Suffice it to say that the legend of the Trump–Putin back-channel lives on in Trump-deranged circles, a technologically updated version of the storied “red telephone” arrangement.15 It is largely based on reporting by Franklin Foer, former editor of The New Republic. On Halloween, just days before the 2016 election, he reported that a network of computer scientists with privileged access to internet communication logs—allowing this “Union of Concerned Nerds” to hunt down malware used by rogue states and other hackers to spy on users and steal their data—had discovered a dedicated Trump–Russia communication line. The discovery had been made in late July, after publication of the hacked DNC emails, when the scientists were reasonably theorizing that Russia-backed hackers might well have stalked other email accounts pertinent to the campaign. At first, it was thought that malware emanating from Russia had targeted a destination domain belonging to Donald Trump. Additional analysis, however, indicated that Alfa Bank, Russia’s most important financial institution—and one whose oligarch executives are welcomed in Washington as Western-friendly barometers of Putin’s thinking—was pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization in Manhattan. There sprung the hypothesis that “these organizations are communicating in a way designed to block other people out.” The conclusion was not certain, but it was highly likely, these experts decided, that a covert hotline had been discovered.16
With Election Day fast approaching, some of the computer scientists tried to draw public attention to their research. Nevertheless, Alfa Bank principals Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven vigorously denied having ever met Trump or conducted any business with his organization. Alfa Bank’s investigator believed the bank’s servers may have been auto-responding to spam sent by a marketing server. For Trump’s part, his spokeswoman Hope Hicks told Foer that the server in question had been set up for marketing purposes, was operated by a third-party, and had not been used in six years—the Trump organization was not using it either to send or receive messages. Meanwhile, Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, told the Washington Times that Trump hotels, like many hotels, collected information on guests that was later used for internet marketing pitches; he surmised that some Alfa employees had at some point stayed at a Trump hotel and gotten added to a marketing list.17
There is no doubt that the FBI and the Justice Department investigated the server link. Putting aside the aforementioned unconfirmed BBC report about failed attempts to obtain FISA warrants in the early summer, both the Beeb and McClatchy reported that, in mid-October, the FISC had authorized investigators’ access to bank records pertaining to potential money transfers. Whether this authorization took the form of a FISA warrant (as the press accounts claim) or, as I suspect, a less intrusive form of FISA process (such as an order for disclosure of business records or a national-security letter) is unknown.18
In any event, Election Day was just over a week away, and Mrs. Clinton was cruising to a comfortable victory—and so brimming with confidence that she was planning a final campaign swing through Republican strongholds, hoping to run up the score on Narcissus.19 Loose ends were being tied up all around. It was in that vein that, on October 28, FBI Director Comey infamously reopened the Clinton emails investigation. FBI headquarters was fearful that there could be a leak that the FBI’s New York field office had discovered copies of State Department emails from Clinton’s private server on a laptop used by disgraced “sexter” Anthony Weiner (the former New York congressman and husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin). Just a week later, with the FBI having purportedly reviewed all 650,000 emails, Comey made yet another public statement, reclosing the investigation and restating his conclusion that Clinton should not be charged.20
Nothing was going to taint or complicate Clinton’s win. I believe it was in this spirit that Foer’s well-researched story was subjected to immediate pushback, as he forthrightly recounts. On the same day Foer’s article was published (October 31), top New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers, who had also been chasing the story, published the report that the Times—in the aftermath of Trump’s shocking triumph—is still kicking itself over. Under the banner headline, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia,” Lichtblau and Myers related:
Intelligence officials have said in interviews over the last six weeks that apparent connections between some of Mr. Trump’s aides and Moscow originally compelled them to open a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Republican presidential candidate. Still, they have said that Mr. Trump himself has not become a target. And no evidence has emerged that would link him or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations.
On the specific matter of the suspected Trump–Alfa Bank connection that the Times had been examining, the reporters added that intelligence officials had
focused particular attention on what cyberexperts said appeared to be a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and the Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia’s biggest banks and whose owners have longstanding ties to Mr. Putin. F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. Computer logs obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 “look-up” messages—a first step for one system’s computers to talk to another—to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring. But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.
Given the zeal with which the CIA, FBI, and Obama Justice Department strained to connect Trump to Russia, cheered on by the media, this would seem fairly conclusive—though, certainly, it would likely have been written differently, or not written at all, if the tea leaves had suggested that Trump had a shot at winning.
Predictably, the election outcome brought out the Wednesday-morning quarterbacks, the recriminations, and the resuscitation gambits. The Times, for example, rues its over-concern for its reputation, rationalizing that even if the Trump–Alfa Bank channel angle was infirm, it could still have been wrapped into an overarching reporting package of rumored but unproven Trump–Russia interactions “with implications of treason.”21 (Query: What would the Times have made of invocations of “treason”—which is aiding an enemy of the United States, which Russia, at least formally, is not—had they been voiced by Republicans while Obama and Clinton busied themselves with the grand “Reset”? After all, the Times and its friends still occasionally hand-wring over whether the Rosenbergs’ actions had implications of treason.22) Heartened by Dexter Filkins’s deep dive in an October 2018 edition of the New Yorker, Foer maintains that the Trump–Alfa Bank communication channel remains a live controversy with many questions still to be answered.23
And then there is the Trump–Russia narrative’s chief script-writer, Glenn Simpson himself. In cagey congressional testimony, the Fusion GPS founder and Hillary Clinton minion distanced himself from the Alfa Bank communications channel story. The technical information behind the theory, he shrugged, “wasn’t generated by us and I’m happy to say it’s beyond our competence to have generated.” He thus claimed, “I did not draw any conclusions from the data,” which was “certainly beyond my competence.”24 In truth, Simpson had hyped the Alfa Bank story. His reluctance to say so was not due to any lack of confidence in its continued viability. Rather, he appears to have been concealing from congressional investigators the fact that he had aggressively pushed his Trump–Russia narrative on the Justice Department—including insisting to Bruce Ohr, a top official (and the husband of Simpson’s contractor, Nellie Ohr), that “The New York Times story on Oct. 31 downplaying the connection between Alfa servers and the Trump campaign was incorrect. There was communication and it wasn’t spam.”25 That is from Ohr’s notes of his meeting with Simpson a few weeks after the election—and it sure sounds like Simpson had drawn some conclusions.
To be su
re, the Alfa Bank angle was ancillary to Simpson’s part in the Trump–Russia saga. His seminal contribution was the Steele dossier. And about that screed’s connection to Obama administration FISA surveillance of the Trump campaign, there is no doubt.
CHAPTER NINE
Narrative as ‘Intelligence’ as Disinformation: The Steele Dossier
The story of the Steele dossier is a familiar one. That is to say, the things that are wrong about it are now ingrained in conventional wisdom.
The encomia to Christopher Steele hail him as a “meticulous” British intelligence officer with a “formidable record.” So highly regarded was he that MI6 put him in charge of the investigation of the Putin regime’s brazen 2006 murder in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB operative who had defected to Britain. Less often mentioned is that Steele had been Litvinenko’s handler when he was poisoned by the radioactive isotope polonium-210. Steele, we’re further told, was so well-connected that he was chosen to run MI6’s all-important Russia desk. Well, yes—but he ran it from London. In the late 1990s, through no fault of his own, his cover in Moscow was blown, along with scores of other spies. He had not been in Russia for almost twenty years when he, Glenn Simpson, and their Fusion GPS co-fabulists wrote the dossier reports. By then, Steele was a sleuth for hire, who did the bidding of such fine, upstanding clients as Oleg Deripaska, Putin’s notorious aluminum oligarch.1
And why not? After all, Simpson, Steele’s equally virulent anti-Russia, anti-Trump collaborator, had Fusion GPS doing lucrative litigation support work for Denis Katsyv—son of Pyotr Katsyv, a Putin crony and transportation minister who rose to vice-president of the regime-controlled national railroad system. Simpson and Fusion labored to defend Katsyv and his company, Prevezon, from a civil forfeiture lawsuit brought by the Justice Department.
The case arose out of a massive fraud scheme orchestrated by Putin’s regime, in connection with which Sergey Magnitsky, an investigator who uncovered the scheme, had been imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. The killing prompted Congress’s enactment of the Magnitsky law, a bane of Putin’s existence that enables the Justice Department to seize his cronies’ assets. The Kremlin thus has an energetic lobbying operation against the Magnitsky law. It is led by a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Among her most influential patrons is Pyotr Katsyv; consequently, she helped represent Denis Katsyv in the Prevezon case—working arm-in-arm with, yes, Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS.2 And—mirabile dictu!—Ms. Veselnitskaya just happened to be the lawyer the Putin regime sent to meet Donald Trump Jr. and other top campaign officials at Trump Tower in June 2016, with the promise of campaign dirt damaging to Hillary Clinton (think of it as Russian-sourced oppo—just like the Steele dossier). It appears that the information she gave the Trump campaign—which was useless—came from Fusion GPS.
Again, such a small world.
Not Objective and Not a ‘Source’
But back to Simpson’s main collaborator, Chris Steele. The focus on his experience as an intelligence officer, in the media coverage of Russia-gate and in the FBI’s use of his so-called dossier, is a deceptive distraction. In drafting the dossier, Steele was not a meticulous intelligence agent of his country. He was a private-eye marshaling information in the light most favorable to his clients. Indeed, as we’ll see, State Department Russia analysts who got access to his reporting took it with a grain of salt; it was assumed that the Deripaska contractor was being spun by the Kremlin.3
In the 2016 election season, Steele was not a scrupulous intelligence analyst; he was a well-paid political hack, pulling together oppo for a campaign—against a candidate he despised. So was Simpson. Don’t be gulled by their résumés. Yes, Simpson was a superb reporter. Steele, it is said, was a top-notch intelligence officer—I find that hard to believe based on what we’ve seen of his work, but let’s stipulate for argument’s sake that, at least at one time, it was true. It still doesn’t matter: In their oppo capacity, the past lives of Simpson and Steele as an investigative journalist and an intelligence officer are diversions, brandished to project an illusion of objectivity and professionalism.
By any objective measure, the dossier is a shoddy piece of work: the stories are preposterous. Steele gets basic facts wrong. There are undated and misdated reports. The reputed Russia expert repeatedly misspells Alfa Bank (using “Alpha”), which is among the country’s most important financial institutions. In the antithesis of good spycraft, Steele tried to corroborate his sensational claims (unsuccessfully) by using dodgy information pulled off the internet—including posts by “random individuals” (as unknown to Steele as most of Steele’s vaunted sources are unknown to the rest of us).4 No wonder Steele’s former MI6 superior, Sir John Scarlett, scathingly assessed the dossier reports as falling woefully short of professional intelligence standards: They quite “visibly” were part of a “commercial” venture, unlikely ever to be corroborated, and patently suspect due to questions about who commissioned them and why they were generated.5
Steele and Simpson were deeply biased political actors. That is their right, of course. There’s no shame in opposing Trump. He rubs many good people the wrong way—narcissistic, crass, mendacious, and with a propensity to surround himself with shady characters. There is a reason why the president’s economic and policy successes have not translated into Reagan-like popularity ratings. Still, there’s a problem: Steele and Simpson were themselves mendacious. They pretended to adopt just-the-facts-ma’am impartiality when, in reality, they were Hillary operatives annealed in anti-Trump derangement. Their mulish predisposition made it easy to assume the Russians must have compromised Trump—just fill in the supporting facts later.6
As Lee Smith notes, Simpson’s journalist wife, Mary Jacoby, bragged in a Facebook post (since deleted) that Simpson was Russia-gate’s impresario:
It’s come to my attention that some people still don’t realize what Glenn’s role was in exposing Putin’s control of Donald Trump.… Let’s be clear. Glenn conducted the investigation. Glenn hired Chris Steele. Chris Steele worked for Glenn.7
Similarly, while he was working on the Clinton campaign’s Trump–Russia project, Steele reached out to his connections in the U.S. government because, as he told Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, he was passionate in his opposition to Trump and desperate that he not be elected. In October 2016, Steele told State Department official Kathleen Kavalec that he was “keen” to push his allegations against Trump into the public record before Election Day. We know he was doing precisely that: feeding his reports to the media at the same time he was providing them to the FBI. This was no secret to the Obama administration: Steele also told Kavalec that he was managing relationships with the media and that some of his information was already in the hands of the “NYT and WP”—i.e., The New York Times and The Washington Post.8
To hear Simpson and Steele tell it, the Fusion team’s job was to investigate Trump. Wrong. Their lavishly compensated job was to get Hillary Clinton elected. This explains the shifts in Steele’s position over time. During the campaign, he hyped his anti-Trump research as critical information on which the government and the press needed to act. After the campaign, however, when Steele was sued for libel in Britain and had to answer questions under oath, he conceded that his research was “raw” reporting that had not been verified and needed to be further investigated, not published.9 There is nothing mysterious here: When Steele’s priority was for Clinton to win, he engaged in hyperbole because it seemed necessary to achieve that outcome. When Steele’s priority became avoiding possible perjury charges, he conceded that his reports were little more than rank rumor.
Most significantly, Steele was not the source of the dossier information—no matter how many times Obama administration officials referred to him as such. Again and again we are told that the Justice Department and the FBI presented Steele’s information to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), even though it had not been corroborated, because Steele was a “credible so
urce.” He had provided solid information in the past, in particular, in the Justice Department’s 2010 FIFA soccer corruption investigation.10 As regards the dossier allegations, however, Steele was not the source; he was the accumulator and purveyor of allegations by the actual sources.
In criminal-justice parlance, when we are talking about information provided to a court in an application for some kind of warrant (e.g., a warrant to search, arrest, or wiretap a suspect), sources are the people who make the pertinent observations—who see the criminal conduct or hear the incriminating statements. In an application for a FISA warrant, the sources are the people who make the observations based on which federal judges are asked to find probable cause to believe a person is engaged in clandestine activity on behalf of a foreign power. Steele did not make any such observations. Instead, the observations of anonymous and sometimes unknown people were (allegedly) reported to him, and he then passed this information—multiple hearsay levels from the original source observations—to the FBI, which presented it to the court. Steele is assiduously referred to as a “source”; the Justice Department and the FBI figure lay people will accept this because he did pass the information to them, which sounds like what a source does. The non-specialist in legal procedure will not spot that the court was not given any basis to credit the actual sources—the unidentified Russian witnesses on whose observations the court was being asked to rely.
Ball of Collusion Page 20
