Summary
HAVING NOT RECEIVED ANY STOLEN “Clinton dirt” from Kremlin agent Joseph Mifsud when the Maltese professor first revealed to George Papadopoulos that the Kremlin had such information in April 2016, and having failed to get any such information from Kremlin agents at Trump Tower in June 2016, the Trump campaign continues nonetheless its efforts to appease the Kremlin through policy proposals and begins a clandestine effort to finally find what it has long sought: Clinton’s “missing” emails.1,2
The Facts
FROM JULY TO SEPTEMBER 2016, Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee coordinates the majority of the campaign’s back-channel appeasement efforts. George Papadopoulos, one of the first men appointed to Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, gives an interview with Russian media in which he underscores that Trump will eliminate sanctions on Russia if elected.3 Carter Page, another of the first five appointees to the National Security Advisory Committee, is cleared to travel to Moscow for a conference, during which he meets with both Kremlin officials and an executive from Rosneft. The Steele dossier says Trump is offered the brokerage of a 19 percent stake in Rosneft if the Russian sanctions are lifted when he is elected.4 Page fails to disclose his Kremlin and Rosneft contacts in subsequent interviews with media and even denies such meetings took place until emails show they did.5 He does report his activities to the Trump campaign, however.6 In September, Page travels to Hungary and discusses U.S.-Russia policy with several Hungarian government officials; while there, he meets with a Russian whose name he will not divulge, even to Congress.7
During the summer of 2016, Joseph Schmitz—like Carter Page, one of the first five appointees to Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee—travels to Hungary for unknown reasons.8 Whether in Hungary for this purpose or not, Schmitz is at the time engaged in an effort to track down Clinton dirt on the dark web in the form of stolen emails.9 He finds a trove of supposed Clinton emails from an unspecified source and takes it to a congressional committee, the FBI, and the State Department; the emails are presumed to be fake by an outside cybersecurity expert, and his request to transfer custody of the emails to the State Department and to the inspector general for the intelligence community is denied.10 During his meetings with government officials, Schmitz says that he is working to find Clinton’s emails with a “client” who, like him, has an ongoing security clearance from prior employment.11 The description of his client Schmitz provides could fit many people, one of whom is Michael Flynn—the “shadow” head of Trump’s national security team, as he has never been formally named to Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee. CNN will report in April 2018 that “in the fall of 2016 . . . U.S. intelligence officials picked up chatter likely between Russian hackers hoping to steal Clinton’s emails and possibly get them to foreign policy adviser Michael Flynn and Trump’s team through an intermediary.”12 Of the possibility that Schmitz’s unspecified dark web source for the presumptively fake Clinton emails he attempted to transfer to U.S. government officials was Russian, CNN writes, quoting Peter Clement, a retired top CIA analyst, “that it is ‘extremely plausible’ that [Schmitz’s] penchant for conspiracy theories could have made him a target for various foreign influencers, including Russia. ‘There’s a lot we don’t know, but Russians during the campaign were clearly targeting specific groups and parts of the country,’ Clement said . . . [and] Schmitz’s business ties ‘would have made him stand out.’ His small law firm represents a major Russian airline previously sanctioned by the US State Department for arms deals with Iran.”13
Whether working with Schmitz or not, during this period Flynn is engaged in the very same effort as Schmitz is: seeking Clinton’s emails on the dark web, in his case with the assistance of a cutout, GOP operative Peter W. Smith.14 Smith receives a tranche of emails from sources he believes to be Russian hackers but cannot get the emails authenticated.15 As Smith tries to recruit additional people to his cause in September, he reveals in a recruitment document that not only is he working with Michael Flynn but also with Steve Bannon, Sam Clovis, and Kellyanne Conway.16 In May 2017, Smith will commit suicide in a Minnesota hotel room, leaving behind a note that says to investigators, among other things, “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER.”17
At least six members of Trump’s national security team are engaged in outreach to Russian nationals during this period, with two of them also part of the effort to find Clinton’s “missing” emails. Trump expresses his frustration with the failure thus far of the latter effort by publicly asking Russia to find and turn over Clinton’s “30,000” deleted emails to American nationals.18 Within twenty-four hours, Russian hackers have begun cyber-intrusions intended to find the very documents Trump requested.19 Three weeks later, on August 17, Trump receives his first classified security briefing as a presidential candidate.20 Less than a month before, on July 26, top intelligence officials had determined with “high confidence” that the Russians were involved in the DNC breach.21 At his classified briefing in August, Trump is told that Russia is likely seeking to interfere with the 2016 election and indeed wants specifically to infiltrate his campaign.22 But there is no abatement in the Trump team’s outreach to Russia. In fact, Trump becomes, in the ensuing weeks, quite publicly enamored with WikiLeaks, a non-state hostile intelligence service that has made contact with both Trump’s son (September 20) and Trump adviser Roger Stone (August 8) and is engaged in an ongoing effort to publish reams of damaging information stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.23
By comparison, the intelligence community is so concerned about Russian actions that CIA director John Brennan warns Putin’s FSB, his domestic intelligence service, to immediately cease all meddling in the U.S. election.24 The one change Trump makes after his August 17 classified briefing is that, within forty-eight hours of being told that Russia is behind the hacking of the DNC, he fires campaign manager Paul Manafort.25 The reason given for the firing is that Manafort has become a distraction after the news, four days earlier, that he received secret payments from Putin allies in the Ukraine.26
In London, Alexander Nix, the head of Cambridge Analytica, which has been hired by the Trump campaign for its data services and at which top Trump adviser Steve Bannon had served as a vice president, reaches out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to try to track down Clinton’s emails.27 Trump’s campaign is by now engaged in a three-front battle to acquire stolen materials from the Russians: Trump asks for them directly and publicly; Schmitz, Flynn, Bannon, Clovis, Conway, and once-removed Trump agent Peter W. Smith hunt for them on the dark web; and Trump’s son Don Jr., Trump’s friend Roger Stone, and the Trump campaign’s data firm, Cambridge Analytica, communicate directly with Russian hackers (Stone) or WikiLeaks (Don Jr. and Cambridge Analytica), the organization releasing the materials the Russian hackers stole.
Throughout this period, a server at Russia’s Alfa Bank is “pinging” a Trump Tower server thousands of times for reasons that are unclear, though one possible explanation is that data is being transmitted.28 According to computer scientists who gained access to the internet server records, 99 percent of all pings of Trump Tower during this period come from either Russia’s Alfa Bank or a server controlled by the brother-in-law of Erik Prince,29 like Michael Flynn a “shadow” national security adviser never formally recognized by the campaign. Russian cyber activities ramp up in other spheres as well, as Russian operatives launch a “spear-phishing operation” on VR Systems, an election-software company.30 Elsewhere, Russian hackers begin their attack on election systems in twenty-one states.31
Trump’s then campaign manager Paul Manafort emails an intermediary to offer Putin ally Oleg Deripaska—Manafort’s former boss—clandestine briefings on the internal workings of the Trump campaign and the campaign’s recent progress.32 This occurs three weeks before the FBI initiates an investigation of the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (July 25) and then opens up a counterintelligence operation investigating cov
ert Trump-Russia communications (July 31)—the FBI’s counterintelligence operation having been prompted by a drunken George Papadopoulos telling an Australian diplomat in a London bar in May 2016 that the Russians have been peddling “dirt” on Clinton.33
At the first presidential debate, despite having received a classified national security briefing forty days earlier stating with “high confidence” that the Russians were hacking Americans and American organizations with the aim of interfering in the 2016 election, Trump tells a national audience that no one knows who is doing the hacking and that it could well be “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”34
Annotated History
* * *
George Papadopoulos, one of the first men appointed to Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, gives an interview with Russian media in which he underscores that Trump will eliminate sanctions on Russia if elected.
Papadopoulos’s September 30, 2016, interview with Russian media outlet Interfax, which the Washington Post reported on in March 2018, was directly authorized by Trump’s deputy communications director Bryan Lanza. In the interview, Papadopoulos communicated to a Russian audience that “[U.S.] sanctions [on Russia] have done little more than turn Russia towards China”—a statement that became the interview’s headline—and “unfortunately for the U.S., sanctions on Russia have resulted in massive energy deals between Russia and China.”35 The interview came in the final six weeks of the presidential campaign, at a time when WikiLeaks was releasing digital materials stolen by Russian hackers and threatening to continue doing so through Election Day. In fact, according to a December 2017 CNN report, Lanza authorized Papadopoulos’s media statements to a Russian audience not long after Donald Trump Jr. had received, on September 14, an email with the website address for documents given to WikiLeaks by—as was understood at the time—Russian hackers.36
* * *
Carter Page, another of the first five appointees to the National Security Advisory Committee, is cleared to travel to Moscow for a conference, during which he meets with both Kremlin officials and an executive from Rosneft. The Steele dossier says Trump is offered the brokerage of a 19 percent stake in Rosneft if the Russian sanctions are lifted when he is elected. Page fails to disclose his Kremlin and Rosneft contacts in subsequent interviews with media and even denies such meetings took place until emails show they did. He does report his activities to the Trump campaign, however. In September, Page travels to Hungary for reasons that remain unclear; while there, he meets with a Russian whose name he will not divulge, even to Congress.
In his November 2 testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Carter Page gave evasive answers on the question of whether he’d met a Russian in Budapest during the same trip in which he met with Hungary’s ambassador to the United States, Réka Szemerkényi. Those answers include “not that I can recall,” “there may . . . at a hotel . . . there were a few people passing through there,” “I have no recollection because it was totally immaterial and nothing serious was discussed,” and “I vaguely recall that, you know, there may have been someone.”37 The possibility that Page met a Russian in Budapest is of interest to congressional, FBI, and Department of Justice investigators because, as has been noted by the Hungarian Free Press, Budapest is “the European Headquarters of Putin’s FSB.”38
* * *
During the summer of 2016, Joseph Schmitz, like Carter Page one of the first five appointees to Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, travels to Hungary for unknown reasons.
The Guardian reported in April 2017 that U.S.-allied spy agencies in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Poland, and Estonia had all told American intelligence in mid-2016 about communications between Trump campaign officials and Russian operatives. Was Budapest one of the locales for these meetings, whose number and secrecy caused John Brennan to go directly to eight senior members of Congress in late August and early September 2016?39 According to a May 2017 New York Times article, at the time Brennan called the members “over secure phone lines while they were on recess. . . . [to tell them] there was evidence that Russia was working to elect Mr. Trump president.”40 Or perhaps Schmitz was taking the advice given by fellow Trump national security adviser George Papadopoulos, who wrote in an April 25, 2016, email to a senior Trump campaign official—just two days before Trump’s “Mayflower Speech”—that if Trump were to accept Putin’s “open invitation” to a pre-election summit, choosing a meeting place other than D.C. or Moscow would be wise because “these governments tend to speak a bit more openly in ‘neutral cities’ ”?41 Certainly, Brennan’s intelligence—and Papadopoulos’s—matched the information that Christopher Steele was contemporaneously recording in his thirty-five-page dossier, which said that at least one proposed meeting between Trump’s and Putin’s respective agents scheduled for Moscow was moved to “what was considered an operationally ‘soft’ EU country when [a Moscow meet] was judged too compromising.” According to the Association of Accredited Public Policy Advocates to the European Union, the seven countries in the EU that oppose sanctions on Russia include Italy, Greece, and Hungary—all countries that Trump’s national security advisers traveled to, in some cases more than once, in 2016.42
* * *
Trump expresses his frustration with the failure thus far of the effort to find Clinton’s “missing” emails by publicly asking Russia to find and turn over Clinton’s “30,000” deleted emails to American nationals. Within twenty-four hours, Russian hackers have begun cyber-intrusions intended to find the documents Trump requested.
The emails in question were never found, but that didn’t stop Trump advisers from pretending they had been. In a November 4, 2016, Breitbart interview, Erik Prince claimed to have learned the content of certain “missing” Clinton emails, even though his accounting was declared false by Clinton campaign officials and was never substantiated, even in part, by any statement from either federal law enforcement or the New York Police Department.
Because of Weinergate and the sexting scandal, the NYPD started investigating it. Through a subpoena, through a warrant, they searched [Weiner’s] laptop, and sure enough, found those 650,000 emails. They found way more stuff than just more information pertaining to the inappropriate sexting the guy was doing. They found State Department emails. They found a lot of other really damning criminal information, including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than 20 times. Hillary Clinton went there at least six times. The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI, and they said, “We’re going to go public with this if you don’t reopen the investigation and you don’t do the right thing with timely indictments.” I believe—I know, and this is from a very well-placed source of mine at 1PP, One Police Plaza in New York—the NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making in this investigation, and they’ve gotten huge pushback, to the point of coercion, from the Justice Department, with the Justice Department threatening to charge someone that had been unrelated in the accidental heart attack death of Eric Garner almost two years ago. That’s the level of pushback the Obama Justice Department is doing against actually seeking justice in the email and other related criminal matters. There’s five different parts of the FBI conducting investigations into these things, with constant downdrafts from the Obama Justice Department. So in the, I hope, unlikely and very unfortunate event that Hillary Clinton is elected president, we will have a constitutional crisis that we have not seen since, I believe, 1860.43
Prince’s false account of Clinton’s emails drew heavily from “Pizzagate” lore—Pizzagate being a conspiracy theory that saw Clinton and several of her friends accused of running a human-trafficking and pedophilia ring from
the basement of pizza restaurant Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. In 2016, the theory was popular among one other election-savvy group besides Trump’s cadre of national security advisers: Russian propagandists. A November 2017 Rolling Stone exposé found that, among others, “Russian operatives . . . manufactured the ‘news’ that Hillary Clinton ran a pizza-restaurant child-sex ring.” The magazine discovered, more particularly, that “the claim that Hillary Clinton was a pedophile started in a Facebook post, spread to Twitter and then went viral with the help of far-right platforms like Breitbart and Info-Wars. . . . It took the better part of a year . . . to sift through the digital trail. We found ordinary people, online activists, bots, foreign agents and domestic political operatives. Many of them were associates of the Trump campaign. Others had ties with Russia.”44
In his testimony before Congress on November 30, 2017, Prince admitted to being the fourth Trump national security adviser who traveled to Hungary in 2016—adding to the possibility he and Schmitz were coordinating on their 2016 Clinton email hunt. Moreover, in his testimony before the House, Prince said that he met with Schmitz (“a lawyer that used to work for me”) twice during the 2016 campaign.45 Whether either of those meetings was in Hungary is unclear. Schmitz’s trip to Hungary was taken right in the middle of his summer 2016 search for Clinton’s deleted emails; Prince flatly refused to tell Congress when he was in Hungary.46
* * *
Three weeks later, on August 17, Trump receives his first classified security briefing as a presidential candidate. Less than a month before, on July 26, top intelligence officials had determined with “high confidence” that the Russians were involved in the DNC breach. At his classified briefing in August, Trump is told that Russia is likely seeking to interfere with the 2016 election and indeed wants specifically to infiltrate his campaign. But there is no abatement in the Trump team’s outreach to Russia. In fact, Trump becomes, in the ensuing weeks, quite publicly enamored with WikiLeaks, a non-state hostile intelligence service that has made contact with both Trump’s son (September 20) and Trump adviser Roger Stone (August 8) and is engaged in an ongoing effort to publish reams of damaging information stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
Proof of Collusion Page 20