32. D claims to have been in Moscow (if not in the hotel) with Trump, while E is said to have “been aware” of the incident but is not alleged to have been in the vicinity. Millian has claimed (at times) to have been in Moscow with Trump at the time, so he must be D—meaning someone else must be E.
33. The most common speculation centers around Felix Sater, a longtime FBI and CIA informant. We will discuss Sater in due course, but there has been no confirmation that he is among Steele’s sources. Interestingly, Sater was originally inked as a government cooperator in the late 1990s by Andrew Weissmann, then a prosecutor working for then-U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch in the Eastern District of New York. Weissmann, of course, was Special Counsel Mueller’s top lieutenant and an author of the Mueller report, in which Sater is benignly described as “a New York based real estate advisor” who dealt with Trump Organization lawyer Michael Cohen (Sater’s friend and high school classmate) on the Trump Tower Moscow project. There is no mention in the report of Sater’s colorful career as a covert government informant in organized crime and terrorism investigations—on which he embarked to get out from under his complicity in a $40 million fraud conspiracy. I guess it wasn’t deemed important—or at least as important as, say, lying about the date of a meeting (for which Mueller prosecuted George Papadopoulos). See, e.g., Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold, “The Asset: How a Player in the Trump–Russia Scandal Led a Double Life as an American Spy” (BuzzFeed, March 12, 2018); Jason Haltiwanger, “Meet Felix Sater, the Russian-born, bar-fighting felon with ties to the mob at the center of Mueller’s Russia investigation” (Business Insider, May 17, 2018); Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, “‘We will be in Moscow’: The story of Trump’s 30-year quest to expand his brand to Russia” (Washington Post, Nov. 29, 2018).
34. Simpson is well known to leak information to the media, which he sees as part of Fusion GPS’s services for clients. Simpson Senate Testimony, supra, p. 210; Simpson House testimony, pp. 103-04. He reportedly outed Millian to ABC’s Brian Ross. See Isikoff and Corn, Russian Roulette, supra. Moreover, on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, just four days before the Journal reported that Millian was a major dossier source, Simpson told Justice Department official Bruce Ohr that there was about to be media reporting about a major dossier source. In addition, Simpson had previously told Ohr that Millian was a potential “intermediary” between Trump and the Putin regime. Bruce Ohr House Testimony, supra, pp. 13-19, 22; see also Chuck Ross, “Bruce Ohr Told of Safety Concerns for Steele Dossier Source” (Daily Caller, Feb. 21, 2019); Ross, “In Newly Released Interview, Alleged Dossier Source Made Cryptic Remarks About Trump” (Daily Caller, Sept. 7, 2018).
35. U.S. Dept. of State, Case No. F-2018-04736, Doc. No. C06679743, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec, “Notes from Meeting with Chris Steele and Tatyana Duran of Orbis Security, October 11, 2016” (Disclosed May 6, 2019); John Solomon, “FBI’s Steele story falls apart: False intel and media contacts were flagged before FISA” (The Hill, May 9, 2013).
36. Relying on reporting by the Financial Times, ABC News recounted that Millian’s organization collaborated on a 2011 trip to Moscow for fifty American businessmen. The FBI later asked some of the Americans whether Russian intelligence tried to recruit them, implying that at least some of the people behind the junket were spies. An intelligence expert told ABC News that the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce reminded him of a classic Soviet front organization. Ross and Mosk, “US-Russian Businessman Said to Be Source of Key Trump Dossier Claims,” supra.
37. Isikoff and Corn, Russian Roulette, supra; Chuck Ross, Bruce Ohr Told of Safety Concerns for Steele Dossier Source,” supra.
38. Ross and Mosk, “US-Russian Businessman Said to Be Source of Key Trump Dossier Claims,” supra; Maremont, “Key Claims in Trump Dossier Said to Come From Head of Russian-American Business Group,” supra. Millian told ABC News he was in Moscow at the time but did not see Trump. He told the Daily Caller that “he was not in Moscow with Trump”—confirming that he knew nothing about any episode with prostitutes but leaving ambiguous whether he was in the city at the time. Chuck Ross, “Bruce Ohr Told of Safety Concerns for Steele Dossier Source,” supra.
39. Chuck Ross, “Steele Identified Russian Dossier Sources, Notes Reveal” (Daily Caller, May 16, 2019); Peter Pomerantsev, “Putin’s Rasputin” (London Review of Books, Oct. 20, 2011); Matt Thomas, “Vladislav Surkov: Who is Vladimir Putin’s ‘grey cardinal’? Putin’s chief political technologist, postmodern novelist, PR man—Surkov has been all of these and more” (International Business Times, Oct. 29, 2016).
40. “Russia Is Selling a Big Chunk of This State-Controlled Oil Giant” (Reuters, Dec. 8, 2016).
41. See Mueller Report, Vol. II, pp. 23, 27 & n.12, 28. [Kindle locations Vol I at 7092, 7176, 7188, Vol 2 at 10632—search term “unverified.”]
42. Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, and Scott Shane, “The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.” (New York Times, Dec. 13, 2016).
43. Mark Tran, “WikiLeaks to publish more Hillary Clinton emails—Julian Assange” (The Guardian, June 12, 2016).
44. Simpson House Intelligence Committee Testimony, supra, p. 234.
45. Alan Yuhas, “Hillary Clinton campaign blames leaked DNC emails about Sanders on Russia” (The Guardian, July 24, 2016).
46. Gubarev v. Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. and Christopher Steele, High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Div., No. HQ17D00413, Defendants Orbis and Steele Response to Interrogatories (May 18, 2017); Rowan Scarborough, “Faced with libel lawsuit, dossier drafter Christopher Steele hedges on liking Trump to Russia” (Washington Times, Dec. 20, 2017); Andrew C. McCarthy, “Politicizing Steele’s Raw, Unverified ‘Intelligence’” (National Review, Jan. 9, 2018).
CHAPTER 10
1. Peter S. Goodman, “The Post World War II Order Is Under Assault From the Powers That Built It” (New York Times, March 26, 2018) (Post World War II order forged by victorious Western powers that “forged institutions—NATO, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization—that aimed to keep the peace through collective military might and shared prosperity. They promoted democratic ideals and international trade while investing in the notion that coalitions were the antidote to destructive nationalism.”).
2. Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash, supra; Marc A. Theissen, “Yes, the Clintons should be investigated” (Washington Post, Nov. 19, 2017); John Solomon, “The case for Russian collusion … against the Democrats” (The Hill, Feb. 10, 2019); Schweizer, “Uncovering the Russia ties of Hillary’s campaign chief” (New York Post, July 5, 2017).
3. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Background to ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections’: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution” (Jan. 6, 2017), p. 13, Annex B (explaining “Estimative Language”).
4. John Solomon, “Comey: DNC denied FBI’s requests for access to hacked servers” (The Hill, Jan. 10, 2017).
5. Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, and Scott Shane, “The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.” (New York Times, Dec. 13, 2016).
6. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, concluded that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion, and the Ukrainian defense ministry denied that the claimed hacking and combat losses had not happened. CrowdStrike, nevertheless, maintained that its analysis was sound. Oleksiy Kuzmenko and Pete Cobus, “Think Tank: Cyber Firm at Center of Russian Hacking Charges Misread Data” (Voice of America, March 21, 2017).
7. Patrick Lawrence, “A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack” (The Nation, Aug. 9, 2017).
8. Various Contributors, “A Leak or a Hack? A Forum on the VIPS Memo” (The Nation, Sept. 1, 2017).
9. Sam Biddle, “Here’s the Public Evidence Russia Hacked the DNC—It’s Not Enough” (The Intercept, Dec. 14, 2016); see also Jeffrey Carr, “FBI/DHS Joint Analysis Re
port: A Fatally Flawed Effort” (Medium.com, Dec. 30, 2016) (“Once malware is deployed, it is no longer under the control of the hacker who deployed it or the developer who created it. It can be reverse-engineered, copied, modified, shared and redeployed again and again by anyone. In other words—malware deployed is malware enjoyed!”).
10. U.S. Dept. of Justice, “Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein Delivers Remarks Announcing the Indictment of Twelve Russian Intelligence Officers for Conspiring to Interfere in the 2016 Presidential Election Through Computer Hacking and Related Offenses” (Office of Public Affairs, July 13, 2018).
11. United States v. Julian Paul Assange, No. 18 Crim. 111 (E.D.Va. 2018), Indictment (March 6, 2018).
12. Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 371.
13. President Obama commuted Manning’s 35-year sentence to seven years, rationalizing that it was warranted due to the distress a transgender woman (who had attempted suicide) faced from the prospect of decades of imprisonment in a men’s military prison. Manning was released in May 2017. Charlie Savage, “Chelsea Manning to Be Released Early as Obama Commutes Sentence” (New York Times, Jan. 17, 2017) See also Andrew C. McCarthy, “Why Isn’t Assange Charged with ‘Collusion with Russia’?” (National Review, April 13, 2019).
14. The 2010 Assange-Manning cyber-theft conspiracy charge is outside the standard five-year statute of limitations for federal crimes: The limitations period was already exhausted when the original indictment was filed in 2018. The superseding indictment, filed on May 23, 2019 (as this book was being finalized), is even more blatantly time-barred. The new indictment will only survive a motion to dismiss if prosecutors convince courts in both Britain (which will rule on extradition) and the U.S. (where the case would be prosecuted) that each of the charges is actually a “federal crime of terrorism,” triggering a three-year statute-of-limitations extension. I am skeptical that the Justice Department’s cyber-theft charge qualifies. The extension statute, Section 2332b(g)(5)(B) of the penal code (Title 18), makes the extra three years applicable to cyber-theft offenses under Section 1030 of the penal code, but not to espionage-act offenses under Section 793. Prosecutors haven’t charged a substantive cyber-theft violation under Section 1030; they have charged a conspiracy (under Section 371) to commit the Section 1030 offense. That is not the same thing. Typically, if Congress intends that its mention of a crime should be understood to include a conspiracy to commit that crime, it says so. It did not say so in the extension statute. See United States v. Julian Paul Assange, No. 18 Crim. 111 (CMH) (Eastern District of Virginia, 2019), Superseding Indictment (May 23, 2019) (and note that, like the original indictment, the superseding indictment contains no charges related to the cyberespionage operations directed at the 2016 campaign).
15. On May 23, 2019, the Justice Department superseded the indictment against Assange. It now charges eighteen felony counts arising out of the scheme with Manning to steal and expose classified information. Again, the government brought no charges related to the cyberespionage operations directed at the 2016 presidential campaign. United States v. Julian Paul Assange, No. 18 Crim. 111 (CMH) (Eastern District of Virginia, 2019), Superseding Indictment (May 23, 2019).
CHAPTER 11
1. Comey Senate Testimony (June 8, 2017), supra.
2. James B. Comey, “How Trump Co-opts Leaders Like Bill Barr—Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive this president” (New York Times, May 1, 2019); Nancy Cook, “Comey calls Trump ‘morally unfit to be president’” (Politico, April 15, 2018).
3. Andrew C. McCarthy, “Trump’s Berating of Comey for the Consumption of Our Enemies” (National Review, May 20, 2017).
4. Andrew C. McCarthy, “Comey Confirms: In Clinton Emails Caper, the Fix Was In” (National Review, April 28, 2018).
5. Inspector General Report, supra, pp. 130-31.
6. Steele and his company (Orbis) worked for Deripaska in an arrangement similar to the one under which Simpson and Fusion worked for the son of Putin ally Pyotr Katsyv. They were retained by law firms that represented the oligarchs to perform research in support of litigation. John Solomon, “Russian oligarch, Justice Department and a clear case of collusion” (The Hill, Aug. 28, 2018); see also Lee Smith, “Was Christopher Steele Paid by Russian Oligarch and Putin Ally Oleg Deripaska?” (Tablet, Feb. 12, 2108) (embedding letter of February 9, 2018, from Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) to Paul E. Hauser, a lawyer for Deripaska believed to have retained Steele, inquiring about Steele’s work for Deripaska); Byron York, “Emails show 2016 links among Steele, Ohr, Simpson—with Russian oligarch in background” (Washington Examiner, Aug. 8, 2018) (relating that the lawyer declined to answer Senator Grassley’s question).
7. York, “Emails show 2016 links among Steele, Ohr, Simpson—with Russian oligarch in background,” supra.
8. Kenneth P. Vogel and Matthew Rosenberg, “Agents Tried to Flip Russian Oligarchs. The Fallout Spread to Trump.” (New York Times, Sept. 1, 2018); Andrew E. Kramer, “Praise for Mueller Report, From an Unlikely Source: Oleg Deripaska” (New York Times, April 3, 2019).
9. Schiff Memo, supra, pp. 3-4; Mike Levine, “Trump ‘dossier’ stuck in New York, didn’t trigger Russia investigation, sources say,” supra (“two months after Page started advising Trump’s campaign, the FBI paid him a visit in New York, asking about contacts with Russian intelligence, according to a [not further described] government document”).
10. Paul Sperry, “Flashback: The Real Carter Page vs. the One People Suspect” (Real Clear Investigations, June 7, 2018).
11. Benjamin Weiser, “Bank Employee Pleads Guilty to Conspiring to Work as Secret Russian Agent” (New York Times, March 11, 2016).
12. United States v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, No. 18 Crim. 215 (ABJ) (S.D.N.Y. 2019), Indictment (July 13, 2018), p. 12.
13. Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, and Scott Shane, “The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.” (New York Times, Dec. 13, 2016); United States v. Netyksho, Indictment, supra, pp. 6-12.
14. Issie Lapowsky, “Wait, Clinton Didn’t Have a Computer in Her Office?” (Wired, Oct. 22, 2015).
15. Lipton et al., “The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.,” supra; Ellen Nakashima, “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump” (Washington Post, June 14, 2016).
16. Jeff Carlson, “Baker Testimony Reveals Perkins Coie Lawyer Provided FBI With Information on Alfa Bank Allegations” (Jan. 21, 2019).
17. John Solomon, “Comey: DNC denied FBI’s requests for access to hacked servers” (The Hill, Jan. 10, 2017). CrowdStrike is “Company 1” in Special Counsel Mueller’s indictment of the Russian intelligence officers. United States v. Netyksho, Indictment, supra, pp. 12, 14, 15.
18. Adam Pasick and Tim Fernholz, “The stealthy, Eric Schmidt-backed startup that’s working to put Hillary Clinton in the White House” (Quartz, Oct. 9, 2015); Ron Miller, “Security Company CrowdStrike Scores $100M Led By Google Capital” (TechCrunch, July 13, 2015); Justin Caruso, “Crowdstrike: Five Things Everyone Is Ignoring About the Russia-DNC Story” (Daily Caller, June 24, 2017); Jack Nicas, “Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt Gave Advice to Clinton Campaign, Leaked Emails Show—The executive backed a startup that helped develop some of the technology behind Mrs. Clinton’s website” (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 2, 2016).
19. In the drafting process, Comey’s remarks were edited: The assertion that it was “reasonably likely” that a foreign government had accessed Clinton’s emails was watered down to a statement that it was “possible” but that the FBI had no concrete evidence that it had happened. “Did the FBI Cover Up Evidence that China Hacked Clinton’s State Dept. Emails?” (Investor’s Business Daily, Aug. 28, 2018). President Trump has publicly claimed that hackers working for China stole Mrs. Clinton’s emails, an allegation that the FBI has shot down. (“The FBI has not found any evidence the servers were compromised.”) John Wagner, “FBI pushes ba
ck on unfounded Trump claim that China hacked Hillary Clinton’s email” (Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2018) (embedding Donald J. Trump Tweets, Aug. 28 and 29, 2018); but see Richard Pollock, “Sources: China Hacked Hillary Clinton’s Private Email Server” (Daily Caller, Aug 27, 2018) (two unidentified government sources claim the Intelligence Community Inspector General believed Clinton’s emails had been penetrated by a Chinese-controlled company in Washington and alerted the FBI’s Agent Peter Strzok—again, note that the FBI denied having such evidence). See also David E. Sanger, “Hillary Clinton’s Email Was Probably Hacked, Experts Say” (New York Times, July 6, 2016); Elias Groll and David Francis, “FBI: An Accont on Clinton’s Private Email Server Was Hacked—An unidentified hacker compromised the email of a Bill Clinton staffer” (Foreign Policy, Sept. 2, 2016).
20. United States v. Netyksho, Indictment, supra, pp. 13-18.
21. Special Counsel Mueller indicted Stone for obstructing the congressional investigations of Russia’s interference in the election. United States v. Roger Jason Stone, Jr., No. 19 Crim. 18 (ABJ) (D.C. 2019), Indictment (Jan. 24, 2019); see also Andrew C. McCarthy, “Fever Dream: Mueller’s Collusion-Free Collusion Indictment of Roger Stone” (National Review, Feb. 2, 2019). As we shall discuss, infra, Assange was indicted by the Justice Department … but not for conduct arising out of the 2016 campaign.
22. Isikoff and Corn, Russian Roulette.
23. Ibid. See also Jonathan M. Winer, “Devin Nunes is investigating me. Here’s the truth.” (Washington Post, Feb. 8, 2018); Rowan Scarborough, “Obama aide started Christopher Steele-FBI alliance” (Washington Times, March 13, 2018); Chuck Ross, “Here’s How the Steele Dossier Spread through the Media and Government” (Daily Caller, March 18, 2019).
24. Eric Felten, “Was Christopher Steele disseminating Russian disinformation to the State Department?” (Weekly Standard, Sept. 14, 2018).
Ball of Collusion Page 50
