By then Trump had ample reason to expect that Russia would do him a favor. The previous fall, fixer Cohen had pursued a deal, with Trump’s signed approval, to license a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen’s partner on the project, Felix Sater, emailed him, “Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.” Cohen made contact with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s office in January to apprise the Russian government of the ultimately futile hotel scheme. Cohen’s initiative continued, fruitlessly, through the spring of 2016—at which time a different effort coalesced. In April, George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy aide who had proposed that the candidate meet with Putin, learned from a London-based contact that the Russians had “thousands of emails” worth of “dirt” on Clinton. Papadopoulos urged Stephen Miller, campaign chairman Paul Manafort—who had consulted for the Russian-backed Ukrainian regime ousted in 2014—and others to redouble efforts to bring about a Trump–Putin meeting. Manafort, for his part, kept an open channel to a long-time contact and Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik, feeding Kilimnik internal information about the campaign for purposes that a Republican-led Senate committee investigation was unable to determine. (The panel judged that Manafort posed “a grave counterintelligence threat.”) On June 9, Manafort attended a meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, predicated on getting dirt on Clinton from a different vendor: Kremlin-connected attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya. An associate of Don Jr. had mentioned that a Russian senior prosecutor could provide damning information, “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” The younger Trump replied, “If it’s what you say I love it.” But while Veselnitskaya claimed dirty money flowed from Russia to Clinton, she couldn’t document any instance of it, and urged the Trump representatives to lift corruption sanctions on Moscow.
The following week the Democratic National Committee announced that Russian hackers had penetrated its servers. Infiltration had begun months earlier, after elements of the Russian GRU had stolen DNC user credentials, entered the party’s network, and exfiltrated tens of thousands of emails and other documents, including opposition research on Trump. The following day a GRU creation calling itself Guccifer 2.0 claimed it was a “lone hacker” responsible for the theft. Using its Guccifer 2.0 persona and another called DCLeaks, Russian intelligence gave purloined documents to WikiLeaks, which began releasing them on July 22, shortly before the Democratic National Convention. Assange wanted the material to deepen division between supporters of Sanders and Clinton, whom he called a “sociopath.” Awkwardly, Guccifer 2.0 boasted of providing WikiLeaks with the DNC material shortly after cybersecurity specialists identified it as Russian. Assange denied it to the point of alleging falsely that a DNC employee who had recently been killed in a random robbery, Seth Rich, was the leaker and that his murder was a reprisal.
While the NSA preferred to exfiltrate user data from American social-media networks, Russian intelligence opted to post. On Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter, Russians used poorly translated handles like Being Patriotic and Secured Borders to impersonate Americans and build pro-Trump, anti-Clinton audiences. They convinced Americans in at least seventeen cities to turn out for rallies. Knowing their audience well, the operators of the Russian accounts powered their grievance machine with white racism. A rally that Secured Borders attempted in Idaho urged that “We must stop taking in Muslim refugees!” Being Patriotic advocated executing Black Lives Matter protesters. They impersonated an American Muslim group and boosted Clinton, in an effort to associate her with Muslims. Tens of millions of American accounts interacted with content created by the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg entity that brought shitposting into the annals of intelligence history.
Trump denied that the DNC hack came from Russia. While it was possible, he acknowledged, he suggested that China might have been responsible, or “someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” His consigliere Roger Stone insisted that Guccifer 2.0, with whom he was later in contact, had hacked the DNC, not the Russians, which was also GRU’s cover story. Trump then committed another GOP heresy by proclaiming his love for WikiLeaks.
But Papadopoulos blundered. In London the Trump campaign aide discussed the Russian dirt offer over drinks with the Australian high commissioner to the UK, Alexander Downer. Downer reported the conversation to his government, which in July 2016 informed the Obama administration. For the first time in its history, the FBI investigated two presidential rivals at once. Comey managed to blunder worse than Papadopoulos.
None of the Security State’s institutions was politically monolithic, but the cleavages in the FBI over Clinton and Trump were extreme. They provided grist for both camps that the powerful law enforcement agency was out to get them. Senior bureau counterintelligence officials were horrified by Trump. Peter Strzok, who worked on both the Clinton and Trump probes, sent an ominous text in August to FBI attorney Lisa Page, with whom he was having an affair. When Page wondered if Trump was really going to be elected, Strzok replied, “No. He won’t. We’ll stop it.” But at lower levels there was enough MAGA enthusiasm, particularly from the overwhelmingly white special agents in the bureau, for one FBI official to remark in the fall of 2016, “The FBI is Trumpland.” The division was particularly acute in the New York field office, which was widely considered to be the source of the FBI’s longtime ally Rudy Giuliani’s cryptic televised remarks suggesting that Clinton was soon to fall under the FBI hammer. The New York office investigated the Clinton Foundation largely because of accusations made by a dubious right-wing book. A veteran of the office explained, “There are lots of people who don’t think Trump is qualified, but also believe Clinton is corrupt.”
Comey’s instinct, going back to his youth, had been to insert himself into complicated situations where he believed honor demanded it. That instinct had compelled the clash over surveillance authorities at John Ashcroft’s bedside, as it had his futile showdown with Apple. Comey rarely drew the obvious conclusion that his interventions often made things worse. That insight might have prevented him from declaring, in July, that Clinton ought not to face criminal charges for her email server. As a former U.S. attorney, he was well aware that charging decisions are for prosecutors to make, not FBI directors. He added, in a transparent attempt at mollifying Republicans, that Clinton had been “extremely careless” with the server and that it was “possible” that foreign actors might have accessed it. Even as he cleared Clinton criminally, Comey placed a new cloud over her, particularly considering there was no evidence of any foreign compromise—and that evidence of such compromise exclusively centered on the Trump campaign, about which Comey was silent.
Then, in late October, in violation of Justice Department policies on noninterference in an election, Comey suddenly revealed that the FBI was reviewing new information from Clinton’s server that it had unexpectedly acquired through a sex crimes probe of Abedin’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. Trump, who had lambasted the FBI for closing the probe, now said Comey showed “a lot of guts.” Two days before the vote, Comey announced that the Weiner material did not change the conclusion against charging Clinton. Comey loudly drove federal law enforcement into the center of an election against Clinton while remaining silent about a counterintelligence probe into Trump associates, each step of the way insisting he had done only what probity demanded.
As the Comey drama unfolded, Obama attempted to enlist Republican congressional leaders in a statement of unity against Russian election interference. They were uninterested. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, expressed skepticism that the Russians were the culprits, which Democrats and intelligence officials understood as an effort to protect Trump. He signed on to a much weaker statement warning state election officials to be diligent in their digital hygiene. Clapper and DHS secretary Jeh Johnson issued a stronger warning that f
all attributing the intrusion to Russia, as did Feinstein and her House Intelligence Committee counterpart, Adam Schiff.
While the Security State leadership had come to view Trump as an adjunct of Russian power, he gained his most important Security State ally from one of their embittered ex-colleagues. Mike Flynn presented himself as a martyr of Obama’s War on Terror, the warrior sacrificed so liberalism could deny the threat of Islam. One of the premier special operators of the 9/11 era became a Fox News guest commentator. He accepted a stipend from the Russian English-language state news channel to sit at Putin’s table during its tenth-anniversary gala. As his profile grew, he took $530,000 on behalf of Turkish interests without registering as a foreign agent with the Justice Department. He saw no contradiction in operating on behalf of an Islamist government while denouncing Islam as a cancer. “Islam is a political ideology” that “hides behind this notion of being a religion,” Flynn told Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America convention in August. Flynn was the ideal validator for Trump. More than nearly anyone else on earth, Flynn had waged the War on Terror, and the lessons he took from it were the ones Trump was selling. All the Security State mandarins lining up against Trump were people Flynn hated so much as to portray them as what was wrong with wartime America. He stood on stage at the Republican convention to lead a chant of “Lock her up” after warning that America’s “very existence is threatened.” It was as if the id of the War on Terror endorsed Trump even as its superego opposed him.
That superego manifested as Mike Morell. The acting CIA director between Petraeus and Brennan, Morell was, like Flynn, a representative of the 9/11 generation at Langley. He had been Bush’s briefer, had led the bin Laden hunt, and had defended CIA torture against the Senate report. Clinton had shown her strength to Morell, he wrote in The New York Times, not least when she was an “early advocate” of the bin Laden raid “in opposition to some of her most important colleagues on the National Security Council,” a swipe at Biden. He suggested that had Obama heeded Clinton on a “more aggressive” approach in Syria there might have been no ISIS Caliphate. By contrast, Morell called Trump dangerous—even an “unwitting agent” of a hostile foreign power. Someone who had excused torture wrote that Trump “plays into the hands of the jihadist narrative that our fight against terrorism is a war between religions.” Morell stated proudly that a Muslim at the agency was the man “most responsible for keeping America safe since the Sept. 11 attacks.” He was referring to Michael D’Andrea, who took the Counterterrorism Center from the final phase of the black sites into the era of drone strikes. Morell did not pause to reflect on how his open-ended era of patriotic brutality aimed at Muslims might have produced leaders, and constituencies, who embraced a narrative of war between religions.
The widespread opposition to Trump by Security State eminences reflected the certainty among elites, and apparently Trump himself at the time, that Clinton was certain to win. Every poll demonstrated it. Assange DM’d Guccifer 2.0, “trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary.” Obama, calling back to his 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner roast of Trump on the eve of the bin Laden raid, mocked Trump to TV host Jimmy Kimmel as an inevitable loser.
To an intellectual named Michael Anton, a Trump loss would be nothing less than the existential threat to America that Flynn had warned of on the convention stage. Clinton’s taking power was “Russian Roulette with a semi-auto.” Conservatives had correctly itemized the civilizational rot befalling America, he thought, starting with “illegitimacy” and proceeding to an “inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third World foes.” But Anton was after something more profound: “virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character.” On that front conservatives were losing, and because conservatives were right and their causes important, “our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society.”
Apart from dutiful nods to the realities of “lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways,” Anton was unconcerned with material issues. That permitted him to see Clinton not as the obstacle to socialism that she was, but instead as someone who was “pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda.” As if the record deportations of the Obama years never happened, Anton said the Democrats’ open borders policy was nothing less than replacement. The mask slipped from his politics of virtù. Clinton augured the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.” Once enough nonwhites had arrived to vote Democratic, the party that made Barack Obama president would feel no more need to “respect democratic and constitutional niceties.” The end of America—white America, great America—was nigh.
The purpose of this Wagnerian conception of politics was to give Anton permission to seek Valhalla. Only in Trump resided any hope of preserving virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, and character. So it was that Anton decreed 2016 “the Flight 93 Election.” He urged the right to rise up with him, like those American heroes on 9/11 above Pennsylvania, and storm the cockpit occupied by Hillary.
Anyone who would compare an election loss to the agony aboard Flight 93 revealed that to them 9/11 was never more than a jingoistic opportunity. But that was not the real obscenity of Anton’s racist fugue state. The real obscenity of the Flight 93 Election and its adherents was that, as much as they imagined themselves as Todd Beamer saying “Let’s roll!,” they were fantasizing about a suicide mission. Within months, Anton was the spokesman for Donald Trump’s National Security Council.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MAKING THE WAR ON TERROR GREAT AGAIN
2017–2020
With time served, Adham Hassoun prepared to finish his fifteen-year sentence under the PATRIOT Act in October 2017. It was his first chance at freedom since June 2002. But there was a complication.
Hassoun, a Palestinian who grew up in Lebanon, was not a U.S. citizen. He knew that he would be deported. Imprisoned at Marion, Illinois, he expected that he’d be sent back to immigration, likely in nearby Chicago, for a few weeks while the Lebanese completed the bureaucratic process of repatriating him. Instead he learned that no country would take him.
On October 10, Hassoun said goodbye to his fellow inmates and left Marion. He was greeted, he remembers, by “a platoon of armed men, twenty or something,” standing by a fleet of SUVs. For a moment he thought he’d be shot. “No, no, they’re escorts,” he remembered being told; “you’re going to immigration.” When they drove him to the airport, Hassoun figured he was in for a short flight to Chicago. The plane instead landed in western New York, where he was placed in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Hassoun became a Forever War trailblazer yet again: its first post-conviction detainee.
He had spent most of his pre- and post-conviction detention in segregated units, even spending a month in solitary. There was Krone in Miami, the Palm Beach County Jail, Terre Haute, even the infamous Supermax in Florence, Colorado. His favorite was, paradoxically, the “real prison” he experienced his second time at Marion, when he was “stepped down” into the general population. He made friends inside Marion, and liked cooking for the whole unit. Andy Stepanian was imprisoned with Hassoun during Hassoun’s first time there. He credited Hassoun with helping “pull me out of my institutional behavior” to reclaim himself from who prison was making him. “Adham changed my life,” Stepanian recalled. “There were individuals there who were true threats. He was not. He talks to the guards all the time. That’s because he’s not a criminal.”
When Hassoun walked into the ICE prison at Batavia, near Buffalo, he saw his picture displayed, “our convicted terrorist.” He noticed a man whose uniform bore the fearsome letters shu—segregated housing unit—and panicked. Desperate not to relive another stint in solitary, he pleaded that he didn’t need the “protection” they were offering. They agreed to give him a cell without a bunkie, but Hassoun was struck by the c
onditions in in Batavia’s general population. “We’re locked in eighteen hours a day,” he recalled. “It’s extremely creepy because it affects your psychological situation. My ordeal started all over again.”
Hassoun had begun his imprisonment in an immigration detention center at the dawn of the Bush administration. When he returned to one, at the dawn of the Trump administration, the cages had swollen. Filled with nonwhites treated like criminals for committing no more than a civil misdemeanor, they were the signature of the Trump immigration era. Trump may have promoted the Wall, but it was never truly built, nor did he deport the multitudes Obama had. The real nativist innovation of Trump was to lock up the migrants who were already in America. He empowered ICE as never before. In Fairfax County, Virginia, ICE agents waited to arrest people leaving a church hypothermia shelter. By March 2019 ICE’s prisons, many of which were for-profit, held a record fifty thousand people.
While those prisons, and the adjuncts run by Customs and Border Protection, were instantly understood to herald the Trump era of immigration, it was relatively rare to hear them discussed as a mark of the Trump era of the War on Terror. Trump never fulfilled his promise to load up Guantanamo, nor was he known to have reopened the CIA black sites. The up-close cruelties practiced within them, the ones that Trump championed, the ones that a generation of right-wing politicians and media figures excused or applauded, were practiced closer to home: on immigrants.
There is no record tracing what James Schlesinger called the “migration” of torture techniques into the immigration intake centers, jails, and camps. Yet it was nevertheless conspicuous that variants of CIA and military torture techniques occurred within the immigration detention system. CBP intake cells known as hieleras kept people in frigid conditions, “iceboxes” reminiscent of the Salt Pit in Afghanistan where Gul Rahman froze to death in 2002. People spent up to three days there, sleeping on floors, wrapped in Mylar blankets. A woman named Victoria told Human Rights Watch that as CBP piled people into a small room with her in February 2017, “They turned up the air conditioning. . . . We slept on the floor with the kids in the middle, trying to keep them covered up as much as possible.” After spending three days inside a CBP hielera, nineteen-month-old Mariee Juarez and her mother were transferred to ICE-contracted custody in Dilley, Texas, where sickness spread easily around a detention complex built to hold a massive twenty-four hundred people. The toddler developed a respiratory infection. Two months after she left the for-profit detention center, Mariee was dead.
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