The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  The assessment’s methodological flaws are not difficult to spot. Manufacturing the politicized findings that Obama sought meant not only abandoning protocol but also subverting basic logic. Two of the ICA’s central findings are that:

  • Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.

  • Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.

  To know preferences and intentions would require sources targeting Putin’s inner circles—either human sources or electronic surveillance. As Nunes notes, however, US intelligence on Putin’s decision-making process was inadequate.

  But even if there had been extensive collection on precisely that issue, it would be difficult to know what was true. For instance, the closest you can get to Putin’s inner circle is Putin himself. But even capturing him on an intercept saying he wanted to elect Trump might prove inconclusive. It is difficult to judge intentions because it is not possible to see into the minds of other people. How would you know that Putin was speaking truthfully? How would you know that the Russian president didn’t know his communications were under US surveillance and wasn’t trying to deceive his audience?

  Quality control of information is one of the tasks of counterintelligence—to discern how you know what you know and whether that information is trustworthy. There was no quality control for the Trump-Russia intelligence. For instance, Crossfire Hurricane lead agent Peter Strzok was the FBI’s deputy assistant director of counterintelligence. Instead of weeding out flawed intelligence on Russia, the Crossfire Hurricane team was feeding Steele’s reports into intelligence products. Yet the ICA claimed to have “high confidence” in its assessment that “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” What was the basis of that judgment?

  According to the ICA:

  Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.

  “Most likely” and “almost certainly” are rhetorical hedges that show the assessment could not have been made in “high confidence.” Putin may have held a grudge against Clinton, but there is no way of knowing it.

  The supporting evidence deteriorates more the farther the ICA purports to reach into Putin’s mind.

  Beginning in June, Putin’s public comments about the US presidential race avoided directly praising President-elect Trump, probably because Kremlin officials thought that any praise from Putin personally would backfire in the United States.

  This is absurd. Part of the evidence that Putin supported Trump is that he avoided praising Trump. It is difficult enough to determine intentions by what someone says. Yet the ICA claims to have discerned Putin’s intentions by what he did not say.

  There is no introductory philosophy class in logic where reasoning like that would pass muster. Yet Brennan’s handpicked group used it as the basis of its assessment that Putin had helped Trump.

  Moscow also saw the election of President-elect Trump as a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

  This may be an accurate description of how Putin saw Trump. But Trump’s predecessor also wanted to coordinate anti-ISIS operations with Moscow. On this view, Trump would have represented a continuation of Obama’s ISIS policy. Why would this make Trump’s victory suspicious to Obama’s intelligence chiefs?

  The ICA also pointed to documentary evidence of Putin’s intentions: English-language media owned by the Russian government, the news site Sputnik, and the RT network, were critical of Clinton.

  State-owned Russian media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary Clinton.

  Curiously, just days before the election, the informant the US government sent after the Trump campaign praised the Democratic candidate in an interview with Sputnik. “Clinton would be best for US-UK relations and for relations with the European Union,” Stefan Halper told the Kremlin-directed media outlet. “Clinton is well-known, deeply experienced, and predictable. US-UK relations will remain steady regardless of the winner although Clinton will be less disruptive over time.”

  The ICA includes a seven-page appendix devoted to RT, the central node, according to the document, of the Kremlin’s effort to “influence politics, fuel discontent in [sic] US.”

  Adam Schiff appeared on RT in July 2013. He argued for “making the FISA court much more transparent, so the American people can understand what’s being done in their name in the name of national security, so that we can have a more informed debate over the balance between privacy and security.”

  RT’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, is a master propagandist, according to the ICA. The document fails to mention that Simonyan heads another Moscow-owned media initiative, Russia Beyond the Headlines, a news supplement inserted into dozens of the West’s leading newspapers, including the New York Times. Russia Beyond the Headlines has been delivered to millions of American homes over the last decade. By contrast, RT’s US market share is so small that it doesn’t qualify for the Nielsen ratings. Virtually no one in the United States watches it.

  Taking the logic of Brennan’s handpicked team seriously would mean that the publishers of the New York Times played a major role in a coordinated Russian effort to elect Donald Trump.

  Nunes realized even then the purpose of Obama’s dossier. “Devin figured out in December what was going on,” says Langer. “It was an operation to bring down Trump.”

  There was no evidence that any Trump associate had done anything improper regarding the Russians, and Nunes was losing patience. “We had serious things the committee wanted to do,” he says. “With Trump elected, we could do some big stuff, like with China.”

  Still, it was important for HPSCI to maintain control of the Russia investigation. Otherwise, Democrats and Never Trump Republicans were likely to get their wish to convene a bipartisan commission to investigate Russian interference—with the purpose of turning it on Trump.

  “Before they started floating the idea of a special counsel, the big idea was a special commission like the 9/11 Commission,” says Langer. It was outgoing secretary of state John Kerry who first came forward with the proposal.

  The point was to change the power dynamic. “In a normal committee,” says Langer, “the majority has the power, and that happened to be us. They wanted to strip our power and make it fifty-fifty.”

  “Bipartisan” was a euphemism for “anti-Trump.” “It would have been a complete joke,” says Nunes. “A combination of partisan hacks from the left and people who hated Trump on the right.”

  Democrats led by Schiff and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer were joined by the late John McCain, the most active of the Never Trump Republicans. After the election, the Arizona senator had instructed his aide David Kramer to deliver a copy of the Steele Dossier to Comey.

  “God only knows who they’d have populated that committee with,” says Nunes. “Anyone they could control. It would have been a freak show.”

  Speaker of the House Paul Ryan defended HPSCI’s independence. On the Senate side, Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr had only one move. To deflect demands for an independent commission, he effectively ceded control of the Senate investigation to his vice chair, Democrat Mark Warner.

  Still, Nunes believed that all the talk of Trump and Russia was a waste of time. “They kept promising us evidence of collusion, week after week, and they came up with nothing.”

  Nunes’s disdain for the ICA forced the Crossfire Hurricane team’s hand. “Right around the time that they came out with the ICA, t
hey kept saying that we were waiting on something to show us, something important that was coming in,” he says. “They said it was some significant figure who they couldn’t quite track down yet.”

  But the FBI knew exactly where its missing link was, the piece of evidence that they thought would convince hardened skeptics like Nunes that collusion was real. They didn’t have to chase him down, because he was sitting at home in Chicago. He submitted to a voluntary interview January 27 and without a lawyer because he had no idea what the FBI had in store for him.

  The Crossfire Hurricane team was figuring how they were going to set up the Trump adviser they’d used to open up the investigation in July 2016: George Papadopoulos.

  Chapter 9

  THE PRESS BREAKS

  ON JANUARY 10, 2017, one of the United States’ most vital political institutions—the media—imploded. The founding fathers believed that a free press was central to the preservation and advancement of a free people. “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”

  Journalists and media organizations around the world are vulnerable—susceptible to the blandishments of self-regarding regimes that would lure them into a career of flattery and, worse, defenseless against the despotisms that would silence them forever.

  Very rarely has a free press sacrificed its independence and prestige by putting its rights and privileges into the service of intelligence operations designed to target one faction on behalf of another. But that was what the US media did in the winter of 2017. They became political operatives. The bylines they used were part of the journalistic apparatus that camouflaged the dirty work they were undertaking.

  The effect of their campaign was to break men and women, including other Americans, to separate them from their families and friends, to strip them of their liberty, their homes, their savings, simply for exercising their constitutional right to participate in a political campaign.

  But from the press’s perspective, they’d backed the wrong candidate and he had won, so those on the other side were disposable.

  On January 6, CIA director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI director James Comey, and National Security Agency director Michael Rogers briefed the president-elect on the intelligence community assessment that Obama had ordered in the wake of Trump’s election. Comey stayed after to tell Trump alone about the Steele Dossier; he’d made sure that allegations from it were included in an appendix to the ICA.

  Comey knew that CNN had the story about the dossier and was only looking for a news hook to justify publishing it. He briefed Trump partly to give CNN the news hook.

  The Crossfire Hurricane group was watching closely. McCabe tipped off colleagues that Trump had been briefed on the dossier. “CNN is close to going forward with the sensitive story,” wrote the deputy FBI director. “The trigger for [CNN] is they know the material was discussed in the brief and presented in an attachment.”

  The January 10, 2017, story, “Intel Chiefs Presented Trump with Claims of Russian Efforts to Compromise Him,” was coauthored by Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper, and Carl Bernstein. The report referred to the dossier’s most serious charge, “allegations that there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.”

  CNN’s story and Comey’s briefing touched on different issues. Comey had told the president-elect only about the dossier’s claims that the Russians had video of him and prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. Why hadn’t Comey told Trump about the much more consequential claims? Because the FBI director was trying to elicit information from Trump.

  Prior to meeting with the president elect, Comey had met with McCabe and others including Crossfire Hurricane “supervisors” and discussed whether Trump might “provide information of value to the pending Russia interference investigation.” Just a day after Obama had directed Comey and others to gather Russia-related information on the Trump team, the FBI director was spying on the president-elect.

  The January 6th briefing was a pivotal episode, for it also showcased the partnership between the press and the national security apparatus.

  Comey wasn’t the only Obama spy chief who pushed his advantage. There was also the director of national intelligence. After initially denying having discussed the dossier with anyone in the media, Clapper admitted under oath that while he was director of national intelligence he had discussed it with his future CNN colleague Jake Tapper.

  Leaks of that magnitude regarding top members of the intelligence community briefing the president and president-elect are rare. And illegal. Leaks of classified information would soon become a regular occurrence.

  Hours after the CNN story broke, BuzzFeed published what appears to be the full text of the Steele Dossier. Tapper emailed BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith to complain. “I think your move makes the story less serious and credible,” he wrote. “I think you damaged its impact.”

  Another media outfit had taken the air out of the CNN investigative team’s big breaking news story. Because of Buzzfeed, American news audiences could judge the credibility of the dossier—with its lurid tales of golden showers and outlandish allegations of Trump-Russia conspiracies—for themselves rather than take it on CNN’s authority.

  Publication of the document undermined the story’s credibility. CNN had not published an account of prostitutes precisely because it wanted to avoid appearing like a tabloid, because it wanted its serious and credible report to have an impact.

  With news consumers now given a wider context in which to judge the CNN report, Tapper was angry. “Collegiality wise,” Tapper wrote, “it was you stepping on my dick.”

  Tapper thought BuzzFeed was unprofessional. “Your guys unlike us don’t even seem to know who the former agent i[s],” he wrote.

  Tapper was boasting. The CNN team was on the inside. It wasn’t until the next day, January 11, it was reported that Steele had authored the memos. CNN had been briefed by Steele himself.

  Steele’s boss, Glenn Simpson, had worked with CNN’s Evan Perez at the Wall Street Journal. After he had left the Journal, Perez still socialized with the former journalists who founded Fusion GPS.

  CNN did not disclose that Perez was friends with the political operatives who had produced and distributed the Clinton-funded dossier that Clapper discussed with the CNN anchorman and that Comey had briefed to the president-elect as a news hook for CNN to break the story. It was a tightly wrapped package, like a bomb designed to blow up on Trump.

  “No one has verified this stuff,” Tapper wrote to Smith regarding the dossier.

  That was true. Months before the election, media organizations had sent reporters as far as Moscow to try to verify the dossier. No one had been able to, which was why CNN needed Comey’s briefing to report on it.

  The CNN anchor was caught in a contradiction. It was unverified, but CNN ran with it anyway. CNN published a story about intelligence officials briefing a president on national security issues based on information it knew might not be true.

  I worked with Tapper nearly twenty years ago at a magazine called Talk. He was a very good journalist. And yet he missed the real story here—four US intelligence chiefs had briefed unverified information to the president and president-elect.

  No one in the press reported that story because they couldn’t—they were themselves part of it. But the CNN story found a way around the traditional measures designed to keep disinformation out of the press: it didn’t report on the allegations of the dossier directly but rather on the fact that it was briefed to the president-elect.

  The dossier was now out in the open. And under the guise of “news,” the press would unleash half a million fictions engendered by a conspiracy theory. After CNN’s January 10 story, there was no going back to traditional, fact-based journalism. Reporters had transformed into outright political operatives.

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bsp; Nunes says he remembers seeing the Steele Dossier in BuzzFeed for the first time. “I showed it to the staff, and everyone was laughing,” he says. “It was a joke, The Onion magazine version of intelligence products. Peeing on a bed? None of it made any sense.”

  It was poorly written, incoherent in places, and rife with misspellings. Steele had graduated from one of England’s great universities. He was a college journalist and debater. At MI6, he’d written reports for a living. How had he learned to write so poorly?

  “We read intelligence products all the time,” says Nunes. “The staff, the lawyers, everyone is saying ‘No one is going to take this seriously.’”

  Nunes also heard from US allies with the most experience of Russian intelligence operations. “Our eastern and central European partners couldn’t believe so many people seemed to have fallen for the dossier,” he says. “They said, ‘This has nothing to do with the Russians, it’s not a Russian work product. The Russians would have made sure there were three or four things in there that were dead true.’”

  Nunes had traveled extensively in the former Eastern Bloc states. Romanian president Klaus Iohannis had awarded him the Order of the Star of Romania, the highest award given to foreigners, for building a strong alliance between Washington and Bucharest.

  “The central and eastern Europeans lived behind the Iron Curtain for half a century,” he says. “They’re laughing at our intelligence agencies for believing the dossier. The truth is, our IC wasn’t buying it; they concocted it in cooperation with the Clinton campaign.”

  Before Comey briefed Obama and Trump on the dossier, he met with congressional leaders. They asked the FBI director who had paid for the dossier. He said that it had been started by Republicans. That soon became a Comey talking point.