The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  Also news stories. The media, as Luttwak wrote in his 1968 book, are central to the success of any coup: “Control over the mass media emanating from the political center will still be our most important weapon in establishing our authority after the coup.”

  In this case, the conspirators already had access to as much media as they needed. They’d been feeding Trump-Russia propaganda to their accomplices in the press corps for more than a year.

  “The anti-Trump operation,” says Luttwak today, “was a very American coup, with TV denunciations by seemingly authoritative figures as a key instrument.”

  The plot against Trump was a bureaucratic insurgency waged almost entirely through the printed word. It was the “Paper Coup.”

  The earliest evidence of the operation was in print: the press reports alleging the Trump circle’s ties to Russia. The dossier, more paper, moved in tandem with the espionage campaign, dispatching operatives to dirty the Trump team with promises of information damaging to Clinton.

  Even their dangles were documents: Clinton emails, specifically. Press accounts were used to secure more paper, a FISA warrant, that magnified the Crossfire Hurricane team’s surveillance powers.

  After Trump’s election, Obama ordered the intelligence community assessment, an official document that produced more media reports and legitimized more spying on the Trump administration. News reports of the dossier opened up more channels for the Crossfire Hurricane team to spy on the Trump presidency.

  And now Comey’s testimony would engender more paperwork: memos, reports, testimony, leaks of classified information, legal strategies, more news stories. In the hands of the conspirators, veterans of countless bureaucratic wars, it was all the ammunition they needed.

  Senate Democrats, led by Judiciary Committee ranking member Dianne Feinstein, had been clamoring for a special counsel to oversee the Russia probe since Sessions had recused himself on March 2. Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley recommended that the decision be left to Trump’s nominee for deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. “Once confirmed, Mr. Rosenstein can decide how to handle it,” said Grassley. “I know of no reason to question his judgment, integrity, or impartiality.”

  Trump was eagerly waiting confirmation of his new deputy attorney general. With Sessions out of the picture and DOJ still controlled by Obama appointees, he didn’t dare move against Comey. But he was losing his patience.

  In a March 30 phone call, Trump had asked Comey about his testimony ten days before. The president said it would be great if Comey could say publicly that he wasn’t himself under investigation. He asked the FBI director several times to find a way to get that out.

  Comey reminded Trump that he had already told him he wasn’t being investigated. He’d said so during the January 6 briefing about the dossier. Again in April, the president asked if Comey could say that he personally wasn’t under investigation. Comey told him to go speak to DOJ about it.

  Comey was brushing off the president, just as he had ignored Nunes’s requests to speak about the unmaskings. And, like the HPSCI chair, Trump came to understand that Comey, as Patel put it, wasn’t a squared-away guy.

  If the president wasn’t under investigation but his subordinates or associates were, why didn’t the FBI provide him a defensive briefing to warn him of who might be compromised? It seems that everyone in the White House was getting defensive briefings about attempts to compromise the administration except the president.

  A memo that Comey wrote to document his conversations with Trump records that two FBI agents gave defensive briefings to someone on the White House staff on February 8. On February 10, McCabe provided a defensive briefing to the vice president’s staff. What was going on? Strzok and Page had texted each other about using defensive briefings as a pretext to collect intelligence on Trump.

  Comey kept Trump in the dark. Trump had asked for his FBI director’s loyalty, and Comey was instead working against him. Comey would have to go.

  Soon after taking his post on April 26, Rosenstein wrote a memo that would justify cutting the FBI chief loose. Trump attached the memo to his own letter thanking Comey for “informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” Rosenstein’s memo focused on procedure. “The Director was wrong,” he wrote, “to usurp the Attorney General’s authority” in announcing that the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s server “should be closed without prosecution.”

  Rosenstein was absolutely right, says Patel. “That’s the call of the prosecutor, not the agents.” That was the last time Objective Medusa’s lead investigator agreed with the new deputy attorney general, who was a gifted bureaucrat but temperamentally ill suited to the highly politicized environment of the moment.

  Democrats criticized Rosenstein for supplying the rationale to oust Comey. He didn’t understand why he was being blamed, and he lost his bearings.

  “He did the right thing,” says Nunes. “But he couldn’t handle the pressure coming at him from the Democrats, the anti-Trump Republicans, and the press, so he panicked.”

  Comey’s firing initiated what has come to be known as the “Nine Days in May.” It’s a reference to John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May, the 1964 film about US military and political officials intending to stage a coup in a week’s time.

  In Trump’s case, the nine days constituted the critical period from May 9 to 17, during which the highest levels of US law enforcement deliberated over how best to seize power from the president.

  One option was to strike quickly.

  Rosenstein, reportedly dejected and isolated from his peers, was eager to regain the favor of the colleagues whose boss he’d fired. He raised with McCabe and others the possibility of recording Trump.

  The aim was to gather evidence to convince administration principals to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment, stipulating that the president may be removed from office when the vice president and a majority of the cabinet declare that he or she is unable to discharge his duties.

  Rosenstein also suggested that McCabe and other FBI officials interviewing for the now-vacant director’s job might record Trump. How? Rosenstein said that the White House never checked his phone for meetings there.

  Rosenstein thought he could get at least two cabinet members to agree to remove Trump. That option was discarded as too impractical. Instead, the conspirators took the path that Comey had laid out by testifying before HPSCI: to tie up Trump with an investigation and set him up for an obstruction of justice charge.

  Even after having been involuntarily returned to private life, Comey played an important role in the Paper Coup. Hours after he was fired, Strzok texted Page: “We need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting.”

  Thus McCabe opened an investigation on Trump after Comey was let go for failing to state publicly that Trump was not under investigation. The acting FBI director said he had been worried about what might happen to the Russia case if he were removed. “Was the work,” McCabe asked himself, “on solid ground?” He said he “wanted to protect the Russia investigation in such a way that whoever came after [him] could not just make it go away.”

  McCabe knew that Trump was unlikely to choose him to replace Comey. And it was possible that the next FBI director would deprioritize or even discontinue the investigation. To lock it in, he urged Rosenstein to name a special counsel. Even if Trump hired a loyalist for the director’s job or McCabe was fired, the investigation would continue.

  Appointed by the Department of Justice, the special counsel would now be under the control of the official overseeing the Russia probe, Rod Rosenstein. The deputy attorney general would now fulfill his promises of goodwill to the Crossfire Hurricane team.

  The strategy required an assist from Comey himself. He said he had asked a friend to leak to the New York Times his memos, including one commemorating “the president’s February 14 direction that I drop the Flynn investigation.” Comey said he had been sure that that would
get a special counsel named to the case.

  On May 16, the Times published Michael Schmidt’s story sourced to Comey’s leak of classified information. The next day, Rosenstein wrote a memo appointing former FBI director Robert Mueller III special counsel.

  Comey’s predecessor at the FBI would continue Comey’s investigation. From paper to paper to paper, McCabe, Comey, Rosenstein, and Mueller had put the Paper Coup onto solid ground.

  At that point nearly any attempt by Trump to discharge his duties as commander in chief—by firing Mueller, for instance—would have led to obstruction of justice charges. Even though DOJ protocol forbids prosecuting a sitting president, Congress could use Mueller’s finding as the basis for impeachment proceedings and continued investigations of Trump through the framework of alleged obstruction.

  Comey’s memos of his conversations with Trump unintentionally draw a sympathetic portrait of a Beltway novice who was trying to find his footing in the White House and sought advice from experienced bureaucrats.

  Trump didn’t realize at first that they were out to humiliate him, then depose him. He invited Comey to bring his family to dinner at the White House. The FBI director left an awkward silence for the commander in chief to fill. “Or a tour,” said Trump, “whatever you think is appropriate.”

  Trump complained about the leaked transcripts of his conversations with the leaders of Australia and Mexico. “It makes us look terrible to have these things leaking,” he said. He talked about the leak of Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador. He said that Flynn hadn’t said anything wrong while speaking to Kislyak. He told Comey that he hoped he could let it go. The wording was inherently nonobstructive; the president could have directed Comey to let it go.

  Trump told Comey that he was upset about the “golden shower” story, especially how it had made his wife feel. He said “it bothered him if his wife thought there was even a one percent chance it was true in any respect.” He confided to Comey, “It has been very painful.”

  He asked Comey if the FBI should investigate the Steele Dossier. Comey discouraged him, saying it “would create a narrative that we were investigating him personally.”

  Comey was lying. The FBI had in fact used the dossier as the road map in its nearly yearlong investigation of Trump. Comey was protecting himself and the Crossfire Hurricane team. A genuine investigation of how the dossier had been funded and assembled would have cleared Trump—and revealed the nature of the Clinton-sponsored operation against him.

  That’s why the work of the Objective Medusa team was essential: Comey’s FBI was crooked.

  Trump asked Comey to say he wasn’t being investigated. It was bad for everyone. He said “he was trying to make deals for the country, the cloud was hurting him.” He assumed that Comey wanted the same for America and implored him to help by getting out word that the president wasn’t under investigation. Trump was insistent—it was hurting his ability to serve Americans. He was trying, he said, “to do work for the country, visit with foreign leaders, and any cloud, even a little cloud, gets in the way of that.”

  Finally, he understood that Comey didn’t see things that way. Comey saw him not as the president but as a target. “There’s no way in their minds that Jim Comey and Andy McCabe’s United States of America would elect this guy to be the president,” says Patel.

  Trump wasn’t their president. And the America that had elected him was beneath contempt. They were keen to impose their perverted fantasies on the public consciousness and show Trump supporters that the president they had chosen was a man who hired prostitutes to urinate on a hotel bed.

  “The Russia investigation gave them everything they needed to delegitimize the election of Donald Trump,” says Patel. “As soon as he was elected, as soon as this stuff started coming out, they’re like ‘Okay, we knew he didn’t win fairly. Now we have our angle.’”

  I ask the Operation Medusa investigators if it’s possible that the DOJ and FBI really believed Trump was a Russian spy.

  “They could believe Trump is a Russian spy,” says Jim. “That was within the realm of the believable. What they couldn’t believe was that he could win the presidency.”

  Did Patel also believe that was true of some of his former DOJ colleagues? “All the people involved did,” says Patel. “They banked on finding Donald Trump in league with Putin. Absolutely. They thought it’s just a matter of time until we find it. They had to believe it. This is how they think. They ran with it to the media, and they all thought they were going to find the equivalent of the Watergate tapes. It was just a matter of time.”

  But Trump had worked in New York City for forty years. His businesses—real estate and casinos—must have attracted the attention of the FBI’s New York field office, as well as the New York Police Department. If there had been anything there, the FBI would have known long before.

  “The FBI guys out in the field every day aren’t running the show,” says Patel. “It’s James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page. I worked with these people. I know their methodology.”

  The Greeks believed that Hubris begets Nemesis, the goddess of retribution. She settles scores with the arrogant, those who relish the public degradation, the shame they bring on others. It wasn’t just Trump who was dragged through the mud to delegitimize his presidency but his supporters as well, half the country.

  Yet it was all of America that paid the cost Comey and the Crossfire Hurricane team incurred. “After weeks and months, as they realized they had nothing on Trump and Russia,” says Patel, “they told themselves, ‘Okay, we probably misfired on this one, but we’re going to keep running with this narrative because half of America believes it anyway.’ And that’s what split America apart.”

  Chapter 15

  DIRTY COPS

  ON MAY 17, Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe called for a Gang of Eight briefing in a secure facility at the Capitol. When Nunes arrived, McCabe told Rosenstein he was worried that the briefing was going to get back to Trump. The acting FBI director wanted the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee gone from the room and prompted the deputy attorney general to act like a nightclub bouncer to keep him out.

  Rosenstein asked Nunes to step outside. “He asked me if I could be in the room,” says Nunes. “I said, ‘Why can’t I be in the room?’ He insinuated that someone wanted me gone from the room. I said, ‘I don’t know who told you that, but whoever it is, they can get the hell out of the room.’”

  Nunes saw what they were up to. “They were obstructing our congressional investigation into their abuses.”

  That was only the half of it. “McCabe said in his book he was worried about me leaking and reporting back to Trump,” says Nunes. “McCabe was looking for a way to stick me in the middle of one of the obstruction traps they were setting for the president.”

  With Comey’s March 20 testimony, the Crossfire Hurricane group put aside collusion and moved to setting obstruction of justice traps. Nunes figured out that they had seen him as bait for one of the snares they’d set for Trump.

  “They were just waiting for me to talk to the president, but I never spoke with the president or any other White House staff about the Russia investigation. I limited my conversations with the White House to tax reform and San Joaquin Valley issues.”

  Nunes wasn’t leaving the room.

  Rosenstein briefed the congressional leaders on his decision to name Robert Mueller to lead the special counsel. It was a continuation of the investigation that Comey had announced in his HPSCI testimony two months before, Crossfire Hurricane.

  McCabe told them that the FBI had opened an investigation on a sitting president. FBI leadership had determined Trump might be a Russian agent.

  What evidence was there for such a sensational claim? Maybe, the Bureau’s top men and women conjectured, Trump had fired Comey at the behest of the Russian government. Maybe it was something else. It didn’t matter; it was part of the game plan to set as many obstruction traps as
possible.

  It was further evidence that there was something very wrong at the top levels of the FBI. “At that point we already know the Crossfire Hurricane team is dirty,” says Nunes. “So when Mueller came on, we were thinking, Okay, now we have a grown-up to take charge.”

  Nunes’s initial optimism soon soured. “I thought Mueller would say, ‘Look, there was no collusion because there’s no evidence of it.’ And that would be the end of it. I thought the special counsel would get the politics out of the investigation. But instead Mueller made it even more political.”

  The premise of the special counsel investigation was political. There was no need to continue the counterintelligence investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election if the January 2017 ICA had already determined that the Russians had interfered—and with the purpose of helping Trump. If the IC had been looking to hold the Russian government accountable, that would best have been done far from the spotlight, where US intelligence officials could most efficiently respond to the Kremlin’s actions.

  Nunes says he’d thought that Mueller would investigate the leaks—especially the ones that had led to Flynn’s leaving the White House. Instead, the scores of lawyers and agents that the special counsel added to the original Crossfire Hurricane team increased by many times the possible sources of leaks.

  An early and important Mueller-era leak went to the Washington Post for a June 14 article reporting that Mueller was investigating Trump for obstruction. According to the story—bylined by Devlin Barrett, Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Sari Horwitz—the special counsel was particularly interested in a March meeting between Trump and his newly named director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats.

  That was sourced to a Post story based on a leak of a meeting between the president and an intelligence chief; Entous’s June 9 story had reported that Trump had asked Coats to intervene with Comey to let Flynn alone.