LAWYER: He answered that question too, and he said he did not explain that to the journalists.11
Other than his disdain for Trump’s “suitability” to be president,12 Simpson was convinced there was some illicit collaboration between the Russians and the campaign. He seemed to have formed the opinion that Carter Page’s speech in Moscow constituted a sordid element of the conspiracy,13 even though it was perfectly legal and fairly innocuous. The fact that Page had earlier been caught up as a witness in a Russian spy-ring case appeared to have reinforced Simpson’s impression of potential criminal conduct.14 As mentioned previously, Page was never charged with any wrongdoing and appears to have been a target of a Russia operative, not a willing participant in a spy ring.
Although Simpson had no real proof of Trump-Russian collaboration, he testified that he thought Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower in June 2016 was a form of corroboration, even though no one in the media discovered the meeting for at least another year.
After Simpson’s experience before the Senate committee, the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed two other executives of Fusion GPS, Peter Fritsch and Thomas Catan. As to every question posed, the two men invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. They likely knew, better than Simpson, the extent to which they were facing legal jeopardy.
Fusion GPS has long been accused of employing underhanded tactics. In advance of Simpson’s appearance, the Senate committee heard sworn testimony from others who claimed that they, too, had been victimized by “prepared dossiers containing false information” and “carefully placed slanderous news items.”15
The anti-Trump “dossier” was another quintessential operation run by Fusion GPS. Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Fusion is known as a ruthless firm that excels in smear jobs.”16 But the Trump assignment was their most notorious. The title of Strassel’s column, “The Fusion Collusion,” was felicitous. She took aim not just at the firm, but at the Democratic Party, “whose most powerful members have made protecting Fusion’s secrets their highest priority.”17 It was “collusion” at an atrocious level.
Under questioning, Simpson confirmed that Steele made contact with the FBI during the first week of July just as the bureau was absolving Clinton.18 Simpson admitted he agreed with Steele’s decision to reach out to the bureau and probably encouraged him to do so. Simpson and Steele both spoke with the media to push their “dossier” on them because, as Simpson stated, “some of it was gathered for the possibility that it might be useful to the press.”19
How hard did Simpson push? Perhaps to the point of actually paying journalists. On November 21, 2017, the Washington Examiner reported on the existence of court documents that showed Fusion GPS made payments to three journalists during the same time Simpson was talking to reporters about the “dossier.”20 The names of the journalists were withheld, but the three “are known to have reported on Russia issues.”21 Fusion’s lawyer argued that the payments were compensation for information from the journalists, not to “pay journalists to write stories.”22 It was an excuse that shattered common sense.
While Simpson and Steele were talking to reporters from five different media outlets and Steele was meeting with the FBI, Fusion GPS and Steele were also promoting the “dossier” to a high official at the Justice Department, Bruce Ohr. It turns out that his wife, Nellie H. Ohr, was a paid employee of Fusion GPS who wrote extensively about Russian topics. According to the House Intelligence Committee, she provided “opposition research” on Trump in collaboration with Steele’s “dossier.”23 Her husband, who was associate deputy attorney general, held secret meetings with both Simpson and Steele.24 The Ohr-Fusion entente was not disclosed by Simpson when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Nor was it disclosed by the Justice Department when it learned of Ohr’s meetings with the proponents of the “dossier” and quietly demoted him.25 It kept the scandal hidden, perhaps in the hopes that no one would discover that Simpson and Steele were covertly providing the DOJ with the unverified document, funded by the Clinton campaign, that was being used to spy on her opponent’s team. Even after the November presidential election, Ohr was meeting with Simpson as the secret surveillance of Page continued.26 It is not clear what actions Ohr, armed with the inflammatory “dossier,” may have taken because the Justice Department has never been forthcoming about what exactly he did.
The DOJ’s efforts to cover up Ohr’s activities were unconscionable. And, so too, was Ohr’s conduct. Since his wife worked for Fusion GPS and contributed to the “dossier,” the relationship presented a disqualifying conflict of interest for Ohr who was legally obligated under DOJ regulations to recuse himself from any investigation in which his wife was involved. He did not seek a waiver of the conflict. Upon joining the Justice Department, he had signed an agreement stating that he would be fired for violating its rules. Inexplicably, he was not terminated, which only reinforces the impression that impropriety and concealment continued at the highest levels of the department.
Not only did Bruce Ohr fail to disclose that Fusion GPS was paying his wife, but it appears he did not fully report the nature of the work performed in financial disclosure reports as required under Justice Department regulations.27 Willfully filing a false report constitutes a crime under 18 U.S.C. 1001.28
Hillary Clinton tried to dismiss her role in paying for the “dossier” by stating that it was simply “opposition research.”29 While it is true that political campaigns often use such research, what Clinton, Simpson, Fusion GPS, and Steele did was antithetical to any definition of “research.” In a column published by The Hill, Ned Ryan explained it this way:
Opposition research is based on fact, from voting records, court records and public statements, to tax returns and business relationships. Fusion GPS’s dossier, on the other hand, was misinformation. It was not opposition research because it was not based on fact.
Given Fusion GPS’s dependence on Russian gossip spread by Vladimir Putin’s spies, there is a good case to be made that Fusion GPS more deeply colluded with the Russians than anyone else.30
And so, too, did Clinton since she helped fund the effort.
There was never any evidence Trump or his associates “colluded” with Russia to win the election. But there is substantial evidence that Clinton and Democrats “colluded” with Simpson, Fusion GPS, and Christopher Steele, a foreign national, to influence the election by defeating Trump. And Russians, according to Steele, participated by providing real or imagined Kremlin “sources.”
Distilled to its essence, the scam worked like this: Clinton’s campaign paid Simpson who paid Steele who allegedly got information from Moscow intended to damage Trump and help Clinton. Then the FBI and the Justice Department exploited the dubious information as a pretense to open an investigation of Trump, while the media ran with their stories intended to bring down the new president. The government abused its powers and the press was shamefully complicit.
The two congressional intelligence memos, when read in light of Steele’s admissions and Simpson’s testimony, give sustenance to the inescapable conclusion that the “dossier” was a fraud. Its author was considered by the FBI to be a liar. Despite this, government officials at the FBI and DOJ secretly collaborated with both Steele and Simpson to obtain their warrants to spy on the Trump campaign without full disclosure of the facts and the kind of legal justification required in our system of justice. When Trump was elected, and even after he took office, the surveillance continued.
The chronology of events demonstrates that the fictitious “dossier” was the pretext for the FBI’s probe of Trump, not Papadopoulos’s so-called “bar talk.” Steele composed his first memo alleging Trump-Russia “collusion” on June 20, then met with the FBI on July 5. On July 31, the investigation of Trump was formally opened. Only thereafter, on August 2, did FBI agents meet with the Australian diplomat to gather information about Papadopoulos.
>
The Spy Game
Carter Page was never charged with any crime. The reason is quite simple: he did nothing wrong. Instead, he became an unwitting pawn in the government’s attempt to implicate Trump for something—anything.
Page cooperated with the FBI beginning in 2013 when the bureau was investigating three Russians suspected of trying to recruit an American to act as a foreign agent. It was understandable that Page had communicated with numerous Russians, given his global energy interests and the three years he spent in Moscow. He had no idea that one of the people with whom he had spoken was a Russian operative in a suspected spy ring. The FBI reportedly surveilled Page through a succession of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants beginning in 2014, but found no evidence to implicate him and, thus, no charges were brought against him.31 Instead, Page is on record stating that he actively assisted the bureau in its prosecution of the case.32 All known evidence indicates this is true. He was working with the FBI against Russia, not for it.
Under the FISA law, “recruitment” as a foreign agent is not enough to sustain the burden of probable cause to surveil someone. The statute is quite strict and limited in its scope. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explained this quite well in a column he penned for National Review:
The fact that a foreign power is trying to recruit an American to become an agent for that foreign power is not a sufficient basis to issue a surveillance warrant against the American under FISA. It would, of course, be sufficient to issue a warrant against the foreign spies who are making the recruitment efforts, but it is not enough for a warrant against the American citizen who is the target of the recruitment effort.
To get a surveillance warrant under FISA . . . the FBI and Justice Department must establish probable cause that the person to be monitored under the warrant is acting as an active, purposeful agent of a foreign power—not that the foreign power hopes to turn him into such an agent.33
Fast forward to 2016; the FBI learned that Page had been named to the Trump foreign policy council. Newly armed with the “dossier” that identified Page as participating in a fictitious meeting with Russians while delivering his speech in Moscow, bureau agents had the perfect excuse to begin spying on Trump and his campaign by seeking a FISA warrant to wiretap Page’s phones in October and gain access to his stored communications.
There were legal impediments to convincing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to grant another warrant to spy on Page. New evidence would have to be provided that would justify yet another wiretap of a person who had been tapped before with no result.
A majority of the House Intelligence Committee later concluded that the endeavor required sleight-of-hand trickery by the FBI and the Justice Department to gain the court’s permission. Evidence would have to be concealed, and the judge would have to be deceived. All that was necessary was to inflate the importance of the “dossier,” obscure the true nature of its authorship, downplay its fabricated content, camouflage its partisan motives, and hide that it was paid for by the true target’s political opponents.
House Intelligence Committee Memo
On February 2, 2018, the House Intelligence Committee declassified a four-page memorandum and made it public.34 The findings composed by a majority of Republicans on the committee were derived from testimony under oath and documents obtained pursuant to subpoenas. Here were the main points of what became known as the “Nunes Memo,” named after the chairman of the committee, Congressman Devin Nunes:
FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe testified “that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information”;
Christopher Steele compiled the dossier and admitted to Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president”;
Steele’s bias was recorded in FBI files but not reflected in any of the warrant applications presented to the court;
Ohr’s wife worked for Fusion GPS and assisted in the anti-Trump research, and Ohr gave his wife’s research to the FBI;
The Ohrs’ relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was concealed from the court;
The FBI assessed the dossier “as only minimally corroborated”;
The dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC);
None of the surveillance warrant applications disclosed this funding, “even though the political origins . . . were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials”;
The FBI and DOJ cited a Yahoo News story about Page to support the warrant application, without disclosing that it came from the same source as the dossier—Steele;
Steele was terminated by the FBI because he “lied” to the bureau about his contacts with the media and disclosure of information;
After Steele was fired, he continued contact with Ohr at the DOJ;
FBI director James Comey briefed President-Elect Trump on the dossier at a time when he knew it was “salacious and unverified”;
Comey, McCabe, and others signed the warrant applications when they knew it was unreliable and unverified.
The results of the committee’s investigation were stunning. The FBI and DOJ knew the “dossier” was unverified conjecture. They knew it was paid for by Clinton and Democrats and was politically motivated. They knew the person who compiled it despised Trump and harbored a clear bias. And they knew they could not spy on a Trump associate without the “dossier.” Despite all of this, the FBI and DOJ used it anyway, deceiving the court by actively withholding or obscuring every bit of vital information.
The government spied on Carter Page by obtaining four different warrants at ninety-day intervals, which means the surveillance lasted for roughly a year starting October 21, 2016. But it also allowed the FBI to get its hands on any of Page’s stored communications he had in the past. It was a way to spy on him going forward and backward. Nothing of any consequence was ever found, which only reinforced how unwarranted the intrusion was to begin with.
The House Intelligence Committee’s evisceration of the original FISA application demonstrates that the judge who approved the initial warrant, had he known the truth, would surely have rejected the government’s request to spy on Page because the application was based substantially on faulty evidence submitted to the court and FISA procedures were ignored. While the bases for the subsequent renewal applications for the warrant have not been publicly disclosed, we can reasonably assume they were riddled with the same defects and deceptions. Among those who signed the warrant applications were then-FBI Director James Comey and current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
It did not end there. When Trump fired Comey, it was Rosenstein who appointed Comey’s good friend and former colleague, Robert Mueller, as Special Counsel to investigate Trump. These all-too-cozy relationships, solidified amid arguably corrupt acts, served as the underpinnings of the case against the president. Such egregious conduct by high government officials was anathema to fairness and justice.
Democrats’ “Rebuttal” Memo
Predictably, Democrats who had fought so hard to stop the release of the Intelligence Committee memo condemned its findings even before it was made public. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called it “bogus.”35 She and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded that Devin Nunes be removed as chairman of the committee.36 Representative Adam Schiff claimed the memo was “rife with factual inaccuracies” and gave a “distorted view of the FBI.”37 Hardly.
The “Nunes Memo” was neither bogus nor inaccurate. There was no discernable distortion. Each and every finding was based on the sworn testimony of witnesses who had been interviewed or documents that were obtained by the committee, many pursuant to lawful subpoenas. The memo was short on analysis, but long on established facts. None of the released information jeopardized sources or methods in intelligence operations. Nonetheless, the FBI took the unusual step of issuing a statemen
t strongly objecting to it being made public.38 Such criticism by the bureau was understandable, given that the information detailed how the FBI and DOJ had seemingly abused their powers to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser.
Immediately after its release, Schiff vowed to construct his own memorandum to serve as a “rebuttal.” He and his colleagues on the committee did so. But unlike Democrats who had voted to stop the Republican memo’s release, Republicans voted unanimously to make public the Democrats’ memo.39
While Schiff had suggested that his memo would contradict many of the findings of the “Nunes Memo,” it accomplished precious little of that. Instead, a close reading of the document showed that it largely supported the earlier findings, although the new memo strained to massage the facts in a light most favorable to the FBI and Justice Department. It also strove to deflect attention to other issues extraneous to the warrant application. On balance, Schiff’s memo contained mostly opinions and argument in a pronounced attempt to reimagine what had so obviously occurred before the FISA court. Conclusions were drawn in the absence of foundational facts.
For example, the new memo claimed that the government had followed all the proper procedures before the court, “did not ‘abuse’ the FISA process,” and “met the rigor, transparency, and evidentiary basis needed to meet the FISA’s probable cause requirement” for the issuance of a warrant to surveil Page.40 These statements were not even close to being accurate. As explained earlier, the FBI did not interview Page when it learned of the “dossier” even though it was required to exhaust all “normal investigative techniques” before seeking a warrant to surveil.41 Page had previously been a cooperating informant for the FBI. Instead of spying on him, the bureau should have simply talked to him to determine whether the allegations against him bore any truth and whether the surveillance was even merited.
Schiff’s memo asserted that the FISA court was properly informed about the partisan backing of the “dossier.”42 This was sincere in only the most distorted sense. Burying cryptic references in a document’s footnotes that disguise the specific names or identities of the Clinton campaign and the DNC hardly constitutes an informed court, especially when the funding of the “dossier” by a political opponent is an indispensable fact for consideration by a judge who is attempting to discern both credibility and motivations. Steele’s partisan funding should have been clearly and deliberately highlighted for the court. Rather, it was intentionally camouflaged.
The Russia Hoax Page 14