Given the scandalous modern American legacy of domestic political spying, the Obama administration had to know this was an extremely controversial choice to make. The choice made perfect sense, though, if it was the candidate himself, not just sundry campaign hangers-on, whom intelligence agents suspected of being a foreign agent. What defensive brief could possibly eradicate a rival foreign power’s infiltration of the Trump campaign if the Obama administration had made up its mind that Trump himself was the problem? The Trump campaign wasn’t going to remove Trump.
Donald Trump is nothing if not shrewd. He would realize all of this. Furthermore, Trump would know that Obama’s Justice Department and the FBI largely based their suspicions—suspicions they took to a secret federal court—on unverified, multiple-hearsay rumor-mongering generated by the Clinton campaign. Simultaneously, it would be clear to Trump, these same officials were burying a criminal case against Clinton, one supported by such daunting evidence of guilt that the plain language of criminal statutes had to be distorted to avoid enforcing them.
Ten weeks. That is when Trump would inherit the keys to the intelligence kingdom. President Obama and his top advisers thus had a stark choice.
They could sit back passively and hope Trump would be content with the power and trappings of the nation’s highest office, willing to excuse his opponents’ excesses after a heated campaign, quietly convinced to look forward rather than backward. There were even some indications he could be reasoned with: In the days following his election victory, Trump took pains to say he was not actually hot to have Hillary Clinton prosecuted for mishandling classified information and destroying government records—even though he’d spent the campaign whipping up his base’s “lock her up” fervor.12 Maybe Trump would see the sense in keeping a top-secret shroud over the Russia investigation’s targeting of the Trump campaign. Maybe the Obama administration should refrain from any anticipatory damage control.
Or instead, Obama officials could assume that Trump would be Trump, that he’d be enraged, and that he’d be too mercurial to keep the investigation concealed, even if disclosure was not necessarily in his interests (after all, because of the FBI’s excellent reputation, many Americans would believe that if there was smoke, there must have been fire—that maybe Trump really was a Putin stooge). The Obama administration had to figure that the new president, who reveled in his “punch back twice as hard” image, would be inclined to reveal everything and then go on offense. Consequently, if the investigation was going to be disclosed anyway, Obama officials had to figure it would be better for them if they orchestrated the disclosure themselves, rather than leaving it to Trump. That way, instead of a political liability, the investigation would be a political weapon—an insurance policy.
Through a campaign of government action and stealthy intelligence leaks, the public could be convinced that there truly was a sinister Trump–Russia conspiracy. The media could be depended on to play along. As the investigation of the Trump campaign was gradually revealed, the public might be increasingly convinced that Obama officials had simply done what duty demanded. The president and his minions could use their waning days of control over the levers of power to cement the Trump–Russia collusion narrative into conventional wisdom. If done methodically enough, the new president and his staff, Washington novices, might even be intimidated into allowing the investigation to continue—for fear of being seen as obstructing it.
For Obama officials, the latter course was the only choice. You want to say it’s the choice that came naturally to an administration run by an Alinskyite progressive schooled in the extortionate use of power, process, and the press against political foes? I’m in no position to say you’re wrong.13 But there was more to it than that. There was the adamantine conviction of Obama officials that Trump was deeply corrupt.
The portrayal of Trump and his minions as compromised by the Kremlin was more than just political posturing. For many Obama officials, it was an article of faith. Never forget: In making the Obama administration’s application for a FISA surveillance warrant, the FBI represented to the FISC that Trump’s campaign was likely complicit in Russia’s cyberespionage. This representation continued to be made through the first nine months of Trump’s presidency. Of course, when Obama officials first posited this allegation, they never expected it to see the light of day. Still, no such asseveration would have been made unless some of these officials believed it in their bones. That they could not prove it was seen, in the moment, as a temporary inconvenience that time would overcome.
They believed it. In their obdurate disdain for Trump—not disdain for a mere political adversary but for a man they’d internalized as an irredeemable villain, a white supremacist nationalist bent on disrupting social progress and the international community—they abandoned the cool professional’s detached objectivity. They convinced themselves that Christopher Steele was a reliable British intelligence pro, rather than a well-paid partisan hack. They were confident that Steele’s claim of an elaborate Trump–Russia conspiracy must be true … they just hadn’t been able to corroborate it yet. Surely that would happen any day now … if they could just keep the investigation alive.
Just as in the Clinton’s email scandal, the key decision—this time to project a case against Trump rather than bury a case against Clinton—traces directly back to President Obama.
Orchestrating Collusion
On December 6, less than a month after Clinton’s defeat and despite having pooh-poohed both the Kremlin’s meddling and the very notion that American national elections can be stolen, the president ordered CIA Director Brennan to assess the impact of Russia’s activities.14 Brennan was to coordinate a review of intelligence by the relevant agencies—in particular, the CIA, FBI, and NSA—and compose a non-classified summary for public consumption.
Think about that.
This is the federal government we’re talking about. Completion of a multi-agency report after a public controversy typically takes months, if not longer. Here, the matter was far more challenging. It involved classified information of the highest order, the tapping of the intelligence community’s most sensitive sources of information about the deliberations and actions of the Putin regime, our most intelligence-savvy competitor. It routinely takes professional investigators at the Justice Department and the FBI well over a year to finish probes of far less complex matters, even though they have subpoena power to compel the production of relevant documents and the testimony of knowledgeable witnesses. In stark contrast, most of the witnesses and evidence relevant to Russia’s 2016 espionage operations were either beyond the grasp of American investigators, or too highly classified to be exposed in court. And, though some critical proof, such as the hacked servers, was easily accessible, the Democrat-controlled Justice Department had curiously chosen not to subpoena or otherwise seize it from the Democratic National Committee. Nevertheless, the president demanded that the intelligence community’s major investigative arms complete the investigation in a matter of days.
There were only two rational reasons for doing this. First, it ensured that the report would be completed by Obama’s own intelligence chiefs, in particular, the hyper-partisan Brennan, not Trump appointees. Second, it meant the report would be submitted to Obama himself, not to the new president. The Obama administration would orchestrate the roll-out.
Naturally, as we saw with the exoneration of Mrs. Clinton, summary reports are not that difficult to pull together quickly when the outcome is predetermined. On December 28, with the public roll-out of the report imminent, the president signed an executive order, effective the next day, announcing “Additional Steps to Address the National Emergency With Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities” by Russia.15 Having thus elevated to a “national emergency” these activities that Obama had deemed too petty to address when they were actually happening, the chief executive made a point of noting an ongoing multi-departmental investigation which could very well find that t
here had been “tampering with, altering, or causing a misappropriation of information with the purpose or effect of interfering with or undermining election processes or institutions.”16 In reality, as the president had publicly stated, there had been peddling of irrelevant emails and moronic propaganda … which is why he had ignored it.
By the order, Obama expelled thirty-five people described as Russian “intelligence operatives.” He slapped sanctions on two Russian intelligence agencies—the military and civilian spy services, respectively, the GRU and FSB, as well as four “cyber officials” and three companies said to support Russian cyber operations. Further, he shuttered Russian-owned buildings on Long Island and Maryland’s eastern shoreline, which were suddenly branded as intelligence operations. Mind you, these facilities and operatives had been up and running throughout Obama’s presidency. No meaningful action was taken against them throughout the 2016 campaign, while Obama was being extensively briefed about Russia’s hacking and propaganda operations. Nor when Russia annexed Crimea, consolidated its de facto seizure of eastern Ukraine, propped up Assad, armed Iran, buzzed U.S. naval vessels, and saberrattled in the Baltics. Only now, to prop up a post-election emphasis on the Trump–Russia narrative.
‘We Cannot Share Information Fully as It Relates to Russia’
As a new year was ushered in, another clock was ticking. The ninety-day surveillance warrant on Carter Page had been issued on October 21, meaning it was scheduled to lapse right as the new president was being inaugurated on January 20. If the Obama administration wanted to ensure its renewal, that would have to be done while Obama was still in office. Consequently, a reauthorization application—an elaborate process that calls for a thoroughgoing review at the top echelons of the FBI and the Justice Department—was underway.
To continue the investigation would be tricky, requiring both that the Steele dossier be revisited (since it would be reaffirmed in the new surveillance application), and that careful consideration be given to how the investigation would be explained to the incoming president. After all, if it were forthrightly explained to Trump that he was the focus of an investigation in which the Justice Department and FBI had already told a federal court that he might be a Russian agent, how could they be sure that he would allow the probe to continue? That he would retain for a nanosecond the Obama appointees who had orchestrated it?
There was thus a lot on the Obama administration’s plate on January 5, when the president convened his national security team at the White House. The administration’s top political officials in the national security sphere—the president, along with Rice and Vice President Biden—were joined by the heads of the four top intelligence agencies: Clapper, Comey, Brennan, and Rogers, along with Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.17 Topping the agenda was “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in the Recent US Elections,” the report Obama had ordered Brennan and his colleagues to complete, along with a non-classified summary for public consumption.18 Significantly, the four intelligence chiefs were scheduled to brief President-elect Trump on the same report the very next day, at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
According to Rice’s memo, immediately after discussion of the report, Obama directed Yates and Comey to join him for “a brief follow-on conversation,” along with Biden, and Rice. Unlike most others at the meeting, the DAG and the FBI director would be staying on in their jobs after Trump took office. If the Russia investigation were to be sustained after Trump’s inauguration, it would be up to them to persevere in it.
So, what instructions did the president give them—aside, of course, from the admonition that everything must be done “by the book”? This is how Rice recalled it in her last-second email (my italics):
President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.
Remember, Rice wrote this fifteen days after the meeting. She knew quite well that the administration had not “shared information fully as it relates to Russia”—such as the information that Yates and Comey had signed off on FISA warrant applications alleging that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russia’s espionage.
Rice’s email continued with a blacked-out paragraph—almost surely referring to some of the information that the Obama administration had decided “we cannot share” with the new administration. Obama’s key aide then closed by reciting the president’s final instruction to Director Comey: Obama was to be informed “if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team.”
You have to keep reminding yourself: Rice was not writing a contemporaneous memo; “the next few weeks” had already happened. As Trump was about to take the reins, Rice was writing a post-facto rationalization for withholding information from him. While the Obama administration had promised cooperation with the Trump transition, the events of the two weeks before Trump’s inauguration had been indicative of concealment and deceit. Rice was painting a happy-face on them: Not Obama’s fault, you see; it was just what “the book” required.
So what happened in those two weeks?
Politicized Intelligence
On January 6, the intelligence community assessment (ICA) was publicly released. Given how hastily it was slapped together, we should not be surprised that it was less than convincing in its titillating conclusion that Russia’s interference was intended to help Trump win.
Brennan’s CIA and Comey’s FBI solemnly expressed high confidence in this conclusion (the NSA just had “moderate confidence”). Why? They couldn’t tell us. The agencies maintained that the secretive nature of their work, the need to preserve intelligence methods and sources, forbade them from describing all of the information that enabled them to read Vladimir Putin’s mind.
Sure.
The problem, of course, is that if you’re essentially going to say, “Trust us,” you have to have proven yourself trustworthy over time. Here, we are talking about an intelligence community whose own analysts have complained that their superiors distort their reports for political purposes. In just the past few years, they have preposterously told us that they had “high confidence” that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons programs in 2003; that the NSA was not collecting metadata on millions of Americans; and that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate, “largely secular” organization. We have learned that the Obama administration intentionally used a compliant media “echo chamber” to sell the public on the Iran nuclear deal (and the fiction that the jihadist mullahs of Tehran were moderating). We saw U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies back the Obama administration’s political claim that “violent extremism,” not radical Islam, is the explanation for terrorist strikes; that a jihadist mass-murder attack targeting soldiers about to deploy to Afghanistan was “workplace violence”; that al-Qaeda had been “decimated”; that the threat of the ISIS “JV” team was exaggerated; and that the Benghazi massacre was not really a terrorist attack but a “protest” gone awry, incited by an anti-Muslim video.
And that was before the FBI asserted with confidence that Trump campaign officials were complicit in Russia’s cyberespionage attacks against Democrats—a representation the Bureau made to the FISC at the same time intelligence community chiefs were belittling the Steele dossier as uncorroborated rumor that could not be included in the ICA.
To be sure, our intelligence agencies overflow with patriotic Americans who do the quiet, perilous work that saves American lives. As an institution, however, “Trust us” is not going to get them very far.
The three agencies based their conclusion that Putin was rooting for Trump on speculation (“Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because” he blames her for protests against his regime), along with heavy doses of hypothesis (Putin is said to have: liked “Trump’s stated policy to work with Russia”; seen Trump’s election as a potential pathway “to achieve an international coa
lition against the Islamic State”; “had many positive experiences working with Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia”; etc.). This guesswork, it is worth noting, was based on publicly available press reports. It didn’t tell us anything we couldn’t have surmised on our own, even without intelligence training and access to classified information.
There is no doubt that Putin meddles in Western political campaigns, as Russia traditionally has. And we can readily assume that he, like everyone else, has his favored candidates. But Putin is a cold, calculating man, one who would not permit his eccentric preferences to intrude on his real-world objectives. His realistic hope for us is destabilization: raising hot-button issues, exploiting racial divisions and economic anxieties, inciting tensions between rivals but not necessarily picking one over the other. Putin knows Russia is not going to take over the United States; but if factions are alienated against Washington and the cultural mainstream, it makes governance and social cohesion difficult. That is his goal for us. Internal strife makes it hard for an American administration to pursue American interests, opening opportunities for Moscow. This counsels in favor of supporting the likely losers, not the expected winners.
Our intelligence community knows this. After all the huffing and puffing about Russia’s “espionage” and “covert ops” to try to “denigrate” Mrs. Clinton, our agencies acknowledged that the Russians assumed Clinton was going to win. Mainly, Putin was trying to fire up dissenters who might undermine the effectiveness of her anticipated presidency. Even if we accept that the Russians wanted Trump to win, they were not daft enough to believe they could actually swing the election to him.
Ball of Collusion Page 37