Ball of Collusion

by Andrew C. McCarthy

  Under Comey’s direction, the FBI decided not to inform Congress about the Crossfire Hurricane probe in its quarterly Gang of Eight briefings. The usually unflappable director seemed to be caught flatfooted when asked about this decision in March 2017. At a public hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, Comey mentioned en passant that the Bureau had just recently told Congress about the investigation. He was then questioned by a very young backbencher from upstate New York, Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik:

  STEFANIK:

  … If the open investigation began in July and the briefing of congressional leadership only occurred recently, why was there no notification prior to … the past month?

  COMEY:

  I think our decision was it was a matter of such sensitivity that we wouldn’t include it in the quarterly briefings.

  STEFANIK:

  So when you state “our decision” is that your decision? Is that usually your decision what gets briefed in those quarterly updates?

  COMEY:

  No, it’s usually the decision of the head of our counter intelligence division.

  STEFANIK:

  Why was the decision made not to brief senior congressional leadership until recently when the investigation had been open since July? A very serious investigation—why was that decision to wait months?

  COMEY:

  Because of the sensitivity of the matter.

  This series of answers is specious. Comey is an exceptional witness, so I can’t help but think he’d have had better answers, and avoided the wormy appearance of throwing his counterintelligence chief (Priestap) under the proverbial bus, if he’d anticipated the questions. Of course, he may not have had satisfying answers because what the FBI did is simply indefensible. The Gang of Eight was established precisely to deal with the situation presented here: making extremely “sensitive” operations known to Congress while they are being undertaken. By definition, there cannot be a matter that is too sensitive to disclose. If there were, then the unelected bureaucrats, rather than the sovereign—i.e., the People, through their elected officials—would decide what the sovereign gets to know. That’s not how American constitutional democracy works.

  More to the point, there is nothing decorous about this protection of “sensitivity.” It is classic Washington swaddling of sharp politics in euphemism. The problem here was not that information was sensitive. It is that eight political leaders, including four senior Republicans, would need to be told that the FBI, under the incumbent Democratic administration and in the stretch-run of a presidential election, was investigating the Republican candidate and his campaign, using counterintelligence authorities authorized by Congress.

  That was against our constitutional and historical norms. Norms, of course, are meant for normal times—and we hope that adhering to them reinforces normalcy and stability. But sometimes there are crises, and they have to give way. It is hard for me to believe Jim Comey thought this might not be grasped by, say, Mitch McConnell. I don’t think Republicans (or seasoned Democrats who understand that what goes around comes around) would have dismissed out of hand the possibility that the Obama administration’s investigation was appropriate—despite how notoriously political the Obama administration was. But there would not have been uncritical acceptance. The Gang of Eight would have asked tough questions: What was the predicate for this investigation? Was it serious enough to merit not only a preliminary inquiry but such intrusive measure as FISA warrants and the use of confidential informants to infiltrate a political campaign? And since anyone can make a serious allegation, what was the corroboration for the claim that the Trump campaign was conspiring with the Kremlin?

  These are precisely the questions that the FBI and the Justice Department still have not answered three years later. It is one thing to say, as the government does, that these matters are classified and cannot be spoken of publicly. It is quite another thing to withhold information from the congressional entity that has been created to deal with that very complication.

  The only sensible conclusion is that the FBI did not disclose what it was doing because it did not want to be put in a position of answering the question: What is your evidence?

  CIA Director Brennan took the opposite approach. He embraced the Gang of Eight process, albeit in his own political way. It was a way to get explosive information into the hands of hardball politicians—such as Senator Harry Reid, a brass-knuckles pol in the best of times. Recall Reid’s false claim that 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney had not paid his taxes, then his “justification” of the slander: the observation that Romney lost.8 Well, in this instance, the now-retired lawmaker was … about to retire—meaning he was untroubled by the usual concerns about blowback for playing political hardball.

  And as an artful operator in his own right, Brennan followed the practice of briefing the eight members separately, over nearly a month’s time—between August 11 and September 6. With a straight face, he maintains that he “provided the same briefing to each the Gang of Eight members.”9 We’re evidently to believe he gave exactly the same briefing to Reid as he gave to, say, Devin Nunes. We’re also to believe that, in a complex, transcontinental investigation, there were no new developments throughout that critical four-week period that would have called for tweaking the briefing. You’ll just have to take his word for it.

  Let’s consider what had to have been communicated to Senator Reid in that briefing.

  Shortly after speaking with Brennan, Reid fired off a letter to FBI Director Comey that was bristling with anger.10 It was now clear to Reid not only that Russia was “tampering in our presidential election,” but that “the evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continue[d] to mount.” Trump was an “unwitting agent” of the Kremlin, Reid thundered, quoting former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell, a Clinton supporter and Brennan ally (whom we met in Chapter 4’s discussion of the administration’s Benghazi cover-up). After venting his spleen about the hacked DNC emails, Reid came to the point:

  Further, [t]here have been a series of disturbing reports suggesting other methods Russia is using to influence the Trump campaign and manipulate it as a vehicle for advancing the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin. For example, questions have been raised about whether a Trump advisor who has been highly critical of U.S. and European economic sanctions on Russia, and who has conflicts of interest due to investments in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom, met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow in July 2016. [Emphasis added.]

  Undoubtedly, the “series of disturbing reports” in question refers to the dossier reports then being compiled by Christopher Steele. And among the main allegations Steele was pushing at the time—the same allegation that he stressed in his breakfast meeting with Bruce Ohr and that Ohr, in turn, stressed to FBI officials McCabe and Lisa Page—was Carter Page’s purported meetings with “high-ranking sanctioned individuals.” Igor Sechin, with whom Steele alleged Carter Page met, was under U.S. sanctions; Igor Divyekin is not known to have been under sanctions, but he was an important (if little known) official in Putin’s administration—and Steele had reported, in any event, that Page was surely meeting with other figures in the widely sanctioned regime, too.

  This is the information that Brennan was running with. He clearly thought the FBI was being overly cautious—a function of the fact that the Bureau uses court processes and must therefore vet information more carefully than the CIA before using it. Brennan was using pressure from Reid to light a fire under Comey.11

  The salient point is that Steele’s information is what Brennan had. It is the information the CIA director used to brief Congress. There is no reason to believe he had or used different information to brief President Obama, along with other top administration national security officials, in early August. If Brennan had lines of information from deep inside the Kremlin that were different from the ones Steele purported to have,
then the FBI would have used them to verify Steele’s information. The Bureau was never able to do that.

  Targeting Trump

  That is not to say the Bureau didn’t try.

  The relationship informant Stefan Halper struck up with Carter Page paid quick dividends. Halper was able to monitor Page—not that anyone ever established that Page was doing anything worth monitoring. Plus, Halper induced Page to give him an introduction to Sam Clovis, the navy vet and GOP activist from the critical presidential primary battleground state of Iowa. Clovis had been quick to hop on the Trump Train, was the campaign’s national co-chairman, and had been given the influential task of arming the candidate with foreign policy advisers. As you’ll recall by now, his performance was erratic—see, e.g., Page … Papadopoulos …

  Given the caliber of help he’d assembled, Clovis had to figure the estimable Dr. Halper was manna from heaven. To be sure, most anyone who browsed his Silence of the Rational Center for just a few minutes would pause to wonder what interest Halper would have in advising a populist-nationalist rabble-rouser.12 Still, Clovis no doubt realized that Trump’s political shtick, the wild style and jock-shock rhetoric, belie the brass-tacks fact that he is a fairly conventional, non-ideological centrist—more right-of-center now than the New York limousine liberal he was for most of his life. Until recent years, when Trump seized on immigration enforcement as his defining issue, many—myself included—would have pegged him as a Clinton Democrat (indeed, in 2008, Trump pronounced: “I think Bill Clinton was a great president”13). If Henry Kissinger finds Donald Trump worth advising, why wouldn’t Stef Halper?14

  After getting Clovis’s contact information from Page, Halper sent him a cloying email him in late August 2016:

  I am a professor at Cambridge University lecturing on US politics and foreign policy. I am what is called a ‘scholar practitioner,’ having served in the White House and four presidential campaigns—two as policy director. Over the past month I have been in conversation with Carter Page who attended our conference in Cambridge on US elections. Carter mentioned in Cambridge, and when visiting here in Virginia, that you and I should meet. I have enjoyed your comments and appearances in the media; you hit the sweet spot focusing Trump’s appeal to working America. May I suggest that we set a time to meet when you are next in Washington. Meanwhile, all the best, Stefan Halper.15

  Within days, the two met up in Virginia. As in his initial contact with Page, the experienced informant ingratiated himself without making any mention of Russia. As Clovis recalls, “There was no indication or no inclination that this was anything other than just wanting to offer up his help to the campaign if I needed it.”16 The Clovis connection gave Halper an entrée into real Trump policy-making circles. In fact, even after Trump won (and the Crossfire Hurricane investigation continued), Halper was invited to advise the White House on China issues—eventually meeting with Peter Navarro, President Trump’s chief trade negotiator (who knew Halper from having interviewed him while making a documentary years earlier).17

  The ill-conceived defense of the Obama administration’s deployment of confidential informants (spies) holds that the investigation did not really target Donald Trump or his campaign (and, later, the Trump administration). Rather, the government merely probed a few suspect actors in Trump’s orbit (principally, Page, Manafort, Papadopoulos, and Michael Flynn). In this vein, it has been pointed out that the FBI does not appear to have specifically instructed Halper to target Clovis—though it is conceded that the informant alerted his handlers that he was doing so.18

  This critique misunderstands both informant work and the nature of the investigation. In long-term investigations (as opposed to brief, transactional assignments, such as an undercover drug buy), informants are given general instructions about the objectives of their part of the operation, and then turned loose. In a counterintelligence investigation, where the objective is to gather information about the nature of relationships between people and foreign powers, rather than to collect evidence of crimes, this can be very broad, loose guidance. That is especially so when dealing with an old hand like Halper (who, no doubt, has been at the game much longer than the agents who were handling him). The informant’s task is to progress from the initial target (e.g. Page or Papadopoulos) to that target’s associates—preferably his superiors (e.g., Clovis and beyond). That is how the probe comes to grasp exactly what is going on, who is involved, what each person’s role is, etc. Halper would not have notified the FBI that Page had gotten him to Clovis, and so on, if that progression were not germane to the operation. That is how investigations are supposed to work.

  Crossfire Hurricane was an investigation, principally, of Trump. As the Steele dossier so heavily relied on by the Obama administration elucidates, the operating assumption was that Trump personally was enmeshed with the Kremlin. That was the theory pushed by Brennan, whose post-election commentary illustrates that he understood Trump to be a willful, corrupt actor. Whether this was the case, or whether Trump was an unwitting target of Russian-controlled operatives (or whether the suspicions of him were baseless all together), would have been questions the investigation was seeking to answer. Such questions could not have been answered by confining the inquiry to the doings of, say, Carter Page.

  Furthermore, as we shall see presently, the FBI viewed the investigation as an “insurance policy.” That is, in the unlikely event Trump won the election, the investigation would give the Bureau a vehicle to monitor the new president and limit the damage FBI officers claimed to fear he would otherwise do to their institution and to the country. Clearly, this was not just an investigation of Page or Papadopoulos. It was to be expected that a skilled informant such as Halper would start with them and then go wherever the trail took him—working toward Trump. That is why he pressed Papadopoulos about the Trump campaign, not just about Papadopoulos himself.

  Let’s consider Halper’s interaction with Papadopoulos. It is not difficult to grasp what happened—nor why the FBI, the Justice Department, the CIA, the State Department, and British and Australian authorities are not anxious to discuss the matter or reveal its paper trail.

  As we’ve seen, Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat, runs in the same British intelligence circles as Halper and Dearlove, which held Trump in the same disdain as did their friends in establishment Washington, such as Senator McCain and the Clintons. After Papadopoulos, in the capacity of a green, young Trump adviser situated in London, intemperately rebuked Prime Minister Cameron in public, Downer arranged to meet him. Trying to impress Downer during their discussion, Papadopoulos made a passing remark that Russia might have damaging information about Clinton. Downer believed Papadopoulos was an airhead and took no action because he thought so little of the remark.

  Two months later, when the hacked DNC emails were released by WikiLeaks—which was controlled by Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, to the great dismay of British intelligence—Downer perceived an opportunity to implicate Trump. So he twisted Papadopoulos’s remark into something Papadopoulos had not said—a “suggestion” that the Kremlin possessed emails related to Clinton that it would release to help Trump defeat her, possibly with Trump’s knowledge. Did Downer distort Papadopoulos’s remark based on Assange’s public statement in June that WikiLeaks had Clinton-related emails? Did Downer have any way of knowing that Mifsud, also friendly with British intelligence, may have told Papadopoulos Russia had emails? We don’t know. We do know that Downer decided to take his distorted version of Papadopoulos’s remark to the American embassy in London—an ardently pro-Clinton branch of a State Department that was already receiving reports from London-based Christopher Steele that Trump and Putin were in a corrupt conspiracy involving the publication of hacked DNC emails.

  The State Department routed Downer’s information to the FBI, whose headquarters was inclined to believe the worst about Trump. The Bureau was also receiving Steele’s reporting, and it was being pushed hard by the CIA (which had t
he ear of the president) on the theory that the publication of the hacked DNC emails was Exhibit A of Putin’s scheme to get Trump elected—a scheme in which, by Brennan’s lights,” Trump was probably complicit. The Bureau immediately opened a formal investigation of Trump’s campaign. Negotiations quickly ensued between the Obama State Department and the Australian government to allow the FBI to breach diplomatic protocol and interview Downer as a witness—with the cooperation of the British government, the host country for the interview. The Bureau dispatched its top counterintelligence agent, the virulently anti-Trump Peter Strzok, to interview Downer. The diplomat related his exaggerated “what Papadopoulos’s comments suggested to me” version, which Strzok—having studied his Josh Marshall—was ripe to internalize as evidence of a Trump–Russia conspiracy involving stolen Democratic emails.

  Strzok brought this information back to his superiors, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who assumed hands-on control of the case, and who was now being briefed by Justice Department official Bruce Ohr about Steele’s allegations. With the cooperation of the British government and the CIA, the Bureau decided to use the Cambridge-based, longtime CIA and FBI informant Halper, who had already made contact with Page and Clovis, to run an operation at Papadopoulos. The objective would be to get Papadopoulos to implicate the Trump campaign—and perhaps even Trump himself—in the scheme to influence the election by illegally hacking and disseminating Democratic emails, a scheme in which Trump’s co-conspirators were imagined to be the Putin regime and WikiLeaks.

  This was an ambitious investigation, so the FBI did not leave it to Halper alone. Another operative was assigned: an attractive woman who goes by the name Azra Turk. This is probably a pseudonym, but because she is a covert asset who may well be involved in other undercover operations (past and/or ongoing), we have confirmation at this time neither of her name nor her status—she has been publicly described as “a government investigator,” but it is not known whether the “government” in question is the U.S. government, or for what agency she is an investigator.19