But what had the agents said at the time? Still no Flynn 302. Under pressure from Judge Sullivan, Mueller’s team finally handed over two redacted versions on December 17.111
Let’s follow the bouncing Flynn 302.
All 302s have three dates on them: the date of interview, the date of drafting, and the date the supervisor approved it. The interview of Flynn by agents Strzok and Pientka had been done on January 24, 2017. Pientka had written a summary the same day.
But McCabe hadn’t approved it until February 14.112
That was strange, but stranger still was the fact that it had been “re-signed and re-certified” on May 31, 2017, a few weeks after the appointment of Mueller.113
In submitting the document, Van Grack, the senior assistant special counsel heading up the Flynn prosecution, explained that the content of both documents was identical, but the original 302 had had a header labeled “DRAFT DOCUMENT/DELIBERATIVE MATERIAL.” That had been removed, and the document had been resubmitted for the use of the Mueller team.114
A simple header mistake? Were the documents really identical? Why the three-month gap?
Flynn had been under investigation since the EC filed by Brennan in mid-July 2016 for “Russian collusion” that didn’t exist, and possibly even earlier. Either his name had been illegally unmasked during the calls to Kislyak or he had been the subject of a FISA warrant, and agents had scooped up all his communications. McCabe or someone else at his level had leaked highly classified information to the press to trigger a furor that had put Flynn under the microscope. Comey had “got[ten] away” with sending a “couple of guys over.” He and McCabe had ignored protocol by not contacting White House counsel. McCabe had pressed Flynn not to have a lawyer, ostensibly to make it easier to talk about the “significant media coverage” he had generated as a pretext.
The FBI agents didn’t warn Flynn that he was being interviewed because they suspected he had committed a crime. They wanted him “relaxed” and “unguarded.” They didn’t need to know what he had said; they had the transcripts. They wanted to see if he would give them a weapon to bludgeon the president.
Flynn regarded them as allies; he was ignorant of the rabid anti-Trump malice held by Comey, McCabe, and Strzok—all of whom were fired and remain under criminal investigation. Although Yates “was not happy” about Comey’s scheme, she joined in, marching over to the White House and engineering the firing of Flynn.
All those deliberately deceitful machinations, and they nailed him for telling four inconsequential lies. Of course, no one should lie to a federal agent. But the lesson from that episode is that no one should ever talk to an FBI agent without a lawyer present under any circumstances.
Flynn’s statements amounted to an anthill compared to the mountain of lies, prevarications, and obfuscations made by Comey in his congressional testimony, also indictable offenses. That elaborate scheme, given a final twist of the knife by Mueller and his crew, destroyed a man’s life. Flynn should never have been charged.
Flynn pleaded guilty not because he lied but because Mueller crushed him financially and threatened to take legal action against his son. Mueller’s prosecution made it impossible for Flynn to find employment. The conduct of the FBI and the anti-Trump zealots on Mueller’s team of prosecutors was egregious.
The release of the Mueller Report revealed more chinks in the carefully constructed artifice of the case against Flynn. The second volume of the Mueller Report, citing possible obstruction of justice violations, quoted a voice mail left by John Dowd, Trump’s personal attorney, on November 22, 2017, for Flynn’s counsel Robert Kelner, after Flynn had withdrawn from a joint defense agreement with the president.
Dowd said, “I understand your situation but let me see if I can’t state it in starker terms. . . . [I]t wouldn’t surprise me if you’ve gone on to make a deal with . . . the government. . . . [I]f . . . there’s information that implicates the President, then we’ve got a national security issue . . . so, you know . . . we need some kind of heads up. Umm, just for the sake of protecting all our interests if we can. . . . [R]emember what we’ve always said about the President and his feelings toward Flynn and, that still remains.”115
Flynn’s attorneys returned the call the next day, saying, according to Mueller, that “they were no longer in a position to share information under any sort of privilege. According to Flynn’s attorneys, the President’s personal counsel was indignant and vocal in his disagreement. The President’s personal counsel said that he interpreted what they said to him as a reflection of Flynn’s hostility towards the President and that he planned to inform his client of that interpretation.”116
Dowd’s comments were portrayed by Mueller—and the press—as an attempt to obstruct justice by urging Flynn not to cooperate. But after Judge Sullivan ordered the government to release the full transcript of the voice mail, it became clear that Mueller’s team had deceptively edited his call.
The Mueller version omitted significant words from Dowd’s voice mail: “I’m sympathetic. . . . I understand that you can’t join the joint defense; so that’s one thing. If, on the other hand, we have maybe a national security issue . . . some issue, we got to—we got to deal with, not only for the President, but for the country . . . without you have to give up any confidential information.”117
By leaving out the context and Dowd’s clear intent not to interfere with Flynn’s cooperation with the special counsel, Mueller twisted his words to mean the opposite.
A highly esteemed fixture of the DC bar, Dowd was understandably furious, accusing Mueller of seeking to “smear and damage the reputation of counsel and innocent people.”118 Dowd was not attempting to obstruct justice but rightfully doing his job as the president’s counsel.
By “taking out half my words, they changed the tenor and the contents of that conversation with Robert Kelner,” Dowd said. “Isn’t it ironic that this man who kept indicting and prosecuting people for process crimes committed a false statement in his own report?”119
A prosecutor who deceptively edits evidence in a court submission, leaving out information that goes against his argument, ends up in deep trouble with the judge and becomes subject to discipline by the bar. There was no excuse for Mueller’s dishonesty. The revelation of the Dowd edits reinforced the realistic concern that either McCabe or Mueller’s team had altered Flynn’s 302.
(So far, Mueller’s team has not provided either the transcript or the audio recording of the Flynn/Kislyak call.)
In early June 2019, after the Mueller Report revealed serious discrepancies with the case against him, Flynn surprised everyone by firing his lawyers. Signaling a change in strategy, he hired former US Attorney Sidney Powell, the author of the hard-hitting book Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice, detailing corrupt and abusive tactics used by dishonest federal prosecutors involved in the Enron Task Force, especially Andrew Weissmann, then general counsel and deputy director of the FBI.120
Powell, who defended an employee of Merrill Lynch in that massive case, has called Weissmann, Mueller’s lead deputy, the “kingpin of prosecutorial misconduct.”121 In 2012, she filed a complaint against Weissmann with the attorney grievance committee of the New York State Unified Court System over his actions during the Enron prosecutions.122
Flynn’s decision was excellent news for his supporters. They believed that Powell—who was familiar with the tricks used by Weissmann, such as hiding exculpatory evidence, using false summaries of interviews, and threatening witnesses—would drill down to uncover who had been involved in the plot to take the general down.
As of this writing, Flynn has not been sentenced. After his career was destroyed, we learned that he was the least of the liars.
Chapter 9
Targeted Intimidation
You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prose
cution or impeachment.
—US DISTRICT JUDGE T. S. ELLIS III, REBUKE TO SPECIAL COUNSEL LAWYERS, MAY 4, 2018
The Mueller team’s outrageous and physically abusive treatment of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort began in late July 2017, the week he voluntarily met with the Senate Intelligence Committee looking into possible Russian “collusion.”
One morning at 6:00 a.m., while the sixty-eight-year-old lobbyist and his wife were in bed, a dozen FBI agents raided his Alexandria, Virginia, condo without warning to execute a sealed search warrant. They stayed ten hours to “mirror” electronic devices and seize records, including “privileged and confidential materials” prepared by his lawyers to aid in his testimony.1
This move was designed to intimidate and instill fear. Trump’s lawyer John Dowd slammed the tactic in an email to the Wall Street Journal, accusing investigators of committing a “gross abuse of the judicial process” for “shock value.” Dowd wrote, “These methods are normally found and employed in Russia, not America.”2
Before the raid, Manafort had provided documents voluntarily, and Mueller had not requested the records that had been seized. A former Justice Department official described the move as unusual. “I think it sends a very strong message to both Manafort himself and potentially other people who might be targets of this investigation that Mueller is going to pursue this aggressively.”3
Mueller’s prosecutors should have been sanctioned for the seizure of Manafort’s privileged communications with his lawyer. The raid was a clear sign the special counsel investigation had quickly gone off the rails, a failure of both Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, who had given the special counsel latitude to investigate “any other matters,” contrary to the special counsel statute.
Taking Out Manafort
A political strategist and lobbyist who had worked for forty years on Republican political campaigns, Paul Manafort was brought in by Trump in March 2016 in advance of the Republican National Convention for his expertise in securing delegates. Two months later, he became campaign chairman.
He resigned in August 2016 after the New York Times reported that he had received $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments from former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian party between 2007 and 2012.4
Manafort had been the subject of an FBI investigation into his business practices that had been dropped in 2014 after being deemed not prosecutable by the Obama DOJ. But Mueller’s team, given carte blanche, blew the dust off those files and used escalating intimidation tactics to get Manafort to turn on Trump.5
As a lobbyist on behalf of unsavory dictators such as Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Mobutu Sese Seko of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Manafort was no stranger to criticism. He defended his political work as “in support of White House foreign policy goals.”6
But he had been targeted more than a year before the special counsel was appointed by both Christopher Steele and a contractor for the Democratic National Committee, Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian American lawyer and activist. During the Clinton administration, she had served in the White House Office of Public Liaison.7
Steele’s so-called Source E claimed that Manafort was in charge of a “well-developed conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to release hacked emails and meddle in the 2016 election.8 As Mueller would discover, that allegation was fraudulent—completely made up.
On May 3, 2016, Chalupa emailed a top DNC official that a “big Trump component” would hit “the pipe” in the next few weeks.9 Less than a month later, from the Ukraine there emerged a handwritten “black ledger” identifying large cash payments to Manafort. A story in the New York Times about the ledger prompted his resignation as Trump’s campaign chairman.10
Though instrumental in pushing information on Manafort into official channels, Chalupa’s name does not appear in the Mueller Report. And it turned out that the FBI had repeatedly been warned that the “black ledger” might be fake.
In February 2017, soon after Flynn’s resignation, Manafort issued a statement that he had “never had any connection to Putin or the Russian government—either directly or indirectly—before, during or after the campaign.”11
But he became a primary target of Mueller’s investigation, which focused on four disparate threads: a possible Ponzi scheme involving real estate in Manhattan, work for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska from 2006 to 2009, his having been paid to influence US opinion of Russia on behalf of Ukrainian president Yanukovych, and potential FARA violations.12
Though Manafort and Gates had filed FARA paperwork retroactively in June 2017 for their work in Ukraine, Mueller used that as a way to ratchet up the pressure.13
Ukraine’s top anticorruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, cautioned the US State Department’s law enforcement liaison and multiple FBI agents in late summer 2016 that “Ukrainian authorities who recovered the ledger believed it likely was a fraud.”14
A Ukrainian businessman who worked with Manafort, Konstantin Kilimnik, wrote an email to a senior US official on August 22, 2016, to express his concerns that the document was probably fake. He pointed out that payments to Manafort had always been in the form of wire transfers, not cash.15
The FBI used the document anyway but in a devious fashion. In its request for a search warrant on Manafort’s house, it didn’t quote the ledger; it referenced media reports about it, just as it had used Isikoff’s story—sourced by Christopher Steele’s phony “dossier”—to buttress its request for a FISA warrant on Carter Page:
“On August 19, 2016, after public reports regarding connections between Manafort, Ukraine and Russia—including an alleged ‘black ledger’ of off-the-book payments from the Party of Regions to Manafort—Manafort left his post as chairman of the Trump campaign,” an FBI agent’s affidavit read. It cited an AP story as a footnote to the affidavit.16
Weissmann and his crew ginned up “collusion” hysteria, but the charges against Manafort boiled down to tax evasion and bank fraud. Manafort made it clear that he was not interested in becoming a cooperating witness. To raise the stakes, the FBI went after Manafort’s son-in-law, Jeffrey Yohai, with whom he had partnered in business deals, to “get into Manafort’s head,” using a technique in white-collar criminal probes called “climbing the ladder.”17
Within a month of the heavy-handed FBI raid, Manafort changed law firms, retaining attorneys who specialized in international tax issues as Mueller’s team began issuing subpoenas to global financial institutions for his personal and business bank records.18
“It’s obvious that it has morphed into an open-ended investigation that is way beyond Russian collusion,” said David Rivkin, an attorney who worked in the DOJ during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, “and the only unifying principle seems to be that it covers people who are close to Trump or worked with Trump. And that is the classical definition of a fishing expedition.”19
After the raid, leaks of classified information escalated the pressure. CNN reported that Manafort had been under FBI surveillance beginning in 2014. The surveillance, reportedly authorized by a FISA warrant, had included wiretapping, searches, and other types of observation, triggered by work done by a group of Washington consulting firms on behalf of Yanukovych’s party in Ukraine.
“The intelligence collected by the FBI led to officials’ concerns that Manafort encouraged Russian interference in the election,” reported Hallie Detrick in Fortune. “A second warrant obtained in 2016 required the FBI to provide evidence for the suspicion that Manafort was acting as an agent of a foreign power. That warrant was directly related to the FBI’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and people suspected of operating on behalf of the Russian government.”20
Leakers liberally sprinkled “collusion” bread crumbs around news outlets, portraying Manafort in a negative light.
But the stories were often untrue. For example, four “current and former American officials” told the New York T
imes that phone records and intercepted phone calls showed repeated contact between Trump officials and senior Russian intelligence officers in the year before the election. The story was illustrated with a picture of Manafort. “The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort.” However, the OSC later told Manafort’s lawyers that there had been no such intercepts.21
“Before signing up with Donald Trump, former campaign manager Paul Manafort secretly worked for a Russian billionaire with a plan to ‘greatly benefit the Putin Government,’ ” reported the Associated Press on March 21, 2017.22
That was also untrue.
After yet another leak, Manafort’s lawyers were alerted to a pre–special counsel meeting in April 2017 involving three FBI agents, Weissmann, then the chief of the DOJ’s fraud division, and four AP reporters. “The meeting raises serious issues about whether a violation of grand jury secrecy occurred,” they wrote in a court filing. Notes by an FBI agent revealed that reporters had even offered investigators a “code” allowing access to a storage facility used by Manafort.23
The following day, the AP reported an exclusive story: “Manafort Firm Received Ukraine Ledger Payout.” Two reporters who had been at the meeting shared the byline with a third journalist.24
On October 30, 2017, Manafort and Gates surrendered to the FBI after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that included conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, being unregistered agents of the Ukrainian government, making false and misleading statements, and failure to file reports of foreign banks and financial accounts.25
The indictment made much of Manafort’s “lavish lifestyle,” saying he had failed to pay taxes, “laundered” more than $18 million, and conspired to defraud the United States by “impeding, impairing, obstructing and defeating the lawful governmental functions” of the DOJ and Treasury Department by routing money through “scores of United States and foreign corporations, partnership and bank accounts” between 2006 and “at least 2016.”
Witch Hunt Page 40