A month after Rosenstein’s public remarks about the honesty and diligence demanded in FISA applications, he was questioned about it by the House Judiciary Committee. Rosenstein seemed to suggest that he might not have even read the FISA application that he had signed. Grudgingly, he admitted that he did not always read what he was signing.98 At one point, he refused to reveal to committee members whether he had read the Page application specifically. Then he offered that he had been “briefed” on it by “a team of career DOJ attorneys.”99 It is ironic that the man who so sternly lectured an audience about how imperative it was for every prosecutor to ensure that a spy warrant contained truthful information is the same man who may never have bothered to read the one he signed against Carter Page.
If there is any doubt about how the FBI and DOJ engaged in shameless deceptions, consider the inconsistent statements and memory lapses of Comey. While promoting his book in the spring of 2018, he claimed he still had no idea who had funded Steele’s “dossier.” But that was not what he told Congress. In private sessions before joint House committees, testimony of which was later released to the public, Comey admitted he had known before the first FISA warrant application that Democrats had paid for the “dossier.”100 But then, in a statement that defies all common sense and belief, he claimed he did not know that the “dossier” had been used for the application to spy on Carter Page. Think about what Comey was saying. He conceded that he had read the application he signed, but he would have us believe that he did not know where the information contained therein came from? That is incomprehensible. Hold on, there’s more:
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN RATCLIFFE: Do you know whether the application that you signed states that the FBI has reviewed this verified application for accuracy?
COMEY: I don’t remember that specifically. It sounds like the kind of thing that would be in there as a matter of course, but I don’t remember. . . .
RATCLIFFE: Does that cause you any concern about the fact that you signed a verified application for a warrant to surveil Carter Page when the Steele dossier was only minimally corroborated or in its infancy in its corroboration?
COMEY: I don’t know enough or remember enough 2 years later to have a reaction. I don’t know their testimony. I haven’t looked at the thing.101
As this exchange reveals, Comey is a master of prevarication. As will be described further in the next chapter, he feigns amnesia whenever it serves his purpose or when the truth might incriminate him. He went on to admit that the FBI was still attempting to verify the “dossier” when he was fired by Trump in May 2017. That was a full seven months after he swore to the FISC that his surveillance application, which was based on the “dossier,” was “verified information.” About all that the FBI had corroborated was that Page had traveled to Moscow to deliver a speech. By itself, that was meaningless.
The five top FBI and DOJ officials who signed off on the FISA warrants to spy on Page cannot credibly blame others beneath them. Testimony by a former top FBI counterintelligence lawyer shows that several of them examined the faulty warrants “line-by-line.” Trisha Anderson reported directly to James Baker, who was FBI general counsel during the time the warrants were sought. Here is the relevant part of her testimony before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees on August 31, 2018:
The sensitivity level of this particular FISA resulted in lots of very high level attention both within the FBI and DOJ. The general counsel (Baker) . . . personally reviewed and made edits to the FISA, for example. The deputy director (McCabe) was involved in reviewing the FISA line-by-line. The Deputy Attorney General (Yates) over on the DOJ side of the street was similarly involved, as I understood, reviewing the FISA application line-by-line.102
Anderson said those senior officials gave the FISA applications “their own de novo independent review” and scrutinized them “carefully.”103 How is it possible that Yates, McCabe, Baker, and others never asked themselves or one another the fundamental question “Are we being honest with the court?” Fidelity to the truth would have meant apprising the court that they had not even identified Steele’s sources, much less verified their allegations. They would have had to ’fess up that Clinton’s campaign had funded the “dossier” and that Steele had leaked and lied after admitting that he was riven with bias. They would have had to inform the judges of the exculpatory evidence they knew. Instead, the FBI and the DOJ exploited an unproven and fictitious “dossier” as a pretext to spy on a Trump campaign associate, perpetrating a fraud on the intelligence court.
Evidence emerged that Comey’s FBI had known in advance of the first FISA warrant that Steele’s “dossier” lacked credibility because the Bureau had been warned of its falsity and the severe anti-Trump political bias of its author. In May 2019, hidden documents were unearthed in a transparency lawsuit that showed that Steele met with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on October 11, 2016, some ten days before Comey signed off on his court application to surveil Carter Page. As first reported by John Solomon of The Hill, the former British spy “admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline.”104 A reference to his funding by the Hillary Clinton campaign was reportedly made. Steele gave the impression that he was desperate to sabotage Trump’s candidacy before voters went to the polls, and he shared his “dossier” material with Kavalec. Kavalec, who had no formal training in investigative techniques, quickly determined that Steele was peddling false information. For example, his claim that the Russians were running their secret operation out of the Russian Consulate in Miami was easily disproven by her. “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami,” she wrote.105
If a State Department employee could figure that out in one day, so, too, could the FBI before exploiting the “dossier” as the principal basis of the Page surveillance warrant. Kavalec also emphasized in her notes that Steele had been disseminating his information to the media. That directly contradicted the statement made by the FBI and the DOJ to the FISA court that “Steele did not have unauthorized contacts with the press prior to October 2016,” as pointed out by Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA).106 Steele made other wild claims that were also readily debunked.107
Records show that Kavalec and others at the State Department had been instructed to forward such information to the FBI.108 She did so on October 13, eight days before the FISA warrant was considered and granted. Her notes, contained in an email, were sent to a top FBI counterintelligence official, who delivered them to “the FBI team leading the Trump-Russia investigation, headed by then–fellow Special Agent Peter Strzok.”109 The Department of Justice was also alerted. In a statement, Representative Mark Meadows (R-NC), who spent two years trying to uncover the truth, reacted with disbelief and disgust:
This once again shows that officials at the FBI and DOJ were well aware the dossier was a lie—from very early on in the process all the way to when they made the conscious decision to include it in a FISA application. The fact that Christopher Steele and his partisan research document were treated in any way seriously by our Intelligence Community leaders amounts to malpractice.110
If ever there were incontrovertible evidence that both government agencies had been warned ahead of time that their FISA warrant application was based on false information, this was it. However, that did not deter Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates from signing and submitting a “verified” application that they knew was not verified at all. Just the opposite; they knew it was deeply flawed and driven by political motivations. They also knew that Steele was not suitable as a source, yet they vouched for his “credibility” to the court as they sought to spy on Page. The Kavalec memos had never been turned over to Congress, despite repeated requests for such evidence. Even the DOJ inspector general may not have been aware of their existence during his yearlong investigation of FISA abuse.111
What is equally troubling is that the FBI, under current director Christopher Wray, endeavored to cover up the Kav
alec memos. Much of the material was belatedly redacted and retroactively classified on April 25, 2019, two and a half years after the memos were written, with the attached notation at the top, “SECRET . . . Declassify on December 31, 2041.”112 That’s right, we will not see Kavalec’s full memos for the next twenty-two years unless Attorney General William Barr and/or Secretary of State Michael Pompeo intervenes. What exactly does Wray fear? That current and former officials at the FBI will be held accountable by exposure to the truth? That the Bureau’s reputation will be sullied even more? It appears that Wray is adhering to the disgraceful tradition of secrecy and obfuscation that was perfected to an art form by his predecessor, Comey.
When powerful forces in government misuse their positions of trust to circumvent the legal process and target or punish people for personal or political reasons, democracy is threatened. Reverence for the rule of law is lost. Corruption prevails.
Undercover Spying on George Papadopoulos
Lying and spying by the FBI were not limited to surveillance and the collection of electronic communications. The Bureau mobilized several undercover informants to insinuated themselves into the Trump campaign to gather incriminating evidence. It was exactly the kind of covert human spying that Attorney General Barr referenced in his controversial appearance before Congress in April 2019. The AG already knew about the operation.
The most prominent FBI and/or CIA informant was Stefan Halper, a professor at the University of Cambridge in Great Britain, who has long ties to both US and foreign intelligence agencies. The son-in-law of a former deputy director of the CIA, Halper worked with the CIA from the late 1970s and into the 1980s. In 2016, he was the head of an allegedly autonomous intelligence business that “consults” with other spy agencies—notably the British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, where Steele operated as a spy.113 These connections cannot be overlooked: John Brennan’s CIA, Christopher Steele’s ties to MI6, and Halper’s extensive work for both the CIA and the FBI. As noted in the previous chapter, there is persuasive evidence that British intelligence was providing information on the Trump campaign to Brennan, the CIA, and eventually the FBI. Halper has a close relationship with Sir Richard Dearlove, the ex-chief of MI6. Another British spy chief, Robert Hannigan, flew to Washington, DC, to meet with Brennan as the “collusion” hoax was taking shape in the summer of 2016.114 Though the work by Halper and Steele was later exposed, the intelligence emanating from UK agencies is still cloaked in secrecy.
By most accounts, Halper is a freelance spy-for-hire kind of guy. His professorial appearance and practiced comportment serve as the perfect artifice. He doesn’t look like a spy; more like a portly, frumpy academic. His position as a foreign policy scholar provided a useful cover. Well educated, he graduated from Stanford University and earned two PhDs at Oxford and Cambridge. But his real skills seem to have been practiced in the impenetrable underworld of espionage.
Beginning in July 2016, Halper was the beneficiary of more than $400,000 in payments for “research” from a somewhat abstruse Pentagon think tank. The timing of the income matches the beginning of his deployment as an informant targeting the Trump campaign. It could have been coincidental and unrelated, except when you consider that intelligence agencies have been known to launder payments through intermediaries to hide their true purpose and render the tracking of money difficult. This became even more apparent when the Inspector General of the Department of Defense audited the monetary outlays to Halper and discovered that there was little documentation in the Pentagon files of the work he did or the justification for the $411,000 in payments.115 That raises a logical question. Was Halper being compensated for work as spy or as a legitimate and conventional defense contractor? Perhaps it was both.
What exactly was Halper’s paid “research”? It is difficult to trace because neither he nor the FBI has been willing to disclose the exact nature of his work. However, Trump campaign associates have spoken about how Halper contacted them for seemingly legitimate reasons but then pivoted to suspicious behavior and strange questions about Russia. Page, Clovis, and Papadopoulos have all confirmed that Halper engaged them out of the blue. He also surreptitiously attempted to gather information from Michael Flynn, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.116 Page stated that Halper had “intensified” communications with him just before the FBI applied for its surveillance warrant to wiretap his phone lines and access his electronic communications in October 2016.117 There was frenzied activity to verify the heretofore unverified “dossier.”
In early September 2016, Papadopoulos received an email from Halper, whom he had never met or heard of. In his book, Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump, Papadopoulos wrote that he was invited to London by Halper and the promise of $3,000 compensation to discuss Mediterranean oil and gas fields—a subject about which Papadopoulos was well acquainted.118 Luring him overseas was legally advantageous because US intelligence agencies’ spying on an American citizen there is less constrained by law. Before Papadopoulos met with Halper, a woman who pretended to be Halper’s assistant arranged to have drinks with Papadopoulos at a bar. She identified herself as Azra Turk, although that turned out to be an assumed name. Here is Papadopoulos’s account:
Azra Turk is a vision right out of central casting for a spy flick. She’s a sexy bottle blonde in her thirties, and she isn’t shy about showing her curves—as if anyone could miss them. She’s a fantasy’s fantasy.119
Within minutes, Turk began peppering him with what he described as “creepy” questions about Russia and demanding to know whether the Trump campaign was working with Moscow. Papadopoulos insisted he didn’t know what she was talking about. He denied any cooperation between the campaign and the Kremlin. The more she pushed, the more suspicious he became. When she didn’t receive the answer she wanted, Papadopoulos said she changed tactics to a sexually seductive approach. She kept advancing the nonexistent thesis that would later become known as Trump-Russia “collusion.” He repudiated the silly notion and rejected what he called her “honey-pot act,” leaving the bar, returning to his hotel room, and telephoning his girlfriend to describe what had just occurred. Later reporting would identify Turk as an FBI investigator.120 Papadopoulos believes she was “a Turkish agent or working with the CIA.”121
Whether the woman who called herself Azra Turk was operating undercover as a spy for the CIA, the FBI, or both, she was undoubtedly searching for confirmation of the Russia “collusion” hoax fomented by the Clinton campaign, the DNC, Comey’s FBI, and Brennan’s CIA and propelled by the manipulations of Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson. The witch hunt was on, and US intelligence was “all in” on the big lie that was aimed directly at Trump. They were shooting arrows blindly, hoping to hit the bull’s-eye on the GOP candidate’s back. It didn’t seem to matter to them that Papadopoulos was a bit player in the campaign.
Turk had reportedly been sent by the FBI to oversee its other undercover informant, Halper, as he, too, attempted to elicit from Papadopoulos incriminating information that he did not possess. Two days after the “bizarre” meeting with Turk, Papadopoulos met with Halper at the Sofitel Hotel in London, where the informant placed his smartphone on the table next to Papadopoulos as if he were recording their conversation. He then promptly posed several leading questions about Trump-Russia “collusion”:
It’s great that Russia is helping you and the campaign, right, George?
George, you and your campaign are involved in hacking and working with Russia, right?
It seems like you are a middleman for Trump and Russia, right?
I know you know about the emails.122
Papadopoulos was both shocked and angry, so much so that he responded with a couple of profane denials and then said:
I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. What you are talking about is treason. And I have nothing to do with Russia, so stop bothering me about it.123
At tha
t point, Halper picked up his phone and dropped it into his pocket. If the Cambridge professor was acting as a spy for the FBI and/or CIA and had been tasked with collecting valuable intelligence from Papadopoulos, he failed miserably. His obvious and clumsy attempts were exceeded only by the fact that his target had nothing incriminating to say. Trump’s young foreign policy volunteer wasn’t the fulcrum in some grand conspiracy between the candidate and Putin to steal the 2016 presidential election. It was a ludicrous supposition. However, it does underscore how desperate US intelligence agents were to implicate Trump in some illicit scheme and how determined they were to damage Clinton’s rival for the White House. Attorney General Barr was particularly disturbed by their “dangling a confidential informant in front of a peripheral player in the Trump campaign.”124 It emitted the ugly odor of a rogue agency misusing its immense power.
Halper and Turk weren’t the only ones who appear to have been spying on Papadopoulos. His book recounts others who “kept tabs” on him, including two military attachés at the US Embassy in London named Terrence Dudley and Gregory Baker, who he surmised were “intelligence operatives affiliated with the CIA or military intelligence divisions.”125 They even asked to be given jobs with the Trump campaign, sending Papadopoulos messages “up until the inauguration.” Meanwhile, the British government was getting in on the game. A junior foreign minister and his colleague appeared out of nowhere, asking about Trump and Russia.126 So did Sergei Millian, a US citizen with a Belorusan name who also has ties to the FBI. Charles Tawil, an American Israeli businessman, introduced himself and promptly began asking the same questions. Why all of the sudden and intensive interest in a peripheral figure in the campaign and his knowledge of any Trump-Russia connection?
Witch Hunt Page 14