Two days later, another of Trump’s “shadow” national security advisers, Erik Prince, recounts on Steve Bannon’s Breitbart radio station a conspiracy theory similar in its contours to Pizzagate (see chapter 9). Clinton’s emails, Prince says, contained “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.”129
This piece of fake news will also be retweeted by Michael Flynn—but this time without any subsequent deletion.130 On November 8, 2016, Trump invites Prince—whose importance to his campaign will never be acknowledged, either in 2016 or at any time afterward—to his election-night party, and he will name Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos his secretary of education.131
When Prince testifies before Congress in November 2017, he will present himself as having had no formal or even informal role in Trump’s 2016 campaign.132
Annotated History
* * *
Trump fired Stone in August 2015—or, to hear Stone tell it, Stone quit at that point—but the correspondence between the two men hasn’t abated as of October 2016, a fact that will eventually lead Special Counsel Mueller to assert in his July 2018 indictment of twelve Russians that Stone stayed much more involved in the pro-Trump movement after his departure than his exit from the Trump campaign proper might have suggested.
As of August 2018, the likelihood of Roger Stone’s being indicted by Special Counsel Mueller appears high. Stone protégé and former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg said on MSNBC, following his appearance before Mueller’s grand jury—and basing his opinion on the questions Mueller’s prosecutors asked of him—“I expect Roger Stone to be indicted.”133 Shortly afterward, another one of Stone’s aides, Andrew Miller, repeatedly refused to honor a grand jury subpoena from Mueller, moved to “quash” (invalidate) it after two months of ignoring it, and finally was found in contempt of court for defying it—all, Stone said when asked about Miller, because Miller had refused “to bear false witness against me.”134 Stone’s friend Michael Caputo likened his appearance before the grand jury to “a proctology appointment with a very large-handed doctor.”135 And on August 27, 2018, Stone himself predicted that he would be the next person indicted in the Mueller probe; “[Mueller] may frame me for some bogus charge in order to silence me or induce me to testify against the president,” Stone told the Guardian.136
* * *
The intermediary Stone references is now believed to be former comedian and current radio host Randy Credico, who will be subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury by Special Counsel Mueller on August 10, 2018.
Mueller’s interest in Credico appears to focus on threatening emails Stone allegedly sent him in spring 2018. According to Mother Jones, to which Credico forwarded a number of emails he said were from Stone, an email Stone wrote to Credico on April 9, 2018, said, “I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die cock sucker.”137 According to the magazine, “Stone was responding to a message from Credico that indicated Credico would release information contradicting Stone’s claims about the 2016 election and that ‘all will come out.’ ”138
Stone defended his “prepare to die” email as a response to news that Credico had “terminal prostate cancer.”139 Stone added that most, if not all, other messages Credico might show Mother Jones would “probably [be] fabricated.”140
For his part, Credico said that he does not have prostate cancer and did not act as an intermediary between Stone and Julian Assange as Stone claims—implying that Stone’s contact with Assange was direct, just as the former Nixon aide and longtime Trump and Manafort associate had originally claimed.141 According to Mother Jones, “Credico also claims that around the time Stone was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee in September [2017], Stone told him to ‘just go along with’ his story.”142 Nevertheless, in May 2018 Credico represented to four Democratic House Intelligence Committee staffers that he was in contact with Assange through a “WikiLeaks associate” and that he wanted to pass a message from Assange to Congressman Adam Schiff—the ranking member of the committee—to the effect that Assange wanted to meet with Schiff face-to-face.143
In August 2018, Mother Jones reported that Assange had called into Credico’s radio program.144 It noted, too, that Stone’s lawyer had told a congressional committee that “Mr. Stone concedes that describing Credico as a go-between or intermediary is a bit of salesmanship.”145 The truth of the Stone-Credico-Assange relationship is still unknown.
* * *
Shortly after the Manafort and Cohen convictions, Trump will tweet angrily about “flippers”—witnesses who commit crimes, then cooperate with prosecutors in later cases against their co-conspirators—referring to them as individuals for whom “everything’s wonderful and then they get ten years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go.” Trump unfavorably compares “flippers” to his “brave” former campaign manager and chairman, Manafort, who, unlike Cohen, “refused to break.”
In August 2018, the New York Daily News reported that Trump was so eager to pardon Manafort—even before Manafort’s upcoming trial in D.C.—that he was considering firing White House Counsel Don McGahn because McGahn was trying to dissuade him from the pardon.146 Multiple aides told Politico they expected Trump would ultimately pardon Manafort, and a Vanity Fair article released the same week said that Trump’s reaction to the convictions of Manafort and Cohen was to “spen[d] the weekend calling people and screaming.”147 Vanity Fair noted that an additional contributing factor to Trump’s ire was the news, hard on the heels of the Cohen and Manafort guilty findings, that the longtime Chief Financial Officer of the Trump Organization (Allen Weisselberg) and one of Trump’s friends at The National Enquirer (Enquirer publisher David Pecker) had both been granted immunity by Special Counsel Mueller in order to secure their assistance in his investigation.148 The Los Angeles Times thereafter noted that Pecker allegedly has a “vault” full of documents and other materials that could damage Trump—even incriminate him—if they are disclosed to the Special Counsel.149
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE TRANSITION
November 2016 to January 2017
Summary
WHILE NOT YET IN POWER, Trump, his family, and his aides begin acting as though they are as soon as Trump wins the 2016 presidential election. Beginning less than two days after the final returns come in, several Trump aides and family members working on the transition team will call, meet, and negotiate with Russians and other foreign nationals. The last of these actions may well violate the federal Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from negotiating U.S. foreign policy with foreign governments.1 Most of those in Trump’s orbit who surreptitiously meet with Russian or other foreign nationals will thereafter fail to disclose or else lie about their actions.
Meanwhile, a cadre of aides, associates, and family members—including Jared Kushner, Erik Prince, Michael Flynn, Tom Barrack, Rick Gates, and Bud McFarlane—are playing a dangerous political game. The game involves seven nations (the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Syria, Iran, and Russia) and seven seemingly unrelated subjects: Kushner’s worsening money troubles; Saudi-Qatari tensions; the Saudis’ desire for nuclear power and, eventually, the right to build a nuclear weapon; the Emiratis’ own nuclear ambitions; Saudi and Emirati hostility toward Iran, and particularly Iranian involvement in the war in Syria; Russian construction firms’ opposition to U.S. sanctions, which are hindering them from making tens of billions of dollars building new nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; and Russian actions relative to the war in Syria, which are ostensibly being coordinated with Russia’s ally, Iran. These issues engage parties that don’t at first appear connected to one another, but at least part of their correlation involves the United States dropping sanctions against the Kremlin in exchange for
the promise of a big financial windfall for Trump and his relatives.
In the midst of these transition-team attempts to illegally negotiate with Russian nationals and other foreign actors, two complicating events occur: the American intelligence community releases a report confirming there was a coordinated Russian campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf, and BuzzFeed, on January 10, 2017, publishes a thirty-five-page dossier of raw intelligence claiming that Donald Trump has been compromised by the Kremlin since at least 2013.
The Facts
LESS THAN FORTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER the election, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov confirms that there were many undisclosed contacts between the Trump campaign and Kremlin agents during the 2016 presidential campaign—exactly the sort of clandestine communications European intelligence agencies had warned the CIA of in the summer of 2016.2 According to an interview with Ryabkov by Russian news agency Interfax (the same outlet George Papadopoulos granted an interview to, with campaign permission, in September 2016), “There were contacts. We are doing this and have been doing this during the election campaign. Obviously, we know most of the people from his [Trump’s] entourage. . . . I cannot say that all of them, but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives.”3
The response to Ryabkov’s comments from the Trump campaign is immediate and categorical: the Trump campaign had “no contact with Russian officials” before Election Day, Trump’s personal assistant Hope Hicks says.4 Hicks will later tell congressional investigators that she sometimes told “white lies” for Trump during the presidential campaign, adding that none of these “white lies” involved Russia.5
As American media report on Ryabkov’s and Hicks’s comments, Putin’s right-hand man, Dmitry Peskov, announces that he will be coming to the United States—in under ninety-six hours—to attend a “chess tournament” a few blocks from Trump Tower.6
In the immediate aftermath of the election, President Obama issues two critical warnings. The first he offers in a face-to-face conversation with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, who seventy-two hours after the election says that there is no possibility that material posted on Facebook in 2016 had any impact on the presidential election and that any suggestion otherwise is “crazy.”7 Obama urges him to take the problem of fake news and propaganda seriously, which Zuckerberg ultimately does when he admits, in July 2018, that instead of the “no [election] impact” he spoke of in November 2016, he now recognizes that material posted on Facebook during the campaign—including Russian fake news and propaganda—was in fact influential.8
The second warning, sent via emails from the Obama administration to Trump transition team members, unambiguously tells them not to “send conflicting signals [on U.S. foreign policy] to foreign officials before the inauguration, and to include [Obama] State Department personnel when contacting them.”9 A former Trump administration official will tell the New York Times, in December 2017, that the incoming administration explicitly agreed to honor President Obama’s “pointed request.”10
Nevertheless, within forty-eight hours of Trump’s November 8, 2016, election, Michael Flynn—who has no official role in the transition and has been denied a White House position by transition head Chris Christie—is cleared to contact Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s government without involvement by the State Department. It is unknown who gave him permission to make the contact.11 By the next day, at the direction of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Christie has been fired from the presidential transition team; he will openly speculate that his objection to Flynn’s participation in the transition was a primary cause of his dismissal.12 Vice President–elect Mike Pence immediately replaces Christie as the head of the transition team, even as Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn toss in the trash all the binders profiling potential administration nominees that Christie had been compiling.13 Pence will later say that he had no knowledge of what Flynn was planning to do, and ultimately did, with respect to covertly negotiating U.S. foreign policy with the Russians.14 This is how Politico will summarize Pence and his team’s defense to allegations that, as head of Trump’s transition team, he must have known something about that team’s clandestine activities: “Donald Trump’s No. 2 knew nothing at all. . . . their man was out of the loop, blissfully ignorant of contacts between the Trump campaign and various foreign actors, from the Russian ambassador to WikiLeaks.”15
Shortly after he helps engineer Christie’s ouster from and Flynn’s emergence onto the presidential transition team, Kushner calls Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Kushner will not disclose the call on his SF-86 federal security clearance form, and when challenged he will say that he does not remember speaking to Kislyak in November.16 Nevertheless, Kislyak appears at the back door of Trump Tower on December 1 or 2 to discuss with Kushner and Flynn crafting a secure back channel between the White House and the Kremlin that is untraceable by the U.S. intelligence community.17 The purpose of the line—its proponents will contend, when their actions are discovered many months later—is to allow Flynn to speak directly to the Russian military about America’s Syria policy as well as “other security issues.”18 As Carrie Cordero, a ten-year Department of Justice national security expert, will write for Politico of the Kushner-Flynn-Kremlin pipeline,
The issue is not so much that the White House wanted to establish a back-channel with a foreign government on a particular matter—the issue is with whom they wanted to establish the channel (Russia), and how they reportedly wanted the channel to operate (using Russian facilities and secure communications). . . . Did Kushner and Flynn realize that using Russian communications channels would either evade or appear to evade the U.S. intelligence community’s own foreign intelligence surveillance activities? It’s hard to believe they didn’t.19
Another question is whether it was Kushner, Flynn, another party, or a number of parties including Kushner and Flynn who were concerned about domestic surveillance of their communications. Ninety days after the Kushner-Flynn-Kislyak meeting in Trump Tower—a meeting whose other attendees, if any, are unknown—Donald Trump will accuse the Obama administration of using U.S. intelligence services to conduct surveillance of meetings held at Trump Tower during the presidential campaign, writing on Twitter, “How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”20
If the surveillance Trump accused President Obama of in March 2017 had been in place in December 2016, it might have picked up Kushner and Kislyak discussing having the Trump administration use a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) controlled by the Russians to contact Russian generals securely.21 By negotiating U.S. policy with the Russians pre-inauguration using a SCIF, Kushner and Flynn would be violating the federal Logan Act, which prohibits unauthorized persons from negotiating U.S. foreign policy with agents of foreign governments; Kushner and Flynn won’t join the government for seven more weeks after their meeting with Kislyak.22 Because Kushner and Flynn have snuck Kislyak in the back door of Trump Tower, the media doesn’t discover what they’ve been doing until well after Trump takes office.23
On December 5, K. T. McFarland visits Trump Tower with her mentor, Bud McFarlane, to see Flynn, with whom she will develop a “close working relationship” during the transition, particularly on the subject of negotiations with the Russians.24 McFarland had been selected, on November 25, to act as Trump’s deputy National Security Advisor under Flynn.25 One of the main proponents of her getting the job was Paul Erickson, boyfriend of now-accused Russian spy Maria Butina; another was McFarlane, a VIP invitee of the pro-Kremlin Center for the National Interest when Trump delivered his “Mayflower Speech” in D.C. in April 2016 (see chapter 6).26
A year later, in December 2017, McFarland will be accused of lying to Congress about her knowledge of Flynn’s secret negotiations with Kislyak during the transition.27 After Flynn’s firing in February 2017 and Trump’s subsequent nomination
of McFarland to be ambassador to Singapore (one of the Rosneft-deal nations whose ambassador was present at the Mayflower), Congress asks McFarland in a written interrogatory whether she ever spoke to Flynn about his 2016 contacts with Kislyak. McFarland will answer in the negative; her leaked emails later reveal, however, that not only did she know about the late December 2016 Flynn-Kislyak contacts in advance, but she advised Flynn as they were happening and indeed did so from Mar-a-Lago, where Trump and many of his top aides were huddled at the time.28 McFarland’s emails will reveal, too, that the discussion of Flynn’s negotiations with the Russians at Mar-a-Lago involved many of Trump’s top aides, including Trump’s future chief of staff Reince Priebus, his future press secretary Sean Spicer, and the CEO of his 2016 campaign, Steve Bannon.29 Moreover, while the emails will not resolve whether Trump knew of the Flynn-Russia sanctions discussions—“It is uncertain how involved Mr. Trump was,” the New York Times will note—reporters will observe that Trump was scheduled to meet with his national security team on the very day members of that team were being kept in the loop about Flynn’s calls with Kislyak.30 Trump was also scheduled that day to have a phone call with nearly all the aides who had received McFarland’s emails about Flynn and Kislyak: Flynn, McFarland, Priebus, and Bannon were all slated to take part in the call, which was due to happen “shortly” after McFarland sent an email to that group (plus Spicer) about Flynn’s ongoing talks with the Russians.31 Another December 2016 K. T. McFarland email uncovered in 2017 notes that “[i]f there is a tit-for-tat escalation [on sanctions], Trump will have difficulty improving relations with Russia, which has just thrown U.S.A. election to him.”32
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