Downer claims to have deduced that Papadopoulos’s barroom banter was related to the hacking and publication of DNC emails. This was specious for at least four reasons:
1) In speaking with Downer, Papadopoulos never mentioned emails. Neither Downer nor Papadopoulos has ever claimed that Papadopoulos spoke of emails.
2) There is no basis to believe Papadopoulos told Downer that Russia was planning to publish damaging information about Clinton through an intermediary. There is no allegation in the Mueller report that Mifsud ever told Papadopoulos any such thing, much less that Papadopoulos relayed it to Downer. Mueller’s report says:
Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had met with high-level Russian government officials during his recent trip to Moscow. Mifsud also said that, on the trip, he learned that the Russians had obtained “dirt” on candidate Hillary Clinton. As Papadopoulos later stated to the FBI, Mifsud said that the “dirt” was in the form of “emails of Clinton,” and that they “have thousands of emails.”[23]
In neither the Mueller report nor in the Statement of the Offense Mueller filed in connection with Papadopoulos’s plea, have prosecutors claimed that Mifsud told Papadopoulos what Russia was planning to do with the “dirt,” much less why. And, to repeat, Mifsud denied telling Papadopoulos anything about emails at all.
3) Papadopoulos says the emails he claims Mifsud referred to were not the DNC emails; they were Clinton’s own emails. That is, when Papadopoulos claims that Mifsud told him that Russia had “dirt” in the form of “thousands” of “emails of Clinton,” he understood Mifsud to be alluding to the thousands of State Department and Clinton Foundation emails that Clinton had stored on a private server.24 To be sure, there is reason to doubt the veracity of Papadopoulos’s description of Mifsud’s information, but if they did in fact discuss emails, it is far more plausible that they were referring to Clinton’s own emails. These were the emails that were being intensively covered in the media (including speculation that they might have been hacked by hostile foreign intelligence services) at the time Mifsud and Papadopoulos spoke—i.e., April 2016. At that point, neither Mifsud nor Papadopoulos had any basis to know anything about hacked DNC emails.
4) The DNC emails did not damage Clinton in any material way, and it would have been ridiculous to imagine that they would. They were not Clinton’s emails and she was not a correspondent in them. The emails embarrassed the DNC by showing that the national party favored Clinton over Bernie Sanders. But Clinton was already the certain nominee; nothing in the emails threatened that outcome or set her back in the race against Donald Trump.
Distorting Papadopoulos’s Role to Obscure Reliance on the Steele Dossier
Immediately after taking High Commissioner Downer’s information, the State Department’s Elizabeth Dibble sent it though government channels to the FBI. It was exquisite timing.
As we shall soon see in more detail, in early July 2016, the FBI (and later, the State Department) began receiving the Clinton campaign–sponsored faux intelligence reports now infamous as the Steele dossier. Even before that, the intelligence community—particularly the CIA, under the direction of the hyper-political John Brennan—had been theorizing that the Trump campaign was in a corrupt relationship with Russia. Thus, even before Downer reported his conversation with Papadopoulos to the State Department, the Obama administration was quietly acting on the theory that Russia was planning to assist the Trump campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Clinton.
The hacked DNC emails were a godsend for this theory. That, obviously, is why Steele—whose vaunted Russian sources had somehow failed to foretell the hacking by Russia and publication by WikiLeaks—simply folded the DNC emails into his preexisting narrative of a Trump–Russia conspiracy.25
Downer’s report enabled the Obama administration to cover an investigative theory it was already pursuing with a report from a friendly foreign government, as if that report had triggered the Trump–Russia investigation. In order to pull that off, though, it was necessary to distort what Papadopoulos had told Downer.
The State Department’s report to the FBI claiming that Papadopoulos had “suggested” these things to Downer was manufactured to portray a false connection between (a) what Papadopoulos told Downer and (b) the hacking and publication of the DNC emails. That false connection then became the rationale for formally opening the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation—paper cover for an investigation of the Trump campaign that was already under way.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Brennan Clearinghouse
Donald Trump “wants to pull us out of NATO!” So inveighed Hillary Clinton at a Milwaukee campaign rally on March 28, 2016.1 The party conventions were still months away, but the finalists were already set: It would be Clinton versus Trump. The former secretary of state was already honing a major campaign theme: She vowed to keep Putin in check and reassure our European allies; Trump, she warned, would do Putin’s bidding and abandon our European allies—ending modern history’s most successful alliance in the process.
It wasn’t really true: Clinton was the top foreign policy official in an administration that had been a pushover for Putin; and Trump, despite his nauseating habit of laying the treacle on dictators, was promising policies (such as a military build-up and deregulation of the energy sector) that would be anathema to the Kremlin. But Clinton’s comments were surely within the tolerable bounds of purple campaign prose—particularly between these two candidates. As we’ve seen, Trump believed NATO was obsolete: Its mission was complete (the Soviet Union no longer existed), and most of its members were free-riding on a U.S. security guarantee that costs American taxpayers a fortune. Plus, doffing his cap to Obama/Clinton foreign policy (as practiced, rather than as Clinton described it), Trump maintained it was better to court than to provoke Russia, the shriveling rump of the Soviet empire.
In an America increasingly indifferent to the Cold War era, this posturing eight months before Election Day made scant impression. Europeans, however, paid close attention: in the chancelleries, where Clinton’s progressive tilt and fawning of the “international community” (and its community banks!) were strongly preferred to the beastly Trump; and especially in the Baltic states, which feel menaced by Moscow in the best of times. For the previous decade, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had fretted over the West’s desultory response as Russia gobbled hunks of Georgia and Ukraine, just recently swallowing Crimea in one bite. NATO countries seemed downright meek. Economic sanctions caused the Putin regime some pain but mostly conveyed lack of resolve to push back or disturb the lucrative Euro-Russo trade in energy, raw materials, machinery, medicines, and manufactured goods.2 The Americans seemed to be a paper tiger as long as Putin was “helping” with Iran and Syria.
At least Clinton and the Obama administration talked a good game: Unlike other countries Russia besieged in its “near abroad,” the tiny Baltic states were NATO members; this, the Democrats stressed, entitled them to the alliance’s Article 5 assurance of collective defense—in theory, a Russian attack on Riga should be regarded by Washington as if it were an attack on Washington itself. Whether, if the time came, Clinton would back up this chest-thumping was uncertain. But Trump, by comparison, appeared doubtful that Americans, fatigued by a decade of costly war and thankless sharia-democracy promotion, would support war with Russia over, say, Estonia. And as they hadn’t taught Politesse 101 in Queens, he didn’t mind saying so.
As you might imagine, that did not go over very well in Estonia.
Asked about whether the threats facing his country and the EU were existential, that country’s then-President Toomas Hendrik Ilves took aim at Trump, telling a U.S. journalist, “When I sit there in Europe and read what one of your presidential candidates says, I think, ‘Is the United States going to exist?’” Ilves, who grew up in New Jersey, expounded on his “good relationship” with the Obama administration and its provision of U.S. air defense support for the Baltics. Later, he b
lasted prominent Trump surrogate Newt Gingrich as “geographically challenged” when the former House Speaker, in the context of discussing the wisdom of “risk[ing] nuclear war” over a conflict with Russia, dismissed Estonia as if it were a hamlet “in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.”3 When he left office in 2016, Ilves landed at Stanford, at the international studies institute headed by Michael McFaul, who was director for Russia affairs on Obama’s National Security Council before becoming the president’s ambassador to Russia in 2012, under Secretary of State Clinton.4
Recall that Estonia was among the European countries that, beginning in the second half of 2015, passed to American intelligence agencies information about claimed “interactions” between Trump associates and suspected Russian agents. In April 2016, the BBC reported that a Baltic intelligence agency, likely Estonia’s, delivered to CIA Director John Brennan what was alleged to be a recording of a conversation about Russian money being transferred into the U.S. presidential campaign.5
‘It Served as the Basis for the FBI Investigation’
Was there such a recording? There is no mention it—or of the words “Estonia” or “Baltic”—in the voluminous Mueller report. Yet, it is said to have greatly alarmed Brennan.
Ever the partisan, Brennan was mindful that his focus on the presidential campaign could press against the legal prohibitions on domestic intelligence activities by the agency. As he later told the House Intelligence Committee, “It was well beyond my mandate as director of CIA to follow on any of those leads that involved U.S. persons.” Therefore, he “made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign, was shared with the Bureau.”6 The vehicle for this intelligence pooling arrangement was an inter-agency task force, comprised on the domestic side by the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Treasury Department, and on the foreign-intelligence side by the CIA, the NSA, and the Office of National Intelligence Director James Clapper; the Obama White House was also briefed.7 Make no mistake, though: Brennan was the driving force. Indeed, he has bragged about his role since leaving office and commencing his political attacks on Trump.
In his House testimony, Brennan expanded on the “intelligence about interactions and contacts between U.S. persons and the Russians” that he undertook to “share … with the Bureau” (my italics):
I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion—cooperation occurred.
Notice that subtle qualifier—unwitting. Brennan testified on May 23, 2017—over a year after instigating the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation. Yet, even then, even as he made cavalier media claims that Trump might be a Russian agent, the former CIA director was unable to point to a single willful, clandestine action on Moscow’s behalf taken by people in Trump’s orbit. Obama’s spy chief could not even pretend that the FBI investigation he had catalyzed—a probe of the opposition party’s presidential campaign—had been triggered by hard evidence.
Brennan’s testimony can be summed up as follows: The Russians are insidious, and they plot to manipulate clueless Americans (e.g., George Papadopoulos, Carter Page). Putin’s regime interfered with the American election by orchestrating the publication of unflattering information (mainly, Democratic emails), hoping either that Donald Trump would win, or that the likely winner, Hillary Clinton, would be badly damaged. While carrying out this plan, Russian operatives reached out to some people who were connected to the Trump campaign. Brennan supposed that the Russians must have attempted to “suborn” those people because … er … well, that’s “what the Russians try to do.”
But all these months later, despite an intensive, multi-agency investigation, he could not say that the Russians had actually suborned anyone. At the time he left the government, Brennan conceded, “I had unresolved questions in my mind as to whether or not the Russians had been successful in getting U.S. persons involved in the [Trump] campaign or not to work on their behalf.”
Do you speak political-hack? Let me translate: He’s got nothing.
It wasn’t for lack of trying.
By the first week in May 2016, Bill Priestap, one of the FBI’s highest ranking agents, was in London to meet with “a foreign government partner,” as he grudgingly admitted to congressional investigators.8 The admission was pried from him by Ohio Republican Jim Jordan during House Judiciary Committee testimony. FBI and the Justice Department lawyers tried frantically to deflect Jordan’s questions about which foreign government Priestap had consulted, and when his relevant overseas trips—three in all—had taken place.
Evidently, the lawyers did not realize it was already public that Priestap was in Britain in early May. The cat was out of the bag thanks to the surfacing of thousands of text messages between those chatty FBI paramours—agent Peter Strzok, who worked for Priestap, and attorney Lisa Page, counselor to Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Or perhaps the government lawyers had missed what Brennan told NBC’s Chuck Todd on national television: “The FBI has a very close relationship with its British counterparts. And so the FBI had visibility into a number of things that were going on involving some individuals who may have had some affiliation with the Trump campaign.”9
Priestap’s presence in London in May is significant. The city was already the nerve center of Russia-gate. George Papadopoulos and Joseph Mifsud (he of the significant British intelligence connections) had had their now-famous breakfast meeting there on April 26, and it was in London on May 10 that Papadopoulos met with Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer. It would be in London that Stefan Halper, an old CIA hand on loan to the FBI under the watchful eye of MI6, would approach Carter Page and, later, Papadopoulos. And while it is well known that Christopher Steele, former British intelligence officer and principal author of the Clinton campaign–generated dossier, had his office in London, it is not well known that the FBI—for reasons still unexplained publicly—had retained Steele as an informant (in Bureau parlance, a “confidential human source”) as early as February 2016 (i.e., months before he was contracted by Fusion GPS to write the dossier).10
The FBI and CIA do not run operations in Britain without clearance and often facilitation from their British counterparts. And as we’ve seen with Papadopoulos, the State Department is often in the mix, too.
Priestap was the Assistant Director in charge of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. At the time, assisted by his subordinate, Strzok, he was running the Hillary Clinton emails investigation—which the FBI was already formulating its plan to shut down despite having failed to interview key witnesses or acquire major evidence. Now, nearly three months before the “Crossfire Hurricane” was officially opened on paper, Priestap and Strzok were already steering the Bureau’s Trump–Russia intelligence effort. As Brennan elaborated in his NBC interview, by the summer of 2016, the CIA “had collected a fair amount of information … about what the Russians were doing on multiple fronts. And we wanted to make sure that the FBI had full access to that.”
Clearly, some of the information Brennan found most significant came from GCHQ. At some not-yet-specified time in the early summer, GCHQ’s chief, Robert Hannigan, flew to the United States. His mission was to transfer intelligence so critical and sensitive that it was deemed necessary to exchange it face-to-face at the director level. The director Hannigan chose to deal with was Brennan. It was an intriguing choice given that GCHQ’s American analogue is not the CIA, but rather the NSA, which was at this time led by Admiral Michael Rogers. As we’ve seen, Rogers was then investigating the intelligence community’s illegal exploitation of surveillance techniques to monitor American citizens, particularly outside the United States—and, in October 2016, would reveal those abuses to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (F
ISC). Interestingly, just days following Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, Hannigan would announce his abrupt retirement from GCHQ, for “personal reasons,” after just two years on the job.11 We don’t know exactly what Hannigan told Brennan; we do know that British intelligence about Trump, filtered through Brennan, was making its way to the Bureau.
The Mythical Alfa Bank Back Channel
Did the Obama Justice Department and the FBI seek a FISA warrant in the early summer based on information they received through the CIA from European intelligence services? There is not yet a clear answer to this question.12
British media sources have reported that the Justice Department sought and was denied warrants by the FISC. Citing reporting from The Guardian, Senators Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham, senior Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, have pressed the question whether, in the early summer of 2016, the FBI sought a warrant to monitor four members of the Trump campaign suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The FISC is said to have denied the application (which is unusual), suggesting that the government narrow its focus. Soon after The Guardian’s story was published, the BBC reported that the Justice Department and FBI twice sought warrants to surveil two Russian banks, and that those applications were denied in June and, even when more narrowly tailored, denied again in July. The senators added that the FISC’s annual statistical report, which indicated a number of applications that had been denied or modified, provided some potential support for these media claims.13
Additional reporting from The New York Times and from the now-defunct Heat Street (written by the conspiracy-minded Louise Mensch) indicated that the FBI had concerns about a private server in Trump Tower that was connected to Alfa Bank and SVB Bank, two major Russian financial institutions. Heat Street described these concerns as centering on “possible financial and banking offenses”—calling to mind Brennan’s initial alarm about Russian money purportedly flowing into the campaign. FBI sources told the Times that the Bureau initially determined that the Trump Tower server did not have any nefarious purpose. But, according to Heat Street, “the FBI’s counterintelligence arm, sources say, re-drew an earlier FISA court request around possible financial and banking offenses related to the server.” That application was said to have “named” Donald Trump—although it was not clear whether Heat Street was claiming that Trump had been targeted to have his communications monitored or if he was merely alluded to in that (purported) application (as, for example, we now know he was alluded to in the Carter Page FISA application—which we’ll discuss in Chapter 15). Consistent with the BBC’s reporting, the June application was said to have been denied.14
Ball of Collusion Page 19
