The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  In any case, the Clinton campaign was not concerned primarily with the possibility of the candidate being charged with mishandling classified information. Had charges been brought, virtually every cabinet member with whom she’d communicated would have been implicated, including the president.

  Obama had not only exchanged emails with her on her private, unsecure account but had done so while she was on the territory of a foreign adversary: Russia. Clinton had sent an email to Obama during her late-June 2012 trip to Saint Petersburg. In an interview with the FBI, Clinton “stated she must have sent it from the plane.” The FBI concluded that “it is reasonably likely that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s private email.”

  It was also possible that Russian intelligence, as well as other intelligence services, had more Clinton emails. The US secretary of state’s communications are among those most highly prized by intelligence services, friendly and hostile, the world over. Clinton had made hers especially vulnerable by using an unsecure server.

  Maybe a spy agency wouldn’t release them. They would offer valuable insight into, or blackmail material on, the woman everyone assumed was going to be the next US president. But someone else might drop them: maybe an opposition research shop or just a private citizen eager to hand Trump an “October surprise.” Maybe a journalist had them. Maybe Assange did.

  Thus, even after FBI director James Comey officially cleared Clinton on July 5 of mishandling classified information—even as he indicated that at least some of the thirty thousand emails she’d deleted had been work related—her problems were far from over. If the deleted emails were published—and there must have been some that would prove hard to explain away—there was no changing the message. But the reception of the news could be shaped by changing the focus: Ignore the content of Clinton-related emails, and pay attention to who dropped them and why.

  The Steele Dossier was corroboration of the espionage operation that had been targeting Trump associates since March. Why did mysterious figures approach Trump officials—Papadopoulos, Page, Miller, Caputo, Stone, Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort—and usually with offers of dirt on Hillary Clinton that originated in Russia? The answer was in Steele’s report: the Kremlin wanted to help Trump, the candidate it had been cultivating, according to Steele, for at least five years.

  Or imagine watching TV and seeing those figures move in and out of the Trump circle. Without naming Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, Henry Greenberg, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Rinat Akhmetshin, and Stefan Halper, the dossier spelled out their purpose in bold letters at the bottom third of the screen. Steele’s June 20 report was the chyron synched to the visuals: Trump is taking dirt on Clinton from the Russians.

  It looks as though the Clinton campaign was defending against a potential “October surprise.”

  The same day Comey exonerated Clinton, FBI agent Michael Gaeta visited Steele in London. Gaeta was assigned to the Rome embassy in the FBI’s legal attaché office. He had previously worked with Steele investigating corruption in world soccer’s governing board, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Gaeta reportedly turned white when he read Steele’s memos on Trump. Presumably he was alarmed by Steele’s findings. But there were questions the FBI agent might have asked the Brit about his June 20 report.

  Why had the Russians been cultivating Trump for five years? How had they known that the host of the top-rated TV show Celebrity Apprentice would someday run for president?

  Why would a serious intelligence service like Russia’s hand over control of an intelligence file on the next president of the United States to Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov? Did Moscow customarily entrust sensitive intelligence operations to press attachés?

  And above all, why would Putin go out of his way to provoke the woman everyone assumed would be the next president by helping her opponent?

  None of it made sense. Perhaps that’s why Steele and his confederates went through Gaeta. They may have seen him as a mark. Otherwise, why wouldn’t Steele simply take his reports to FBI counterintelligence? Instead he went to an FBI agent whose focus was organized crime. What did he know about the inner workings of the Kremlin?

  The same, of course, could be said of Steele. According to his friend Bruce Ohr, Steele was an expert in Russian organized crime.

  Gaeta and Steele had worked together in the past on what had essentially been an organized crime case. Press reports claimed that Steele was celebrated in US law enforcement circles for having helped the Justice Department win dozens of indictments of FIFA officials in 2015.

  That was part of Steele’s legend. It credentialed his Trump-Russia reports. The FBI officially assessed Steele to be “reliable as previous reporting from [Steele] has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.” However, it appears that Steele’s contribution to the FIFA case was overstated.

  In 2009, Steele left MI6, founded a private intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, and was reportedly hired by a consortium sponsoring England’s efforts to win the 2018 World Cup. The England bid’s backers wanted to know what their rivals were up to, and Steele was reportedly directed to focus on Russia.

  He contacted Andrew Jennings, a then-sixty-six-year-old investigative journalist who’d covered sports corruption for decades. In 2006, Jennings had written a book on FIFA: FOUL! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals.

  In late 2009, Steele asked to meet the reporter in his hometown in northwest England. “He came up to Penrith for lunch,” Jennings tells me by Skype. “He’s a very intelligent guy.” He says that he talked with Steele about FIFA head Sepp Blatter and some of the more notoriously corrupt local football associations, with particular attention to the Americas and the Caribbean. “I’d been on the story since 2001,” says Jennings. “I gave Steele the basic background on FIFA, and he got it pretty quickly. It’s an organized crime racket.”

  It appears that while Steele was working for the sponsors of the England 2018 bid, he contacted the FBI to discuss his research. Shortly after the new year, says Jennings, Steele invited Jennings to London to meet with US law enforcement officials. One was a young FBI agent named Jared Randall. The other two were Michael Gaeta and head of the Department of Justice’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, Bruce Ohr. The Americans were attentive, and Jennings was enthusiastic. “The FBI guys were very serious,” he says. “I’d been working on this for years, and there were no national police in the world who were interested in pursuing corruption in FIFA, and then the FBI turns up at my door. I’m thinking this could be very good.”

  I ask Jennings if he shared documents with Steele and the US officials. “Not that I remember,” says the journalist. He briefed them, as he had Steele.

  The last time Jennings spoke with Steele was in 2011. “I tended to trust him,” says the journalist. “He didn’t seem like the sort of guy to make stuff up, because it wouldn’t take long before someone caught on if it wasn’t true. And that would discredit all that he’s done.”

  Jennings wrote two more books on FIFA, one published just before the Justice Department handed down more than a dozen indictments in December 2015: The Dirty Game: Uncovering the Scandal at FIFA. DOJ brought no charges against Russian officials or institutions.

  There is no public evidence that Steele’s research into Russia’s 2018 bid panned out. He contributed intelligence he’d collected on Russia to a database regarding rival bids. However, the information on Russia from the database was never officially made public. The intelligence, one source told the press at the time, was “incendiary” but was not thought to be “legally credible.”

  Finally in 2014, nearly four years after Russia was awarded the World Cup, the work for which Steele had reportedly been hired began to surface. The former British spy leaked his findings to the press. In a report two journalists filed with the British Parliament, Steele is referred to as the “MI6 source.” He drew a portrait of a wide-scale Russian government camp
aign, including top Putin allies, to corrupt the bidding process and win the international tournament. But he had no evidence to prove it.

  “What you need to remember about this is the way this was done in Russia is that nothing was written down,” Steele told the journalists. “Don’t expect me or anyone else to produce a document with Putin’s signature saying please X bribe Y with this amount in this way. He’s not going to do that. Putin is an ex–intelligence officer. Everything he does has to be deniable.”

  It would not require the professional habits of an intelligence officer to avoid signing documents providing evidence of a criminal conspiracy. Steele’s bluster hid his failure. Indeed, his 2014 account of Russia’s World Cup bid foreshadowed his reporting on the Trump team’s ties to Russia.

  According to Steele, the central figure in the World Cup scheme was Igor Sechin, the CEO of the Russian energy giant Rosneft. Sechin, Steele claimed, was Putin’s proxy, offering officials from Qatar energy deals in exchange for supporting Russia’s 2018 bid. Also according to Steele, the key data point was Sechin’s visit to Qatar in April 2010 to discuss joint projects to develop gas deposits in the Russian Arctic. “We always suspected and I think there were indications that there were other items on the agenda of which the World Cup was one,” he said.

  One of Steele’s informants—“extremely well placed,” boasted the former spy—later confirmed the MI6 veteran’s hunch: “We got something from a source saying that this was significantly related to the World Cup.” He continued, “Our conclusion was that if there was collusion [between Qatar and Russia] it was done through the energy sector. Gas deals. Igor Sechin went just before the vote.”

  Steele must have been fixated with Sechin. Just two years after he named him as Putin’s bagman for Russia’s World Cup bid, Steele identified him as the mastermind of the Kremlin’s effort to tilt the US presidential election to Trump.

  In a July 19 report for Fusion GPS, Steele claimed that Carter Page had met with Sechin in Moscow. According to Steele’s memo, Sechin “raised with PAGE the issues of future bilateral energy cooperation and prospects for an associated move to lift Ukraine-related western sanctions on Russia.” He was repeating the precise pattern he had set out in his FIFA investigation: collusion, through the energy sector, with Igor Sechin in control. The ex-spy simply swapped out Qatar for the Trump campaign.

  Page, according to Steele’s memo, had also met with a Russian official who mentioned the compromising material “the Kremlin possessed on TRUMP’s Democratic presidential rival, Hillary CLINTON, and its possible release to the Republican’s campaign team.”

  When the WikiLeaks emails dropped on July 22, three days before the Democratic National Convention began, it wasn’t Clinton’s thirty thousand deleted emails but emails between DNC insiders about sticking it to Clinton’s rival Bernie Sanders.

  The Clinton campaign was prepared to identify who had done it. And even explain why.

  The cybersecurity firm hired by the campaign, CrowdStrike, claimed it had been a Russian hack.

  Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook pushed it one step further—the Russians, he told CNN’s Jake Tapper on July 24, had done it to help Trump. “I don’t think it’s coincidental these emails were released on the eve of our convention here,” he said.

  The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum reinforced the campaign’s messaging. She complained there was too much attention paid to the emails and not enough to who dropped them and why.

  “Most of those covering this story,” Applebaum wrote in her July 25 column, “are not interested in the nature of the hackers, and they are not asking why the Russians apparently chose to pass the emails on to WikiLeaks at this particular moment, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention. They are focusing instead on the content of what were meant to be private emails.”

  The echo chamber was primed.

  During the convention, the Clinton campaign’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, and foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, had briefed the broadcast media on what other Clinton operatives had been telling the print press for several months: that the Trump team had suspicious connections to the Kremlin. So when Trump jokingly called for Russia to publish Clinton’s thirty thousand deleted emails, the echo chamber roared. In the media environment the Clinton campaign had created, the GOP candidate unknowingly lent credibility to the disinformation campaign designed to destroy him.

  On July 29, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked his guests about the leaked DNC emails, “Do we know how this is going to play out and not just for the DNC but even for the Trump campaign if it, in fact, is shown that Russia is behind this? Not that there would be any Trump collusion with Russia, obviously, but the fact, would there be blowback for the Trump campaign?”

  New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman said that the “Clinton campaign is basically saying that there’s collusion between Trump and Russia.”

  The Clinton campaign was using Steele’s language and briefing on it: collusion between Trump and Russia.

  On July 30, Steele was in Washington and saw the Ohrs, his old acquaintances Bruce and fellow Fusion GPS contractor Nellie. Over breakfast, he told them about the work for which the Clinton campaign had commissioned him. He told them about Carter Page’s meeting with Igor Sechin. He talked about Oleg Deripaska’s lawyer, who was collecting information on money Manafort might have stolen from the oligarch. He also told them about one of his sources, a high-level former Russian intelligence official.

  Steele’s most significant finding was nearly identical to claims made by Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook. According to Steele’s July 26 memo, the WikiLeaks dump had been evidence of a “well-developed conspiracy between [Trump officials] and Russian leadership.” It had been managed, Steele claimed, by Paul Manafort with “Carter PAGE, and others, as intermediaries.”

  The day after Steele met with the Ohrs, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation on the Trump campaign. Australian diplomat Alexander Downer had tipped off a State Department official based in London regarding another Trump intermediary. George Papadopoulos had been told by Joseph Mifsud, a Rome-based academic alleged to have ties to Moscow, that the Russians had thousands of Clinton’s emails.

  The investigation was opened on a Sunday, which was peculiar enough. Even odder was the fact that the probe—called “Crossfire Hurricane”—was not run out of a field office as it normally would be. Instead, top officials exerted direct control by running the operation out of FBI headquarters in Washington.

  Chapter 7

  THE INSURANCE POLICY

  PETER STRZOK WAS LONELY. It was August 2, and the deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division had just arrived in London. His mistress, Lisa Page, was back in Washington. Strzok had wanted her to come with him, but she couldn’t. They both had their jobs to do now that the Bureau had officially opened a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign.

  Strzok was the lead agent. Page was special counsel to Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. She had come up with the name for the investigation: Crossfire Hurricane.

  The same top FBI officials who had been running the Clinton investigation—McCabe, Strzok, and Page—were now officially investigating the other presidential campaign. They opened the investigation on the Papadopoulos information, but the parameters of the probe included Page, Flynn, and Manafort as well. From the FBI’s point of view, they were all satellites circulating in Trump’s orbit; the Bureau was investigating the candidate.

  Not all of the FBI’s investigations, for instance, typical criminal investigations, are classified at high levels. Counterintelligence investigations are classified at least at the Secret level, cordoning off the investigation from colleagues. The FBI has oversight mechanisms for counterintelligence investigations, but the Bureau’s highest-ranking officials—number one, Comey, and number two, McCabe—were participants in the operation.

  Crossfire Hurricane was run out of headq
uarters, which meant that the agents involved were more adept at bureaucratic infighting. They were political by necessity. Further, running it out of the FBI’s main office—from the counterespionage section of the counterintelligence division, to be exact—ensured that it would be as closely held as possible. The conspirators, up to the highest level, could update one another in person with less risk of leaving a record of their communications.

  The fact that Strzok and Page texted on their FBI phones is an index of their arrogance. They were in communication all the time. They regularly complained about bureaucratic rivals. He liked to text her about the important things he was doing, the things they were working on together. “And damn this feels momentous,” he had texted her just before he left for England. “Because this matters.” Strzok was in London to interview sources. He met with the Australian diplomat Downer and likely with Halper, too.

  Lisa Page told Strzok that he was “meant to protect the country.”

  He texted back: “I can protect our country at many levels.”

  He liked having her approval. He was needy. They were both married to other people.

  She tended to believe what the media said about Trump. Many of the stories in the press were the same stories that Steele was feeding to the FBI.

  Glenn Simpson was introducing Steele to reporters in the late summer and early fall. It was as if Simpson was afraid to let Steele go out on his own. He escorted the former spy to the offices of the Washington Post and the New York Times and met with a New Yorker reporter at a Washington restaurant.

  No one was publishing any of Steele’s claims yet, but the press was looking into them, especially the story about the tape of the urinating prostitutes. In the meantime, journalists were publishing Trump stories synced to the protodossiers.

  On August 14, Gary Silverman published an article in the Financial Times about Felix Sater and Tevfik Arif, both in the May 20 protodossier.