by Dan Bongino
Was that conversation monitored? If so, who was listening? Did Kotzias report this to someone and was that conversation monitored?
This is something that has never been resolved. Because if Papadopoulos never told Downer or anyone else about Mifsud’s email tale and he repeated the story of emails only once—while speaking Greek—then how did the FBI discover Mifsud’s “Russia has Clinton dirt” claim, which was made months before news broke of the DNC email hack? Was Mifsud working with Western intel, as his online connections and as comments by his associates about his connections appear to indicate? Was Mifsud working with a political campaign, or a contractor being paid by a political campaign, as congressman Devin Nunes asked in a May 20, 2019, interview with Fox News’s Shannon Bream?11 Did he or his handlers feed information to intelligence operatives or the FBI?
Mifsud’s connections and how the FBI learned of his email claims remain some of the most profound mysteries of Russiagate.
THE GRAND ILLUSION
The problem with the FBI’s and the intelligence community’s doubling down on the dossier (really quintupling down when you consider they swore to Steele’s bogus information for an original FISA warrant, for three renewals, and in the December 2016 intelligence community assessment), as I spent the last chapter explaining, was the “raw intelligence” that comprised the document. It was as tainted and toxic and murky as, well, swamp water. The sourcing was unknown and therefore dubious, and the suspected sources we do know about, notably Trubnikov and Surkov, were specialists in Russian disinformation campaigns. Some of the “intelligence” seemed to follow relevant or tangential news reports, basically rehashing events and loosely tying them to Moscow.
In October 2016, then, armed with their FISA warrant, James Comey’s lieutenants Peter Strzok, Bill Priestap, and other investigators set about trying to verify the claims made in the dossier—because those were the allegations used to obtain the warrant.
They investigated Carter Page. They worked with intelligence agencies to track Russian cyberoperations. They began interviewing members of the campaign. They did this all in secret because that’s standard operating procedure at the bureau. Some of what they were investigating officially made it into press reports, but the dirty details of the investigation remained secret. While the dossier was leaked to David Corn, who reported on it prior to the election, the official FBI investigation continued in secret. On November 8, Trump pulled off one of the most shocking election victories in U.S. history. And on January 6, 2017, FBI director James Comey met with President-Elect Trump at Trump Tower.
This is where things get very nuanced and even more devious. At this point in time, the media knew about the dossier. In fact, a number of organizations had the dossier and were chomping at the bit to write about it. But they couldn’t write about it because it was completely unverified and because, believe it or not, these organizations do adhere to certain standards out of fear of being dragged into a lawsuit. And writing a story about a document that is as reliable as graffiti scrawled on a bathroom wall understandably gave even the most Trump-hating organizations some pause. In other words, the press needed the dossier to become an official part of the story in order to report on it and damage Trump.
James Clapper, future CNN contributor, apparently knew this. Was this a motivating factor in his decision to advise Comey to brief Trump? It sure seems that way, especially if the House Intelligence Committee report I mentioned earlier was accurate when it stated: “Clapper subsequently acknowledged discussing the ‘dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,’ and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic.”12
But here’s the catch: Comey didn’t want to tell Trump about the entire dossier because the bureau was investigating the Trump campaign and he didn’t want Trump to know that. By limiting his discussion to the salacious, ridiculous “pee tape” charges and the idea of blackmail, Comey avoided tipping off the future president to the fact that his entire campaign—including Trump, obviously—was under investigation, spurred by allegations that it colluded with Russia to win the election. So that’s all Comey discussed with Trump: the pee stuff and the sex stuff. Not the other election-stealing, collusion allegations in the dossier or in any similar reports that Steele filed with the FBI.
I’m sure Comey and Clapper thought they were threading the needle here. Comey briefed Trump but didn’t show all his cards; he made good on following the instructions from Clapper, who was the guru of government intelligence operations; and he maintained FBI policy by not clearly delineating the details of an ongoing investigation or even confirming its existence.
It was a remarkably shrewd and crafty move on his part. But there are other words for it, too: “misleading,” “dishonest,” “devious,” “calculating,” and “nasty” are some that come to mind.
At any rate, the exchange delivered just what Clapper needed for CNN. Although he denies being a source, evidence suggests he told Jake Tapper that the dossier was discussed, which was true in that elements of the dossier were discussed, and CNN and the rest of the world now had a hook on which to report on the “explosive” dossier.
There it was! The gates of hell opened wide and unleashed a torrent of charges that bordered on treason against the president-elect of the United States.
Trump was shocked and horrified. And so, frankly, was the rest of the world. These were stunning charges, the stuff of movies and spy thrillers. And they were gathered, we are told, by a “credible” FBI source who was in charge of Russian intelligence gathering for one of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence organizations, England’s MI6.
But no one was more outraged than Trump because he was put in a completely untenable position, which is often the plight of the wrongly accused.
He had no way to refute any of the charges except to say they didn’t happen. The burden of proof is legally on investigators and the prosecution in our legal system. It isn’t on the accused. But when sleazy allegations are made about you—things that never happened—how do you defend yourself? You are fighting shadows, ghosts, lies. No doubt, the natural inclination is to fight back, to rebut the falsehoods. But the charges in the dossier don’t include the names of the accusers. They quite often don’t even include specific details. So Trump really had no way of proving that the events in the dossier never happened.
There were no exchanges of damaging information that his campaign received, at least that he knew about. He’s never been blackmailed by the Russians. That compromising videotape doesn’t exist. All he could do is reject the claims. That’s why he branded a great deal of what surfaced as “fake news.” What else should you call it? I guess, if he wanted to take the high road, he could have called it irresponsible, unsubstantiated misinformation. But why play the euphemism game that the left and their media acolytes so adore? These were weaponized lies designed to hurt the Trump campaign and the future Trump administration. Whatever you call it, it all comes down to the same thing. Cooperation and collusion with Russia never happened under his direction or under the direction of anyone associated with Trump’s campaign.
Listen, Trump is a maverick. He has said some things that the American public is not accustomed to hearing from our current crop of focus group-tested politicians. And any comments about Russia on the campaign trail were manna from heaven for his enemies looking to tar him with a fabricated collusion scandal.
But Trump never publicly walks back any of his past. That’s not in his DNA, and being from Queens, New York, as Trump is, I understand that. But I think that if he could redo some of those things, he would. Like it or not, they gave his corrupt adversaries ammunition; they helped create the optics—the appearance—that Trump was eager to work with Russia.
Still, the investigation, based on hearsay, was frustrating and infuriating to Trump. And that wasn’t his only headache. Maverick military man Michael Flynn had been working as an
advisor to Trump since February 2016. By November, the retired three-star general had impressed Trump enough to be tapped as the president-elect’s national security advisor. But Flynn quickly became a target as reports surfaced of his lobbying efforts on behalf of Turkey. And those reports were soon overtaken by a series of leaks and reports about Flynn’s communications with then Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak—the very same man named in the Steele dossier who would, as we are about to see, also haunt Jeff Sessions.
Kislyak haunted Flynn. Big-time. But so did the press, who relayed leaks about Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak and Flynn’s conversations with the FBI.
According to a partially redacted FBI memo, Flynn “did not give any indicators of deception” when bureau agents interviewed him on January 24, 2017, about the specifics of his calls with Kislyak. Reliable information that I am privy to indicates that Flynn was not lying about the details of his call with Kislyak in his conversations with FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka, and that Flynn was simply not able to recall certain details due to the time and place of the conversation and the circumstances surrounding the call. But things snowballed from there, with the press smelling blood and continuing to pile on.
Once again, optics—the appearance of possible impropriety and subsequently weaponized PR—cursed Team Trump. Sally Yates, then-acting attorney general and noted anti-Trump cheerleader, learned about Flynn’s FBI interview. News then leaked that she warned White House counsel Don McGahn in January 2017 that Flynn’s denial of discussing sanctions with Kislyak may have been misleading, and that Flynn’s comments made him “vulnerable to Russian blackmail.”13
It’s hard not to wonder if Flynn still had a target on his back from his time with the Obama administration. Obama had in 2013 fired Flynn from his job as head of the DIA. And when Trump met with the departing president in the Oval Office on November 10, 2016, Obama actually warned Trump about working with Flynn and said he “wasn’t exactly a fan” of Flynn, according to former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.14
Blackmail. Russia. Trump advisor. Obama foe. Does any of this sound familiar? It sure does. This is the same kind of garbage that filled the dossier. There is no evidence that Flynn was ever blackmailed, and using the Logan Act—the 1799 law forbidding unauthorized communication with foreign governments, violations of which had never been successfully prosecuted—as a precedent to pressure the Trump team to get rid of Flynn, as Yates did, was absurd, even by D.C. swamp standards. Even more outrageous is the idea that the Russians thought they could leverage this and turn a former three-star general into a treasonous spy. But that was the narrative that the mainstream media bought—hook, line, and sinker. Throw in the story about Flynn’s getting paid a reported $40,000 to speak at a 2015 gala for RT, the Russian TV network, where he sat at a table with Russian president Vladimir Putin, and Flynn had no chance at political survival. The swamp was hungry for a scalp. The optics increased the volume for the Collusion Chorus and Flynn was finished. He was forced to resign on February 13, 2017.
The Flynn debacle played out directly under the shadow of the now-debunked dossier, which was posted online by BuzzFeed on January 10, 2017, putting the entire misinformation-filled document in the public view. It was excerpted everywhere. The world was treated to thousands of articles, posts, and tweets about sleazy, disgusting stories and about the dossier author, Christopher Steele. To the anti-Trump brigade, he was the second coming of James Bond—an upstanding Russia specialist with impeccable sources and an unassailable reputation. But he was really James Bonehead and nothing more than a sad, sorry, has-been gossiper profiting off of lies and misinformation. He was the prototypical “useful idiot.”
The BuzzFeed posting gave credibility to what was a totally incredible dossier in the eyes of those desperate to find chum in the water when no such water existed in the first place. And instead of disavowing the filthy dossier and Steele’s information, the premier law enforcement agency on the planet was investigating Steele’s information. In fact, to get a FISA warrant, agents swore to its legitimacy and placed the word, in all caps, “verified” on the FISA warrant application used to spy on the Trump team. It was all a gross abuse of misinformation.
Privately, Trump fumed to any and all around him about what he called, over and over and over, a “witch hunt.” He told his communications lead Hope Hicks that the idea that the Russians helped him win the election was crippling.15 According to Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House spokesman, the president believed that the Russia story had been developed to undermine the legitimacy of his election.16 It delegitimized his triumph. It took the shine off one of the greatest political upset stories in American history. You can see why this was extremely important to him. All presidents want to know they have the support of the nation behind them. It’s both human nature and political nature. Polls help policy get through Congress. Public opinion, while not the only policy driver, is a useful mirror for politicians. The allegations polarized America. They still do. And that has made governing much harder.
One of the ironic things about the investigation into Russiagate is that Trump actually told James Comey that making sure his campaign and administration were on the up-and-up would be a good thing. (Does that sound like “obstruction of justice” to you? Yeah, me neither.)
Comey’s June 8, 2016, testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee reveals that during his call with the president on March 30, 2017, Trump said he was fine with investigators reviewing the conduct of the people around him.
“Trump went on to say that if there were some ‘satellite’ associates who did something wrong, it would be good to find that out, but that he hadn’t done anything wrong and hoped we would find some way of getting it out that we weren’t investigating him,” Comey said in his opening statement.17
Trump’s interaction with Comey grew more problematic, as the world knows. But Comey was hardly the only one who infuriated the president.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a longtime Trump ally, also angered the president. During his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2017, Sessions failed to reveal that he’d briefly met Russian ambassador Kislyak and insisted to the Senate that he “did not have communications with the Russians.” Mueller later vindicated Sessions by acknowledging these were not meetings but mere brief encounters.
Once it was discovered that Sessions had failed to recall brief encounters, which are not even remotely unusual for a politician of Session’s stature, with Kislyak—one during an event at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and another on September 818—the attorney general was engulfed in a cloud of suspicion of disingenuous collusion. Once again, the optics, as if bent in a funhouse mirror, were twisted to make it look like Sessions was hiding something. And so, for optics, he recused himself from overseeing the Russiagate investigation at the Department of Justice. He then appointed Rod Rosenstein to handle things.
Big mistake.
Sessions’s decision to recuse himself was yet another capitulation to the optics created by the toxic climate of distrust sown by Steele, the dossier, and the echo chamber of the mainstream media. Seriously, if Moscow had wanted to divide the country, create turmoil, and destabilize the presidency, they probably couldn’t have done it any better than Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, and the reporters who bit on their bogus “intel.” The chief lawman was forced to abdicate control of the most important investigation in American history because he stopped for a handshake with the chief Russian diplomat in America.
Trump couldn’t believe that Sessions, an early Trump adopter on Capitol Hill, had ceded control. He was apoplectic over it. A guy he presumed would be his right-hand man would have no insight into the illegitimate investigation and also would have no influence.
More leaks sprung. Or maybe we should call them “hits.” On February 14, the day after Flynn’s resignation, the New York Times reported that “four current and fo
rmer officials” said, “Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”19
Obviously, those sources were as accurate as Christopher Steele’s fabricators, right? Who were these sources? Who were the Trump associates? Just as with the Steele dossier, the charges here were unverified. We now know that Carter Page was targeted by Russian spooks, who later deemed him unworthy of being an asset. But that’s it. Manafort and Flynn did not meet with “senior Russian intelligence officials.” Nobody has shown that Mifsud was working for Russia, and Mifsud was never charged with a crime. Mifsud was even allowed back into the United States in February 2017 to attend a conference at which the State Department was a sponsor. As noted previously, Papadopoulos is convinced that Mifsud was working with Western intelligence, and the evidence of Mifsud’s connections to Western intelligence can be at your fingertips using a simple image search on the internet.
What should have been a honeymoon period for a new presidency was a partial nightmare. During its early months, the administration was faced with courts rolling back Trump’s immigration policies. Stories abounded in the anti-Trump press regarding dysfunction in the White House—stories about a shortage of appointees, unfilled positions, and icy relations with traditional American allies. But the thing that truly rankled the president was the idea that his election was not legitimate. That some nonexistent secret agreement with Russia had put him in office.