Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  That particular fusionist perspective, which saw Islamists in collaboration with the Security State, spoke to something else that had snapped on the right. There was nothing new about conspiratorialist thinking among nativists, nor resentment against the Security State. The neoconservative assault on the supposed institutional obstacles to the Iraq war, while far more respectable, had demonstrated that the right exempted itself from the post-9/11 deference it wanted the left to accord the security institutions. But those earlier manifestations of right-wing resistance to the Security State were in pursuit of particular objectives. MAGA viewed its own war with the Deep State as an existential struggle: either they or the Security State would dominate. But as Trump’s empowerment of ICE and CBP showed, fealty to Trump was, in MAGA world, the true difference between heroes of the security services and a Deep State. From the start Trump had decried “Nazis” in the intelligence agencies, aligned with Democrats and journalists, determined to go to criminal lengths to undo his election.

  Liberals watched in horror as Trump turned on the intelligence community and law enforcement. Horror became identification. What became known as the #Resistance on Twitter was a mockably earnest expression of, most often, white bourgeois outrage at Trump. Its adherents tended to surgically separate their hatred of Trump from any examination of the America that produced him. That exceptionalist position inclined the #Resistance to favorably view the FBI no longer as Hillary Clinton’s irresponsible persecutor but as the swift blade of justice dangling above Trump’s criminal reign. The FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the Justice Department were the foundations of the rule of law, not manipulators, torturers, serial violators of fundamental constitutional liberties, and justifiers. To the #Resistance, which heeded figures like the NSA and CIA’s Hayden, Iraq warmonger Bill Kristol, and Clapper, Trump’s clash with the Security State testified to the virtues of the Security State.

  Accordingly, liberals overinterpreted Russia’s election interference and Trump’s unadulterated solicitousness toward Putin. An obsession with the baroque, fragmentary details of what became #Russiagate inclined the #Resistance toward a Cold War liberalism. Many #Resistance validators, like Lawfare, had primarily seen Snowden as a Russian dupe or operative, so the narrative of a renewed geopolitical rivalry had deep roots among Democrats. But believing Russia had suborned Trump avoided reckoning with how deeply American Trump and his movement actually were. The #Resistance tended to condemn Trump’s threats to pull troops out of Afghanistan or Syria without bothering to argue the merits of the Forever theaters. After the Yemen raid that killed Ryan Owens and young Nawar al-Awlaki, columnist Ramzy Baroud noted how “Yemeni lives suddenly matter” now that the man taking them was Trump. “There is hardly a single bad deed that Trump has or intends to carry out that does not have roots in policies championed by prior administrations,” he wrote. The #Resistance cheered on the “Adults In The Room” without considering that an earlier set of adults, the adults they esteemed, had already prepared the room.

  The terms of the culture war drawn, the conflict took an unexpected early casualty: Jeff Sessions. Trump’s election had been the triumph of Sessions’s politics. Running the Justice Department had been beyond his wildest expectations, and he set to work abandoning the department’s oversight of brutal, criminal police; misrepresenting terrorism data to portray it as immigrant violence; and championing Zero Tolerance. Yet when Sessions inherited control over the FBI’s investigation into a campaign whose foreign policy team Sessions had led, the former prosecutor recused himself. It was fatal to his relationship with Trump. Sessions had not understood that Trump valued him according to his ability to protect Trump from legal trouble. Trump would humiliate Sessions on the way to firing him.

  Within weeks of Sessions’s recusal, Trump, aware that the FBI was investigating his campaign, fired Comey. The president had tried to get the FBI director—who kept as quiet about Crossfire Hurricane as he had been loud about the Clinton probe—to drop the case against Flynn and publicly state that Trump himself wasn’t under investigation. The head of the Russia probe, Sessions’s deputy Rod Rosenstein, helped draft a boldfaced pretext for why firing Comey was proper. Rosenstein then himself immediately earned the ire of Trump and his loyalists for appointing the FBI’s post-9/11 director, Robert Mueller, as a special prosecutor. Comey leaked his accounts of his conversations with the president, infuriating Trump, who admitted to firing Comey because of “this Russia thing”—an admission of obstruction of justice—before later lying that he had said no such thing.

  The Mueller investigation immediately became the chief political threat to Trump. Charateristically, his response was to craft a counternarrative. In March he declared without evidence that Obama had ordered his “wires tapped” at Trump Tower. Trump called Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt,” distracting from the real crime committed by the Black president, the Deep State, and their deceitful media cronies. Trump’s allies strained to make the fabrication real. Nunes claimed to have received word from an intelligence whistleblower validating a version of the claim—that Trump and his associates, who had conversations with people under surveillance, had their identities improperly unmasked and leaked to hostile media. It soon emerged that the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee had concocted the narrative right after Flynn allies provided it to him at the White House. Still, it would become an article of faith on the right that the craven Security State had put Trump under surveillance in order to effectively overturn the 2016 election. The #Russiagate narrative and the Mueller investigation were a means to a soft coup. Rosenstein had appointed Mueller, Bush’s FBI director, to make the inquiry unquestionably legitimate. He failed to realize that to MAGA there could be no such thing. That spring, Nunes took an astonishing step for an Intelligence Committee chairman: he suggested that the Republican Congress might kill Section 702, the wellspring of the NSA’s PRISM and UPSTREAM data collection, in retaliation.

  At that moment the House Intelligence Committee web page that Nunes controlled had a pull-down explainer about the need to reauthorize “FISA 702.” Nunes was stumbling into an anti-surveillance position that no House Intelligence chair had suggested since 9/11. “FISA abuse” would soon become an article of faith among elected Republicans, especially in the House. Yet this accusation against the Security State came in startling contrast to their silence over how much surveillance the Trump administration was actually carrying out.

  At the dawn of Trump’s presidency, the NSA did away with so-called “about” collection, whereby it collected communications data from people merely discussing a targeted person. The following year, the only post-Snowden collection reform collapsed. The 2015 USA FREEDOM Act tasked the telecoms with providing the massive graphs of association requested by the NSA and providing the results to Fort Meade for analysis. But the novelty of the tasking resulted in such a stunning amount of “overcollection”—that is, automatic surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone records—that NSA opted to purge its entire USA FREEDOM database and abandon the program. Its cancellation did not stem from any Trumpist crusade of principle against a surveillance apparatus run amok; the NSA continued to violate guidelines set by the FISA Court and Congress to restrain suspicionless digital surveillance on Americans at scale.

  The NSA hardly closed its dragnets. FISA surveillance orders on stateside targets spiked to a high of 1,833 before falling sharply in 2019, to slightly over 1,000 targets. But thanks to Section 702, collection on Americans’ outward-bound internet communications and records was much easier than obtaining a FISA order. Under Trump, Section 702 orders continued to skyrocket. In 2018 they reached 164,770 targets—a total that vastly underestimates the amount of surveillance conducted on those whom the targets contacted and so on. By 2019, 702 orders reached a high of 204,968 targets. Once the data reached the 702 databases, the FBI could sift through it without a warrant, the so-called “backdoor search” that Senator Ron Wyden
railed against. In 2018 a FISA Court judge found that the FBI’s backdoor searches were “inconsistent with statutory minimization requirements and the requirements of the Fourth Amendment,” a ruling that would not become public for another year.

  The schizophrenia reached its peak in January 2018. As the House was set to vote on 702, Trump tweeted his opposition to it. A furor erupted as it looked as if Republicans might actually vote down the intelligence community’s highest priority for fear of crossing the president. Trump instead reversed himself, and the bill passed, uniting Nunes and his hated Democratic counterpart, Adam Schiff. The outcome reflected the state of the surveillance coalition. The Republicans deplored surveillance against Trump while having no reservations about the surveillance dragnets expanding ever further over untold millions of others, at home and abroad. The Democrats, despite proclaiming Trump a unique threat to the Constitution, kept handing him surveillance authorities. Their identification with the Security State inclined them to take increasing ownership of Forever War architecture in the name of rescuing it from the Trumpists. But it needed no saving. Even as Trump’s crusade against the FBI for its “witch hunt” intensified, a Justice Department official told The New York Times that there was no “fear of using the FISA tool.”

  But Mueller’s “witch hunt” soon indicted key Trump allies, including Flynn, and established, at minimum, receptivity at senior levels to suggestions of Russian election interference. Trump countered with a typical alternative narrative: the whole thing was the result of corrupt Democrat cops. Text messages emerged showing Strzok and Page discussing Trump as a humiliating, treasonous clown. Nunes, aided by the former Flynn ally Harvey, constructed a narrative about Deep State persecution of Trump out of, principally, an unfairly adverse surveillance warrant re-up before the FISA Court against Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign policy aide whom an earlier FBI case had established was proximate to Russian intelligence operatives in New York. (“You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself,” was how one of them, Victor Podobnyy, explained how to deal with Page on an intercepted call.) If all this wasn’t enough for Trump and his allies to adopt a narrative of a shadow coup by the Democrat-aligned Security State, it was conspicuous that a Democrat like Schiff, a former California prosecutor, raised his profile considerably through the constant investigations. There was a #Resistance trade in cringeworthy anti-Trump merchandise like Robert Mueller votive candles. Schiff and other congressional Democrats signaled that they were there to help the Security State and the Adults restrain a threat to the republic.

  Before the reckoning there was an abrupt detente. Ultimately desirous of a good relationship with the CIA, Trump nominated Gina Haspel to become the agency’s director. It was a brilliant move, elevating one of the leading figures of the 9/11 generation of the CIA to be its first woman leader. Nothing could have felt more like a vindication. Not four years after the Senate torture report, Haspel prepared humanizing autobiographical testimony for the panel that had once sent Dan Jones through her affairs. Clapper and Brennan took a break from assailing Trump as a threat to the republic to hail her. “She is capable. She has integrity,” Mike Morell vouched in a quote circulated by the White House.

  The CIA’s push for Haspel was gratuitous in a manner that suggested Langley took her ascension as a matter of honor. The agency refused to release any but the vaguest of details about her torture tenure. Revisionism was its strategy for the rest. The CIA general counsel who clashed with Rodriguez and Haspel when they destroyed the torture tapes, John Rizzo, wrote in his memoir that the then-pseudonymous Haspel “ran the interrogation program.” Now that his account unexpectedly threatened Haspel, Rizzo insisted that he must have gotten it wrong, even though the CIA had never requested a correction in the four years since the book’s publication. Haspel was confirmed with the aid of six Senate Democrats, including Mark Warner, the senior Intelligence Committee Democrat who oversaw the Senate version of the Russia “witch hunt.”

  But by the time Mueller delivered his report, in spring 2019, Trump had finally found what he was looking for in an attorney general. Bill Barr, along with a younger Mueller, had created a predecessor to STELLARWIND at the Drug Enforcement Administration during the George H. W. Bush administration by building a bulk phone-data interception system for Americans’ international calls. He was Verizon’s senior lawyer during the actual STELLARWIND and pressed Congress for the telecom immunity delivered by the law establishing Section 702. Among the legal wing of the #Resistance, which at blogs like Lawfare had defended the Security State’s prerogatives throughout the Forever War, Barr was a familiar quantity. “A very decent outcome,” tweeted Lawfare’s Ben Wittes, since Barr “knows and values the department’s traditions.” He responded by rubbing their faces in his shamelessness.

  Ahead of the public release of Mueller’s report, Barr released a deceitful summary claiming it exonerated Trump. Mueller, after a crucial silence, objected to Barr’s characterization. He detailed the Russian influence and espionage operations, as well as Trump’s resistance to the investigation, explicitly stating that his report “does not exonerate” Trump. But Mueller said he lacked definitive evidence to prove what in nonlegal shorthand was known as “collusion” with Russia, and he stopped short of saying conclusively that Trump had obstructed his attempts at acquiring that evidence. In any event, by the Office of Legal Counsel’s non-judicial precedent, one concocted during Richard Nixon’s presidency, a sitting president cannot be indicted. After two years of investigation, Mueller said Congress was the proper venue for adjudicating Trump’s perfidy. But months later, in congressional testimony, Mueller declined to meaningfully characterize what his report implied about Trump’s threat to the Constitution. The president, once again free from consequences, boasted of his “Complete and Total EXONERATION.”

  The day after Mueller’s testimony Trump had a conversation with the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky needed a substantial shipment of weapons to repulse a Russian military and proxy advance, along with assurances of continued American support. “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Trump replied. Having already pursued seemingly unsuccessful efforts to acquire Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton, Trump wanted Zelensky to provide Ukrainian dirt on Joe Biden, who had recently declared for president. The plan was hatched by an increasingly unstable Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani, by now Trump’s personal attorney but with a penchant to crumble under non–Fox News questioning, had pursued Ukrainian contacts to establish that Biden had ousted the senior Ukrainian prosecutor in order to spare Burisma, a natural gas company on whose board Biden’s son Hunter served, from investigation. In truth, the prosecutor was widely considered to have been corrupt, and the corruption demonstrated by Burisma in granting a board seat to the son of the U.S. vice president was the sort practiced by respectable elites worldwide.

  With Trump’s assent and the knowledge of Secretary of State Pompeo, Giuliani put together an effort to subordinate Ukraine policy to his scheme for Trump’s reelection. Giuliani worked along and through a loyalist clique known as “the three amigos”: Energy Secretary Rick Perry; State Department Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker; and EU ambassador Gordon Sondland, a hotelier who had donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural. Their antics prompted alarm from career diplomats, military officers, and the NSC’s Russia desk—and, surprisingly, the opposition of John Bolton, who said he wanted no part of Giuliani’s “drug deal.” In a move that could not remain secret for long, the administration withheld $400 million in aid and a White House visit for Zelensky in what Sondland later testified was a “quid pro quo” for Zelensky announcing an investigation into Burisma.

  Before Zelensky could announce anything, a CIA detailee to the NSC informed Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence agencies, of the drug deal. Atkinson did as he was legally obligated and reported it to the congressional intelligence committees. Pelosi, Schiff, and the House Demo
cratic leadership announced the impeachment hearings they had long dreaded holding.

  Trump and MAGA erupted. So soon after they had done away with Mueller, here was Deep State Witch Hunt Part 2. “The time and necessity for vengeance is upon us,” Scheuer blogged. Nunes and key Republican legislators defended Trump by telling the story in reverse. The plot was nothing more than Trump’s selfless concern for eradicating corruption from Ukraine. The real story was the collusion among Deep State bureaucrats from the CIA and elsewhere with the Democrats to protect Biden’s corrupt son. John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican, made theatrically baseless defenses of Trump, such as his insistence that the Trump–Zelensky conversation was merely “a congratulatory phone call where there are no crimes alleged.” Harvey began to leak a name supposedly belonging to the CIA whistleblower, which would soon make appearances in right-wing media and on Twitter for both retaliation and to deter future whistleblowers. Army lieutenant colonel Alexander Vindman, who came to America as a young Soviet Jewish refugee and was injured by an IED in Iraq, was un-Trooped when he testified against Trump from his vantage on the NSC. Allies of the president, including John Yoo and Rudy Giuliani, questioned Vindman’s loyalty. Schiff implored in vain for Republicans in the House to finally oust this threat to the republic, but not one voted to impeach. In the Senate, Mitt Romney, who had once boasted of Trump’s endorsement, was the only Republican vote to convict.