The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  The real Watergate story, then, is anything but heroic. Rather, it’s a tale of ambition and revenge and how those all-too-human emotions play themselves out in the large office buildings scattered along the Potomac, where bureaucratic backstabbing shapes the life of a nation.

  The press corps has long seen itself in the starring role of the Watergate legend, an interpretation that two generations of journalists turned into a professional ethos. Accordingly, the job of journalists is to ingratiate themselves with government officials, who use the press to leak information damaging to their rivals. The lesson for aspiring journalists is that if they stay close enough to power, they may someday break a story that will bring down a president—as Woodward and Bernstein did.

  That was another reason the media could never expose the truth about the coup. National security reporters could not produce stories without the acquiescence of the intelligence community that fomented the plot. The journalists’ jobs, their prestige, the welfare of their families required their loyalty to the men and women who leaked them classified information.

  It was appropriate that Carl Bernstein’s byline appeared on the January 10 CNN story leaked by intelligence bureaucrats for the purpose of destroying Trump. After more than forty years, he was still paying off the debt he had incurred by becoming Carl Bernstein. He owed them everything.

  What’s more interesting is to see Watergate through the eyes of the Crossfire Hurricane group. “The way they saw Watergate, the FBI man is the leading man,” says Nunes. “The hero isn’t Woodward and Bernstein, it’s Felt. They all wanted to become the next Deep Throat.”

  The FBI protagonist sees the press corps for what it is and uses the journalists’ vanity, professional ambition, and neediness to do the work that matters to him. He’s not interested in Pulitzer Prizes, book deals, or TV contracts. He’s running assets. His mission is simply to bring down the president.

  Felt managed to take out Nixon almost single-handedly, using two young reporters to push a story that most of the press ignored for months. By comparison, Crossfire Hurricane had not only the number two man at the FBI but also a counterintelligence team, a top DOJ lawyer, and surveillance capabilities that Nixon would have envied.

  Their operations were assisted at various times by the FBI and CIA directors and the director of national intelligence, as well as senior Obama White House and State Department officials. Instead of two reporters, Crossfire Hurricane had elite teams at the United States’ two most prestigious papers, whose reputations ensured wide buy-in from the rest of the media.

  Compared to Felt’s operation, the odds were stacked heavily in favor of Crossfire Hurricane. The conspirators had reason to believe they were going to bring down Trump.

  A neglected aspect of the Flynn affair is that in portraying a US official as an agent of a foreign power because of his contacts with a foreign ambassador, Obama aides subverted a foundational principle of international diplomacy: An envoy is sent abroad as a line of communications between his home and host countries. This relationship is especially useful in times of crisis between a home and host country.

  In falsely accusing Putin of throwing the election to Trump, Obama officials manufactured a potential crisis with Moscow. At the same time, they made the Russian ambassador toxic. For even speaking with Kislyak signaled a willingness to betray the United States.

  A March 1, 2017, Washington Post piece by Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Miller broke the news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had met with Kislyak twice. The article was sourced to intercepts of Kislyak’s communications with Moscow in which he had told his superiors he’d met with Sessions.

  If the Post article is accurate, US officials had exposed the intelligence community’s ability to monitor the Kremlin’s communications in order to target the country’s top law enforcement official.

  Sessions had foolishly set his recusal in motion when he had been confirmed attorney general the month before. Upon the publication of the Post story, he officially stepped aside.

  “Sessions should have known better,” says Nunes. “He’s an honorable man who sees the good in people, and he didn’t realize they were taking advantage of him. He knew that he didn’t do anything wrong, so he thought there wasn’t going to be a problem. In a perfect world that’s what would have happened, but it wasn’t what they had in mind.”

  Nunes’s communications director imagines what was going through Sessions’s mind. “The media attacks driving the collusion narrative were overwhelming and disorienting for the targets,” says Jack Langer. Soon he would experience it himself. “The hysteria can get you to do things you wouldn’t normally do,” he says. “And you think there’s no way out from the pain except to do what they demand from you. For Sessions, it was to recuse.”

  Trump was outraged that his attorney general had left him exposed to a political operation. Maybe the president had come to regret firing Flynn, for Nunes’s warnings had come true. There was no calm for the White House, only more blood in the water. Two days later, the president tweeted: “Just found out that Obama had my wires tapped in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism.”

  Nunes said at the time that there was no evidence of a wiretap but he was concerned about other possible surveillance activities against the Trump team. And he came to realize that Trump had been right about the rest. “It was McCarthyism,” he says. “I said it several times. They used McCarthyism to build a political structure. They used the Russia investigations to rile up their base and as a fund-raising mechanism.”

  With Sessions’s recusal, Democrats started calling for a special counsel. They wanted an investigation with as little oversight as possible. Now that Flynn was gone and Sessions had recused himself, the conspirators, with the Crossfire Hurricane team on point, saw an open field before them. Trump was in their sights. Only Nunes was in the way. They went after him next.

  Chapter 12

  THE VALLEY OF DEATH

  AFTER TRUMP tweeted that his predecessor had spied on him, Nunes said that there was no indication Trump had been wiretapped. There was ample evidence, however, that the national security apparatus was being used against the president and his senior aides.

  Trump’s January conversations with world leaders had been leaked to the media. His conversation with the president of Mexico had been leaked to Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker, Joshua Partlow, and Nick Miroff. The president’s call with the Australian prime minister had been leaked to the Post’s Greg Miller and Philip Rucker.

  An intercept of the national security advisor’s communications with the Russian ambassador had been leaked to the Post’s team of Miller, Entous, and Nakashima; nine US officials had been directed to confirm it.

  An intercept showing that attorney general Jeff Sessions had met with the same diplomat had also been leaked to the Post’s Miller, Entous, and Nakashima.

  Clearly, there was a political operation under way designed to sabotage the Trump administration.

  “Alarm bells should have been going off all over,” says Nunes. “The FBI should’ve been breaking down doors to find out what was going on. ‘Hey, we’re here to protect you and the country, Mr. President.’ Instead,” says Nunes, “there was nothing.”

  But the members of the intelligence community who weren’t part of the anti-Trump operation were panicked. The plotters were putting sensitive programs at risk. Whistle-blowers reached out to the HPSCI chair.

  “The sources,” Nunes says, “told me that Obama officials had been going crazy unmasking people on the Trump transition team.”

  Nunes will not disclose anything about his sources and cannot say much about the nature of what he uncovered, as it touches on intelligence community sources and methods. But he outlines how he revealed the unmasking of Trump officials and brought it to light. “I slowly put together what happened. But it was difficult. I couldn’t just say to the new administration, ‘Give me everything that was unmasked
,’ because I didn’t know what I was looking for. I wouldn’t have known where to find the records without the sources.”

  On March 21, Nunes went to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjoining the White House, where the bulk of White House staffers have their offices. “I got my hands on the documents I was looking for and the next morning briefed Speaker Ryan on it,” he recalls. “I told him, ‘I’m going to go brief the Republican members on the committee and the president. I’m going to be very transparent with the press so that they know what’s going on.’ So I called a press briefing before I went to the White House to give them what details I could of what I had seen.”

  As Nunes’s staff gathered to discuss the next move, there was concern that the chairman was moving too quickly. “We didn’t want him going out there alone on this,” says a Nunes aide who asked not to be named. “We wanted another set of eyes on it so he could get some support from the rest of the committee and Republicans.”

  Damon Nelson, HPSCI’s staff director, was particularly wary. He’d known Nunes since high school. “I met him when I was a freshman and he was a sophomore and we had classes right next to each other,” says Nunes. “He had long hair and cut class and played pool. Then he seemed to drop from sight. And then, in 2002, I was interviewing for my first legislative director and here’s this guy with the same name—Damon Nelson, who graduated from high school, joined the air force, where he met his wife and served in the first Gulf War, and went on to get a bunch of degrees.”

  It was an amazing transformation, says Nunes. And he came to value Nelson’s advice as much as anyone’s. But the chairman also knew he had to act quickly. “The window of opportunity to expose what they’d done was closing,” he says. “Once they found out I was onto them, they were going to shut down everything. There were still plenty of Obama holdovers in that building, and they were watching me when I came in that day. I had to move quickly.”

  The staff eventually came to see that their skepticism was misplaced. “He has great political instincts,” says the aide. “He’s almost always right about that kind of stuff. And besides, after all the debate, we all recognized that he was the one who was elected.”

  And they knew it was their job to follow him into the valley of death, into which he was surely heading by taking on the intelligence community, political operatives, and the press.

  At his March 22 press conference in the Capitol, Nunes stressed that none of the surveillance of Trump team members “was related to Russia or the investigation of Russian activities or of the Trump team.” That is, what he’d seen had nothing to do with any investigation of the Trump transition team. “It was never about Russia,” he says. “It was simply Obama people unmasking Trump transition people for no legitimate reason.”

  HPSCI found that huge numbers of unmaskings of Americans had been done by certain Obama officials in 2016, including hundreds by Samantha Power, who wouldn’t have seemed to need such constant access to highly sensitive intelligence to conduct her duties as US ambassador to the United Nations. Testifying before HPSCI, former national security advisor Susan Rice acknowledged having unmasked Trump transition officials when they had met in December 2016 at the Trump Tower with the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. Her testimony was leaked to CNN reporter Manu Raju, revealing the names of the Trump officials she’d unmasked: Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, and Steve Bannon.

  Rice justified the unmasking by saying that she had been frustrated that the Emiratis had not followed protocol for visiting officials and had failed to notify the White House of their stay. But if her aim was to rebuke foreign dignitaries, why unmask the identities of US officials—which were then leaked to the press?

  It seems that part of her purpose in unmasking transition officials was to gather intelligence on a future meeting between Trump associates and UAE officials.

  A few weeks after the meeting between the Trump officials and the Emirati royal, prominent Trump supporter Erik Prince, the founder of the private security firm Blackwater USA and brother of incoming education secretary Betsy DeVos, met with Emirati officials in the Seychelles. There Prince was introduced to a Russian banker.

  Prince denied allegations made in an April 3, 2017, Washington Post article that he had been there to establish a back channel with Moscow. Adam Entous had the lead byline with Greg Miller, Kevin Sieff, and Karen DeYoung on another Post article seemingly sourced to a classified intercept.

  Prince said he had been shown “specific evidence” by sources from the intelligence community that his name was unmasked and given to the paper. “Unless the Washington Post has somehow miraculously recruited the bartender of a hotel in the Seychelles,” said Prince, “the only way that’s happening is through SIGINT [signals intelligence].”

  That was the essence of the political campaign targeting the Trump White House: Obama officials leaked classified intelligence to political operatives with bylines to sabotage Trump.

  Because Nunes had uncovered the operation, he had to be crushed. “Finding the unmasking was really deadly to them,” he says. “And it should be, and they should all be investigated, and people should be thrown in jail for it. People should be in jail for a long time for what they did to Flynn and others.”

  And just as they’d pushed Flynn from the White House and forced Sessions to recuse himself, they were going after Nunes. “Right after that March 22 appearance,” he says, “they turned their entire apparatus, from super PACs to the press, on me, dumping oppo research and fake news about me everywhere. They did it because they knew they were caught—they were unmasking Trump transition people and leaking it to the press. I broke up their party. They knew they were screwed, so they tried to get rid of me.”

  Jack Langer’s office is down the hall from Nunes’s in Longworth. The communications director spent many of his early years in Japan, where his father was a computer executive. After his family returned home to Philadelphia, he went to the University of Colorado Boulder, and once he’d finished college, he moved to Prague. “I learned Czech and forgot it,” he says. “I have a talent for forgetting languages—I forgot the Japanese I used to know, too.”

  He worked as a reporter and ad salesman for a few English-language publications in the Czech Republic before he came back to the United States to get his PhD at Duke. He wrote his dissertation on imperial Russian history. “I can’t believe Team Collusion missed that one,” he jokes.

  Nunes offered him the communications director’s job after he’d edited the congressman’s book, Restoring the Republic: A Clear, Concise, and Colorful Blueprint for America’s Future. “It was a great experience,” says Langer, a slender man with a thick, booming voice. “We’d be working on the book late at night and drinking a good bottle of wine from Devin’s winery.”

  Langer remembers when his relationship with the media was good. “Before the Russia stuff, we really had no problems with anybody in the press,” he says.

  That changed after the March 22 press briefing. An early example of the press’s new posture surfaced in a March 24 Daily Beast story by Tim Mak. That kicked off the “Midnight Run” narrative. It was a fictionalized account of how Nunes had learned of the unmasking. According to Mak’s sources, Nunes “received a communication on his phone,” jumped out of an Uber he was sharing with staffers, switched cars, and went somewhere at night to review the documents.

  “The story was sourced to three Intelligence Committee officials and one other official closely tied to the Intelligence Committee,” Langer remembers. “So the author is basically acknowledging ‘These are Intelligence Committee Democrats who gave me this story.’”

  Langer says that four or five different publications called him to confirm details of the “Midnight Run.” “Obviously the story was being shopped around,” he says. He remembers a call from a Washington Post reporter. “The writer told me, ‘I have this story from three of your own committee’s staffers.’ I still remember the tone of voice. It was stunned, as if
to say, ‘I’ve got this from three people on your own committee. How can you deny it?’ When in fact it’s three Committee Democrats saying this and the reporter can’t imagine that a hostile source may have a reason to invent a story to discredit Devin.”

  After Nunes unmasked the unmasking, numerous stories were contrived to embarrass the HPSCI chairman. The purpose was to intimidate him and keep him from digging further into the anti-Trump operation.

  “I didn’t understand what was going on with the press,” says Langer. “I was still naive enough that I didn’t understand the point of this story or why it was being put out. But then Adam Schiff comes out and labels this ‘the Midnight Run,’ and then the Democrats and the press start ridiculing Devin and pointing to this as proof he’s this weird conspiratorial guy who does wacky things like jump in and out of cars in the middle of the night.”

  Nunes went on CNN a couple of days later and told Wolf Blitzer the story was false. “He didn’t jump in and out of any cars, he didn’t go anywhere at night, and he wasn’t sneaking around,” says Langer. “He stopped and casually chatted with various people he ran into on his way to the Eisenhower building, which has the secure facility where the documents were. But all the denials had absolutely zero effect. To this day, the media reports the ‘Midnight Run’ story as a fact. It’s too perfect of a caricature of Devin for them to let go.”

  Another story that sticks out in Langer’s mind is a New York Times piece trying to identify Nunes’s sources for the unmasking. “These publications could have sent their journalists out to discover whether or not it was true that Obama people were unmasking Trump people,” he says, “but instead they all tried to hunt down the whistle-blower.”

  Langer hadn’t immediately agreed with the congressman’s suggestion to stop talking to the mainstream press. But as the investigations wore on and the media became increasingly hostile, he came to see it differently. “Talking to reporters had become useless,” he says. “They had the story they wanted to tell, which was whatever story the Democrats and the intelligence leakers were feeding them. Coming to us for comment was just a formality, and what we said didn’t matter anymore. They were no longer reporters, they were narrative pushers.”