That Trump shares “informal” legal counsel with the FBI agents who pressured Comey into reopening the Clinton case has not been widely discussed—but that the agents’ illegal leaks to the media helped convince Comey to reopen the Clinton investigation, thereby costing Clinton the election, is clear. On October 30, 2016, just two days after Comey reopens the Clinton case, the New York Times reports that he did so because “he believed that if word of the new [Clinton] emails leaked out—and it was sure to leak out, he concluded—he risked being accused of misleading Congress and the public ahead of an election” (emphasis added).74 Further evidence of Comey’s certainty his own agents were leaking to the media is found in late October emails he and his deputy Andrew McCabe exchanged, uncovered through a FOIA request by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.75 In the Judicial Watch tranche of Comey-McCabe emails is an email from McCabe to Comey from October 25, 2016, alerting the latter to an article from the day before published on the website True Pundit, which reports that “Democratic factions controlled by a Hillary Clinton insider” paid almost $700,000 in campaign funds to Jill McCabe, Andrew McCabe’s wife, who was a Virginia state senate candidate in 2015. Andrew McCabe, True Pundit noted, was a senior FBI agent who advised Comey against criminally charging Clinton.76
McCabe believed the article had used an FBI leaker as a source, telling Comey it was a “heavyweight [FBI] source.”77 While Comey disagreed that the leaker was a “heavyweight” in the FBI, he agreed it was someone within the Bureau leaking details of an internal investigation.78 Forty-eight hours later, he and McCabe meet in person and he decides to reopen the Clinton case, partly, per the New York Times, because of his fear of continued FBI leaks—the same leaks Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani had been discussing publicly on Fox News and Trump supporter and future legal counsel Joe diGenova had personally facilitated.79 Indeed, the June 2018 Inspector General’s report on Comey’s decision to reopen the Clinton case will repeatedly cite Comey’s concern about internal leaks as influencing his decision-making—both leaks of information concerning Attorney General Loretta Lynch and leaks of information concerning the “new” Clinton emails.80 As the Inspector General (IG) will conclude, “several FBI officials told us that the concern about leaks played a role in the decision [to reopen the Clinton case].”81 The IG will note also that “[t]he harm caused by leaks, fear of potential leaks, and a culture of unauthorized media contacts . . . influenced FBI officials who were advising Comey on consequential investigative decisions in October 2016.”82 The IG will quote one of the prosecutors in the Clinton case as indicating to him that “leaks undermine investigations and that ‘unfair leaks’ were an ‘added’ consideration in the [Clinton] investigation”; per the IG, “Laufman [a second prosecutor] told us that the [Clinton] prosecution team’s goal was to . . . [be] mindful that leaks ‘could be used by political actors in furtherance of political agendas.’ ”83 The IG will find that Comey’s concern touched equally on credible leaks and “leaks of . . . non-credible information”—the latter sort of leak being the kind facilitated by diGenova. Comey’s pre-election review of the “new” Clinton emails on former congressman Anthony Weiner’s computer will find no incriminating information, contrary to what diGenova’s clients in the FBI told the Daily Caller to expect.84
When Comey reopens the Clinton case, the Republican National Committee will immediately declare that this “shows how serious this discovery [of ‘new’ Clinton emails] must be.”85 However, in August 2018 it will be revealed that the True Pundit story that concerned Comey and McCabe was written by a former employee of Republican National Committee finance chair Steve Wynn, who was appointed to his position by Trump in 2017.86 As it happens, diGenova is also a former employee of the Republican Party, having been, before entering private practice, “chief counsel and staff director of the Senate Rules Committee and counsel to the Senate Judiciary, Governmental Affairs, and Select Intelligence committees.”87
The effect of the leaks facilitated by Trump surrogates and supporters—and aided by former employees of the Republican Party and their associates—is not just the reopening of the Clinton case but the mass dissemination of the fake news that Clinton’s “new” emails contain incriminating evidence, including, supposedly, proof that—as alleged by Erik Prince—“Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. . . . at least six times.” The convergence of Comey’s decision and the supposed content of Clinton’s “new” emails produces a vivid display of the influence and danger of viral alt-right conspiracy theories fueled in part by Russian disinformation and fake social media accounts. This display starts online a day after the Comey announcement and ten days before the November election. It ends in a pizza restaurant in Washington.
Indeed, the strangest Trump-Russia connection of October 2016 involves the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which first appears in a Facebook post on October 29. That post comes just a day after FBI director Comey reopens the Clinton email investigation and a day after then Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani finishes a three-day spree of radio and television interviews teasing an October surprise that will harm Clinton’s campaign. Calling it a “fake news scandal,” Rolling Stone will describe Pizzagate more particularly as the surprisingly widespread belief that Hillary Clinton was “sexually abusing children in satanic rituals . . . in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.”88 The magazine notes that this conspiracy theory—for which no evidence ever emerges, indeed not even a basement in the suspect pizza parlor—is born and disseminated during the presidential campaign through the work of, among others, “Russian operatives [and] Trump campaigners.”89 “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,” Rolling Stone writes, name-checking a media outlet run by Steve Bannon and a podcast, radio show, and YouTube program frequented and sometimes even anchored by Trump adviser Roger Stone.90 After nearly a year of investigative reporting, Rolling Stone concludes that, along with average Americans and social media “bots,” “foreign agents and domestic political operatives”—“[m]any of them . . . associates of the Trump campaign” and “[o]thers . . . tie[d] with Russia”—are the progenitors of the Pizzagate fake-news operation.91
The Facebook post that launches the conspiracy theory will be traced to a Cynthia Campbell in Joplin, Missouri, a woman, Rolling Stone speculates—with supporting evidence, including a significant overlap in social media accounts—is the “Carmen Katz” who posted the October 29 allegations regarding the computer owned by former congressman Weiner that was seized by the NYPD in late September 2016.92 Because Weiner’s then wife, Huma Abedin, was a top Clinton staffer, when the NYPD found Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop there was speculation that the emails might contain new information relevant to the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s private email server; the NYPD subsequently turned the laptop over to the FBI, which had possession of it by October 3 at the latest.93 Though the Clinton investigation had been closed by the FBI in July 2016, “Katz” insisted that “[m]y NYPD source said its [the contents of Weiner’s laptop] much more vile and serious than classified material on Weiner’s device. The email DETAIL [sic] the trips made by Weiner, Bill and Hillary on their pedophile billionaire friend’s plane, the Lolita Express. Yup, Hillary has a well documented predilection for underage girls. . . . We’re talking an international child enslavement and sex ring.”94
Because the FBI had possession of Weiner’s laptop but had not yet conducted any significant analysis of its content, the fake news that top officials at the FBI—particularly Comey and his deputy McCabe—were deliberately hiding incriminating Clinton emails quickly spread across the internet.95 The claim dovetailed with longstanding claims by Russian agents, dating back to Joseph Mifsud’s conversations with Trump adviser George Papadopoulos in April 2016, that there were Clinton emails still waiting to be released. In June 2016, the Russi
ans were intimating to Donald Trump Jr. that the Clinton materials in Russia’s possession were “incriminating.” The Pizzagate conspiracy thus seemed to coincide with a long-running narrative with which the Trump campaign had been enamored, by October 2016, for six months.
The investigation conducted by Rolling Stone ultimately sets the birth of Pizzagate much earlier than October 2016, however—and much closer to Russia, too. According to the magazine’s November 2017 exposé, a “possible [seed] of Pizzagate” appears on July 2, 2016, when “someone calling himself FBIAnon, who claimed to be a ‘high-level analyst and strategist’ for the bureau, hosted an Ask Me Anything [AMA] forum on [the internet website] 4chan. He claimed to be leaking government secrets . . . out of a love for country, but it wasn’t always clear which country he meant. At various times, he wrote, ‘Russia is more a paragon of freedom and nationalism than any other country’ and ‘We [America] are the aggressors against Russia.’ ”96 FBIAnon seemed particularly interested in the Clinton Foundation, as the Russians who had visited Trump Tower a month earlier also had been; “Dig deep,” wrote FBIAnon. “Bill and Hillary love foreign donors so much. They get paid in children as well as money.”97 A 4chan reader following the AMA asked FBIAnon if Hillary had sex with kidnapped girls; “Yes,” replied FBIAnon.98
In October, writes Rolling Stone, the claim that FBI brass might be engaged in a “cover-up” of the content of the “new” Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop shows up on a discussion board geared toward NYPD officers called “TheeRANT”—then quickly makes its way to a Facebook group focused on law enforcement, then in short order ends up on Twitter thanks to an account (“Eagle Wings,” or @NIVIsa4031) whose followers include Trump advisers Michael Flynn and Sebastian Gorka.99
According to Samuel Woolley, the research director of the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, the tweeting pattern established by Eagle Wings over many months confirms that, “[w]ithout a shadow of a doubt, Eagle Wings is a highly automated account [and] part of a bot network”—which, as Rolling Stone explains, is a “centrally controlled group of social-media accounts.”100 Another high-traffic Twitter account that immediately backs up Katz’s claims—writing, “I have been hearing the same thing from my NYPD buddies too”—also looks to be “highly automated,” per Woolley.101 According to Rolling Stone,
Pizzagate was shared roughly 1.4 million times by more than a quarter of a million accounts in its first five weeks of life. . . . [and] more than 3,000 accounts in our [sample] set tweeted about Pizzagate five times or more. Among these were dozens of users who tweet so frequently—up to 900 times a day—that experts believe they were likely highly automated. Even more striking: 22 percent of the tweets in our sample were later deleted by the user. This could be a sign, Woolley says, of “someone sweeping away everything so that we can’t follow the trail.”102
The magazine cross-referenced a list of the 139 most Pizzagate-focused Twitter accounts. It found 14 that were linked to Russia, including one (@Pamela_Moore13) that had been retweeted by both Donald Trump Jr. and Roger Stone.103 Noteworthy here is that, according to the New York Times, Donald Trump Jr. had in August 2016 been offered by Wikistrat’s Joel Zamel—at a meeting set up and attended by Trump national security adviser Erik Prince—a “multimillion dollar . . . social media manipulation effort to help elect Mr. Trump.”104 According to the Times, Trump Jr. “did not appear bothered by the idea of [election] cooperation with foreigners”—despite the fact that such cooperation would be a federal crime.105 The Times adds, “It is unclear whether such a proposal was executed.”106
The possibility of both Russian and Trump campaign involvement in a conspiracy theory that spread quickly across the internet in the ten days before the 2016 presidential election—constituting an “October surprise” of the sort Giuliani had hinted at days earlier—is underscored by what Rolling Stone finds when it looks for intersections between the Trump campaign and the pre-election fake-news operation. “The [Trump] campaign’s engagement [with Pizzagate] went far deeper,” writes the magazine. “We found at least 66 Trump campaign figures who followed one or more of the most prolific Pizzagate tweeters. Michael Caputo, a Trump adviser who tweeted frequently about Clinton’s e-mails, followed 146 of these accounts; Corey Stewart, Trump’s campaign chair in Virginia, who lost a tight primary race for governor in June, followed 115; Paula White-Cain, Trump’s spiritual adviser, followed 71; Pastor Darrell Scott, a prominent member of Trump’s National Diversity Coalition, followed 33. Flynn’s son, Michael Flynn Jr. . . . followed 58 of these accounts. . . .”107
Some of the most popular Pizzagate accounts are ultimately traced to a Macedonian fake-news farm run by a Macedonian media attorney, Trajche Arsov. In July 2018, BuzzFeed will reveal that two American conservatives “worked closely” with Arsov, and that at least two writers for the American fake-news website Gateway Pundit wrote for the Macedonian attorney’s fake-news operation.108 Moreover, at least one member of Russia’s Internet Research Agency visited Macedonia shortly before Arsov’s first American-politics website was registered.109 Arsov meets the two American conservatives—with whom, according to BuzzFeed, he engaged in “extensive cooperation”—via Facebook in 2016; one of the men, Paris Wade, at first denies even knowing Arsov until he is confronted by the BuzzFeed reporter with his messages to the Macedonian.110 Wade’s partner, Ben Goldman, will later admit the connection as well.111 Wade is found to have written 40 articles for the Macedonian’s American-politics website; his brother Alex, 670. Another American, Alicia Powe—who now writes for Gateway Pundit—is given a job by Arsov and allowed to write “as many articles as I wanted” for his sites.112 A second Gateway Pundit author, Oliver Dollimore, also writes “news” for Arsov.113 According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Paris now “boasts about getting Donald Trump elected.”114
The Washington Post notes in November 2016 that shortly after the election the group website PropOrNot, “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds,” issued a list of the two hundred websites in the world that “echoed Russian propaganda” and were doing so during the 2016 campaign; Paris Wade’s website, Liberty Writers News, made the list.115 According to the Post, “The [PropOrNot] researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages.”116
As for the member of Russia’s Internet Research Agency who visited Macedonia just before Arsov got his first American-politics site off the ground—an operation that former FBI agent Clint Watts told BuzzFeed would have required some start-up capital—her name is Anna Bogacheva, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller will indict her in February 2018 along with twelve of her IRA compatriots.117 Bogacheva traveled to Macedonia right as Trump was announcing his presidential campaign in mid-2015, and during the same trip she appears to have also visited Greece and possibly Italy—two of the three nations (the other being the United Kingdom) in which Trump national security adviser George Papadopoulos will have face-to-face contact with Russian agents or allies, at least one of whom is peddling what turn out to be fake Clinton emails.118
In an interview with Rolling Stone, one of the Macedonians who disseminated fake news into the U.S. market during the presidential campaign said that he often just amped up existing articles from right-wing websites instead of concocting his own news stories; “Breit-bart [sic] was best” for this, he told the magazine, naming the website run for years by Steve Bannon, the CEO of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.119
The Macedonians are right to be reading Breitbart and other pro-Trump websites in the days leading up to Election Day. When self-described private investigator Douglas Hagmann goes on Alex Jones’s Infowars program four days after the “Carmen Katz” Facebook post to say, “Based on my source, Hillary did in fact participate on some of the junkets on the Lolita Express,” the Pizzagate story is transformed from an obsc
ure conspiracy theory to a mainstream phenomenon. According to Rolling Stone, “Google Trends measures interest in topics among the 1.17 billion users of its search engine on a 0–100 scale. . . . On October 29th, the day Katz posted the story on Facebook, searches for ‘Hillary’ and ‘pedophile’ ranked zero. . . . [But] when Hagmann ‘broke’ the story on InfoWars, they scored 100.”120 During his November 2 appearance on Jones’s program, Hagmann implies, citing an NYPD source, that Clinton may have committed “treason” by allowing Huma Abedin to transfer classified intelligence to her “relations” or “associates”—Hagmann’s intimation being Muslim terrorists—adding that “many of the higher-ranking NYPD investigators” have been pushing for the FBI to reveal this information about Clinton and her emails.121 Whether he is one of the “higher-ranking NYPD investigators” Hagmann is referring to or not, NYPD deputy chief Michael Osgood—the man in charge of the Weiner investigation for the NYPD in October 2016—will be found in April 2018 to have donated thousands of dollars to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign in the final six weeks before Election Day.122
Hagmann tells Jones that there is a “group that [has] banded together” at the NYPD and FBI that’s decided that “we’re not going to allow this [the ‘new’ Clinton emails] to be pushed under the carpet.”123 He alleges that “a group of FBI agents” in the bureau’s New York field office has secretly refused to destroy the hardware and data incriminating Clinton that it has been ordered to destroy.124 Most important, Hagmann says to Jones, of Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani, that “[p]eople better be looking at him really close and listening to what he’s saying, because he’s behind—he’s responsible, I would say—for a lot of this information coming from the NYPD segment of this group of [NYPD and FBI] patriots that we see forming.”125
The same day as the Hagmann-Jones interview, Michael D. Moore—a former employee of Trump’s eventual RNC finance chair, Steve Wynn—publishes the sum and substance of the Pizzagate conspiracy on True Pundit in an article entitled “BREAKING BOMBSHELL: NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes with Children, Child Exploitation, Pay to Play, Perjury.”126 The article is retweeted almost immediately by Trump “shadow” national security adviser (and future National Security Advisor) Michael Flynn, who thereafter deletes his retweet for unknown reasons.127 Flynn’s deletion will effectuate the deletion of a Trump Jr. tweet—as Trump Jr. had retweeted Flynn’s original link to True Pundit.128
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