Ball of Collusion

by Andrew C. McCarthy

  The ledger’s exposure, of course, is what led to Manafort’s ouster from the Trump campaign. The Ukrainian payments became an important strand of the Russia-gate narrative. The wealth that Manafort’s Ukrainian work generated formed the foundation of his prosecution by Special Counsel Mueller for tax, money laundering, and unregistered foreign-agent offenses.

  Can anyone say Clinton Campaign Collusion with Ukraine? The Ukrainian courts can: In December 2018, one such tribunal ruled that Leshchenko and Sytnyk had violated Ukrainian law by leaking the ledger. The infraction, the court added, “led to interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016 and harmed the interests of Ukraine as a state.”

  Meanwhile, CNN maintains that sometime in 2016, the FBI “restarted” the FISA surveillance that the network says had been discontinued early in the year.42 We will take a closer look in Chapter 8 at the claims, based on felonious intelligence leaks, that Manafort and other Trump campaign figures were subjected to FISA surveillance beginning in autumn 2016 and continuing into the start of the Trump presidency.

  When Is ‘Early Spring’?

  In Russia-gate, like most everything in Washington, what they don’t tell you—or especially, what they go out of their way to keep from you—is more meaningful than most information you get.

  The House Intelligence Committee’s completed its report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign on March 22, 2018, but it took over a month for the report to be released to the public—festooned with blackouts insisted upon by the Justice Department, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies. Fortunately, the Committee’s then-Chairman, Devin Nunes, went ballistic over the excisions. Finally, some of them were quietly un-redacted. When they were, The Wall Street Journal’s eagle-eyed Kimberley Strassel was keeping watch. She noticed some overlooked passages on page 54.43

  As a result, we learned that, in what was described as the “late spring” of 2016, the FBI’s then-Director James Comey briefed the principals of the National Security Council on “the Page information.”

  NSC principals are a presidential administration’s highest-ranking national-security officials. The Obama NSC was chaired by the president. Regular attendees included Vice President Biden, National Security Advisor Rice, and National Intelligence Director Clapper. The heads of such departments and agencies as the Justice Department (Attorney General Lynch) and the CIA (Director Brennan) could also be invited to attend NSC meetings if matters of concern to them were to be discussed.

  We do not know which NSC principals attended the Comey briefing about Carter Page. But how curious that the House Intelligence Committee interviewed so many Obama-administration officials who were on, or knowledgeable about, the NSC, and who had government appointment calendars that are exactingly kept, and yet none of them provided a date for this meeting more precise than “late spring” 2016. Given how mulishly the intelligence community has stonewalled questions about when and why the Trump–Russia investigation(s) originated, the haziness about a date that could easily be determined is intriguing.

  Further, exactly what “Page information” was at issue? The FBI did not begin receiving Steele dossier reports about Page until July 2016. What information was so significant in the “late spring” that Director Comey needed to brief top Obama national security officials about it? Did the FBI still have an open counterintelligence investigation on Page based on the 2013 case in which Page had cooperated with the FBI’s prosecution of Russian spies (one of whom described Page as “an idiot”)? Was the Page information somehow spruced up by intelligence coming over the transom from Europe? Did it seem more alarming because Page’s coming on board the Trump campaign was so rapidly followed by Manafort’s doing so? We don’t know. We just know Page and Manafort had the attention of the Obama administration’s top echelon.

  At the insistence of the FBI and the Justice Department, another significant meeting was initially redacted on page 54 of the House report, purportedly out of concern for national security secrets. When it was unredacted at Nunes’s insistence, however, it became clear that national security had nothing to do with the excision. Sometime apparently before the “late spring” NSA briefing, Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, met with Attorney General Lynch “about Page.” Among the topics discussed was the possibility of providing the Trump campaign with a “defensive briefing.” This would be a meeting with a senior campaign official to put the campaign on notice of potential Russian efforts to compromise someone—presumably Page—within the campaign.

  Isn’t that interesting? As we’ve noted, the FBI had interviewed Carter Page in March 2016.44 Was that interview a reaction to his joining the Trump campaign? Was it an effort to gauge whether Page was still a Russian recruitment target? Was it a substitute for giving the campaign a defensive briefing, or a preparatory step in anticipation of possibly giving such a briefing? We don’t know. Former Attorney General Lynch told the House Committee that a potential defensive briefing was discussed, but she could not—or, at least, did not—provide an explanation for why it never happened.

  Here is what we can surmise.

  It defies modern American norms for the incumbent government to investigate the opposition party’s presidential campaign, and to invoke the government’s extraordinary foreign counterintelligence powers in doing so. To be sure, no sensible person would argue that the government should refrain from investigating if, based on compelling evidence, the FBI suspects individuals—even campaign officials, even a party’s nominee—of acting as clandestine agents of a hostile foreign power. The question is, what should trigger such an investigation?

  The Obama administration decided that the norm against exploiting government powers to investigate political opponents did not apply to the Trump campaign. The administration decided not to give the campaign a defensive briefing even though plenty of Trump campaign officials had impeccable national-security credentials. For example, by the spring of 2016, Trump surrogates included Rudy Giuliani (a former New York City mayor, U.S. Attorney, and top Reagan Justice Department official), Chris Christie (then the New Jersey governor and a former U.S. Attorney), and Senator Jeff Sessions (then the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and highly likely to land a top national security position if Trump won). If all the Obama administration had been trying to do was check out a few worrisome characters who had wheedled their way into the Trump campaign despite suspicious Russia ties, the FBI could easily have alerted one or more of these former government officials.

  If it was not ready or willing to do that, the Obama administration could have reacted to the news that Page and Manafort had joined the Trump campaign by interviewing them—again. As we’ve noted, Page was clearly available for interview. Manafort had submitted to an interview in 2014 over his Ukrainian work, and would have been hard pressed to decline if the Justice Department (which oversees the Foreign Agent Registry) said it wanted to discuss the matter further.

  Instead of treating the Trump campaign like a normal political organization, the Obama administration chose to treat it as a co-conspirator collaborating with Russia. Instead of offering a defensive briefing, Obama officials made the Trump campaign the subject of a counterintelligence investigation. From the “late spring” on, it appears that every report of Trump–Russia ties, no matter how unlikely and uncorroborated, was presumed to be probative of a traitorous arrangement. Facts about Trump were viewed in the worst possible light. The mogul was never given the Obama administration’s Hillary Clinton standard: the irrebuttable presumption of innocence, no matter how high the corruption evidence mounted.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Maltese Professor, an Austrian Diplomat, and a Sap … in London

  Chicanery was the force behind the formal opening of the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation. There was a false premise, namely that the Trump campaign must have known that Russia possessed emails somehow related to Hillary Clinton before WikiLeaks caused the dissemination of hacked Democratic National Co
mmittee emails to the media, beginning on July 22, 2016. Starting from that premise, the foreign ministries of the United States and Australia, through mendacity or incompetence, erected a fraudulent story that warped the Trump campaign’s purported foreknowledge of Russia’s perfidy into a potential espionage conspiracy.

  That is what we learn from the saga of George Papadopoulos, as fleshed out by the Mueller report.1

  The investigative theory on which the FBI formally opened the foreign-counterintelligence probe code-named “Crossfire Hurricane” on July 31, 2016, held that (a) the Trump campaign knew about, and was potentially complicit in, Russia’s possession of hacked emails that would compromise Hillary Clinton; and (b) in order to help Donald Trump win the presidency, the Kremlin planned to disseminate these emails anonymously (through a third party) at a time maximally damaging to Clinton’s campaign.

  The theory was woefully flawed. George Papadopoulos, the young campaign adviser on whom it rests, knew nothing about the DNC emails. And there is a good chance that his claim of being told about any emails related to Clinton is false. Furthermore, even if Papadopoulos was told that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton, there is no evidence that he was informed about what Russia planned to do with it, or why.

  Long before the hacked DNC emails were published, the Obama administration was speculating—whether out of partisanship or predisposition about Trump—that the Republican nominee was in a corrupt conspiracy with Russia to sabotage the election. When the hacked DNC emails were published, Obama officials distorted Papadopoulos’s gossipy statements to an Australian diplomat—which the diplomat himself had initially dismissed as nonsense—into the formal rationalization for commencing a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign that they had already been conducting.

  The investigation was built on a fraud.

  Papadopoulos: The Origin Story 2.0

  As we’ve seen, it has been portrayed as the Big Bang: the Magic Moment that started it all … especially after the first Big Bang, the Carter Page Origin Story, faded into a withering whimper. But the George Papadopoulos Origin Story—Origin 2.0—has never added up: If the young energy sector analyst had actually emerged in early 2016 as the key to proving Trump–Russia espionage, you would think the FBI might have gotten around to interviewing him before January 27, 2017—i.e., a week after President Trump had been inaugurated, three months after the Obama administration began FISA surveillance of Page, six months after the Bureau formally opened “Crossfire Hurricane,” and more than eight months after Papadopoulos’s meeting in a London bar with an Australian diplomat—throwing back the shots heard ’round the world.

  You would probably also think Papadopoulos, Suspect One in The Great Cyber Espionage Attack on Our Democracy, might have rated a tad more than the whopping fourteen-day jail sentence a federal judge eventually imposed on him. You might even suppose that he’d have been charged with some seditious felony involving clandestine operations against his own country, instead of, yes, fibbing to the FBI about the date of a meeting.

  That, however, does not scratch the surface. We are to believe that what led to the opening of the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation, and what therefore is the plinth of the collusion narrative, is a breakfast meeting at a London hotel on April 26, 2016, between Papadopoulos and Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic we are supposed to take for a clandestine Russian agent. We are to take Papadopoulos’s word for it that Mifsud claimed Russia possessed “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands” of “emails of Clinton.” We are further to believe “the professor” elaborated that, in order to help Donald Trump’s candidacy, the Kremlin would release these “emails of Clinton” at a time chosen to do maximum damage to the Democratic nominee’s campaign.

  The story is based on no credible evidence. If ever presented to a jury, it would be laughed out of court.

  The Papadopoulos “collusion” claims (without collusion charges) are alleged in the Mueller report, which essentially repeats the grandiose “Statement of the Offense” that the special counsel included with the comparatively minor false-statement charge to which Papadopoulos pled guilty.2 Carefully parsed, this narrative stops subtly short of alleging that the Trump adviser collaborated with a Russian agent. Rather, it claims that Papadopoulos engaged in a lot of twaddle with Mifsud, whom he had reason to suspect might be a Russian agent. The pair brainstormed endlessly about potential high-level Trump campaign meetings with the Putin regime, including [insert heavy breathing here] between Trump and Putin themselves. Papadopoulos then exaggerated these meanderings in emails to Trump campaign superiors he was hot to impress.

  All this may be interesting, but it is neither nefarious nor illegal—if it were, you might have expected to find a sentence or two in the Mueller report about Bill Clinton’s $500,000 payday from a Kremlin-tied bank while the Uranium One deal was under consideration.

  More maddening: it is virtually certain that Mifsud was not a Russian agent. Whether he was an asset for any intelligence service, we cannot say with certainty at this point. But we can say that he had close contacts of significance with British intelligence, and with other Western governments. Does that mean this is a case of Western intelligence agencies entrapping the Trump campaign by first using an “asset” (Mifsud) to plant a damning “Russia helping Trump” story with Papadopoulos, and later using another “asset” (Stefan Halper) to try to get Papadopoulos to repeat that story so that “collusion” could be proved? At this point, we don’t know. Here is what we do know: The United States government has never charged Joseph Mifsud. It has never accused him of being an agent of Russia. It took no steps to arrest him despite opportunities to do so. In fact, the FBI interviewed Mifsud and, when he denied Papadopoulos’s claim that he had told the young Trump adviser that Russia had Hillary emails, the Bureau let him go. Special Counsel Mueller has never alleged that Mifsud’s denial was a false statement.

  That’s a pretty a curious way to treat the “Russian agent” who was the rationale for the incumbent administration’s use of foreign counterintelligence powers to investigate the presidential campaign of its political opposition, no?

  The Wanabees

  In early 2016, Papadopoulos was an ambitious twenty-eight-year-old trying to push his way into Trump World. He had graduated from De-Paul University in 2009, and a year later he received something called a “master of science degree in security studies” at University College London. Longing for a way into big-time U.S. politics, he latched on to the Ben Carson presidential campaign, after unsuccessfully seeking work on the Trump campaign. When the Carson bid cratered, Papadopoulos, who is not a lawyer, took a job at the London Centre for International Law Practice—an impressive-sounding but obscure academic institution.3

  George’s big break came in March, when the Trump campaign became anxious to show that it had some names—seemingly any names—advising Trump on foreign policy. Papadopoulos’s résumé was passed to Sam Clovis, the campaign’s co-chair and top adviser. Clovis performed a Google search and found that the multilingual, ostensibly cosmopolitan Papadopoulos had done sporadic intern work for a conservative-oriented think-tank between 2011 and 2014. His curriculum vitae also touted Papadopoulos’s participation in, yes, the 2012 Geneva International Model United Nations. (I confess to having thought that was a Middle School project.) Evidently, this implied to the campaign that Papadopoulos had some modicum of credibility on energy issues. Sight unseen, Clovis retained Papadopoulos over the phone as an unpaid foreign policy adviser.

  The green young man remained a fringe figure, unknown to the candidate. Indeed, before the lone time he ever met Papadopoulos, Trump characteristically bragged to The Washington Post that the “oil and energy consultant” was just “an excellent guy”—but he had to read it off a sheet, and he wouldn’t have known Papadopoulos if he fell over him.4 These facts underscore how farcical it is that American intelligence agencies could have suspected the chaotic Trump campaign was partnered in a soph
isticated, clandestine enterprise with Russian intelligence, and that the Kremlin would conceivably have chosen Papadopoulos as its entrée to the candidate.

  In Rome on March 14, Papadopoulos met Joseph Mifsud. Twice Papadopoulos’s age, the Maltese professor was also affiliated with the previously noted London Centre for International Law Practice. Besides teaching there, Mifsud was an instructor at Rome’s Link University. In an invaluable deep dive into the Maltese professor’s background, Lee Smith explains that Link’s “lecturers and professors include senior Western diplomats and intelligence officials from a number of NATO countries, especially Italy and the United Kingdom.” Mifsud also taught at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and the London Academy of Diplomacy, “which trained diplomats and government officials, some of them sponsored by the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Council, or by their own governments.”5 We’ll come back to Mifsud’s ties to the British government momentarily.

  Like Papadopoulos, Mifsud was a shameless self-promoter (at least until Russia-gate notoriety sent him underground). He traveled frequently, including to Russia, where he participated in academic conferences and claimed acquaintance with regime officials—though how well he actually knows anyone of significance is unclear. In sum, Mifsud is the aging academic version of Papadopoulos. Thierry Pastor, a French political analyst who (with a Swiss-German lawyer named Stephan Roh) co-wrote a book about l’affaire Papadopoulos, made this observation about Mifsud’s brag that he knew Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov: “Yes, he met Lavrov. He met him once or twice in a large group. He knows Lavrov, but Lavrov doesn’t know Joseph. [Mifsud’s] contacts in Russia are with academics.”6