Crime in Progress

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Crime in Progress Page 34

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;


  The Russians invested in various other prospects, often by cultivating political figures through Putin’s network of captive oligarchs, who have a history of backing large lobbying efforts, supporting Washington think tanks, and making politically strategic investments. These efforts mostly came up short. In the 2008 campaign, for example, the Russians appear to have attempted to infiltrate the McCain presidential campaign with the help of none other than Oleg Deripaska and Paul Manafort. The 2008 operation failed when it was partially exposed in the media.

  Russia’s political influence efforts in the United States surfaced again in 2010, when the FBI exposed and arrested a network of sleeper Russian agents in Operation Ghost Stories, better known as the Anna Chapman case. Intercepts and other evidence showed that the ring was more preoccupied with getting close to American political figures than in stealing state military secrets, an approach the media misread as some weird relic of the Cold War.

  The agents were engaged in an elaborate exercise to identify people who might one day ascend to positions of political influence and power. It was the same Soviet intelligence tactic used in Britain in the 1930s to spot talent inside Cambridge University. That led to the recruitment of the Cambridge Five, whose most famous member, Kim Philby, became and MI6 officer and acted for decades as a double agent for Moscow.

  At some point in the past decade, Putin decided to augment his foreign influence project with new propaganda technologies that would enable Russia to manipulate public opinion and even elections in the United States and other countries through social media, such as Twitter trolls.

  Russia’s targeting of democratic political systems was ingeniously opportunistic: While the intelligence and defense establishments of NATO countries are well defended against traditional espionage, their wide-open political systems make for soft targets. Politicians hate being monitored by their own security services and retaliate when such investigations come to light. This makes it difficult for the FBI and its counterparts to conduct counterintelligence investigations without getting sucked into precisely the sort of damaging political controversies that have erupted since Trump took office.

  In Trump, Putin found the perfect opportunity to exploit Russia’s newfound propaganda powers with a long-shot bid to install an ally in the White House. Falling short of that, Russia would at least sow distrust among Americans in their electoral system. As it turned out, Putin succeeded on both counts.

  Was Trump a witting accomplice in all this? Mueller concluded that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to say he was. But it is abundantly clear that Trump has shown an extraordinary fealty toward Putin as toward no other world leader. Trump’s economic revival over the past fifteen years came about in large part because of a conduit of cash from the former Soviet Union into his various stumbling enterprises. And a vast number of his aides and advisers have had close ties to Moscow and welcomed Russia’s help in what it did to twist the 2016 electoral outcome.

  To deny that Russia intervened in the 2016 election with the express purpose of helping Trump win—given all the evidence presented by Mueller and the Intelligence Community—requires a staggering degree of willful blindness. Worse, however, is to support that position with silence.

  Today’s Republican leadership has much to answer for in that regard. There is strong circumstantial evidence to believe that Republican leaders in Congress either knew or suspected much more about what Russia was up to in 2016 than they let on. It is now known that Senator Mitch McConnell intervened almost two months before the election to stop the Obama White House from publicly calling out Putin’s crimes. In 2019, McConnell has also repeatedly blocked bills aimed at protecting state voting systems from foreign hackers, earning him the epithet “Moscow Mitch” from critics and a shiny new aluminum factory back home in Kentucky courtesy of Oleg Deripaska’s company.

  Americans learned in September 2019 that just a day after Mueller’s congressional testimony, Trump repeatedly pressed Ukraine’s president to revive an investigation into unsubstantiated corruption allegations potentially damaging to Vice President Joe Biden, his most potent Democratic rival in 2020. Here was Trump, now acting as president, using the levers of U.S. foreign policy to enlist a foreign leader to help him undermine a domestic political rival. Feeling impunity from the outcome of an investigation into his conduct in one election, he was turning his sights to the next—this time even more brazenly, and again with only muted reactions from Republicans in Congress.

  Like McConnell, the Republican establishment has proven itself extremely susceptible to foreign electoral blandishments. As the Republican Party’s base of white voters has shriveled, there has been an increasing willingness on the part of its leaders to pursue win-at-all-costs electoral strategies, such as the deliberate disenfranchisement of minority voters and covert alliances with foreign regimes similarly fearful of demographic demise.

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  A handful of documents in recent times have bent the course of history deeply enough to merit their own sobriquet. The Pentagon Papers. The Warren Report. The Starr Report. Time will tell whether the Steele dossier—that collection of intelligence snapshots from a former British spy’s source network—deserves to take its place among them. As a touchstone for the Trump-Russia scandal, it is already perhaps the most famous work of opposition research in American politics.

  Yet as opposition research, the dossier’s impact before the election was negligible. Republican efforts to portray the dossier as a hoax or a political dirty trick ignore the fact that it emerged publicly only after the vote. Because Fusion and Steele quietly provided their most alarming information to law enforcement, questions about the Trump campaign’s cooperation with Russia had no sway over voters before the election. If the dossier had been created to swing the election, as many Republicans still suggest, it would have been released before Election Day.

  The dossier’s true impact was not as opposition research, but as a timely warning to the world about Russia’s ability to deploy powerful new tools in a coordinated attack on Western democracies, and about very real concerns regarding the man whom the United States had just elected. These concerns have only grown over time.

  The dossier’s publication—something that, it is worth stressing again, Fusion never wanted or anticipated—helped thrust the Russian attack to the front of public consciousness from the first days of Trump’s tenure and cast his intentions as president in a starkly different light. The document gave meaning and urgency to a closely held FBI investigation into Trump’s Russia ties and set in motion a cascade of events that, when amplified by a newly aggressive news media, led to the appointment of Robert Mueller.

  Had that collection of intelligence reports not exploded onto the world stage in January 2017, the Trump presidency—and possibly many global events—may have taken a dramatically different path. Among other things, the dossier appears to have derailed a plan by the incoming Trump team to reorder the post–World War II Western alliance through a rapprochement with Russia that would transform U.S. relationships with Europe, the Middle East, China, and beyond. Domestically, it helped fuel an investigation that landed several of Trump’s closest allies in jail and tied his administration in knots.

  Fusion GPS foresaw none of this when it hired Steele to make discreet inquiries in the summer of 2016. Steele’s memos were one piece among dozens of research feeds that were intended to supplement and expand upon Fusion’s own investigation, which focused on records available in the open source. These various threads of research would normally be distilled, analyzed, and—if deemed credible—passed along to the Clinton campaign.

  That process was upended by an extraordinary historical event captured in the dossier itself: the Russian government’s unprecedented attack on the American electoral system. Steele’s first report arrived at the end of June 2016, just as news of those hacks was becoming public, and the do
ssier described aspects of the attack almost in real time. In the eyes of Fusion and Steele, that transformed a thread of opposition research into critically important evidence of a crime in progress.

  Historic intelligence failures such as Pearl Harbor and September 11, 2001, have often been attributed to “failures of imagination.” The same could be said of the Russian attack on the 2016 presidential elections. Neither the U.S. government nor the media nor the public were prepared to grapple with a sweeping foreign intrusion into our fragile electoral system. The efforts by Steele and Fusion to raise the alarm initially struck many as wide-eyed paranoia.

  But by raising the alarm when they did, Steele’s memos played a critical role in helping to alert the U.S. government—and eventually the media and the public—to Russia’s sinister efforts and the Trump campaign’s openness to them. It offered an explanation for much of the strange activity that had occurred over the previous year, from the RNC’s platform change on the Ukraine conflict to Trump’s incessant flattery of Putin. Events that seemed disconnected suddenly made sense to ordinary people in the light of the dossier’s stark warnings.

  The dossier also helped focus greater attention on broader dangers the United States is still grappling with: manipulation via social media, Putin’s ambition to dismantle the Western alliance, and the nascent kleptocracy of the Trump administration.

  In that sense, the dossier served a vital purpose: sparking the collective imagination like a bonfire on a mountaintop, awakening people to the previously unimaginable threats of the day.

  While the dossier’s impact on the events of the past few years is beyond debate, the veracity of all its claims is not.

  After three years of investigations, a fair assessment of the memos would conclude that many of the allegations in the dossier have been borne out. Some proved remarkably prescient. Other details remain stubbornly unconfirmed, while a handful now appear to be doubtful, though not yet disproven.

  For anyone familiar with human intelligence reports, that assessment should come as no surprise: A spy whose sources get it 70 percent right is considered to be one of the best. But that context was lost on many readers, who were befuddled by its staccato presentation of information from sources identified only by letter in a “company intelligence report.” As journalists scrambled to corroborate or refute the startling allegations, they focused quickly on its salacious contents and minor details, such as the spellings of transliterated Russian names and whether there was a Russian consulate in Miami.

  As a result, they tended to miss the central message, which, in hindsight, Steele got strikingly right.

  In his first report, on June 20, 2016, Steele stated that Russian election meddling was “endorsed by Putin” and “supported and directed” by him to “sow discord and disunity with the United States itself but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance.”

  Six months later, the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment determined that Steele was right. “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election,” the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated. “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process” and “undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order.”

  The U.S. assessment also concluded that Steele was right about something top FBI officials appear to have been slow to admit or recognize: Putin wasn’t merely seeking to create a crisis of confidence in democratic elections. He was actively pulling strings to destroy Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump. It is worth noting that, months earlier, in the run-up to the election, the FBI was either wrong about this fact or lying to the press.

  In September 2019, U.S. officials confirmed that the Central Intelligence Agency had a human source inside the Russian government during the campaign, who provided information that dovetailed with Steele’s reporting about Russia’s objective of electing Trump and Putin’s direct involvement in the operation. This may help explain why both Obama and Trump were briefed on Steele’s reporting weeks before the inauguration.

  The first Steele memo also reported that the Russian effort to cultivate Trump included “various lucrative real estate development deals in Russia.” Trump categorically denied having any ties to Russia, much less any lucrative business deals in the works. More than two years later, however, court records confirmed that throughout the election, Michael Cohen and Felix Sater communicated with Putin’s top aides while working to secure permits for a Trump Tower in Moscow that would earn Trump an estimated $300 million. Steele’s sources may have been vague, but they were ultimately correct.

  A July 2016 memo by Steele reported, “Russians apparently have promised not to use ‘kompromat’ they hold on TRUMP as leverage, given high levels of voluntary co-operation forthcoming from his team.” We now know the Russians kept their knowledge of the Trump Tower Moscow deal secret, and Trump has been inexplicably deferential to the Kremlin both as a candidate and as president. After a lengthy Helsinki meeting with Putin in July 2018, for example, Trump sided with the Russian leader over his own intelligence agencies, saying he “didn’t see any reason why” he should believe Russia was responsible for hacking the DNC.

  It is sometimes hard to credit the dossier for its prescience because so many of its claims are today accepted as common knowledge. But the dossier first introduced to the public a cast of characters that would later become central figures in the investigation. Carter Page, Michael Cohen, and the Agalarov family were all obscure names before their appearance in the dossier, yet they would prove to be key to the Mueller investigation. For example, the Agalarovs burst onto center stage only a year later, when The New York Times discovered in July 2017 that they had arranged the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian attorney to discuss Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton.

  The dossier also correctly identified the figures at the center of the Trump campaign’s secret dealings with Russia, including Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. The Mueller report showed that Manafort was in contact with a Russian intelligence operative and several other Russians closely linked to the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign. Starting in the spring of 2016, Manafort began sharing internal Trump campaign polling data with an associate tied to Russian intelligence. The data focused on Rust Belt swing states that would later prove pivotal to Trump’s election. Because Manafort and the associate lied to investigators, Mueller said his team could not determine how that data was used.

  The dossier named Michael Flynn as a pro-Russia intermediary on the campaign and said the Kremlin believed it had successfully recruited him. Media investigations later found that Flynn was paid $68,000 by the Russians for a trip to Moscow, and he admitted to lying about several conversations with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during 2015 and 2016.

  Media also later reported that in intercepted phone conversations, Russian officials reportedly “bragged…that they had cultivated a strong relationship with former Trump adviser retired general Michael Flynn and believed they could use him to influence Donald Trump and his team.”

  The role of Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page as a key intermediary with Russian officials was another central revelation of the dossier. Steele’s sources said Page had privately met with senior Kremlin officials in Moscow in July 2016 to discuss Western sanctions. He was also said to have met with officials of the state-owned oil giant Rosneft so that he could earn broker fees on the forthcoming sale of company’s shares.

  That sale was little known at the time Steele described it, but it later came to pass as he described. Page adamantly denied the claims made in the “dodgy dossier,” but records later revealed that soon after his trip, Page sent emails to the Trump campaign reporting on “incredible insights and outreach I’ve received from a few Russian legislators and senior members of the Presidential Administration here.” According to the Mueller report, those contacts included “a private conver
sation” with the Russian deputy prime minister.

  And in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017, Page reluctantly acknowledged that he had also met with a Rosneft executive about sanctions and the company’s sale of shares in the deal. His categorical denial was ultimately reduced to a quibble: The dossier was wrong, he complained, about whom he met with—it was the Rosneft head of investor relations, he said, not the CEO.

  Steele’s allegations about Trump fixer Michael Cohen remain unresolved. Steele’s sources stated that Cohen had played an “important role” as a “secret liaison with Russian leadership,” particularly after Manafort was forced to resign as campaign chairman in August 2016. Most notably, they alleged that Cohen had attended a meeting with Russians in Prague in late August or early September 2016. At the meeting, the memos said, the two sides discussed how to cover up the extensive cooperation between the two sides, including “deniable cash payments” to the hackers involved in the effort.

  There is no doubt Cohen played a central role in dealing with Russians in the Trump Tower Moscow deal, but the explosive Prague allegation in the Steele reports was undermined—though not disproven—by Cohen’s continued denials after his plea bargain with Mueller’s team. In the Mueller report, the special counsel appeared to endorse those denials in a section describing Cohen’s false testimony to Congress about Trump’s ties to Russia. The report states, “Cohen had never traveled to Prague and was not concerned about those allegations, which he believed were provably false.” A footnote cites Cohen’s own testimony to Mueller as the evidence of this.

  It is certainly possible that Cohen was mistakenly identified as one of the attendees of the meeting by Steele’s source. It could also be that the whole story of the Prague meeting was misinformation fed to Steele to discredit him, something the former spy knew to be a risk anytime he collected information from sources. Yet Cohen has never publicly produced a concrete alibi concerning his whereabouts during the period in question, and there are still unexplained aspects of the alleged incident, such as reports of cell signals from Cohen’s phone in the region and reports of his presence picked up by foreign intelligence agencies. In this age of relentless phone tracking, ubiquitous video cameras, and credit card use, the truth shouldn’t be too hard to determine. But the facts, like so many others raised in the dossier, remain frustratingly beyond reach.

 

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