The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  In September, Obama scrapped the program, much to the dismay of Warsaw and Prague, as well as the foreign policy establishment.

  When Obama was caught on an open microphone in spring 2012 telling outgoing Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that after his election he would “have more flexibility” in dealing with issues such as missile defense, it lent further evidence to the case that he was appeasing Moscow.

  That’s how Trump saw it. He was critical of Obama’s Russia policy even before he announced his candidacy. Trump said that Mitt Romney had been right to say that Moscow represented a geostrategic threat to US interests. Trump was in favor of sanctioning Russia for invading Ukraine.

  “There are a lot of things we could be doing economically to Russia,” Trump told a TV interviewer in 2014. “Russia is not strong economically, and we could do a lot of different things to really do numbers on them if we wanted to.”

  But Trump also wanted good relations with Moscow. There was nothing incongruous about holding the two ideas at the same time. It had been the mainstream bipartisan position since the end of the Cold War: harsh criticism and hope for friendly relations. Starting with George H. W. Bush, every US president, Democratic and Republican, sought to get off on a good footing with Russia. And since George W. Bush’s first term that had meant trying to get along with Putin.

  But Trump’s pedigree was unorthodox—he wasn’t a politician—so his style was, too. From Trump’s perspective, with him as president, Putin would be dealing with a US leader who had a source of wealth and prestige independent of his office, a business leader who had holdings around the world. In Trump’s view, Putin would be dealing with someone even more famous than he was.

  To hear Trump tell it, he already had the Russian strongman’s respect. Putin, he boasted, had sent him a present during the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow. In contrast, said Trump, Putin “has zero respect for Obama or the US.” He argued that the foreign policy elite, Democratic and Republican, had repeatedly shown its incompetence over the last two decades in the form of endless wars and bad deals.

  The Bush administration had been responsible for the war in Iraq and the never-ending battle to win in Afghanistan. The Obama White House had concluded the nuclear agreement with Iran—a catastrophe, Trump said on the campaign trail, the worst deal ever made. As for Putin, said Trump, he’s “eaten Obama’s lunch, therefore our lunch, for a long period of time.”

  Trump, like most of the foreign policy community, misread Obama in one important respect: Obama’s dealings with Russia were not entirely a result of his weakness. In fact, Obama believed he was dealing from a position of strength. He used Russia as an instrument to secure the foreign policy goal he most cared about: the nuclear deal with Tehran.

  The testing ground was the Syrian war, where Iran and Russia had teamed up in support of their client Bashar al-Assad. The United States’ allies in the region implored Obama to arm Syrian rebel factions to defeat Assad and weaken Iran—which was precisely what Obama sought to avoid.

  He knew that the nuclear deal would be off the table if he targeted the Syrian regime. Accordingly, he saw Moscow as a partner rather than an adversary.

  In late summer 2013, Putin showed he was willing to team up with Obama, so long as it advanced Russian interests. Months before, Assad had deployed chemical weapons, crossing a red line set down by Obama. If Obama enforced his red line with military strikes on Assad, he risked pushing the Iranians from the negotiating table. But if he failed to act, he’d pay a steep political price for backing down.

  The Russians proposed a solution: there was no need for Obama to hit Syrian regime facilities to make his point; Moscow would persuade Assad to turn over his chemical weapons arsenal. For Obama officials, it was a win-win. Putin would save his client Assad, and Obama would keep hope of the Iran deal alive. Obama aides called it a diplomatic masterstroke. In exchange for Putin’s favor, Obama turned a blind eye when the Russians escalated their troop presence in Syria in September 2015.

  “The Obama administration said they were caught by surprise,” says Nunes.

  That was not possible. US intelligence had seen it unfolding in real time. Moscow had been sending troops and weapons through the Bosporus, an international waterway controlled by a NATO member, Turkey.

  “Of course the White House knew what was happening,” Nunes says.

  For months after the Russian escalation, Nunes had been trying to get out word regarding the administration’s dangerous dance with Moscow. “I wanted to get one of the big papers to cover it,” says Nunes.

  But the press had little interest in a story critical of the White House’s Russia policy. It was embarrassing to an Obama-allied media that in coordinating with Putin, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning president was complicit in the campaign of sectarian slaughter in Syria, the largest humanitarian catastrophe of the twenty-first century.

  Trump would win no favors from the press.

  Trump had been the front-runner since December 2015 and, after big primary wins on March 1 and March 15, was the presumptive candidate. Nevertheless, there was already talk of a brokered convention in July, in which the establishment would fight Trump for the nomination. It seemed unlikely, but the Republican political and ideological leadership that Trump had rejected had in turn rejected him.

  Early in March, a foreign policy website, War on the Rocks, published an “Open Letter on Donald Trump from GOP National Security Leaders.” Signed by 122 former Republican diplomats, intelligence officials, senior policy makers, analysts, and other foreign policy figures, the letter listed Trump’s alleged national security flaws. For example: Trump’s “admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.”

  The signatories vowed to oppose him. “As committed and loyal Republicans,” the letter concluded, “we are unable to support a Party ticket with Mr. Trump at its head. We commit ourselves to working energetically to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office.”

  The men and women who signed the letter were mostly serious people with a good understanding of their areas of interest, from Europe to the Middle East, from nuclear proliferation to counterterrorism. Group letters, however, are not serious. Republicans signed many during the Obama years in protest of policies they were powerless to affect.

  But this early manifestation of “Never Trump” Republicanism carried real consequences. The Republican establishment’s abandonment of the candidate left the campaign with a thin foreign policy bench.

  The foreign policy letter and negative media attention caused the Trump campaign serious problems. In a March 9, 2016 Washington Post column (“Why can’t Donald Trump close the deal with any foreign policy advisers?”), Daniel Drezner made a timeline of Trump’s promises to announce a foreign policy team dating back to September 2015. For six months, Drezner wrote, the GOP candidate had been promising the “finest team anyone has put together.”

  That was the substance of the first question the Washington Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan, asked Trump when he sat down with him for a March 21 interview with the DC policy establishment’s hometown newspaper. He asked the GOP front-runner if he could share some names from the foreign policy team he was planning to announce later in the week.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” said Trump. “Do you have that list,” he asked an aide. “I’ll be a little more accurate with it. Okay, you ready?” He sounded nervous. The journalists laughed.

  There were only five foreign policy advisers on his list. Trump read them off. “Carter Page,” said Trump. George Papadopoulos was another. “Excellent guy,” said Trump. None of the journalists had heard of either one. They’d certainly never published in the Post. The editorial board, men and women with direct lines to leading US statesmen going back decades, from Henry Kissinger and George P. Shultz to Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice, had no idea who Page and Papadopoulos were.

  “Trump reads
those names off, and that’s what puts them in Fusion GPS’ and the Obama administration’s crosshairs,” says Nunes. “Now they’re looking for anything they can get on Trump’s two new advisers.”

  It wasn’t until May that Papadopoulos hit the press when he volunteered for an interview with a British newspaper. The Trump adviser said that Prime Minister David Cameron should apologize for insulting Trump and criticizing his proposal to deny US visas to nationals from certain Muslim countries. The interview touched off a firestorm in the small London community of politicians, diplomats, and intelligence officials.

  But the first story on Carter Page dropped two days after Trump’s talk with the Post. Lachlan Markay of the Washington Free Beacon explored Page’s history. An energy investor who “advised Russian-state-owned energy company Gazprom,” wrote Markay, “Page has blasted NATO states’ ‘biased philosophies and draconian tactics,’ their ‘targeted discrimination and interventionist policies,’ and their ‘misguided and provocative actions.’” According to the article, “Trump’s selection of Page may indicate the reality-star-cum-politician’s opposition to U.S. policies that counter Russian interests in key global theaters.” But choosing an unknown and unpaid campaign adviser from a small pool of candidates eager to embrace Trump signaled no such thing. The campaign to tar Trump as suspiciously Kremlin friendly was under way.

  In a March 31 Free Beacon article, Markay zeroed in on another Trump campaign aide. This time he reported on the connections between newly named Trump campaign convention manager Paul Manafort and a Ukrainian businessman with ties to Russian political and criminal figures. Manafort, the story asserted, was part of a web of Russia-linked Trump associates, like Page “a staunch defender of Putin’s regime and highly critical of U.S. efforts to counter Russian influence in Ukraine and the rest of Europe.” At the center of it was the candidate himself. “Trump’s praise for Russian president Vladimir Putin,” wrote Markay, “… has drawn criticism from Republican rivals and experts on U.S. policy toward Russia.”

  The Free Beacon had the Washington, DC-based firm Fusion GPS under contract to compile opposition research on Donald Trump. The publication’s major donor, hedge fund manager Paul Singer, had used the outfit previously. Singer, who supported other Republican candidates for the nomination, tasked Fusion GPS to look into Trump.

  In May 2016, after it became clear that Trump had locked up the GOP nomination, the Free Beacon cut off the Trump-related research, and in January 2017 it discontinued its relationship with Fusion GPS. But by the end of March 2016, Fusion GPS had already found a different sponsor for its Trump research. Rumors circulated that Clinton supporters were funding Simpson.

  According to former CIA official Robert Baer, in the March–April period there were other Clinton operatives trawling for rumors of the GOP candidate’s ties to the Kremlin.

  Cody Shearer, an associate of Hillary Clinton’s private spymaster, Sidney Blumenthal, compiled two unpublished reports on Trump’s ties to Russia. Shearer wrote that Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison had told him that Fusion GPS principals Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch had been hired by the Democratic National Committee.

  Simpson and Fritsch had “uncovered info,” according to Shearer, on Trump’s newly named campaign convention manager, Paul Manafort, and his connections to Ukraine. But Simpson was already familiar with the lobbyist’s work for Ukrainian politicians. He’d written about Manafort and his relationship with former Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych nearly a decade before, when he had been with the Wall Street Journal. Along with Flynn’s RT dinner, Manafort’s work for Yanukovych became one of the media operation’s key talking points. It was meant to provide further evidence that Trump was close to the Russians, via a campaign adviser. Shearer wrote that Fusion GPS had “nothing directly on Trump.” That didn’t matter. By April, a media campaign tying the New York billionaire to Russian interests was in full swing.

  An April 3 article on Politico by former Obama official Evelyn Farkas claimed that Trump posed as much of a threat to the West as Putin did. “Trump,” according to Farkas, a Russia specialist, “… is seeking to turn the United States into a post-factual society analogous to Putin’s Russia.”

  Another Politico article, “The Kremlin’s Candidate,” this time by Michael Crowley, also posted in April. It alleged that the Russian government–owned English-language TV station, RT, favored Trump over Clinton. The article cast a suspicious eye at Michael Flynn for attending the December 2015 banquet. “It was extremely odd that he showed up in a tuxedo to the Russian government propaganda arm’s party,” one former Pentagon official told Crowley. A senior Obama administration official said, “It’s not usually to America’s benefit when our intelligence officers—current or former—seek refuge in Moscow.”

  An April 28 story in New York magazine by Jonathan Chait, “Why Is Donald Trump a Patsy for Vladimir Putin?” argued that Trump’s desire to find common ground with Putin signals “a clear turn in American policy.” The explanation, Chait concluded, is that “Trump is Vladimir Putin’s stooge.” The piece linked to Crowley’s article as well as one by Franklin Foer, the former editor of The New Republic. Foer and Chait would become among the most active operatives in the Trump-Russia media campaign.

  In Foer’s April 28 article on Slate, he profiled Manafort with a long section on his business with the Ukrainians, with special attention to Yanukovych. “Why,” asked Foer, “would Paul Manafort so consistently do the bidding of oligarchs loyal to Vladimir Putin?” Manafort’s hiring, Foer asserted, had been more evidence of Trump’s “admiration for Putin’s bare-chested leadership.”

  At the time, Nunes was still trying to get out word of the Obama administration’s disastrous Russia policies. “Finally,” says Nunes. “I did a CNN interview in which I got in my points regarding Russia.”

  “The biggest intelligence failure we’ve had since 9/11,” Nunes said in an April interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, “has been the inability to predict the leadership plans and intentions of the Putin regime in Russia.”

  Under normal circumstances, an unequivocal statement like that from the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee would likely attract widespread attention. But there was little room for Nunes’s criticism of the White House’s Russia policies in the midst of the anti-Trump media frenzy. So what if Obama had repeatedly prioritized Russian interests over those of our allies? So what if Obama had wanted to coordinate military operations in Syria with the Russians and share intelligence?

  According to the press, the real concern was that the GOP candidate said he wanted friendly relations with Putin, and one of his senior advisers, a former army officer, had sat next to Putin at a dinner in Moscow.

  None of that was news or analysis. Rather, it was evidence that top media organizations had become the platform for an information operation targeting the Trump campaign. Just as Obama had seen Russia as an instrument to advance his foreign policy objectives, now Democratic operatives were deploying Moscow as a weapon in a presidential race. The media were part of the anti-Trump operation from the beginning.

  Chapter 4

  THE PROTODOSSIERS

  IN APRIL 2016, Hillary for America, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign operation, and the DNC hired Fusion GPS to build a Trump-Russia echo chamber. Fusion GPS was paid more than $1 million to compile information about Trump’s ties to Russia and distribute it to the press. By the end of the spring, every major US media organization was involved in pushing the big story about the Republican candidate: Trump and his associates were tied to Russian and other former Soviet Bloc business interests.

  Fusion GPS was the Clinton campaign’s shadow war room—and subsequently became its dirty tricks operations center. Founded in 2010 by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, both former Wall Street Journal employees, Fusion GPS had worked on presidential campaigns before. In 2012, it had been hired for Obama’s reelection drive to smear Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Fusio
n GPS had dug up the divorce records of a Romney donor and labeled him a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.” Fusion GPS understood what liberal media audiences wanted to believe about the world. The company became an important part of the media ecosystem because it also knew what journalists needed to get their stories published: sources, background, and above all a compelling narrative.

  “Lots of these investigative firms are made up of ex-cops or ex–FBI guys,” a former editor tells me over breakfast at a DC hotel in February 2019. “They do solid work, but it’s dull, plodding, like reality itself most of the time. Simpson and Fritsch are former journalists. They’re unique in that they know what makes for a front-page story.”

  Fusion GPS typically refers to the opposition research documents it disseminates as “dossiers.” Most famously, former British spy Christopher Steele’s Trump-Russia reports became known as the “Steele Dossier.”

  By the time Fusion GPS hired Steele in May 2016, the company had already produced several separate dossiers on Trump and his circle’s relations to Russia and former Soviet-bloc states.

  At the end of breakfast, my friend hands over a large yellow folder containing four documents along with clips of dozens of news stories from major media outlets that relied on Fusion GPS’s open-source research. The number of stories, the repetition of themes, subject matter, names, and even phrases used in press reporting, show that the four documents drove the media campaign targeting Trump and associates that began in early spring 2016. Those four documents were protodossiers. They constituted the skeleton of the dossier that would come to be attributed to the former British spy. The sheer volume of research involved in compiling the four protodossiers, culled from US and foreign media sources, shows that the anti-Trump project was in an advanced stage many months before Steele came on board.