Ball of Collusion

by Andrew C. McCarthy

  Of course the statement was injudicious, but only because it was not an isolated incident. As we’ve seen, a number of Trump’s public statements about Putin had been jaw-dropping: praising him as a “strong leader” and “far more [of a leader] than our president [Obama] has been a leader”; defending Putin after the British government found that he’d approved the poisoning of a defector (“Have they found him guilty? I don’t think they’ve found him guilty”); drawing a moral equivalence between Russian-regime murders of dissenters and covert operations by U.S. intelligence (to an interviewer’s description of Putin as a “killer,” Trump responded: “There are a lot of killers. Do you think our country is so innocent?”).10

  Disturbing? Yes. Many of Trump’s statements are disturbing. The trend has not ceased during his presidency. As this book goes to press, the president has just tweeted that he is confident the sociopathic North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (“Chairman Kim”) “will keep his promise” to Trump to refrain from long-range missile tests. The context: Kim had just directed short-range missile tests in violation of international sanctions the United States is supposed to enforce. The president not only laughed off this provocation; for good measure, he added that he “smiled” upon hearing that Kim “called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual.”11 If Trump’s Putin treacle upsets you (as it upsets me), try reading his blubber about how he and Kim “fell in love.”12 This is Donald Trump’s way. Do you find it nauseating? Me too. I make an effort (often, it takes extraordinary effort) to tune out the blather and focus on important policies with which I emphatically agree, but it is absurd to suggest that what a president says does not matter. It matters a great deal. Trump’s shock-jock shtick would have constituted a fine reason in 2016 for Americans to campaign vigorously against him, especially if there had been a tolerable alternative. All that said, though, none of this claptrap is close to being espionage—even if one thinks, as John Brennan maintains, that there is such a thing as “unwitting” espionage.

  ‘Corroboration’: Circular Reporting and Another Dossier

  As summer 2016 dwindled, Fusion GPS stepped up the Clinton campaign effort to leverage government investigative power with media influence. Glenn Simpson arranged to meet with Bruce Ohr on August 22, providing the Justice Department official with more details from Steele’s reporting about Trump–Russia connections. For professional reasons, Simpson, a self-described “journalist for rent,”13 preferred to pretend that he was not a government informant—you never know when they might want to subpoena, say, your “research” on behalf of Putin’s “Destroy Bill Browder” project, so you want to be able to claim full free-press protections. Simpson thus resisted contact with the FBI, using Ohr to transmit campaign dirt. He would later tell congressional investigators that he did not have contact with Ohr until after the election—and that, of course, it was Ohr’s idea, not his.14

  Fusion’s real blitz occurred in mid-September. On Friday the 16th, Steele emailed Ohr to say he would soon be in Washington “on business of mutual interest.” Steele was in town by Wednesday the 21st. He and Ohr agreed to meet for breakfast on Friday, since by then Steele said he’d have gotten through a series of “scheduled meetings.”15 As it turned out, Simpson had set up meetings for Steele with a number of prominent journalists: Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind Helderman of The Washington Post, and The New York Times’s Steven Lee and Eric Lichtblau, as well as a session with CNN.16

  On September 23, right after these press briefings, Isikoff filed his bombshell story, “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.”17 The account, featuring a picture of Carter Page, related that the U.S. government was conducting an intelligence investigation to determine whether Page, a Trump adviser, had opened up a private communications channel with such “senior Russian officials” as Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin to discuss lifting economic sanctions if Trump became president. Isikoff’s dispatch was rife with allegations, from what were portrayed as “intelligence reports,” that “U.S. officials” were actively investigating. These were actually Steele’s reports, paid for by the Clinton campaign, but framed in a way that would lead readers to assume they were official U.S. intelligence reports.

  That is not to say there was a lack of official American government involvement. Isikoff’s story asserted that U.S. intelligence agents were briefing members of Congress about these “intelligence reports.” And they were: Brennan had briefed the Gang of Eight. The story described the reaction of three Gang members—all Democrats. Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congressman Adam Schiff (both of California), issued a joint statement explaining that, according to what they’d been told, “very senior levels” of the Russian government were making “a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election.” The letter Senator Reid had written to FBI Director Comey was also emphasized, with reference to Page’s purported meetings with Sechin and Divyekin. Isikoff’s story elaborated that “questions about Page come amid mounting concerns within the U.S. intelligence community about Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee.” Those would be the cyberattacks that Fusion GPS had conjured into a Trump–Russia conspiracy, in which Page was the foot soldier for Trump and his campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

  Isikoff obviously checked with his government sources to verify what Steele and Simpson had told him about the ongoing government investigation. His story recounts that “a senior U.S. law enforcement official” confirmed that Page’s alleged contacts with Russian officials were “on our radar screen.… It’s being looked at.”

  It was more than being looked at. Notwithstanding the lack of support by independent evidence, Steele’s reporting was being elevated to grist for a FISA warrant on Page. The Obama administration would try to paper over the deficiencies by presenting Isikoff’s article to the court as if it were verification of Steele’s reporting—media reporting substituting for gum-shoe investigating, and Steele offered as corroboration for Steele (with an audacious government representation that Steele had not been Isikoff’s source—at least not “directly”).

  By then, Steele’s reporting to the FBI would also include rank rumor supplied by the State Department, courtesy of two other longtime Clinton hatchet men, Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer, who had been peddling their own anti-Trump dossier since the spring.

  In Washington, Steele, who was toting his reports, let his State Department friend Jonathan Winer read them, but not keep a copy. Like others who perused Steele’s work, Winer was stunned by the bottomless depths of Trumpian depravity depicted therein. He prepared a two-page summary, which he shared with Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland, and which both of them agreed simply had to be brought to the attention of Secretary of State Kerry.

  Then, later in September, Winer says he spoke with his “old friend” Blumenthal. In a self-defensive op-ed he was later invited to publish at The Washington Post, Winer recalled that Blumenthal’s emails had been hacked in 2013—though Winer managed to avoid mentioning that some of those emails, exchanged with then–Secretary of State Clinton through her private server, dealt with the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack and contained classified information (Blumenthal did not have a security clearance and did not work for the government, Clinton having been forbidden by the president from hiring him after Blumenthal’s Blumenthally work against Obama in the 2008 campaign.)18 Winer decided to discuss Steele’s confidential anti-Trump reporting with Blumenthal—strictly for academic purposes, of course. Now, try not to be too stunned when I tell you that Ol’ Sid just happened to bring along a copy of the notes assembled by his running buddy, Cody Shearer—whose ties to the Clintons run deep and, natch, unseemly.19 Shearer’s meanderings “alleged that the Russians had compromising information on Trump of a sexual and financial nature.” Imagine that!

  The invaluable Lee Smith obtained a copy of this Blumenthal–Shearer dossier, a collection of two undated reports, each four pages long.2
0 Shearer—a one-time journalist who specialized in gossip and has no intelligence background—based his reports on interviews with “journalists and various media personalities, as well as [an] unnamed Turkish businessman,” who allegedly had “excellent contacts with the FSB” (Russia’s internal security service). The “reports” were entitled “Donald Trump—Background Notes—The Compromised Candidate” and “FSB Interview.”

  Uncannily similar to Steele’s reports, Shearer’s memos related that Trump and Paul “Manniford” were involved in a corrupt conspiracy with Russia. Shearer also rehashed the left-wing media theme that Trump, in desperate need of financing after his bankruptcies, laundered money for Russian oligarchs in return for capital. From his tentacles in the FSB, Shearer had learned “that Trump … had been flipped [to the Kremlin side] in a honeypot operation in Moscow.” The mogul, he added, had been “filmed twice in Moscow in November 2013, during the Miss Universe Pageant,” including “[o]nce in the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel,” with “a copy of the sex videos” stashed in “Bulgaria, Israel and FSB political unit vaults in Moscow.” Sure seems like a lot of copies of a video no one reports having seen, but I digress. Shearer concluded that the Kremlin was pushing hard to get its compromised candidate elected president of the United States, through the theft of emails and even tampering with voting machines. The mysterious Turkish businessman chimed in that his unidentified Russian source knew of a “cut out,” through whom Trump, once elected, would communicate “into President Putin’s office.”

  Winer could not help but be “struck” by “how some of the [Shearer] material echoed Steele’s but appeared to involve different sources.” Though he did not know Shearer, Winer assumed—what, with Blumenthal vouching for him—that these reports constituted assiduously researched, impeccably sourced intelligence that should promptly be brought to the attention of the master himself, Chris Steele. Winer shared a copy with the former spy, “to ask for his professional reaction.” Yes, indeed, Steele replied, this could well be “collateral” information—similar to his own reporting but separately sourced. Knowing Steele was generating reports, Winer let him keep a copy of Shearer’s notes. Naturally, in his quest to give the FBI every stitch of anti-Trump rumor he could locate, Steele incorporated Shearer’s information as part of his research, transmitted to the FBI’s intelligence database.21 According to former Representative Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), who saw some of the relevant documentation as a congressional investigator, the FBI listed information from Blumenthal as part of its purported corroboration of Steele.22

  When they later referred Steele to the Justice Department for a possible false-statements prosecution, Judiciary Committee Senators Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham recounted that, in a memo dated October 19 (but not published by BuzzFeed), Steele had outlined Shearer’s information as a report from the “US State Department,” traceable to “a foreign subsource” (the unidentified Turk with the purported but unidentified FSC source), and then routed through Shearer, Blumenthal, and Winer.

  The Obama State Department, which hoped and expected to become the Clinton State Department, remained invested in Steele’s anti-Trump project through the end of the campaign. These days, former Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland (who left State within days of Trump’s inauguration), poses as a pillar of rectitude: Immediately upon hearing about the dossier in July 2016, she says, she admonished her subordinates:

  [T]his is about U.S. politics, and not the work of—not the business of the State Department, and certainly not the business of a career employee who is subject to the Hatch Act, which requires that you stay out of politics. So, my advice to those who were interfacing with [Steele] was that he should get this information to the FBI, and that they could evaluate whether they thought it was credible.23

  That, however, is not what happened. Nuland, of course, had approved Agent Gaeta’s July 5 trip to London to interview Steele, so she knew the FBI already had Steele’s information. The State Department, meanwhile, hosted Steele at Foggy Bottom in October 2016 to brief select officials on his dossier allegations about Donald Trump. Nuland incoherently claims both not to have known about the briefing and to have consciously chosen not to attend it. As Eric Felten observes, how odd that State Department officials could see dabbling in the dossier as a potential Hatch Act problem but be untroubled by having Steele himself presenting his information “to State Department officials in State Department offices on State Department time”—the same information he and Fusion were presenting to the media in the waning days before the election.24

  Fellow Agent or Source?

  How surprised should we be that the State Department gave Steele the Cody Shearer/Sid Blumenthal dossier? After all, the FBI was feeding Steele information, too. In late September, following his return from Washington meetings with select Obama administration officials and favored journalists, Gaeta summoned Steele to Rome to meet with agents who had flown in from the United States to debrief him. It wasn’t a normal witness debriefing, though. It was more like a conference among law-enforcement peers conducting a common investigation. The agents shared some of their information and sought reciprocal contribution from Steele.25

  This was a huge part of the problem with the former British intelligence officer: U.S. investigators could never seem to make up their minds whether he was a source (as indicated to the court) or a fellow investigator (as suggested in their meetings). The distinction is significant: A source or witness is someone from whom agents adduce information; it is essential to keep this a one-way street, since the investigator is always trying to evaluate credibility and the reliability of information. You have to be able to keep straight what the witness is telling you based on his unique information, versus what he is telling you based on what you have told him—or based on what he infers that you want to hear from what your questions suggest.

  That wall was never maintained with Steele, for two reasons. First, he was not really a source; he was an informant relying on hearsay from sources. That is, his role in the investigation was analogous to an FBI case agent, who aggregates other people’s information. Second, while Steele technically was not a government agent, he had been one (for an allied government). And he was still in the investigations business—though now in search of income, not truth. Plainly, if Steele hadn’t been a former agent who seemed like a current agent, no one would have given him the time of day. Normally, a good investigator puts little or no stock in an informant whose sources are far away, sometimes anonymous, multiple hearsay layers removed, and unverifiable.

  In Rome, the Bureau shared details of their investigation as if Steele were another FBI agent. Investigators told him about George Papadopoulos, whom Steele did not know. And they held out the possibility of paying him $50,000 if he could corroborate his claims. (Hint: That means they knew his claims were not corroborated, and that this was a big problem—Steele’s own personal credibility was irrelevant if the sources, who had purportedly made the pertinent observations, could not be verified.) As things worked out, his dossier was soon made public; according to Steele, he not only wasn’t paid for his information, he didn’t even get reimbursed for traveling Rome for the meeting.26

  The FBI’s inability to verify Steele’s information remains a sticking point to this day. Rather than admit failure, top Bureau officials expatiate about corroboration as an organic process that never really ends unless information is outright refuted … conveniently flipping the constitutional burden of proof, under which the government must prove its suspicions, not treat them as proven until disproved.27 To take the position, years after information has been acted on, that although not yet verified it may someday be is an appalling abuse of investigative power. That, however, is Russia-gate in a nutshell: no rumor is ever dismissed because, when it comes to Trump, it is no longer the FBI’s obligation to verify information; it is somehow the suspect’s burden to show that the suspicions are wrong. And no one is ever exonerated because, when it come
s to Trump, it is no longer the prosecution’s burden to prove guilt; the accused must establish his innocence.

  Despite the pining about how asking questions about the conduct of this investigation imperils the very foundations of the republic, I am going to go out on a limb and say: that’s not very American.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  FISA Warrants: Targeting Trump, Not Page

  In the eight years between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and 9/11, al-Qaeda repeatedly attacked the United States. The government struggled to decide whether international terrorism was strictly a criminal matter, to be investigated with such techniques as criminal wiretaps, or a national-security matter, to be investigated under FISA and other intelligence-gathering procedures. Obviously, it was both. But that caused the Clinton Justice Department sleepless nights over what seemed—to me, among other terrorism prosecutors and investigators—to be overwrought fears of hypothetical abuses, remote from real-world experience.

  I guess I owe Jamie Gorelick an apology.1

  The then–deputy attorney general and other Clinton DOJ officials were worried about FISA. What if you had rogue agents who were predisposed to believe a group of suspects was guilty, but couldn’t prove it? The rogues did not have enough evidence to seek a regular wiretap or search warrant. Mightn’t they be tempted to use FISA? They’d just need to claim that there was some vague national-security aspect to the case; to pretend that their investigation was connected to a broader counterintelligence investigation of a foreign power. The rogues could then seek FISA warrants to surveil the suspects. The agents would call it “counterintelligence,” but in reality they’d be conducting a criminal investigation—eavesdropping and conducting other surreptitious searches—even though they did not have probable cause to believe a crime had been committed.