On January 15, 2017, five days before Trump’s inauguration, Pence told CBS’s Face the Nation that Flynn and Kislyak had not discussed sanctions in December 2016. “It was strictly coincidental that they had a conversation,” said Pence, the head of the presidential transition team. “They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.”133 Pence’s statement was ultimately found to be untrue, which forced the White House to say that either Flynn had lied to Pence or Pence had lied to the nation. It chose the former and thereafter fired Flynn.134
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Kushner, Flynn, Bannon, Nader, and the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates meet secretly at Trump Tower. Two days later, on December 13, 2016, Trump nominates Rex Tillerson for secretary of state—doing so while Carter Page is in Moscow meeting with Rosneft executives and on the same day Jared Kushner meets with the chief executive of VEB.
Something else Trump did on December 13 was to tell the Wall Street Journal he wanted to end all sanctions on Russia. Trump’s campaign manager–cum–presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway repeated that sentiment two weeks later, just before Trump’s first phone call with Vladimir Putin as president of the United States.135
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On January 6, the U.S. intelligence community releases a joint FBI/CIA/NSA report concluding that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
The “new” information in the report, which Trump was briefed upon several hours before it was published, was that Russia preferred Trump to Clinton. Trump had already been briefed on August 17, 2016, on the fact that U.S. intelligence had seen “direct links” between the Russian government and systemic interference with the 2016 presidential election.136
Three days before the January 6, 2017, briefing, Trump took to Twitter to falsely claim that the briefing had originally been scheduled for January 3; he used the occasion of the briefing allegedly being moved back, which it was not, to try to discredit it in advance, tweeting, “The ‘Intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”137 This was one of the earliest instances of Trump’s casting doubt on U.S. law enforcement not merely for its handling of the Clinton investigation but its handling of the ongoing Russia investigation. It is a political strategy that would shortly become a hallmark of the new Trump presidency.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE FIRINGS OF FLYNN AND COMEY
February to May 2017
Summary
AS DONALD TRUMP ENTERS OFFICE, the collusion question no longer centers on Trump’s securing the White House through a clandestine quid pro quo but something altogether different: a collaborative effort by Trump and his aides, allies, and associates to obscure what has been done and by whom, mostly by seeking to control or derail federal law enforcement’s fast-expanding investigation into the matter.
For Trump, the most immediate dilemma is National Security Advisor (and one-time VP short-lister) Michael Flynn, who was acting on orders from Jared Kushner—and possibly others—in negotiating with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition, but now must be removed from his job before the scandal over his actions deepens.1 From the moment Flynn is fired, Trump is engaged in an effort to convince or compel FBI director James Comey to end the Flynn investigation and to clear Trump himself of any wrongdoing relating to Russia. The new president fires Sally Yates—the Obama-holdover acting attorney general, and also the attorney who brought Flynn’s actions to the attention of law enforcement—and seeks to maintain Flynn’s loyalty to him through a clandestine outreach.
Meanwhile, the December 9, 2016, handoff of the Steele dossier from Senator John McCain to James Comey—McCain having received it from a retired British diplomat, Sir Andrew Wood, at an annual security conference in Nova Scotia in mid-November 2016—has launched a new phase of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Russian election meddling.2 This new phase puts Trump and several of his aides and associates in the crosshairs of federal law enforcement as chief figures in the dossier. When a man strongly suspected by investigators of being one of Steele’s sources is apparently murdered in Moscow, U.S. and foreign journalists suggest that this lends credence to some of the intelligence Steele has compiled.3
When Comey refuses to publicly clear Trump of any wrongdoing, his job is immediately placed in jeopardy; he is fired by Trump on May 9, less than ninety days after Flynn is removed from his position. During those ninety days an event occurs, however, that will make Trump’s firing of Comey the most problematic decision of his presidency: facing accusations of lying to Congress, Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recuses himself from the ongoing Trump-Russia investigation in early March. Sessions’s recusal from the Russia probe, followed by Comey’s firing, opens the door for Rod Rosenstein, the acting attorney general for the Russia investigation, to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel. Rosenstein’s appointment of Mueller—authorizing the former FBI director to investigate any coordination or links between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign, as well as any crimes that might arise from the investigation of that question—comes under new Department of Justice regulations. The old ones had lapsed when the independent counsel statute expired after the last major investigation of a president (Kenneth Starr of Bill Clinton).4 Mueller moves quickly to continue the work Comey had started, even as a series of sluggish and highly partisan congressional investigations begin interviewing a few of the key witnesses in the Trump-Russia case.
In Washington, D.C., Trump exhibits increasingly unusual behavior: urging the White House counsel to lobby Sessions to “un-recuse” himself; disclosing classified Israeli intelligence to Kremlin agents in the Oval Office; accusing President Obama, without any proof, of wiretapping his Trump Tower office; and finally firing Comey, an act he brags about to Kremlin agents and then admits, in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, was an attempt to stifle the Russia investigation. This fuels speculation that far more of the Steele dossier may be accurate than anyone had previously realized. While media will point out that the dossier is “unverified,” and Trump will call it “fake” and “sick,” as the first 120 days of the Trump presidency comes to a close there is substantial evidence to suggest the FBI is using Christopher Steele’s compilation of human intelligence as a road map for understanding Trump-Russia collusion prior to Election Day.
The Facts
FBI DIRECTOR JAMES COMEY BRIEFS Trump on the Steele dossier two weeks before Trump’s inauguration. He will later testify before Congress that he immediately memorialized his briefing of Trump, based on the president-elect’s reaction to hearing the information in the dossier and because, as he later said, “I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting.”5 Two days after his inauguration, Trump will single out Comey during a public event and attempt to embrace him in front of a bank of cameras; according to a friend of Comey’s who was told the story later on by the former FBI director, “Comey was disgusted. He regarded the episode as a physical attempt to show closeness and warmth in a fashion calculated to compromise him before Democrats who already mistrusted him.”6 Five days later, Trump invites Comey to dinner at the White House; according to former director of national intelligence James Clapper, who spoke to Comey before the dinner, Comey was “uneasy with it, both from a standpoint of the optic of compromising his independence and the independence of the FBI.”7 At dinner, Trump does several things that communicate a preoccupation with the Russian collusion allegations he knows the FBI is then investigating: for instance, he asks Comey, who is working under a lo
ng-term, cross-administration appointment, whether he wants to remain the FBI director, which Comey will later say seemed like “an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship”; Trump demands an oath of loyalty from Comey immediately after Comey tells him the FBI needs to remain independent, saying, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” and then repeating, “I need loyalty,” at the end of the dinner; and Trump is so attentive to the details of the Steele dossier, which he claims is both false and offensive, that, per Comey, “He said he was considering ordering me to investigate the alleged incident [at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow in 2013] to prove it didn’t happen,” though he never follows up on the idea.8 In a May 2017 interview on Fox News, Trump will use the sort of vacillatory, self-exculpating phrasing he had previously used with respect to Michael Flynn—“I didn’t direct him [to discuss sanctions with the Russian ambassador], but I would have directed him because that’s his job,” he’d declared on the Flynn matter—by saying to Jeanine Pirro, “I didn’t [ask Comey for his loyalty], but I don’t think it would be a bad question to ask.”9
As Trump is attempting to build a relationship with Comey that would make continued investigation of him by the FBI less likely, he is also dealing with a growing crisis involving his National Security Advisor. Four days after Trump’s inauguration, Michael Flynn is interrogated by the FBI on suspicion of having illegally negotiated U.S. foreign policy with a hostile foreign power prior to Trump taking office.10 That Flynn had spoken to Kislyak around the time Putin decided not to retaliate for the new sanctions imposed by Obama was clear by January 12; however, Vice President–elect Mike Pence, who was the transition head, had told CBS three days later that “[Flynn and Kislyak] did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.”11 When Flynn dissembles with the FBI on January 24, telling agents he never discussed sanctions with the Russians—which the FBI knows is untrue, as it has telephonic intercepts indicating otherwise—Acting attorney general Sally Yates, an Obama holdover fulfilling her role until Sessions is confirmed, will go to the White House to tell White House counsel Don McGahn that the nation’s National Security Advisor may be compromised by a foreign power.12
Yates’s fear is that if the Russians know Flynn hasn’t told the FBI the truth, they can exert leverage over him via a threat to disclose to federal law enforcement what he really said and did. Yates also wants McGahn to know that Flynn has been dishonest with White House officials about his calls to Kislyak—an assumption she makes because the White House has said publicly that no one on the transition team discussed sanctions with the Russians.13 Instead of treating Flynn’s potential compromising by Russia as an emergency, McGahn asks Yates why the Department of Justice cares about the issue. When Yates repeats that Flynn is now susceptible to blackmail by a foreign power, McGahn demands to see all the evidence the Department of Justice has compiled on Flynn.14 Yates agrees to provide the evidence by January 30; Trump fires her that day.15 According to subsequent comments by White House press secretary Sean Spicer, at the time Trump fired Yates he had been fully briefed on the fact that she was correct—Flynn had indeed lied about his discussions to the FBI and, ostensibly, to certain officials in the Trump administration.16
It is later revealed that then president Obama warned Trump against hiring Flynn two days after the 2016 election, the same forty-eight-hour span in which Chris Christie was issuing his own warning on Flynn.17 Trump instead hired Flynn as his National Security Advisor on November 17, less than a week after both Obama and Christie had strongly advised him not to do so.18 Within twenty-four hours, a Democratic congressman, Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), had written transition head Mike Pence demanding more details on Flynn’s unregistered lobbying for both Turkey and Russia—the latter of which Flynn had been working for through the Kremlin-funded propaganda network, RT.19 Cummings will later discover, and make public, that Flynn did not disclose on his federal security clearance forms a trip he took to the Middle East to lobby for nuclear power plant sales the very month Trump announced his presidential run. He will find, too, that Flynn failed to report several contacts with Israeli and Egyptian governmental officials—two nations with whom George Papadopoulos also had substantial contact during the campaign.20 Notably, Flynn will be the next Trump campaign adviser charged with a crime after Papadopoulos becomes a cooperating government witness in July 2017.
In the final few days of Flynn’s tenure as National Security Advisor, the Kremlin attempts to pass a sanctions relief proposal to Flynn—framed as a “peace deal” for Ukraine—through a Kremlin-allied Ukrainian politician, Andrii V. Artemenko.21 Artemenko meets with Trump business partner Felix Sater and Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen. At the meeting, he hands them an envelope with the Kremlin-approved anti-sanctions proposal inside. The envelope later ends up on Flynn’s desk. Cohen at first acknowledges bringing the envelope to the White House and giving it to Flynn, and then changes his story and says he had no interest in what Artemenko was “selling” and told the Ukrainian to mail his proposal to the White House by regular mail if he wanted to contact President Trump.22
For reasons that are never made clear, after Trump is told in late January by his White House counsel that Flynn has had conversations about sanctions with the Russian ambassador, he—according to the White House version of events—waits two weeks to tell Pence that Flynn lied to him.23 Throughout this two-week period, Trump knows that his National Security Advisor has been compromised by the Russians, but he allows him to maintain his security clearance.24 When questions are raised in the months ahead about why Flynn’s security clearance wasn’t revoked on January 27, Trump will blame Obama for having given Flynn a security clearance in the first instance.25 Flynn resigns or is fired—depending upon whom one asks—ninety-six hours after Pence is officially informed (if he did not already know) that Flynn lied about his calls to Kislyak.26 On March 9, when Flynn’s lobbying for Turkey becomes national news, Pence will say he is hearing about it for the first time.27 As for the date on which Trump first heard about the Flynn-Kislyak calls, that fact has not yet been established; it is confirmed by Fox News, however, that at some point prior to Flynn’s firing, Trump is fully briefed on what his National Security Advisor said to Kislyak—including Flynn’s statement to the Russian ambassador, in contravention of the Logan Act, that “the Kremlin could expect a reprieve from the sanctions” announced by then president Obama on December 29, 2016.28 Nevertheless, on February 16, just seventy-two hours after Flynn’s firing, Trump will say at a press conference, “Mike was doing his job. . . . I would have directed him to do it if I thought he wasn’t doing it. I didn’t direct him, but I would have directed him because that’s his job.”29 Trump’s claim that he believed Flynn was discussing sanctions policy with the Russians in late December, coupled with his denial that he specifically ordered the negotiations, does not include a concurrent denial that he had knowledge of the negotiations as they were happening.
A key issue for Trump, following Flynn’s exit, is the question of how many of his former aides, allies, and associates will cooperate with the quickly evolving FBI probe of potential Trump-Russia collusion. On March 30, Flynn takes the extraordinary step of publicly offering to testify before Congress in exchange for immunity from prosecution.30 His attorney will tell the media that Flynn “certainly has a story to tell.”31 Congress rebuffs his offer in under a day; it cannot, in any case, immunize him against possible prosecution by the special counsel.32 Shortly thereafter, Trump calls Flynn and tells him to “stay strong.”33 Almost immediately, Flynn ceases to cooperate with congressional investigators, ignoring a subpoena in mid-May.34 The same month, Carter Page reveals that he is cooperating with Senate investigators and is “eager” to continue doing so.35 By then, it has already been revealed that Jared Kushner has volunteered to be questioned by Congress.36 Meanwhile, Trump’s son Don Jr. gives an interview in which he is asked whethe
r he had any campaign-related meetings with Russian nationals pre-election. “Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure,” Trump Jr. responds, then adds, “but none that were set up, none that I can think of at the moment, and certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape, or form.”37
On May 8, former acting attorney general Yates, under questioning from Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), repeatedly refuses to publicly rule out Trump as a potential target of the FBI’s ongoing counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.38
At his testimony in June, James Comey—fired by Trump on May 9, six days after he refuses to rule out Trump as a target in the Russia investigation, and one day after Yates likewise refuses to do so—will tell Congress what happened between him and Trump the day after Flynn’s February 13 firing. According to Comey, he went to the Oval Office the day after Flynn’s firing for a scheduled briefing, after which the president asked him to stay behind. Comey was hoping Sessions would prevent Trump from seeking a one-on-one audience with the FBI director, but Sessions left the room when Trump asked him to do so. Thereafter, Trump said to Comey (in Comey’s paraphrase), “ ‘I want to talk about Mike Flynn.’ . . . The President began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President. He added that he had other concerns about Flynn, which he did not then specify. . . . ‘He is a good guy and has been through a lot.’ . . . He then said, ‘I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.’ ”39 Comey will add that, because of “the setting and the fact that Trump asked to see him alone, he took the president’s words as a directive.”40
Proof of Collusion Page 27