Yet, Page clearly was under suspicion—in Washington, if not in New York. At some point that spring, Comey briefed Obama’s National Security Council about Page. Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch also discussed the possibility of providing the Trump campaign with a defensive briefing about potential Russian infiltration—a briefing that was never given.
In April, information was reportedly passed to Brennan from the Baltics (probably Estonia’s intelligence service), claiming that Russian funding was being channeled into the Trump campaign. There is no hint of such a money trail in the Mueller report; nor was there any suggestion of it in the intelligence assessment that Brennan himself led, on Obama’s order, after the 2016 election. At around the same time, as we’ve seen, Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor with British intelligence ties, is alleged to have informed Papadopoulos that the Kremlin had thousands of Hillary Clinton emails.
April is also when President Obama, in a nationally televised Fox News interview, reaffirmed his endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy to succeed him. In so doing, he argued that because the former secretary of state had not intended to harm national security, she had not violated the law by conducting official State Department business on her private server system and by mishandling classified information. Thereafter, having already been directed by Attorney General Loretta Lynch not to refer publicly to the Clinton probe as an “investigation,” FBI Director Comey and his advisers began drafting an exoneration statement. The drafting and editing of that statement, which tracked Obama’s stated “no intent to harm national security” rationale, was undertaken even though the Bureau had not yet (a) interviewed over a dozen key witnesses, including Clinton herself; and (b) obtained possession of key physical evidence.
In early May, Bill Priestap, then the head of the Bureau’s Counterintelligence Division, made at least one of his trips to London—though, as we’ve seen, he would not even tell a congressional committee where he had traveled, much less what he was doing there. Even as a criminal investigation based on strong evidence against Hillary Clinton was being buried, Obama intelligence agencies in the United States and overseas were on the prowl for some reed—even a slender one—around which they could plausibly wrap their Trump–Russia conspiracy theory.
Then they found one.
Hack Attack
By May, the DNC realized that its computers had been hacked.12 The realization had been a long time coming. The FBI first notified the DNC that it might be compromised in September 2015, by having a line agent contact a low-level DNC staffer by phone. Yes, if you were a top Bureau official investigating Trump, you were jetting to London from Washington or Rome at the slightest scent of collusion. Yet, though the DNC offices were just a few blocks from FBI headquarters, the agent to whom the apparently low-priority matter was assigned did not bother to visit in person. Nor, even in phoning the DNC, did the agent attempt to reach someone in a position of authority. (He obviously could not email the DNC, which would have tipped off the intruders.) Unsure they were dealing with a real FBI agent, rather than a scam artist, Democrats shrugged off the initial notification after some perfunctory checking. It would be seven months before top DNC officials learned of the potentially grave intrusion and thus stepped up security measures—just the kind of red-alert you’d expect when “our democracy is under attack,” right?
In the interim, it was discovered that servers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) had also been attacked. There was, furthermore, a wave of “phishing” attacks in mid-March 2016. One of them duped Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, resulting in the theft of a decade’s worth of emails—estimated to be 60,000 in total.13 The extensive heists from the DNC, DCCC, and Podesta involved hundreds of thousands of emails, internal memoranda, and other sensitive files.
Two things were instantly apparent about the hacking attacks. First, though the problem was exacerbated by the FBI and DNC’s collective lack urgency in addressing it, there was never an iota of evidence that Donald Trump and his campaign had anything to do with it. No suggestion that they knew about it. No indication that they had the resources and competence to participate in it.
Second, Hillary Clinton is not much of an emailer. She was rarely an active participant in the trains of emails exchanged by Democrats—even Democrats on her own campaign. She had staff for that. Clinton later told Congress she did not even have a computer in her office at the State Department.14 The infrequency and curtness of her communications were illustrated by the investigation of her private server: Her misconduct primarily entailed the willful installation of a non-government server system, in which sensitive and classified information would be exchanged and stored, and in which communications would be shielded from State Department recordkeeping. Even when using the homebrew system, Clinton was not a prodigious message writer.
Consequently, while the hacks of party email accounts were a disaster for some Democrats (such as then-DNC chief, Debbie Wasserman Schultz), Clinton was essentially unscathed. And of course, Clinton was telling the country that the reckless disregard for law and security displayed by her own email scandal was no big deal. She was thus in no position to portray hacking attacks, which highlighted the indifference of other Democrats to security, as a great blow to her campaign—which, manifestly, it was not.
No matter.
The hacking was attributed to Russia by the DNC’s security experts within days of its discovery. From then on, the narrative was set: Russia was conspiring with Trump to steal the election; co-conspirator Trump must be complicit; and the Democrats were victimized so Hillary must be the principal victim.
To address the hacking, the Democrats hired CrowdStrike, through one of their lawyers, Michael Sussmann, a former prosecutor and cybersecurity expert. Sussmann was a partner at Perkins Coie, the law-firm through which the DNC and the Clinton campaign had hired Fusion GPS.15 Remember the Alfa Bank yarn about a private communications channel between Trump and the Kremlin that Glenn Simpson eventually peddled to Bruce Ohr at the Justice Department (Chapter 18)? Well, it is Sussmann who would steer that same story to James Baker, the FBI general counsel who signed off on FISA warrants in the Trump–Russia investigation.16
CrowdStrike is a deeply Democratic firm—there is a reason Sussmann chose it, and a reason the DNC allowed CrowdStrike to root around in a communications system it declined to make available to the FBI.17 Right around the time the DNC retained CrowdStrike, President Obama appointed the firm’s general counsel and chief risk officer, Steven Chabinsky, to his Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. CrowdStrike’s co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which is heavily funded by Victor Pinchuk—the Ukrainian billionaire and Clinton Foundation donor we met in Chapter 6, the patron of a legislator in Kiev who loudly backed Clinton’s candidacy and leaked the compromising ledger that got Paul Manafort bounced from the Trump campaign. One of CrowdStrike’s major investors is left-leaning Google; billionaire Eric Schmidt, the now-former chairman of Google’s parent company (Alphabet Inc.), was a close Hillary adviser and provided critical tech support for her White House bid.18
As we’ve seen (Chapter 9), Julian Assange foretold on June 12 that WikiLeaks had “emails pending publication,” which would be the subject of “leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton.” Educated speculation was that he might have obtained at least some of the sixty thousand emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private servers. Because Clinton’s flimsy homebrew system had been so vulnerable to penetration, it was widely speculated that her emails had been hacked by foreign intelligence services. FBI director Comey conceded that this could have been the case in his July 5 exoneration remarks—which, as delivered, were toned down from an earlier draft that betrayed the FBI’s conclusion: Clinton probably was hacked.19
Assange had already published a searchable index of the thirty thousand emails Clinton had surrendered to the State Department. It was anticipated that, i
f he in fact had more emails related to Clinton, he might be preparing to release a trove from the thirty-two thousand emails she had withheld from the State Department—perhaps showing more interplay between State and the Clinton Foundation. That speculation did not change after CrowdStrike announced, on June 14, that Democratic party accounts had been hacked.
More than likely, Assange did not yet have the DNC emails when he made his June 12 statements. Ten days later, on June 22, WikiLeaks reached out to the hacking persona Guccifer 2.0, asking for “new material.” Assange obviously wanted the hackers to use his renowned WikiLeaks platform, rather than the alternatives they had recently set up—a website called DCLeaks and a WordPress blog site Guccifer 2.0 had started. WikiLeaks assured that its publication prowess would give the materials “a much higher impact.” Assange despised Clinton, and he believed time was of the essence if she was to be stopped. He knew that if the Democratic National Convention, set to begin on July 26, went smoothly, support would consolidate behind Clinton, leaving Trump little chance to win in the general election. It was critical, therefore, that any new damaging material be published before the convention, to rally Senator Sanders’s base. The hackers apparently agreed. After a few failed attempts, Guccifer 2.0 managed to transfer a bulging archive to WikiLeaks on July 14. On July 22, Assange released the first 20,000 for publication.20
Democrats were mortified, particularly by communications showing the party establishment had its thumb on the scale for Clinton—hardly a revelation, but embarrassing nonetheless. The former secretary of state was never in any danger of being derailed, however. In fact, the irrelevancy of the DNC emails to Clinton personally was a disappointment to some in Trump World, such as Roger Stone, an old friend of the magnate (and Manafort’s former consultancy partner). Stone was convinced that WikiLeaks possessed devastating Clinton Foundation fodder. Though lacking an inside track to Assange, despite some characteristically self-important braggadocio suggesting otherwise, Stone schemed to reach the WikiLeaks leader and urge him on.
When WikiLeaks started publishing the hacked DNC emails, a “senior Trump campaign official” (not further identified by prosecutors) asked Stone what damaging Clinton material WikiLeaks might have. It was a natural question since Stone had disingenuously suggested he had insight into WikiLeaks’s operation. In reality, Stone had no inside information; he’d heard rumors about a potential Clinton Foundation email dump, but he had no way of knowing. Though later instrumental in publishing the Podesta emails, WikiLeaks issued nothing from Clinton’s own emails.21
The narrative, nevertheless, was set: the hacked Democratic party emails that did not actually damage Clinton—certainly not in comparison to her own, self-induced email scandal—became the “evidence” that Trump and Russia were conspiring to destroy her campaign.
The Spies, the State Department, and the FBI’s Investigation
“But wait a second,” you’re thinking: “There was no evidence that Trump had anything to do with hacking attacks on Democrats … and even the evidence that Russia was responsible was not a lock.” No problem—those narrative loose ends were already being tied up.
As we’ve detailed, on June 20, Christopher Steele completed his first dossier report, alleging that Putin had compromised Trump with a lubricious video, was backing Trump and feeding him intelligence to use against his political rivals, and was holding a dossier of compromising material on Hillary Clinton. Steele called his old friend Mike Gaeta, an FBI agent Steele knew from the FIFA soccer investigation, who was now the FBI’s legal attaché in Rome. Steele told Gaeta he had dynamite information, but “I can’t discuss it over the phone. You have to come here. Believe me, Mike, you have to come to London.”22
To make the trip happen, the FBI needed a greenlight from Victoria Nuland, a high-ranking State Department official responsible for overseeing European and Eurasian affairs. Nuland had come to national prominence when then-Secretary Hillary Clinton made her the Department’s spokesperson. She was also familiar with Steele. The veteran spy had befriended Jonathan Winer, a lawyer and former legislative aide to Senator John Kerry. Upon being named by Obama to replace Clinton as Secretary of State, Kerry had brought Winer to Foggy Bottom. Steele passed along to Winer some of his company’s reporting on Eastern European affairs, including Russia and Ukraine. Winer showed Nuland Steele’s assessments; she considered them helpful and asked that Steele continue to send them. Over time, Winer shared over a hundred of Steele’s reports with the State Department’s Russia experts.23
Not all of them shared Winer and Nuland’s enthusiasm for Steele. They understood that the former intelligence officer was now a private eye, generously compensated by clients who were drawn to Steele because of his knowledge of Russia—such clients as Putin confidant Oleg Deripaska. One unidentified senior State Department official told journalist Eric Felten, “We were not aware of [Steele’s] specific sources but assumed that many of them were close to Putin and were peddling information that was useful to the Kremlin.” Note that Felten heard this even before we learned that, besides Deripaska, Steele counted among his sources top Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov and former SVR chief Vyacheslav Trubnikov. Felton notes that the State Department officials who saw his work most frequently and were most knowledgeable about Russia detected a “Putinesque spin” in Steele’s assessments. They were not given much weight.24
It was as though they’d read the dossier before it was written.
Nuland approved Gaeta’s trip and, on July 5 (not-so-ironically, the day of the Comey press conference exonerating Mrs. Clinton), the legal attaché winged his way from Rome to London, where he met with Steele in Orbis’s offices. In the telling of Michael Isikoff and David Korn in Russian Roulette, the seasoned agent turned white upon reading Steele’s report. After some solemn silence, Gaeta is said to have remarked, “I have to report this to headquarters.”25
Steele was already a Bureau informant. The Gaeta meeting was the first of FBI interviews that would continue directly for nearly six months. The interviews would then continue indirectly for another few months through the Justice Department’s Bruce Ohr—notwithstanding sworn representations that Steele had been terminated as an informant, made to the FISC by Bureau and Justice officials.26 As we’ve detailed (Chapter 9), immediately after WikiLeaks started publishing the hacked DNC emails on July 22, Steele incorporated this news into Fusion’s Trump–Russia narrative.
It has been claimed by various FBI officials and congressional Democrats that Steele’s information did not make its way to the headquarters team that was investigating Russia-gate until mid-September 2016.27 This is simply not true.
On Saturday, July 30, 2016, Steele was in Washington, where he had breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel with Bruce and Nellie Ohr. Steele regaled the Ohrs with his allegations of a Trump–Putin conspiracy. Associate Deputy Attorney General Ohr was sufficiently stunned that he called his old friend, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Sometime within the next few days, Ohr went to FBI headquarters to meet with McCabe and the latter’s counsel, Lisa Page. He briefed them on what he had heard from Steele—both Steele’s Trump–Russia allegations and the fact that Steele was working on an opposition research project connected to the Clinton campaign, along with Ohr’s wife Nellie (the former CIA researcher). Even assuming the unlikely possibility that information from Gaeta’s alarming debriefing of Steele had not been transmitted to headquarters immediately after their July 5 interview, Ohr ensured that the top echelon of FBI headquarters was aware no later than the beginning of August.28
Moreover, Nuland acknowledged in Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, “I was first shown excerpts from the dossier, I believe in mid-July of 2016. It wasn’t the complete thing, which I didn’t see until it was published in the U.S. press” (i.e., when the full dossier was published by BuzzFeed on January 10, 2017).29 On Face the Nation in February 2018, Nuland elaborated that she was shown a synopsis Steele had passed to the State Department—“two to four page
s of short points of what he was finding.” Her immediate reaction, she claims, was that “this is not our purview” and that “this needs to go to the FBI, if there is any concern here that one candidate or the election as a whole might be influenced by the Russian federation.”30 Nuland’s recollection is curious, to say the least. She had learned about Steele’s dossier information because she had been asked to approve a trip by an FBI agent to debrief Steele; she thus had to assume the FBI already knew about the information—there was no need for her to send it to the Bureau. A more likely explanation, we shall see, is that the Obama State Department was very much a player, not a disinterested observer, in Steele’s Trump–Russia project.
In that project, Steele was far from the only spy.
Or, if you prefer, “confidential human source.” Or “informant.” Or how about “asset”? Whatever floats your boat. Some commentators have gotten the vapors over the deployment of the word “spy” to describe covert information gathering. Regardless of what label you’re comfortable putting on a person who does such work, seventy-one-year-old Stefan Halper had been one for decades by the time he was dispatched to troll Trump campaign advisers in 2016.
“Stef” Halper is an American-born scholar who splits time between rural Virginia and toney Cambridge, where he is an eminent Life Fellow at Magdalene College. A Stanford undergrad, with doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge, Halper is the author of several books on foreign policy that both celebrate the Post-World War II Order and anguish over its disruption. (Sounds like a Trump guy, no?) Halper’s ties to the CIA trace back decades. He was the son-in-law of the late Ray Cline, a Langley legend for his role in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Halper worked in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and on the unsuccessful 1980 primary campaign of Ford’s CIA Director, George H. W. Bush. He was even entangled in a minor agency tempest in 1980: the alleged pilfering of Carter campaign briefing documents, claimed to have been leaked to the Reagan campaign in advance of the candidates’ only debate. (This was in the era before Mrs. Clinton showed the best debate prep is advance knowledge of the media’s questions, not the opponent’s answers.)31
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