by Lee Smith
In 2010, Remnick published a biography of Obama, but had he, too, paid no attention to the policies of the man he had interviewed frequently over nearly a decade? Remnick knew Russia, too, having headed the Washington Post’s Moscow Bureau as the Cold War ended. Did he really believe that having a campaign adviser who held a stake in the Russian energy sector suggested that the candidate had questionable loyalties?
Of all those exercises in staged ignorance, Kristol’s article was the most willfully vicious. At the Weekly Standard, Michael Flynn was regarded as a hero.
I worked at the magazine for seven years, writing mostly on the Middle East—the Syrian war, the Iran nuclear deal, and Obama’s partnership with Iran and Russia, all issues that Flynn tackled in and out of the Obama administration. He was a hard-charging intelligence officer who killed terrorists and saved American lives in the Middle East. After Flynn left the DIA, Kristol and Stephen Hayes, a Weekly Standard writer who eventually became editor-in-chief, used him as a source for articles about the Osama bin Laden documents, as in this August 2015 piece:
“There are letters about Iran’s role, influence, and acknowledgment of enabling al Qaeda operatives to pass through Iran as long as al Qaeda did their dirty work against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, tells The Weekly Standard. “What Congress should demand is to see all the UBL [Osama bin Laden] documents related to Iran and all the documents related to intentions of AQ into the future—they are very telling.”
Now, less than a year later, Kristol was suggesting that a retired three-star general, a combat veteran who’d served his country for thirty-three years, had a suspicious relationship with an adversarial power because he had once sat at the same table as Putin.
Fusion GPS had done the job, or part of the job, the Clinton campaign had paid for; with the anti-Trump echo chamber, it had built a solid thing. It was made of the same human matter the Obama administration had used to sell the Iran nuclear deal. As Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, explained, the echo chamber included officials drawn from the administration, as well as newly minted experts from the think tank and academic communities, and the press. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” Rhodes told The New York Times Magazine in May 2016.
Rhodes spoke in the article about exploiting younger journalists, twenty-seven-year-olds who “literally know nothing.” But the real core of the echo chamber was the older, experienced journalists, the men and women at the top of their profession whom Rhodes had manipulated for two terms. All they wanted was access to Obama, and as the deans of American journalism, they deserved no less. Rhodes had granted Goldberg five interviews with Obama. Remnick was given enough time with the president to write a biography. They were reliable. It’s hardly a coincidence that they were among the first to push the Trump-Russia story.
The other big names were equally useful to Fusion GPS’s campaign. Applebaum was an award-winning author who had written extensively about the post-Soviet landscape. If she was calling Trump a Kremlin stooge, it was expert insight. Kristol was the intellectual impresario of the neoconservative movement. As a Republican, he lent the Russia echo chamber the appearance of bipartisan depth.
The paper of record, the New York Times, weighed in as well, giving the Fusion GPS–generated campaign its stamp of approval.
Columnist Andrew Rosenthal pondered over Flynn’s appearance at the RT dinner. In a July 20 article, the son of the paper’s former executive editor A. M. Rosenthal concluded that “the idea that there is some nefarious undertone to Trump’s obsession with Putin—is the Russian leader flattering Trump to somehow gain control over him?—somehow does not seem entirely crazy.”
On July 22, the Times’ Paul Krugman filed “Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate.” The Nobel Prize–winning economist thought it was suspicious that the GOP platform on Ukraine “was watered down to blandness on the insistence of Trump representatives.”
These weren’t twenty-seven-year-olds grinding out copy but opinion leaders. They were authors, top validators, and once you got them to say something, the pack was sure to follow.
And just in time, for the Clinton campaign was preparing for potential problems.
Chapter 5
THE FUSION RUSSIANS
FUSION GPS had joined the Clinton campaign in March to fill the media echo chamber with reports of the Trump team’s suspicious ties to the Kremlin. At the same time, there was an analogous operation under way in the shadows. Trump associates were repeatedly approached by figures offering them Kremlin-sourced dirt on Clinton.
Sometimes the dangles were more specific: Trump advisers were told about Clinton’s emails and that the Russians had them.
There were six known suspicious approaches made to the Trump team between the time Fusion GPS was hired and the Democratic National Convention, which began on July 25. The operatives who came after Trump associates all had ties to the FBI, other Western intelligence services, or the Clintons. Taken together, it looks like a sting operation targeting the Trump circle.
GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS
George Papadopoulos was one of the five foreign policy advisers named by Trump in his March interview with the Washington Post. That same month, he traveled from London to Rome on a delegation sponsored by his then employer, the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP). In Rome, he was introduced to another LCILP employee, Joseph Mifsud, a former Maltese diplomat.
Mifsud taught intelligence and law enforcement officers in London as well as Rome, where he worked at Link Campus University. The university trains intelligence and law enforcement officials from several NATO countries. US intelligence officials from the CIA, NSA, and FBI lectured and researched at Link. Mifsud’s professional network comprised high-ranking western European politicians, diplomats, and spies. He was especially well connected in British and Italian circles.
Mifsud told Papadopoulos he had high-level Russian contacts. He connected him by email to a director of a Russian think tank. In London, Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to a young Russian woman he said was Putin’s niece. She wasn’t.
In April, Mifsud emailed the Trump adviser from Moscow, where he was participating in an academic conference. On returning, he met Papadopoulos for breakfast in a London hotel April 26. Mifsud reportedly told him that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton “in the form of thousands of emails.”
Papadapoulos said he had never told anyone on the Trump campaign about the conversation with Mifsud. Neither Mueller nor anyone else discovered evidence to contradict his claim.
Papadopoulos was in for another strange London encounter two weeks later. Australia’s envoy to the United Kingdom asked to meet him in a London wine bar. Papadopoulos said he didn’t understand why a senior foreign official like Alexander Downer, formerly Australia’s foreign minister, had sought a private meeting with an unpaid campaign adviser.
Downer’s circles, like Mifsud’s, consisted of high-ranking Western intelligence officials. He’d served on the board of advisors of Hakluyt, a prominent private intelligence firm founded by former MI6 officers. He had ties to the Clintons, too. In 2006, he had arranged a $25 million grant to the Clinton Foundation for its AIDS prevention and education efforts.
Papadopoulos said that Downer kept sticking his phone into his face. He was certain the Australian diplomat was recording their May meeting.
STEPHEN MILLER AND CARTER PAGE
In May and June, Trump advisers Stephen Miller and Carter Page were invited to the University of Cambridge for a July symposium supported by Stefan Halper’s academic department. Speakers at the event included Halper’s Cambridge colleague former MI6 director Sir Richard Dearlove. Miller declined the invitation. Page accepted the invitation tendered by Halper’s associate Steven Schrage. At the symposium, Page was engaged in conversations by Halper and Downer, the Australian diplomat who’d met with Papadopou
los. Halper told Page he knew Paul Manafort; It’s unclear what Downer might have discussed with Page.
MICHAEL CAPUTO AND ROGER STONE
Also in May, a man calling himself Henry Greenberg contacted Trump campaign communications adviser Michael Caputo, who arranged for him to meet with another campaign aide, Roger Stone. Greenberg told Stone that he could provide “damaging information” on Clinton in exchange for $2 million. Stone turned him down. Caputo and Stone later learned that Greenberg was a Russian national with a criminal record. In 2015, Greenberg had signed a court affidavit claiming that he had been an FBI informant for seventeen years.
DONALD TRUMP, JR., JARED KUSHNER, AND PAUL MANAFORT
Perhaps the most remarkable episode in the series was initiated by Emin Agalarov, son of Aras Agalarov, the Azerbaijani businessman who played a starring role in Fusion GPS’s May 20 protodossier.
The Agalarovs told the Washington Post of their friendship and business relationship with Trump. But when they reached out with information that could help his presidential campaign, hurt his rival, and, most important, earn his gratitude, they chose instead to go through intermediaries. The Agalarovs arranged for a British music publicist, Rob Goldstone, to email Donald Trump, Jr. Goldstone wrote the candidate’s son that the Agalarovs had “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” The phrasing of the email appears designed to frame the Trump team for conspiring with a foreign government: “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Trump Jr. promptly responded, “If it’s what you say I love it.”
It was the only known time a Trump campaign adviser expressed willingness to take damaging information regarding Clinton that was said to be sourced to the Kremlin.
On June 9, Goldstone went to the Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan to meet with Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. He brought with him a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. She was sent to convey the information promised to the Trump campaign. The senior campaign officials were disappointed to find out that she had no dirt on Clinton. She wanted instead to talk about sanctions imposed on senior Russian officials under a 2012 US law. She had been hired to help repeal those sanctions. She reported directly to a senior Kremlin official. And Glenn Simpson, who had also been hired to help those efforts, reported to her.
Simpson, says one former journalist familiar with Fusion GPS’s operations, is the man with the contacts, while Peter Fritsch is the partner who keeps the trains running on time.
“Simpson is the typical kind of investigative reporter who needs to be reined in from time to time to keep him from wandering into conspiracy theory territory,” says the former journalist. “That’s Fritsch’s role; he’s the guy who maintains order there.”
Simpson had distinguished himself as an aggressive, if sometimes overzealous, reporter. He had cowritten a 1998 Wall Street Journal story alleging that a White House steward had seen Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky alone together and found tissues with “lipstick and other stains” following one of their encounters. The story was false, and the Journal retracted its account the next week. Clinton White House press secretary Mike McCurry called it “the sleaziest episode in the history of American journalism.”
Simpson jumped on the big national security stories of the day: terrorism and the post-9/11 Middle East, as well as organized crime in the post-Soviet Eastern Bloc. He was also interested in Beltway banditry and coauthored a 1996 book with the political scientist Larry Sabato, Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics.
It was perhaps inevitable that Paul Manafort would get Simpson’s attention. The longtime GOP power broker was at the nexus of Washington influence peddling and post-Soviet money. In 2007, Simpson and his wife, Mary Jacoby, also a reporter at the Journal, wrote their first of several articles on Manafort and his work for the Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych. It’s a piece of straightforward reporting on how the Republican establishment introduced former Eastern Bloc figures like Yanukovych to the ways of Washington. However, Simpson’s characterization of Yanukovych as pro-Putin was evidence of his limits as a foreign policy journalist—or that he was pushing against one Ukrainian faction on behalf of others.
A quick glance at a map shows why. Ukraine is a buffer state, weak in relation to its neighbors to the west, Europe, and east, Russia. Russians make up Ukraine’s largest ethnic minority, nearly 20 percent. To call a Ukrainian official pro-Putin is meaningless. No Ukrainian head of state can long survive, never mind hold power, with prolonged opposition to Kyiv’s mightier, nuclear-armed neighbor in Moscow. The trick for any Ukrainian leader is to find a way to balance Europe and Russia against each other. Manafort advised Yanukovych as president to inch closer to Europe with an association agreement, a trade deal with some political benefits.
In September 2013, Yanukovych was poised to sign and Putin threatened economic measures that were likely to send Ukraine into default. Yanukovych withdrew Ukraine from the agreement, and protestors filled the streets of Kyiv, leading to violence. In February 2014, he went into exile in Russia, from which he described Putin’s reannexation of Crimea as a tragedy. EU and US diplomats complained bitterly about Russia’s brutal actions in a conflict they’d helped stoke, even as they knew Western leaders would never entangle their interests in a fight on Russia’s border.
In the spring and summer of 2016, the US press corps, feeding from Fusion GPS’s trough, was happy to accept Simpson’s description of Yanukovych as pro-Putin. Since Trump adviser Manafort had worked for the Ukrainian, the fiction further advanced the Trump-Russia narrative.
Experienced Russia hands saw early on that Simpson knew little about Russia or Ukraine and used his conspiracy theory predilections to engage in large-bore theories about what was going on there. “Glenn knew the names of a few Russian oligarchs, and whenever something happened in Russia, he seemed to link those events to one of them,” says a national security journalist. “He seemed to know what he was talking about—if you didn’t know much about Russia.” Oleg Deripaska’s is a name that regularly appears in Simpson’s Russia reporting. “He was obsessed with Deripaska,” says the journalist.
Deripaska is mentioned in a few of the protodossiers. “UPDATE—Paul Manafort,” reports that one of his shell companies is pursuing Manafort “for allegedly diverting millions of dollars and not delivering on promised investments.” Nevertheless, Simpson’s contractor Christopher Steele apparently did not share his concerns about Deripaska. In January 2016, the former British spy lobbied his and Simpson’s mutual friend Bruce Ohr on behalf of the oligarch.
Steele and Ohr were among the law enforcement and intelligence professionals who shared Simpson’s interest in the chaotic post-Soviet environment. Simpson’s interest in uncovering Eurasian organized crime appears to have steered Fusion GPS’s work in the opposite direction.
“Fusion GPS started as an opposition research firm,” says the national security journalist. “Then their work in Latin America pushed them in another direction, political and dirty.” A few years after its founding, the company was working for foreign interests allegedly involved in criminal enterprises.
In 2014, Fusion GPS was hired for a job with Derwick Associates, a firm of five young Venezuelan businessmen with ties to Hugo Chávez’s government. Derwick’s business practices had attracted unwanted media attention, and they sought help deflecting it.
“Between 2009 and 2011,” says independent Venezuelan journalist Alek Boyd, “Derwick bribed their way into twelve no-bid contracts, worth in total about $2.2 billion, of which they stole through overpriced equipment and services about $1 billion.”
Derwick has denied this, and a 2013 lawsuit concerning the charges was dismissed.
Boyd explains that the populist Venezuelan government needed help keeping the energ
y sector afloat and turned to the Russians for help. “As soon as Chávez took over the state oil conglomerate,” he says, “he fired some twenty thousand people, so he had to replace their knowledge and experience. He looked to international partnerships, which would take a large percentage but not a majority stake. Russia was a staunch supporter of Chávez.”
That created opportunities for Derwick. “Around 2013 Derwick got into a partnership with Gazprombank,” says Boyd. “But Derwick had no track record related to oil. All they had was the millions they’d misappropriated and their network of contacts, which they used to provide an expensive loan to Gazprom and insert themselves into a joint oil deal.”
When journalists started asking questions of Derwick, the firm threatened legal action. “Most corrupt Venezuelan businessmen get their money and buy a condo in Miami and fly off into the sunset quietly,” says Boyd. “But these guys waged an international censorship campaign, and it was the clumsiness of the campaign that got my attention.”
Derwick called in Fusion GPS. In 2014, Boyd received a tip that Peter Fritsch had flown to Caracas to meet with Derwick principals. Boyd called another member of the Fusion GPS team he knew, Thomas Catan. “I met Catan when he was covering the 2006 Venezuelan elections for The Times of London,” he says. He asked Catan about Fritsch’s trip to meet the Derwick principals. Catan denied that Fritsch had flown to Caracas. “But I had a copy of a hotel reservation from July 2014 with Fritsch’s name on it,” says Boyd.
The purpose of Fritsch’s visit to Venezuela was to meet with reporters from the Wall Street Journal who were working on an investigative article about Derwick. Fritsch and a group of Derwick executives arranged to meet with Journal reporter José de Córdoba, Boyd explains. “They said they’d provide de Córdoba with documents to show the contracts were legitimate, but they never did.” Boyd says that the purpose of the trip was to bully the Journal into silence. Fritsch had once been Córdoba’s boss at the Journal. Córdoba told a colleague that the “blatant intimidation tactics” had made him feel “uncomfortable.” He eventually published a story, but Fritsch apparently derailed a longer investigative piece.