had every intention of cashing in on the lofty role).33
As we’ve detailed, Manafort had longstanding, lucrative political consulting (and other business) arrangements with Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs who had Kremlin ties. These arrangements had already been spun into a narrative of political corruption by Glenn Simpson in 2007 and 2008—when Simpson was a Wall Street Journal scribe, not yet the Fusion GPS impresario. (The Russia-gate tale is very much an off-the-shelf affair.)
Six years later came Ukrainian Euromaidan uprising of February 2014, which finally forced the flight to Moscow of Manafort’s client, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. With American attention intensifying as tensions boiled over in Kiev, Manafort reentered the FBI’s investigative cross-hairs, as did other American political consultants who did work that benefitted the Party of Regions. It is difficult to say, however, what forms these investigations took.
CNN, for example, has reported that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI launched an investigation of Manafort in 2014, and that the probe included some kind of surveillance authorization from the FISC, with this monitoring finally discontinued in early 2016 “for lack of evidence.”34 This report is difficult to square with representations by prosecutors, during Special Counsel Mueller’s 2018 prosecutions of Manafort, that the government was not in possession of any relevant intercepted communications by Manafort. Due process rules would have required prosecutors to disclose such communications to the defense—or at least to acknowledge their existence, then try to convince the court that they were irrelevant to the case and should not be disclosed.35 It is possible that that there was some kind of FISA order that did not involve monitoring of Manafort’s communications. Or it could be that the FISC authorized the surveillance of a foreign associate of Manafort’s—most likely, Konstantin Kilimnik—and that Manafort was neither the direct target nor a participant in any intercepted communications.36
At any rate, while it appears certain that Manafort’s failure to register as a foreign agent of Ukraine was scrutinized after Yanukovych fled, it is unclear whether court-authorized surveillance was among the investigative techniques the government used.
Yanukovych’s abdication delighted the Obama administration, which was quick to back the new administration of President Petro Poroshenko. The ensuing Obama–Clinton–Ukraine collaboration that followed has been laid bare by the dogged reporting of Peter Schweizer, Chuck Ross, Jeff Carlson, and John Solomon.37 Kiev became so dependent on Washington for desperately needed financial support that, by threatening to withhold funds, Vice President Joe Biden pressured Poroshenko into firing Viktor Shokin, one of his top prosecutors. Shokin just happened to be investigating a natural gas company called Burisma, which just happened to have placed Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, on its board of directors. While the Veep pushed the International Monetary Fund to grant Ukraine a $17.5 billion loan package, Burisma lavishly compensated Hunter’s law firm, to the tune of more than $3 million over an eighteen-month span. (A lot of money, but chump change compared to the Chinese government’s $1.5 billion infusion in a joint investment fund with Hunter Biden while Vice President Biden, administration point-man on China issue, turned a blind eye to Beijing’s aggression in the South China Sea.38)
Under the circumstances, it may seem ironic that the Obama administration prodded Ukraine to establish a National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU)—but the IMF, like most progressive institutions, is duly impressed by such Orwellian titles. Naturally, the fledgling NABU developed a close-knit relationship with the FBI. In 2014, NABU alerted the Bureau to a ledger said to have belonged to Yanukovych, bête noire of the new Ukrainian government. The ledger purports to show $12.7 million in cash payments to Manafort. The FBI used the information to interview Manafort, but the authenticity of the ledger has not been established. Manafort dismisses it as fake (contending that the Party of Regions paid him by wire transfer, not cash), and Ukrainian officials have conceded that they cannot prove the payments reflected in the ledger were made. The Justice Department thus reportedly closed the case with no charges. (Perhaps not coincidental to the decision not to pursue the case: Manafort had brought influential Democrats into his Ukrainian work, such as former Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig and the consulting firm started by Obama and Clinton adviser John Podesta—a firm that is still run by Podesta’s brother.39)
But then came 2016, and sudden renewed interest in the Manafort–Ukraine investigation. The interesting question is, why?
As we’ve seen, Yanukovych high-tailed it to Moscow, having ignored Manafort’s advice to chart Ukraine’s course toward the EU rather than Russia. Afterwards, the consultant busied himself by propping up a new Ukrainian political organization, the Opposition Bloc, to supplant the Party of Regions. That put Manafort on the radar screen of Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American and a DNC consultant who was all in for Hillary. Chalupa is said to have had an inkling that Manafort would become involved in the Trump campaign. Why she did is an interesting and thus far unanswered question. To be sure, if it was conjecture, it would have been sensible conjecture: a Ukrainian keeping tabs on Manafort would know he was a friend and former political consulting business partner of Roger Stone, who was himself vigorously supporting Trump’s bid (though no longer formally part of the campaign40). Manafort was itching to get back into the American political arena, and Trump’s steamrolling campaign would be a logical landing place; in fact, it was Manafort, not Trump, who made the first move in reaching out to Tom Barrack.
Chalupa also had good sources in Kiev who were focused on Manafort. These included Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian legislator opposed to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions and the Opposition Bloc, and Artem Sytnyk, NABU’s director. It was Sytnyk who took over and quietly closed the investigation of Burisma after Vice President Biden got Poroshenko to pink-slip the prosecutor. Leshchenko just happens to be a vassal of Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire who just happens to give millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. Wonder of wonders, Leshchenko took a public, strident anti-Trump position during the U.S. campaign—highly unusual for a foreign parliamentarian. “A Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy,” he told the Financial Times, so it was “important to show not only the corruption aspect” of the mogul, but also that Trump was “a pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world.” That, he added, was why most Ukrainian politicians were “on Hillary Clinton’s side.” (I’m sure she was thrilled about the
enthusiasm in Kiev, but enthusiasm in Wisconsin might have been more helpful.)
During the same early 2016 weeks when Chalupa was tapping her Ukrainian sources and giving Democrats a heads-up about a potential Manafort–Trump alliance, NABU investigators and Ukrainian prosecutors journeyed to Washington. There, the Obama administration arranged for them to huddle with the FBI, the Justice Department, the State Department, and the White House’s National Security Council (agencies that coordinated frequently throughout the collusion caper). Andrii Telizhenko, a political officer at Ukraine’s embassy in Washington, later told John Solomon that the U.S. officials uniformly stressed “how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united.” The officials also indicated to their Ukrainian counterparts that they were keen to revive the investigation of payments by Yanukovych’s ousted Party of Regions government to American figures—i.e., the FBI’s Paul Manafort probe. I know this may be hard to believe, but the Obama officials seem to have been less interested in Greg Craig than in Manafort.
Nazar Kholodnitskiy, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told Solomon that soon after the January 2016 Washington meetings, he found that Ukrainian officials were effectively meddling in the American presidential election. Another top Ukrainian lawman, Kostiantyn Kulyk, recalled that after the Kiev contingent’s return home from the United States, there was lots of buzz about helping the Americans with the Party of Regions investigation.
Which brings us back to Serhiy Leshchenko, Ukraine’s unabashed Clinton backer. And whaddya know—besides serving the government in Kiev and providing scintillating geopolitical analysis, Leshchenko had a side job: he was a source for … wait for it … Fusion GPS—the Clinton campaign oppo arm that dreamed up the Steele dossier. Turns out it was Leshchenko (along with NABU chief Sytnyk) who leaked the unverified Yanukovych ledger to the media in May 2016, just after it was announced that Trump had made Manafort his campaign chairman. There is also a pending investigation into whether Leshchenko attempted to blackmail Manafort by sending text messages to the consultant and his daughter that threatened to give NABU, the FBI, and the media “bulletproof” evidence of Manafort’s financial dealings with Yanukovych.41
Ball of Collusion Page 16
