Corsi testified before a grand jury on September 21, 2018. It took about thirty minutes. The prosecutors shook his hand and congratulated him. But it wasn’t over. In preparation for a second appearance before the grand jury, he met again with the Mueller team on October 31.
Zelinsky and Rhee again peppered him with questions. But his memory was poor. They finally showed Corsi an email he had written to Stone while in Italy in August 2016. They wouldn’t let him have a copy, but it said something such as “Word is . . . Assange will make two drops, one soon on Clinton foundation, second one in October on Podesta.”115 Corsi had no recollection of sending that email, but it seemed to him that he had merely been placating the excitable Stone.
That triggered another barrage of questions, hours and hours of questions over every email and phone call he’d made in 2016.
Corsi underwent forty hours of interrogation. But the prosecutors refused to accept that his memory was poor.116 They pressured him to plead guilty to making three false statements under the 18 U.S.C. § 1001 statute. He accused the OSC of setting him up for a perjury trap.117
“If I was obstructing justice, why would I keep the external hard drive?” Corsi said. “I would have thrown all of that away.” On November 21, his lawyer sent a letter to the special counsel: “The issue is that the statements that Dr. Corsi made were, in fact, the best he could recall at the time. From the beginning, Dr. Corsi immediately provided all of his computers, emails, phones, social media accounts, etc., and his intent was always to tell you the truth to the best of his recollection, which he admitted to you, was not very good as these events took place years ago.”118
Amending testimony is not uncommon: after delivering demonstrably false testimony before Congress, Comey and Clapper had amended their statements. Neither had been charged with a crime.
But in the twisted world of Special Counsel Mueller, a person could be charged with a crime for forgetting about three emails sent two years earlier. You’d be accused of lying because you’re human. And then, under threat of imprisonment, you’d be forced to confess that your imperfect recollection had been an intentional deception, even though it hadn’t been. In other words, you’d be told to lie about the truth.
That happened to Flynn and Papadopoulos, who yielded to the pressure. Corsi dug in his heels. After weeks of coercion, intimidation, and legal bullying by Rhee and her cohorts, he refused to acquiesce to their demands.
“I will not sign a plea agreement that is a lie,” he wrote in a memo to his attorney on November 25, 2018. “I never ‘willfully and knowingly’ gave false information to the FBI or the Special Counsel.”119
Pleading guilty could have cost Corsi his securities license in the banking and securities business where he had been active.120 Corsi claimed that Rhee had advised him not to tell federal regulatory authorities of the plea agreement because it would be sealed. “Rhee just advised us to commit a felony.”121 He refused the plea deal.
Mueller’s team went after Corsi’s stepson, Andrew Stettner, subpoenaing him to testify before a grand jury.122 Notice a pattern?
Corsi went public in November 2018, saying he expected to be indicted any day. “This has been one of the most frightening experiences of my life,” he said, speaking of the pressure from the OSC. “At the end of the two months, my mind was mush.”123
He claimed that the special counsel had wanted him to support a Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative devised by Mueller’s team. Insisting that his only crime was supporting Trump, Corsi said he was afraid he’d go to jail “for the rest of my life because I dared to oppose the deep state.”124
At roughly the same time, Trump’s lawyers became aware of the unconscionable pressure being applied on Corsi by the special counsel when documents involved in his case were delivered to them by an anonymous source. They included a proposed indictment and plea agreement, as well as a statement or allocution for Corsi to read during a guilty plea that would falsely accuse the president of having received some collusive information. Rudy Giuliani said they took action late that same night:
We immediately reported it to the FBI and Department of Justice telling them that Mueller’s team was attempting to suborn perjury which is a felony. They were dangling an offer that he’d get probation and never have to go to jail if only he agreed to say things under oath that were false. They were threatening him to get him to lie.125
Trump’s lawyers met with prosecutors at the Justice Department. However, with Rod Rosenstein in charge, no action appears to have been taken over those complaints of gross prosecutorial misconduct, if not crimes.
After Stone’s over-the-top raid by the FBI, Corsi wondered if agents wearing body armor would haul him out of bed one morning at gunpoint. But perhaps Mueller’s team realized that their dramatic bust of Stone had backfired. Charging Corsi with such thin gruel would have made them look petty and vengeful. Mueller issued his report in March 2019 with the announcement that no new indictments would be brought.
The FBI Employed Scorched-Earth Tactics
People got caught in the crosshairs of a zealous FBI and a prosecution team eager to run up its count as it became clear that there was no real reason for the special counsel’s existence. Process crimes would do. Among those convicted were:126
Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch attorney based in London but arrested in the United States, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Rick Gates and an unnamed person in Ukraine. He served thirty days in jail and was deported.
Sam Patten, a “Never Trumper” and lobbyist who pleaded guilty to a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), for failing to register as a foreign agent for Ukrainian clients. After spending more than $140,000 in legal fees, he was sentenced to three years of probation and a $5,000 fine. “It’s proof positive of selective enforcement [of FARA],” he said. “It’s only used when the government has nothing else.”127
Richard Pinedo, who pleaded guilty to identity theft in relation to the Internet Research Agency Russian troll farm operation (see below).
Charges remain pending against:
Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian colleague of Manafort, charged with obstruction of justice.
Iranian American businessman Bijan Kian and Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin, business associates of Mike Flynn, charged with conspiring to violate foreign lobbying laws. Kian was tried by a federal jury and convicted.
Gregory Craig, a former White House counsel for Barack Obama, indicted for lying and concealing information from federal authorities regarding foreign lobbying. He is the only Democrat charged to date in connection with Mueller’s investigation; however, criminal referrals were made on lobbyists Tony Podesta and Vin Weber.
Literally hundreds of people were caught up in the investigation as witnesses or potential suspects, particularly conservative journalists, Republican congressional staffers, and conservative think tank analysts.
Journalist Paul Sperry tracked down a dozen or so witnesses—ignored by most media outlets—and found strikingly similar tactics. Agents and prosecutors had pressured them to admit crimes, threatened their wives and girlfriends, and intimated that they’d be going to jail. Their communications—emails, texts, call records, travel records—had been scooped up and scrutinized, even though they had little evidence to provide. In some cases, they believed that information they had presented to a grand jury had been leaked, a federal crime.128
Compelled to hire lawyers, many suffered emotional and mental distress. Some have filed legal complaints or formally complained to the DOJ. They have decried Mueller’s “scorched earth” tactics, and, given their description of events, it’s hard to disagree with them.129
FBI informants had even targeted some others.
Michael Caputo, a former aide to Trump’s campaign who had lived in Russia during the 1990s, was approached by a Florida-based Russian named Henry Oknyansky, aka Henry Greenberg, offering to sell derogatory financial information on Clinton, ac
cording to the Mueller Report. Caputo and Stone met with Greenberg in May 2016. Stone refused the offer, “stating that Trump would not pay for opposition research.”130
Caputo ran up more than $125,000 in legal bills as a result of interrogations by Mueller’s prosecutors and preparation for his testimony before two congressional committees. He was forced to remortgage his home to pay his legal bills.
“Forget about all the death threats against my family,” he said in a statement after a Senate committee interviewed him. “I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election. . . . I want to know because God damn you to hell.”131
It turned out that Greenberg had another name as well: Gennady Vostretsov. He had a long string of arrests in the United States and Russia. In 2015, he told an immigration judge he had worked for the FBI for seventeen years throughout the world, including in the United States, Iran, and North Korea.132
Caputo hired a private investigator to look into Greenberg’s background, posting the eye-opening details online on Democrat Dossier. “When he tried to sell us dirt on Clinton, it was an FBI operation. . . . The FBI sent a violent, illegal-alien criminal Russian to meet with us.”133
Greenberg’s criminal record and history as an FBI informant are not mentioned in the Mueller Report. Caputo called for Mueller’s team to be investigated for prosecutorial misconduct, saying “Ruining lives was blood sport for them.”134
Two FBI agents knocked on the door of the journalist Art Moore, an editor for the news site WorldNetDaily, demanding to talk about Corsi and WikiLeaks. “They were clearly on a fishing expedition,” said Moore, who lives in Washington state. “They seemed desperate to find something to hang onto the narrative” of Russian collusion. He believed that the Mueller team had secretly obtained his emails, phone records, and text messages.135
Joseph Farah, the founder of and an editor at WorldNetDaily, got the same treatment. Not long after agents grilled him about Corsi, Farah suffered a stroke; his nationally syndicated column has been suspended.136
Trying to connect the dots among WikiLeaks, Stone, and Corsi, FBI agents went after Jason Fishbein, a Florida lawyer who had done legal work for WikiLeaks. Interrogated for six hours over two days, he gave them more than five hundred pages of documents, and then a grand jury subpoenaed him for all records of his communications with WikiLeaks, which should have been protected by attorney-client privilege. Though a small cog in the wheel, he spent $20,000 for legal fees to handle the demands.137
“That doesn’t nearly account for all the time I have had to spend occupied with this,” he said. Though not charged with a crime, he came to believe the investigation was nothing more than a “politically manufactured criminal investigation and coordinated media outrage.”138
In March 2018, Ted Malloch, the author and political analyst whom Corsi had asked to talk to Assange, was detained and interrogated by FBI agents at Logan Airport about Roger Stone and WikiLeaks and interrogated about having visited the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.139
Malloch told the agents he had not been to the embassy or communicated with Assange. Issued a subpoena to testify before a grand jury, Malloch complied but argued he had no information pertinent to the investigation. “I am not an operative, have no Russian contacts, and—aside from appearing on air and in print often to defend and congratulate our President—have done nothing wrong. What message does this send?” He published a book arguing that the covert intelligence activity surrounding the Trump campaign had been not Russian but Western.140
CNN reporters showed up in April 2018 on the Bethesda doorstep of Joseph Schmitz, a former Pentagon inspector general who had worked on the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser. They waylaid him in his front yard with “16 questions as salacious as the stuff in the [Steele] dossier,” he said. Schmitz declined to answer their questions. CNN’s resulting “exclusive” story suggested that Mueller had been investigating Schmitz about his efforts “to expose damaging information about Clinton” by looking for her deleted emails on the dark web. Though Mueller’s team and the FBI refused to comment for the story, Schmitz believed they had been coordinating with CNN, a suspicion reinforced when network cameras magically appeared at dawn to record the raid on Roger Stone’s home.141
Why Did the Obama Administration Not Target Russian Trolls and Hackers?
The introduction to the Mueller Report stated as undisputed fact that “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” The interference included a “social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Russian military intelligence conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign and then released stolen documents.”142
Attorney General Barr has questioned why more was not done by the Obama administration to counter Russian efforts. “That’s one of the things I’m interested in looking at as part of my review of the Russia collusion investigation,” he said. As the Obama administration had warnings of such efforts as early as April 2016, Barr wondered “what, exactly, was the response to it if they were alarmed. Surely the response should have been more than just, you know, dangling a confidential informant in front of a peripheral player in the Trump campaign.” And why had the FBI not given the Trump campaign a defense briefing regarding Flynn, Papadopoulos, and Carter Page, who had been under investigation well before the election?143
Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, told the White House cybersecurity coordinator to “stand down” in 2016 regarding the meddling by Russia. Michael Daniel, special assistant to the president and cybersecurity coordinator for the National Security Council, told the SSCI that he and his staff had responded in “disbelief.”144
Even when Mueller charged actual Russians, he could not make a connection between them and Trump.
On February 16, 2018, Mueller indicted three Russia-based companies and thirteen Russian individuals. He alleged that they had conspired to defraud the United States by “impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions” of the Federal Election Commission, the DOJ, and the State Department. Additional charges included conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, as well as aggravated identity theft.145
In a multimillion-dollar operation, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and two related companies were accused of conspiring to interfere in the 2016 election by hiring people to pose as Americans and post political comments and memes on the internet. In other words, “to troll” or provoke reactions on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They also staged rallies with the “strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system.”
Announcing the charges, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made it clear that there had been no alleged wrongdoing by the Trump campaign, nor had the activity affected the outcome of the election.146
Based in Saint Petersburg, the IRA began its effort in 2014—well before Trump announced his run for office. Russians entered the United States, hiding their true identities, and began operating through shell companies. With a budget in the millions of dollars, the IRA had more than eighty employees working on “the translator project,” an effort to manipulate social media. They created fake personas and pages and communicated with “unwitting members, volunteers, and supporters of the Trump campaign involved in local community outreach, as well as grass-roots groups that supported then-candidate Trump.”
The operatives purchased ads on Facebook and Instagram to promote Trump rallies, paid one Floridian to dress up as Hillary in a prison uniform, and paid another to build a cage.147
Their operations included “supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Trump . . . and disparaging Hillary Clinton.” So it was proof that Russia wanted Trump to win!
“It’s hard to read the indictment and not see the ‘troll factory’ as conducti
ng a Kremlin-sponsored covert action aimed at the U.S. political system,” said Andrew Weiss, a former Clinton White House national security aide. He cited their use of cameras, SIM cards, and “drop phones” to communicate secretly as “intelligence-style tradecraft,” suggesting a sophisticated Kremlin-type operation. Or maybe a garden-variety adulterer cheating on his wife.148
John Brennan posted this tweet: “DOJ statement and indictments reveal the extent and motivations of Russian interference in 2016 election. Claims of a ‘hoax’ in tatters. My take: Implausible that Russian actions did not influence the views and votes of at least some Americans.”149
It’s doubtful that Instagram accounts such as “Woke Black” posting this had much effect: “A particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.” Or “Blacktivist” posting this comment: “Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.” Then there was the “United Muslims for America” posting “American Muslims [are] boycotting elections today, most of the American Muslim voters refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton because she wants to continue the war on Muslims in the middle east and voted yes for invading Iraq.”150
In the social media chaos of the election, those Russian-backed accounts’ efforts amounted to children’s popguns in a shooting war, as did their ads on Facebook: “Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote!” “Donald wants to defeat terrorism . . . Hillary wants to sponsor it.”
And did the organization really support Trump? Before the election, it sponsored rallies for Trump; a few days after he won, it sponsored rallies against him: “Trump is NOT my President,” held in New York, and “Charlotte Against Trump,” in North Carolina.
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