The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  Other journalists covering Derwick were smeared with false allegations, including the Venezuelan journalist and human rights activist Thor Halvorssen. He says Fusion GPS was behind a smear campaign targeting him. He filed a civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act lawsuit against Simpson, Fritsch, and others in the Eastern District of New York. The lawsuit alleges that Fusion GPS’s principals worked for a group of Venezuelan criminals, Derwick, to smear whistle-blowers in a multibillion-dollar fraud in Venezuela. “They circulated a fake dossier about me and placed false accusations in the media that I was a heroin addict, a pedophile, and an embezzler,” he says. “Their tactic is to manufacture accusations so appalling that being innocent is not a defense,” he continues. “Fusion GPS’ strategy is to make you radioactive as a whistle-blower and delete any credibility you may have. What’s interesting is that they have a record of engaging in the same pattern of accusations against multiple people. They’re mercenaries.” These claims are anchored in his RICO suit.

  Boyd, too, was smeared on social media, describing him as a drug trafficker, extortionist, car thief, and pedophile. Unknown culprits burglarized his home in London, according to London police reports. Photographs of his young daughters, taken with a telephoto lens, were put into his raincoat pocket. He also received anonymous notes threatening his daughters with sexual abuse.

  “Derwick doesn’t understand how media works” says Boyd. Fusion GPS was there to lead them and explain it to them. Because of their background, they have an impressive array of contacts they can rely on to discredit someone.”

  Smear campaigns and press intimidation became signature Fusion GPS tactics.

  When the firm was hired in spring 2014 to help Russian officials repeal US legislation sanctioning Putin associates, Fusion GPS targeted the driving force behind the law: the fifty-three-year-old Chicago-born financier William Browder. Browder’s company, Hermitage Capital Management, had opened for business in Russia in the mid-1990s and become one of the country’s largest investment advisers. In 2005, Browder was expelled from Russia and his offices were raided. Seized documents were later used to misappropriate $230 million in taxes that his company had paid to the Russian government.

  Browder hired a Russian tax specialist, Sergei Magnitsky, to investigate. In 2008, Magnitsky was arrested. Russian authorities demanded that he sign a false statement admitting that he had stolen the $230 million. Magnitsky refused. His health steadily deteriorated in prison, and on November 16, 2009, the thirty-seven-year-old Magnitsky was found dead. Independent inquiries showed that he’d been beaten by Russian authorities, leading to his death.

  Browder knew that there was nothing to be done in Moscow but that he could hurt Putin and his associates by going after the money they’d parked in Europe and the United States. He found allies on Capitol Hill, and in 2012 the Magnitsky Act, targeting the officials and regime cronies responsible for the Russian’s death, was signed into law.

  Two years later, the Justice Department opened a case against a Russian holding company, Prevezon, for laundering money stolen in the fraud Magnitsky had uncovered. The company was owned by Denis Katsyv, the son of a former Russian minister who frequently employed Natalia Veselnitskaya. “She’s an arm of the Russian government,” says Browder. Court documents filed with the Southern District of New York show that she was producing documents for the Russian government in response to requests from the US government. “It shows that she is not just an independent lawyer but is employed by the Russian government,” says Browder.

  Veselnitskaya was one of Moscow’s instruments for undoing the Magnitsky Act. She hired the law firm BakerHostetler to litigate the Prevezon case in the US, and the firm brought on Fusion GPS for “litigation support.” Sources explain that their job was to manufacture and market a cover story to the press in order to smear Browder and Magnitsky. “Glenn Simpson was running an advocacy campaign for an agent of the Russian government,” says Browder. “He was employed by Veselnitskaya to assist the Russians in discrediting me and the Magnitsky Act.”

  Veselnitskaya brought on another associate to push the anti-Magnitsky, anti-Browder campaign on Capitol Hill, Rinat Akhmetshin. A relatively well known figure among Washington, DC, journalists working the national security beat, Akhmetshin lobbies on behalf of various Russian-related interests. He’s reportedly a former Soviet intelligence officer. “I’d never heard of Akhmetshin until he popped up in this story,” says Browder.

  Veselnitskaya and Simpson’s main line of attack was to deny that Magnitsky had been killed and put forth an alternative narrative. “They said Magnitsky wasn’t murdered. Nobody did it. And he wasn’t a whistle-blower,” says Browder. “Therefore, since the Magnitsky Act was advocated by me under false pretenses, it should be repealed.”

  Browder tried to interest journalists in a story about the role that Simpson and Fusion GPS had played in the campaign targeting him and Magnitsky. There were no takers. “I discovered that Glenn Simpson was so deeply embedded as a source for different stories, no one wanted to write a story about him,” he says. “I was told explicitly by journalists in those organizations that their editors wouldn’t touch Simpson, he was so firmly entrenched. I was told by a few journalists who wanted to do a story on Fusion GPS that Simpson called their editor and tried to get them fired.”

  Simpson had the press on his side. He peddled the fake narrative about Browder and Magnitsky to a number of US journalists and apparently found a taker in NBC News’ Ken Dilanian. Browder shared documents with me chronicling Dilanian’s reporting on the Magnitsky Act, reporting that Browder says is derived from Fusion GPS’s smear campaign. Browder provided Dilanian with voluminous evidence regarding the circumstances of Magnitsky’s murder. Yet the reporter continued to contest the facts.

  Eventually Browder’s lawyers stepped in and responded to Dilanian’s employer. The reporter’s questions, the lawyers told NBC executives, indicated that he was ignoring the details of the case and the evidence that Browder had produced in response to his questions. “It is inconceivable,” wrote Browder’s lawyers, “that Mr. Dilanian could publish an article for an esteemed media company such as NBC while ignoring this evidence.”

  Whatever story Dilanian might have been reporting did not run. But Browder saw the reporter’s questions as evidence of a larger maneuver. “April 2016, the smear campaign began in earnest,” he says. “The point was to assert that all the facts of the Magnitsky case were not true, so in effect I’d been lying to Congress.”

  Simpson met with Veselnitskaya the day before and after her June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower. His narrative discrediting Browder and Magnitsky was recycled into her talking points. She brought Akhmetshin with her and repeated much of what Dilanian recited in his correspondence with Browder. She told the Trump aides that Browder was guilty of tax fraud and embezzlement. That was not what Trump team had expected. They’d been hoping for the dirt on Clinton. They stopped the meeting after twenty minutes.

  What happened?

  Fusion GPS had rolled its smear campaign on behalf of Veselnitskaya into its Clinton-funded smear campaign. After all, the goal of the anti-Trump operation was to tie him to the leadership in Moscow. A meeting with a genuinely Kremlin-linked lawyer would dirty senior campaign officials, including the candidate’s son

  It was around that time that someone else was rolled into Fusion GPS’s Trump job: Christopher Steele, who was already working on at least two other Russia projects.

  The former MI6 officer had contacted Bruce Ohr about Deripaska’s visa problems. Also, by April, Steele had reportedly completed an investigation for clients, called “Project Charlemagne,” that looked into Russian interference in European politics.

  It seems that Steele was also already working for the FBI. In February, the ex–British spy had been “admonished”—given specific instructions—by the FBI as a confidential human source.

  The various currents of the anti-Trump operation—Russia,
Fusion GPS, and the FBI—were merging. Steele was the nexus. The former MI6 man, said Simpson, “doesn’t exaggerate, doesn’t make things up, doesn’t sell baloney.” But Fusion GPS had brought on Steele for no other purpose. To market make-believe, Clinton cutouts hired a credentialed Russian expert who was already working for the FBI.

  Chapter 6

  THE AVATAR

  SIMPSON SAID that he had brought on Steele because his company had gathered all the public-record information on Trump and had exhausted open sources. So Fusion GPS hired a specialist who could take the investigation further. Remarkably, in only one month’s time, Steele hit the mother lode. Even though his tenure at the Russia desk had ended seven years before and he hadn’t been back to Russia since his cover had been blown in the late 1990s, Steele’s sources provided him with details that illuminated what Fusion GPS’s May 20 report had barely touched.

  Note how Steele’s June 20 report augmented and expanded the information from a month before.

  THE MAY 20 PROTODOSSIER:

  Donald Trump’s connections to Vladimir Putin’s Russia are deeper than generally appreciated and raise significant national security concerns.

  THE JUNE 20 MEMO:

  Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting, and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by Putin, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.

  MAY 20:

  Trump and his children have travelled to Russia on multiple occasions over the past thirty years, ostensibly to license his name to local partners. The details never materialized.

  JUNE 20:

  So far TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals offered him in Russia in order to further the Kremlin’s cultivation of him.

  MAY 20:

  Credible anecdotal evidence suggests Trump was at least as interested in meeting Russian women on these trips as inking deals.

  JUNE 20:

  Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB [Federal Security Bureau, Russia›s main security and intelligence service] has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.

  The pattern is clear: the June 20 memo used the May 20 protodossier as a template. It picked up themes from the earlier document and sensationalized them. Trump, it said, was not merely connected to Russian businessmen in perhaps suggestive ways; he’d in fact been compromised by the Kremlin. He wasn’t just attracted to Russian women; Russian intelligence had recorded him doing perverted things with Russian women.

  The May 20 document was only one source for the June 20 memo. Steele’s reports incorporated other Clinton-related Trump-Russia research as well.

  For instance, the most memorable claim from the June memo appears to have been cribbed from the reporting that, according to former CIA officer Robert Baer, Clinton associates Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer began in March–April 2016. The Shearer-Blumenthal memos relate that an FSB officer claimed there was film of a woman urinating on Trump and that he had been caught on tape in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton in 2013. Clinton operatives must have believed that urination was a compelling theme, for in the June 20 memo, Steele claimed that Trump had hired prostitutes in 2013 to urinate on a bed in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton, where President Obama had once slept.

  Like the Shearer report, Steele’s memo claimed that Trump’s actions had been documented. “The hotel,” according to Steele, “was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms.”

  What had started as an opposition research project that had turned up little of substance had transformed into a smear campaign. But Fusion GPS didn’t need Steele for that. It had already shown its ability to dirty targets in its work for the Obama campaign, Derwick Associates, and Veselnitskaya.

  So why did Fusion pay Steele a reported $168,000 to put his byline on a dirty tricks operation? The documents themselves provide some clues.

  In addition to the tabloid-style revisions of the June 20 report, and the fact there are no footnotes as there are in the protodossiers, there were other differences between the two documents. First, the May 20 protodosser paid extensive attention, three of fifteen pages, to onetime Trump associate Felix Sater. The felon with alleged ties to Russian organized crime was absent from Steele’s June 20 report and appeared nowhere in the dossier’s subsequent sixteen memos.

  Why was Sater, who had reportedly worked as a confidential informant for the FBI and other US government agencies, missing from the Steele Dossier? Had Fusion GPS been advised not to include him?

  This raises an even more significant issue. Nellie Ohr said she had been hired to look into Trump’s connections to Russian organized crime figures, research reflected in the May 20 protodossier. However, the June 20 report and Steele’s subsequent memos described the Trump team’s clandestine relationship with a foreign power, Russia. These are two different scenarios.

  With the beginning of Steele’s reporting, Fusion GPS changed course. From the May 20 protodossier to the June 20 memo, the Clinton-funded operatives moved from opposition research to a document laying the groundwork for a counterintelligence investigation. The radical shift provides evidence that the dossier was written under direction, with an eye to obtaining a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.

  Finally, Steele’s report made two claims not found in the May 20 document. First, it alleged that “the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his team valuable intelligence on his rivals, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON for several years.” Much of it had come “from bugged conversations CLINTON had made on her various trips to Russia and focused on things she had said which contradicted her current position on various issues. Others were most probably from phone intercepts.” However, according to Steele, the Russians had nothing incriminating on Clinton. The file “comprised mainly eavesdropped conversations of various sorts rather than details/evidence of embarrassing behavior.”

  Presumably, the client that had paid Fusion GPS to distribute Trump-Russia information to the press was relieved to find that the Russians had nothing embarrassing on the candidate. Clinton campaign officials couldn’t have been more delighted had they dictated the finding themselves.

  The next section of the Steele report, however, claimed that the Russians weren’t passing information to Trump or to anyone else. Under the “explicit instructions of PUTIN himself,” Steele claimed, the Clinton information “had not as yet been leaked abroad, including to Trump or his campaign team. At present it was unclear what PUTIN’s intentions were in this regard.”

  So was Russia passing off intelligence on Clinton to Trump or not? Had they given the Trump team Clinton-related dirt previously but were holding off on newer material? The answer is unclear. However, it seems that whoever was directing Steele’s reporting was preparing for the possibility that Clinton’s communications were going to be leaked.

  It appears that the memo was part of a cover story that would not only defend Clinton but also damage her rival; it was the Russians who gave Clinton’s stolen communications to Trump. And he was in the Kremlin’s pocket.

  On June 12, a little more than a week before the date of Steele’s first memo, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had told a British TV interviewer that WikiLeaks had “upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton.” Assange said, “We have emails.”

  It wasn’t clear what he was referring to. WikiLeaks had already posted the thirty thousand emails that Clinton hadn’t deleted from her server and had been obtained lawfully pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request. Was Assange talking about the more than thirty thousand emails she said she’d deleted and couldn’t be located?

  Clinton claimed they had been emails about her daughter, Chelsea’s, wedding, “condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other thi
ngs you typically find in inboxes.” In other words, she had deleted them because they were no one’s business but her own. But what if she’d tampered with official government records? What if she’d destroyed evidence?

  Her emails and the private, unsecure server on which she’d conducted official government business during her term as secretary of state constituted one of the campaign’s major worries. In July 2015, the FBI had opened an investigation into her possible mishandling of classified intelligence. Peter Strzok led the FBI investigation, called “Midyear Exam.” In February 2016, Andrew McCabe took on oversight when he was named deputy FBI director.

  There were concerns inside the FBI that McCabe had a conflict of interest. In March 2015, longtime Clinton associate Terry McAuliffe had encouraged McCabe’s wife to run for a Virginia state senate seat and then arranged for nearly $700,000 in campaign contributions. FBI higher-ups reasoned that since McCabe had taken over the Clinton probe after his wife’s unsuccessful run had ended in November 2015, there was no conflict of interest. That was a poorly reasoned decision; just because his wife’s campaign was over didn’t mean McCabe was no longer indebted.