Even more suspect were the financial backers who solicited the injurious material. It was paid for by Democrats and the Clinton campaign. This should have instantly called into question its veracity because of obvious, underlying partisan motives.5 It was a classic example of what’s known as “opposition research,” with the notable exception that it appeared to have been entirely contrived. The material was not derived from public documents or voting records as most opposition research originates. Instead, it seemed to have been dreamed up and then propagated by pro-Clinton and anti-Trump forces, notably Brennan among them.
The author of the “dossier” should have been considered inherently untrustworthy, if indeed he was the author at all. As a former British spy, Christopher Steele was trained in deception and chicanery. Reportedly, he never traveled to Russia to gather his so-called “intelligence.”6 Rather, he claimed to have had Kremlin-connected sources, even though he had not set foot in Russia since the early 1990s. Given the change in leadership there during the course of more than two decades, it is highly doubtful that any of his so-called sources held important government positions or otherwise had firsthand access to dependable information.
Upon reading the contents of the “dossier,” Brennan must have known that it was no more reliable than a supermarket tabloid. Yet, the evidence suggests that he advocated the use of the dubious document to damage Trump. Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian Studies at New York University and Princeton, spoke about Brennan’s role and what he described as “Russiagate” on a New York radio show, the contents of which were published in The Nation under Cohen’s name:
Brennan played a central role in promoting the Russiagate narrative, briefing members of Congress privately and giving President Obama himself a top-secret envelope in early August 2016 that almost certainly contained Steele’s dossier.
In short, if these reports and Brennan’s own testimony are to be believed, he, not the FBI, was the instigator and godfather of Russiagate. Certainly, his subsequent frequent and vociferous public retelling of the Russiagate allegations against Trump suggest that he played a (and probably the) instigating role. And, it seems, a role in the Steele dossier as well.7
James Kallstrom, who once served as assistant director of the FBI, agreed, offering insight gleaned from his conversations with those who had access to Brennan’s maneuvers and manipulations behind the scenes:
My sources tell me (Brennan) was leaking almost weekly or daily, and he was taking that bunch of phony crap supposedly from Russia, and peddling that through the Congress and the media. He was one of the active people. I’ve known him a long time and I think he’s involved, and quite frankly, I think it goes right to the top.8
The “top,” of course, meant President Obama, who received constant foreign policy briefings from his CIA director. Brennan was an Obama and Clinton loyalist at his core. However, in his role as head of the agency that was dedicated to collecting intelligence, Brennan was supposed to be a nonpartisan and apolitical voice. His actions in proliferating the unfounded “dossier” were plainly political and deeply biased. Author and commentator Paul Sperry interviewed Gene Coyle, a thirty-year CIA veteran who served under Brennan. Coyle described Brennan “as the greatest sycophant in the history of the CIA, and a supporter of Hillary Clinton before the election.”9 He added that “Brennan made it very clear that he was a supporter of candidate Clinton, hoping he would be rewarded with being kept on in her administration.”10
In his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017, Brennan admitted that information he received about the Trump campaign and Russians “served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion—cooperation—occurred.”11 While Brennan did not specifically refer to the unproven “dossier,” it is clear that he took credit for instigating the bureau’s investigation of candidate Trump.
Journalist Lee Smith, who writes for the Weekly Standard and Tablet, described Brennan’s role in the Trump-Russia case:
In other words, the FBI investigation didn’t start when the Australians, according to the New York Times—or the Brits, according to Brennan’s most recent version of the story—contacted the FBI after the Papadopoulos-Downer meeting. No, it started when the director of the CIA decided to start an investigation, when Brennan passed on information and intelligence to the FBI, and signaled the bureau better act on it.12
It is true that James Comey, who cleared Clinton, made the ultimate decision to investigate Trump and his campaign. And FBI agent Peter Strzok, who loathed Trump, is the one who signed the papers opening the probe. But it appears to have all been orchestrated by Brennan, whose enmity toward Trump he has not tried to conceal in comments and tweets since election day, 2016. In one message posted more recently, Brennan ranted, “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.”13 Tired clichés aside, Brennan was anything but apolitical. He was Clinton’s advocate and protector. In that role, he politicized phony intelligence and instigated the fraudulent case against Trump.
If there is any doubt that Brennan is capable of such malevolence, consider the ominous warning issued by Obama’s United Nation’s ambassador Samantha Power, “Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan.”14
It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that the Russia collusion hoax began when Brennan seized upon the “dossier” to wreak havoc on the Trump campaign. Precisely when he would have first received it is unclear. However, as explained in the previous chapter, he reportedly met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in August 2016.15 Two days later, Reid sent the first of two letters to Comey demanding an investigation.16 Those letters were conveniently made public to sully Trump’s candidacy with the taint of scandal in advance of the election.
Brennan wasn’t the only top official in the intelligence community that was suspected of peddling the fake “dossier.” The director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was also involved, according to information uncovered by the House Intelligence Committee.17 Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) described Clapper’s role, “The guy who leaked information about that dossier is James Clapper.”18 Jordan insists Clapper gave the material to CNN where he is now a paid contributor:
Specifically leaking information I believe, from that January 6th (2017) meeting where they briefed President Trump, then President-elect Trump on the dossier. Someone at CNN got information. We think it was Mr. Clapper who gave it to them. And then a few days later Buzzfeed prints the entire dossier.19
Jordan’s account is backed up by the “Summary of Findings” published by the House Intelligence Committee when it concluded that Clapper was not forthcoming about media leaks. Finding # 44 states, “Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, now a CNN national security analyst, provided inconsistent testimony to the Committee about his contacts with the media, including CNN.”20
But how did top intelligence officials in the Obama administration get their hands on the “dossier” in the first place? Who commissioned it? Where did it come from?
The Phony “Dossier”
The origins of the anti-Trump “dossier” began in earnest in April 2016 when Marc Elias, the attorney of record for both the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, hired a company called Fusion GPS to develop negative information on Trump. Fusion GPS, in turn, hired Christopher Steele, who worked for a private British intelligence firm called Orbis Business Intelligence. Steele had retired as a British agent with MI-6 and had once served as a spy stationed in Russia.21 Elias’s firm was paid $12.6 million during the campaign, while Fusion GPS received $1.02 million, and Steele’s company, Orbis, earned $168,000 for his work.22
The “dossier” was actually a compendium of seventeen consecutive memos believed to be penned by Steele between June and December 2016. The first memo was entitled “Republican Candidate Donald Trum
p’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin.” It was dated June 20 and alleged that the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years,” but it also accused him of “perverted sexual acts” that could be used to blackmail him.23 Armed with this implausible document that identified no specific source, Steele decided to approach the FBI with his unverified claims.24 Remarkably, Steele met in person with the FBI on July 5, the very day that Comey cleared Hillary Clinton in her email scandal.25 Thus, at the moment the FBI was absolving Clinton, it appears that the bureau was beginning its investigation of Trump into Russian “collusion.” Perhaps Steele thought that his document in the hands of the FBI and, later, the media would prevent the Republican candidate from gaining the presidency. This, of course, this would surely ingratiate him to his financial benefactors. Shortly after the Steele-FBI meeting, the bureau formally opened its criminal probe of Trump on July 31, 2016, under the pretense of a counterintelligence investigation. In the ensuing months, Steele met with several U.S. news organizations to push his “dossier.”26
It is obvious why the Clinton campaign wanted to trash Trump with any dirt, however real or imagined, that it could dig up. The expected Democratic nominee was facing a legitimate challenger for the presidency and was determined to stop him at any cost. A million dollars for tabloid garbage may have seemed like a small price to pay given the high stakes of power and the cash machine the Clinton campaign had become. But Steele’s motive appears to have been personal. According to evidence produced by the House Intelligence Committee, the ex-spy confided to a Justice Department official that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.”27
Any intelligent person with an ounce of skepticism would have quickly dismissed the contents of the “dossier” as nothing more than a collection of unsubstantiated and far-fetched assertions cobbled together by someone with a motive to smear Trump by inventing the equivalent of sordid fairy tales. It read like a horribly written spy novel. This was the challenge for the Clinton campaign and their allies: how to peddle a fantastic set of lies to the FBI and journalists? It took a while.
The first obstacle, of course, was the “dossier” itself.28 It is worth reading online if you’re looking for a good chuckle. But here are some highlights:
Russia had been cultivating Trump as a political asset for many years;
Trump and Russia were exchanging intelligence with each other for eight years;
Russia had been supporting his candidacy for at least five years;
Russia had been feeding Trump valuable intelligence on Clinton for years;
Trump was favored by Russia with lucrative real estate deals;
Trump’s lawyer met secretly in Prague with a Kremlin official;
Carter Page met secretly in Moscow with two Russian officials (Sechin and Divyekin), promising to lift Russians sanctions;
Page and Paul Manafort were intermediaries in the Trump-Russia conspiracy;
Trump agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine in exchange for hacked email operation;
Trump defiled a hotel bed in Moscow where he knew the Obamas had slept;
Russia was exploiting Trump’s “personal obsessions and sexual perversions” for blackmail purposes.
No evidence was offered, and there was never any proof that it was true. Some of it was conspicuously false. All of it was transparently partisan and patently absurd. Yet this document was used by Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to convince a willing FBI to open an investigation into Trump and spy on his associates. The bureau was either duped or, more likely, became a willing participant in its zeal to steer the election in a way that would conform to its own political preference, namely Clinton.
Paul Roderick Gregory studied the “dossier” within days of it becoming public in January 2017. He is considered an expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, having visited there close to a hundred times dating back to the 1960s and having written several books. Gregory opined that the author’s use of words like “trusted compatriots” to identify his anonymous sources, plus other tell-tale signs within the composition, convinced him that the “dossier” was actually compiled by a Russian determined to invent a collection of lies for the purpose of creating mischief:
There are two possible explanations for the fly-on-the-wall claims of the Orbis report: Either its author (who is not Mr. Steele) decided to write fiction, or collected enough gossip to fill a 30-page report, or a combination of the two. The author of the Orbis report has one more advantage: He knew that what he was writing was unverifiable.29
Gregory singled out one claim that was particularly ludicrous—that Trump’s peripheral adviser on the foreign policy council, Carter Page, promised to lift sanctions against Russia in exchange for a 19 percent stake in the oil company Rosneft, which would amount to a multibillion-dollar bribery scheme to line the pockets of either Page or Trump or both:
This story is utter nonsense, not worthy of a wacky conspiracy theory of an alien invasion. The huge bribe for (perhaps) lifting the sanctions makes Nikita Khrushchev’s hare-brained schemes—for which he was fired—look eminently reasonable.30
To its credit, Newsweek also turned a critical eye to the “dossier” and published a story entitled “Thirteen Things That Don’t Add Up in The Russia-Trump Intelligence Dossier.”31 Besides picking apart the main allegations, the magazine also took notice of what it described as “tortured and borderline non-native syntax” and “basic ignorance of Russia.”32 All of this called into question not only authorship and sourcing, but the veracity of any of the dossier’s bizarre and outlandish claims.
In truth, there was little that was intelligent about the so-called “intelligence” document purportedly authored by Steele and/or his company Orbis or a Russian. The only allegation that was subject to verification seemed to be rather easily disproven.
The document alleged that Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, secretly met with Russians in Prague in August 2016 to arrange cash payments and devise a cover-up operation. It was provably false. Records show that Cohen was in Los Angeles and New York during the stated time-frame. There are no known international records of him traveling to Prague that have been publicly produced. In reaction to the accusation, Cohen stated, “I’m telling you emphatically that I’ve not been to Prague, I’ve never been to Czech (Republic), I’ve not been to Russia. The story is completely inaccurate, it is fake news meant to malign Mr. Trump.”33
Lawyers are taught and jurors are instructed that if a witness lies about one part of his testimony, it may be concluded that all of his testimony is untrue. And so it was with the “dossier,” but more so. Viewed either through the lens of its individual assertions or in its entirety, it was preposterous. Even a casual reader of the document would reach this conclusion.
And so would a discerning journalist like Bob Woodward, who called it a “garbage document.”34 Frankly, that may be an insult to garbage.
On an edition of Fox News Sunday, Woodward, the associate editor of the Washington Post who rose to fame uncovering the Watergate scandal, told host Chris Wallace that American intelligence chiefs made a mistake and should apologize.35
What did the Russians have to say? Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, labeled the unverified memo as “pulp fiction.” He said, “I can assure you that the allegations in this funny paper, in this so-called report, they are untrue. They are all fake.”36
Russian President Vladimir Putin offered that the “dossier” was an attempt by the outgoing American president, Barack Obama, to “undermine the legitimacy of the president-elect.”37 Putin’s theory is a pretty good bet. Speaking at a news conference shortly after the document was published, Putin branded as nonsense the notion that Russia had been collaborating with Trump for many years:
Trump, when he came to Moscow a few years ago, was not a politician. We did not even know about his political ambi
tions. He was just a businessman, one of the richest men in America. Is someone really thinking that our intelligence agencies are chasing every American billionaire, or what? Of course not. It’s just a complete nonsense.[sic]38
Naturally, the comments by Peskov and Putin should be viewed with skepticism inasmuch as they had the incentive to hide the kind of activity that was alleged in the “dossier.” However, Putin’s mocking dismissal of the charge that the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump as a political asset for many years and exchanging intelligence with him for eight years was a valid one. If the claim was true, it would suggest uncommon, if not inhuman, prescience on the part of Russian leaders. No crystal ball or set of tea leaves would have envisioned Trump’s electoral ascendancy all those years before.
But those in the U.S. intelligence community, the FBI, and Democrats who had access to the “dossier” set aside whatever doubts or misgivings they may have had about the farcical document. Truth be damned, the “dossier” could be exploited for a malevolent objective. That is, it could be weaponized to influence the election. Should that fail, it could always be repurposed to bring down Trump’s presidency.
Carter Page and the “Dossier”
Carter Page played a minor role in the Trump campaign, but became a major instrument in the government’s quest to pursue the Trump campaign. As an investment banker and a vice president at Merrill Lynch, Page had been assigned by the company to work in Moscow for three years. Thereafter, he started his own energy investment firm in New York.
At a time when some were questioning the foreign policy bona fides of a businessman turned presidential candidate who had never held public office, the Trump campaign decided it would be prudent to convene a foreign policy advisory council to help deflect the criticism. A board was hastily assembled and Page, by virtue of his background in Russia and energy, as well as his doctorate degree, was selected as a member upon the recommendation of Sam Clovis, who eventually became co-chair of the Trump campaign.
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