Ball of Collusion

by Andrew C. McCarthy

  Let’s pause over Source E. After the pee tape report, Steele identifies E as the lone source for the dossier’s most critical report, written in the aftermath of WikiLeaks’s publication of the hacked DNC emails. To repeat with more elaboration, Steele’s undated late July report alleged:

  Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted there was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between them [sic] and the Russian leadership. This was managed on the Trump side by the Republican candidate’s manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries.

  Putin’s regime, E added, had also “been behind the recent leak of embarrassing email messages from the [DNC] to the WikiLeaks platform.”

  E then goes on to allege that the “Trump campaign/Kremlin co-operation” against Clinton entails the deployment of “Russian émigré and associated offensive cyber operators based in the US.” To reward these “assets” and promote “a two-way flow of intelligence and other useful information,” E related that Russian diplomatic staff in key cities “were using the émigré ‘pension’ distribution system as cover.” One of these key cities, E explained, was Miami. The success of the operation, then, depended on the local Russian émigré community, and “tens of thousands of dollars were involved.” In his confusing bullet-point summary, Steele emphasized that there was an “agreed exchange of information established in both directions” (the aforementioned “two way flow”). That is, not only was Trump getting Kremlin help; he was feeding the Kremlin information from his own network of “moles within the DNC and hackers in the US as well as outside in Russia.”

  Steele, we must recall, urged his anti-Trump reporting not only on the FBI and the media but on the State Department. Eventually, this led to his being interviewed in Washington by Kathleen Kavalec, then the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs. In fleshing out his allegation about Russian émigré accomplices in Miami, Steele said that, according to his source, the Russians had constructed a “technical/human operation run out of Moscow targeting the election.” Émigrés were used to “do hacking and recruiting,” and “payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian consulate in Miami.”35

  Kavalec made notes of her interview with Steele—notes that the State Department withheld from congressional investigators for two years. When the notes were finally disclosed (pursuant to Freedom of Information Act claims by the conservative group Citizens United), Kavelec’s assessment jumped off the page: “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami.”

  That’s right: Source E was wrong about a fundamental element of the supposed Trump–Russia conspiracy.

  The Miami émigré claim was fiction. There can have been no exchanges of mounds of intelligence and piles of money at a Russian consulate there, supporting a U.S.-based Russian émigré hacking network. It was nonsense. Equally absurd was the notion that Trump—depicted in the narrative as the bumbling stooge-beneficiary of Putin’s machinations—was running his own reciprocal hacking and mole operation for Putin’s benefit. It was all Trump could do to run his campaign, the most haphazard such operation in modern times (the lack of sophistication about personnel and practices lending no shortage of ammunition to the collusion arsenal).

  We should note that Steele did not claim Source E provided this information directly; E supposedly spoke to someone he trusted, who then relayed the information to Steele. So here are the possibilities: E was lying, E was galactically mistaken about a major collusion allegation, or Steele’s alleged source for E’s meanderings got them hopelessly wrong. One way or the other, if the FBI had scrutinized Steele’s sources with its usual diligence—if it had taken the minute or two it must have taken Kavalec to Google the purported Russian consulate in Miami—agents would have realized that, at a minimum, any information in the dossier from Source E was suspect. Plus, given how easy some of this information was to check out, the Bureau would also have realized that Steele’s work product rated skepticism, not blind faith.

  ‘Big Talker’ and the Crème de la Kremlin

  With that in mind, let’s consider Sergey Millian, the apparent source of these tales about émigré hacker networks, the Trump–Putin conspiracy of cooperation, and the pee tape.

  When the dossier was written, Millian was a thirty-eight-year-old native of Belarus who had immigrated to America in his early twenties. Upon arriving, he worked as a translator and used the name Siarhei Kukuts, though he was also known as “Sergey” Kukuts before settling on Millian. In 2006, to raise his profile, he started an outfit called “the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.” Sounds impressive, but it was a shell with little in the way of assets or activities—just the sort of entity, ABC News pointed out, that Russian intelligence would typically use as a front for recruitment operations, which is how the FBI is said to have suspected Millian’s “Chamber” was used.36

  Even Simpson confided to friends that he worried Millian was an unreliable “big talker.”37 No wonder. Millian has claimed in Russian and American media appearances to have a close relationship with Trump, and to have marketed Trump organization properties as a real-estate broker. In fact, Millian barely knows Donald Trump and cannot keep straight the story of when they met. Originally, he said it was in 2007 in Moscow. When it was suggested to him that Trump had not been in Russia that year, he revised the tale, claiming to have met the mogul in Florida at a 2008 marketing meeting.

  According to Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, there was just one meeting, a photo op of the kind that Trump, a global celebrity, did thousands of times. Cohen denied Millian’s claims of a personal and professional relationship with Trump, as well as a working relationship with Cohen, who says he never met Millian but did email him warnings to stop exaggerating his ties to the Trump organization. No, Cohen is not the world’s most reliable source, having been convicted of fraud and false statements. But he was right to contend that no publicly known evidence supports Millian’s claims of close Trump ties. Further, Millian’s representations have been contradictory. When challenged on his purported work as a Trump real estate agent, he admitted never actually having represented Trump. Significantly, Millian acknowledges that he was not with Trump during the 2013 Moscow trip. And upon being exposed as an indirect Steele source, Millian dismissed the dossier as “fake news (created by sick minds).”38

  So that’s the main source.

  As noted at the start of our dossier discussion, Steele also claimed that a “former top Russian intelligence officer” was his principal source for the allegation that Moscow had amassed enough embarrassing kompromat on Trump to blackmail him at any time of Putin’s choosing. This top intelligence officer, Steele explicated, was “still active inside the Kremlin,” as was a “senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure” also counted by Steele as a spy. There were supposedly other Russian sources, but these were the two Steele highlighted at the start.

  We now know, thanks to the aforementioned revelation of the notes made by State Department official Kathleen Kavalec, that Steele claimed his sources included Vyacheslav Trubnikov and Vladislav Surkov. As the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross explains, Trubnikov is a regime eminence who, before Putin came to power, ran Russia’s SVR (their external intelligence service, analogous to our CIA) from 1996 to 2000, and then served as first deputy for foreign affairs and Russia’s ambassador to India. Surkov, most recently Russia’s deputy prime minister, may be Putin’s top adviser—referred to as the “Kremlin demiurge” and “Putin’s Rasputin,” his special concentrations in recent years have been Georgia and Ukraine, where, you may have noticed, Russia has annexed territory and has designs on more.39

  Really? So when Steele is not slumming with the wannabe likes of Sergey Millian, he’s getting the 4-1-1 from the Crème de la Kremlin? Count me skeptical. As Daniel Hoffman, the CIA’s former station ch
ief in Moscow, told Chuck Ross, trusted figures in Russia’s national security bureaucracy “never stop” working for the Kremlin. In Trubnikov’s case, “There’s no such thing as a former intelligence officer.” And Surkov might as well be Putin’s right hand. If these characters are Steele’s “sources,” it is not to spy on the Kremlin but to have the West believe what the Kremlin wants the West to believe.

  Steele seems like a full-throttle hack to me. None of his information panned out, and if you’re the scourge of Russia, I don’t think Oleg Deripaska tops your client list. On that interpretation, it is unlikely Putin regime heavyweights would give the time of day to a British spy under whose nose the Kremlin spitefully murdered Litvinenko. The thought of Surkov and Trubnikov as Steele sources seems most implausible; it is more likely Steele was exaggerating—a habit, it appears. But that is the Panglossian take on things. Surkov and Trubnikov were sufficiently high-ranking and sophisticated to have sniffed out Steele’s anti-Trump project and to have told him what he wanted to hear. That is, it is entirely possible that Putin’s regime duped Steele with disinformation about Trump—realizing that loathing of the then-candidate was unhinged in the upper echelons of U.S. intelligence, that much of the U.S. media was equally willing to credit any hint of corruption, and that Trump could be relied on to say outrageous things that would add fuel to the fire.

  Certainly the rest of Steele’s handiwork does not fare much better than the pee tape.

  The dossier, for example, accuses Carter Page of being an intermediary between Manafort and Kremlin contacts. In July 2016, he made a trip to Moscow, during which Steele maintained that Page met with two operatives close to Putin: Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin. Sechin heads up Rosneft, the Kremlin-controlled petroleum and natural-gas conglomerate. He and the company were (and are) under U.S. economic sanctions imposed because of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. According to Steele, Sechin proposed that if Trump were elected president and lifted the sanctions, Russia would pay Page and Trump the brokerage fee from the sale of a 19 percent privatized stake in Rosneft. Page was described as noncommittal, though he was said to have signaled that Trump would indeed lift the sanctions. Note that Rosneft is valued at nearly $60 billion. In late 2016, it finally sold a 19.5 percent stake to Qatar and the commodities trader Glencore for $11.3 billion, so the brokerage bribe would have amounted to a king’s ransom.40

  Divyekin, an official in Putin’s presidential administration, is said to have informed Page that Russia had a kompromat file on Mrs. Clinton that it might be willing to share with the Trump campaign. He also warned that the Kremlin had such a file on Trump, too, which the tycoon should bear in mind in his dealings with Russia. The dossier also had Trump lawyer Michael Cohen getting in on the scheme—dispatched on a secret trip to Prague to meet with Putin’s operatives for dark discussions about (a) damage-control after public revelations about Manafort and Page ties to Russia; and (b) “deniable cash payments” for “hackers in Europe who had worked under Kremlin direction against the Clinton campaign.”

  Despite intense investigation (much of it after the Obama administration used Steele’s information to obtain FISA warrants), none of these Steele allegations was verified. The only details that have been corroborated are ones that were readily knowable, such as the fact that Carter Page took a trip to Moscow from July 7–9 to deliver his speech at the New Economic School in Moscow. Page told numerous people he was taking the trip; the Trump campaign explicitly instructed him that he could only go in his individual capacity, not as a representative of the candidate; and the speech Page gave was public. The salient details alleged by Steele—namely, Page’s supposed meetings with Sechin and Divyekin—have been vehemently denied by Page and never proved. Page, moreover, denies even knowing Paul Manafort, let alone reporting to him in an espionage conspiracy. There is no reason to believe he is lying—Special Counsel Mueller, who repeatedly referred to the dossier as “unverified” in his final report,41 never charged Page with any crimes, and never charged Manafort with any crime having to do with Page, Trump, or Russia.

  The dossier, moreover, is just as unreliable for what it does not say. Michael Cohen eventually pled guilty to providing misleading testimony about the extent of Trump–Russia negotiations over the potential construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow. Those dealings went on for well over a year and were widely known in Kremlin circles. Yet Steele’s supposedly plugged-in Kremlin sources apparently knew nothing about it; while Trump’s organization was signing a letter of intent and in serious talks to participate in a multi-billion dollar transaction, Steele’s sources told him Putin’s regime had tried but failed to entice Trump into real estate deals. Further, while Steele includes a report about “Alpha” Bank’s relationship with Putin, his sources apparently knew nothing about strange (but ultimately inconsequential) traffic between servers for Alfa Bank and the Trump organization—notwithstanding that it was being investigated by the FBI and several journalists prior to the election.

  Folding New Events into the Partisan Narrative

  Despite its jerry-built quality, efforts have been made to prop up the Clinton-campaign-generated dossier by claiming that Steele’s allegations have been corroborated by such events as the hacking and publication by WikiLeaks of the DNC emails. That, however, places the cart squarely in front of the horse. Steele was just following the crowd. His Russian sources clearly provided no advance warning, notwithstanding that he’d been poking around for Trump–Russia conspiracy evidence for well over a month by July 22, 2016, when publication of the DNC emails began in earnest. This is worth exploring because it highlights an insidious aspect of the dossier that has gotten too little attention: the former British spy could not foretell events; rather, after events occurred, he and Simpson wove them into the Democrats’ Trump–Russia conspiracy narrative.

  By autumn 2015, the FBI knew that the DNC servers had been hacked and that Russian operatives were surely the culprit.42

  It is well known in Western intelligence circles that WikiLeaks is, at least in part, a willing agent of Russian intelligence. On June 12, 2016, over a month before WikiLeaks published the hacked DNC emails, Julian Assange gave an interview on the British television network ITV. In it, he announced, “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton.… We have emails pending publication.”43 By the time of this interview, WikiLeaks had already published a searchable index of approximately thirty thousand emails from the private server on which Secretary Clinton had systematically conducted State Department business. These were the emails that she disclosed to the State Department two years after leaving office, falsely claiming they were the only ones she had that involved government business.

  The natural speculation after Assange’s interview was that WikiLeaks had, and was poised to release, some or all of the approximately thirty-two thousand emails Clinton had deleted and attempted to destroy—i.e., the emails she had not surrendered to the State Department, falsely claiming none of them involved government business. But that is not what Assange said. To repeat, he coyly indicated only that the emails he was planning to publish were “in relation to Hillary Clinton.” Consequently, when WikiLeaks began publishing the hacked DNC emails on July 22, 2016, it was quickly and widely concluded that the Russians were responsible for the cyberespionage operation. It was also assumed that Assange’s June 12 boast about having emails “in relation to” Clinton must have been a reference to the hacked DNC emails.

  Steele did not attribute the DNC hack to Russia until a few days after the emails started being published. He made the attribution in a dossier report entitled, “RUSSIA/US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: FURTHER INDICATIONS OF EXTENSIVE CONSPIRACY BETWEEN TRUMP›S CAMPAIGN TEAM AND THE KREMLIN.” This is the report Steele failed to date, and in the assembled dossier published by BuzzFeed, it comes after a report the erratic spy incorrectly dated “July 26, 2015”—he meant 2016.44 But we know Steele’s report came after the publication of the hacked emails because it says so: Steele write
s of “the recent appearance of DNC emails on WikiLeaks.”

  As we’ve detailed, this claim that Russia was behind the WikiLeaks DNC dump is attributable to Sergey Millian. Clearly, he was in no position to know about either end of any purported conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Steele nevertheless described him as “an ethnic Russian close associate of … Donald TRUMP,” and cited him (Source E) as support for the claim that “the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing email messages, emanating from the [DNC] to the WikiLeaks platform.” Millian’s multiple-hearsay meanderings are said to have been communicated to Steele through an unidentified intermediary, to whom Millian spoke in “late July.” By the time Steele got this information, the fingering of Russia was old news.

  Steele’s claim is even less impressive in context. In the June 20 pee tape report that begins the dossier, Steele claimed that Russia had a “dossier” of “kompromat” related to Hillary Clinton that had been “collated by the Russian Intelligence Services for many years and was mainly comprised of bugged conversations she’d had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct.”

  Notice: nothing about emails. And remember: Assange’s June 12 interview occurred eight days before Steele’s first report, and it was widely reported in the British press. Yet, there is not even a hint in Steele’s report that Russia might have emails (whether from the DNC or from Clinton herself), much less that Russia passed emails along to WikiLeaks.