The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  Kenneth Vogel’s August 18 piece on Politico reported on Manafort’s work for Yanukovych and his “closeness” to a Ukrainian political operative, Konstantin Kilimnik. It appears that whoever identified the “Russian Army–trained linguist” for Vogel didn’t tell him that Kilimnik was also a source for the State Department.

  A September 23 Newsweek article by Kurt Eichenwald described Trump’s foreign business ties to people such as Anar Mammadov, the key figure in the “Trump in Azerbaijan” protodossier.

  On October 19, the Financial Times again reported on Trump’s connections with Sater and Arif.

  A November 6 story on The Daily Beast by Michael Weiss, Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, and James Miller detailed Trump’s connections with the Agalarovs, Sater, and Arif.

  Editors at prominent publications continued to break standard journalistic protocol, assigning and publishing stories about Trump and his Russian connections that others had already printed.

  That didn’t matter to Lisa Page. Articles about Trump and Russia interested her. She sent Strzok the link to a New York Times article about Manafort. She sent her boyfriend the link to another Times article about Trump and Russia, “The Real Plot Against America.” Trump scared Lisa Page. “Trump is a loathsome human,” she texted Strzok.

  “Omg he’s an idiot,” he replied.

  “He’s awful,” she wrote.

  “God Hillary should win 100,000,000–0,” he texted.

  Strzok’s bias against Trump was a problem. He was the lead agent, and it compromised the investigation. But he was also just a man telling a woman what he thought she wanted to hear.

  “Congrats on a woman nominated for President in a major party!” he’d texted during the Democratic National Convention. “About damn time!”

  Strzok wanted to believe that Hillary was deserving. He led a phony investigation of the Democratic candidate’s handling of classified material to clear the way for her inevitable electoral victory. And now he was point man on an operation to dirty a presidential campaign. Had that ever happened at the FBI before, even in the Hoover era? It was third-world stuff, like in Egypt or Argentina. But it was happening in the United States of America.

  Page told him he was protecting the country because that was what they meant to each other: they reflected back to themselves confirmation of their self-images. They were narcissists, just like the candidate they were protecting.

  Clinton had little to offer voters except the promise that they would share in her redemption. Her husband had humiliated her publicly. It seemed the only thing that could make her whole was the presidency. She resented having to earn it; she felt she deserved it. Her supporters understood that. Strzok wanted to show Page that he did, too.

  Page and Strzok shared Clinton’s worldview. Trump supporters were loathsome, deplorables. The two FBI officials were sad that their boss, McCabe’s, wife, Jill, had lost her race for the Virginia state senate. She had run on the Democratic ticket: “Disappointing, but look at the district map,” Strzok texted, “it’s still largely ignorant hillbillys.”

  The intermingling of their self-love bred contempt for others. “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart,” Strzok texted her. “l could SMELL the Trump support.”

  “Yup,” she replied. She was lunching with another FBI lawyer who had a role in Crossfire Hurricane, Sally Moyer. “We both hate everyone and everything,” she texted.

  That was the sensibility of the public servants who decided to spy on Americans exercising their constitutional rights by participating in a political campaign. That was the character of the intelligence bureaucrats who took it into their hands to interfere in an election because they didn’t like their neighbors and the candidate they had chosen to govern the republic. They had a plan to stop Trump.

  “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected,” Strzok texted her, “but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

  When Strzok returned from London, he briefed Comey, who then reported to Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough. “POTUS,” Page texted Strzok, “wants to know everything we’re doing.”

  Other Obama administration principals had also been enlisted, including CIA director John Brennan. At the end of August, Brennan was briefing congressional leaders in classified settings. Brennan testified that he “provided the same briefing to each of the Gang of Eight members.” He may have tailored his briefings to his audience.

  The briefing he gave Nunes was lacking on details. “I’ll tell you what he didn’t brief me on,” says Nunes. “Whatever he told Harry Reid, he didn’t tell me.”

  He didn’t brief Nunes on the dossier. On August 25, Brennan briefed the Senate minority leader.

  Subsequently, on August 27, Reid wrote in an open letter to Comey, “I have recently become concerned that the threat of the Russian government tampering in our presidential election is more extensive than widely known.” In the letter, he referenced “a Trump advisor which was Carter Page.

  Reid’s letter was another channel to get the dossier information to the FBI. It seems it was also an instrument Brennan used to motivate the Bureau. He took credit for getting the probe off the ground.

  He later testified before Congress: “I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion—cooperation occurred.”

  The more sources feeding the FBI with Steele’s reports, the more authentic they appeared to be. Reid was also a vehicle to get Trump-Russia rumors into the press. Just as Fusion GPS was giving Trump-Russia stories to the media, Obama’s intelligence chiefs were feeding congressional leaders the same material, counting on the likelihood that they, too, would give it to reporters.

  On September 8, Comey, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, and Obama’s homeland security advisor, Lisa Monaco, summoned congressional leaders for an unusual briefing. Obama had sent them, reportedly to urge a “show of solidarity and bipartisan unity” against Russian interference in the election.

  “They pulled us into the House Intelligence Committee room for an all-hands briefing,” Nunes recalls. “They called it a Gang of Twelve meeting, which was out of the ordinary.”

  The Gang of Eight is an informal name for the congressional leaders from both parties and the chairs and ranking members from the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, who are briefed on classified intelligence matters by the executive branch.

  “Gang of Twelve,” says Nunes, “included the chair and ranking member from Homeland Security committees in the House and Senate. There had never been a Gang of Twelve meeting before. They were trying to create a stir.”

  The subject of the meeting was Russia and what the intelligence agencies said they were picking up about Russian efforts to shape the upcoming presidential election. However, they provided no details.

  “They had no evidence of anything,” says Nunes. “I was wondering, Why aren’t you giving us information about what they’re up to? Is there anything abnormal about what the Russians are doing? If not, if they’re just doing what they always do, which is interfere with elections, why aren’t you, the executive branch, taking care of it? Why are you coming to us with it?”

  Comey and the others wanted to light a fuse. “They were trying to create the impression that there had been a major occurrence and the Russians were behind it,” Nunes says. “They were trying to coerce Congress to come out with a joint statement of some kind: the Russians were up to something. And they orchestrated a bigger group—‘Gang of Twelve’—to increase the likelihood of leaks.”

  Obama’s intelligence chiefs succeeded in getting more leaks, but the Republicans refused t
o produce a joint letter. They weren’t taking the bait.

  “Comey and the others wanted to create a panic,” Nunes says, “but I knew that something wasn’t on the up-and-up. [Senate majority leader Mitch] McConnell knew it was a setup. And [House speaker Paul] Ryan knew it was a setup. I remember the Speaker talking to McConnell’s people, asking what the hell are they doing?”

  With Comey, Johnson, Monaco, and Brennan laundering the Trump-Russia story through Congress, Obama’s intelligence community had merged with Clinton operatives.

  On July 26, Wall Street Journal reporter Damian Paletta texted Carter Page: “We are told you met with Igor Sechin during your recent Moscow trip and discussed energy deals and the possibility of the US government lifting sanctions on him and others.” Paletta also asked if he had met with a senior Kremlin official who said Russia had compromising material on the candidates.

  Page denied the allegations. He texted the reporter that the point about sanctions lifting was a “ridiculous idea.”

  Soon Page heard from more reporters with similar questions. Fusion GPS was talking to the press about the findings Steele was taking to the FBI. One of the reporters looking into the story about Sechin and Page was Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News. He’d been briefed by Steele, under Simpson’s supervision.

  On September 23, the story about Carter Page that Fusion GPS had been trying to place since late July finally launched. Isikoff’s story quoted Steele as “a well-placed Western intelligence source.” The ex–MI6 spy said he had given US officials intelligence reports claiming that during Page’s three-day trip to Moscow, he had met with Sechin, who had discussed the possibility of lifting sanctions.

  The Isikoff story illustrated how Clinton operatives and the Crossfire Hurricane team pushed the operation. The stories that Fusion GPS fed the press were the same reports that Steele was pushing into the FBI. The Crossfire Hurricane team used the stories to corroborate the memos. Together, the stories and memos allowed the little FBI group to legitimize spying on the Trump campaign—and enhance their surveillance powers of the GOP candidate.

  As it had in July, the Clinton campaign’s messaging reinforced the information operation that it was funding. Shortly after the Isikoff story broke, the campaign released a statement regarding “the bombshell report”—without mentioning that the story’s source, Steele, was being paid by the campaign. “It’s chilling,” according to the statement, “to learn that U.S. intelligence officials are conducting a probe into suspected meetings between Trump’s foreign policy adviser Carter Page and members of Putin’s inner circle while in Moscow.”

  After months of fending off reporters’ questions about the false stories, Page was shaken to see them in print, and decided to leave the campaign. “There’s so little time between now and the election,” he told a reporter. “This is in the best interests of the candidate. It’s so ridiculous I want to have it behind us.”

  On September 25, Page addressed an open letter to Comey, offering to speak to the FBI in order to clear his name and “put these outrageous allegations to rest while allowing each of us to shift our attention to relevant matters.”

  Thinking about it today, Nunes shakes his head in disbelief. “Page wrote Comey a letter offering himself for an interview,” says Nunes, “and the director of the FBI turns around and says, ‘To hell with him, forget the interview, let’s go spy on him.’”

  The Crossfire Hurricane group took its anti-Trump operation to a new level after the FBI was forced to reopen the Clinton email case.

  In September, the FBI’s New York field office and New York Police Department discovered Clinton emails on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner—the subject of a sex crimes investigation for his contact with an underage girl—and his wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin. McCabe found out about the emails on September 28 and briefed Strzok. He and McCabe stalled for a month before reopening the Clinton case. It was during that monthlong lapse that the Crossfire Hurricane team obtained the warrant to spy on Carter Page.

  “After they reopen the Clinton case,” says Nunes, “the little cabal—Strzok, Page, McCabe—are desperate. They’ve convinced themselves they’re going to find something on the Trump campaign.”

  It didn’t matter that Carter Page had left the campaign the month before; a FISA warrant allowed the FBI to monitor his past communications as well as his ongoing ones. “It was his past communications they wanted,” Nunes says, “going back as far as they still existed and weren’t deleted.”

  Monitoring Page’s communications would serve as an entry point into the entire campaign. Whatever the Crossfire Hurricane group came up with would serve the purpose. The target was Trump. “But there was no way they were going to the FISA court and say they needed a warrant to spy on Trump,” says Nunes. “So they made it sound like it was just about this one bad actor. They loaded up everything they had on Page, hoping to strike oil.”

  The FISA program is the US government’s most intrusive form of intelligence collection. In the wake of the intelligence community’s vast abuses uncovered during the 1970s, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) set out the proper procedures for the electronic and physical surveillance and collection of foreign intelligence information between foreign powers and agents of foreign powers.

  Title I FISAs allow federal law enforcement agencies to go into the National Security Agency’s massive database, culled from service providers, and retrieve the target’s phone calls and emails. Title III FISAs deal with physical searches.

  To obtain a warrant, the requesting agency presents evidence before a judge in the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The target of the warrant has no legal representation at the FISC, which relies on the probity of federal officers.

  Though it is an exaggeration to call it a rubber-stamp court, the FISC rarely refuses to grant the warrant. The Crossfire Hurricane team had reportedly attempted at least once during the summer to get a FISA on the Trump campaign but had been denied.

  The FISA application stated that Page was a foreign agent and had been recruited by Russian intelligence in 2013. That was inaccurate. Page had been approached by Russian agents working undercover at the UN Consulate in New York. He had assisted the FBI in apprehending them.

  The centerpiece of the application was the Steele Dossier. Also in the application was the Isikoff article, which was sourced to Steele’s reporting. The application also cited other press reports, including Josh Rogin’s Washington Post article claiming that the Trump campaign had watered down the RNC platform’s position on support for Ukraine.

  Also included in the application was an article that appears to be Michael Crowley’s August 3 story in Politico (“Trump changed views on Ukraine after hiring Manafort”) that built on Rogin’s j124

  RNC story. According to Crowley, Trump’s position on Ukraine had shifted because of “his recent association with several people sympathetic to Russian influence in Ukraine.” Crowley cited Manafort and Page, “who has extensive business ties in Russia.”

  But the Crossfire Hurricane group still wasn’t sure that would get them the warrant. “They knew that once they pulled that trigger and got the FISA, it lives forever,” says Nunes. “For months their operation was all compartmentalized as a counterintelligence investigation, classified and siloed off from the rest of the FBI and everyone else so only their little group knew about it. So if they’re going for it, they better make sure they get the FISA. They needed an insurance policy.”

  According to Nunes, the “insurance policy” that Strzok and Page texted about, the issue they’d discussed in McCabe’s office, was not simply the operation against Trump that they planned to roll into a coup in the event he was elected.

  “It has a deeper meaning, it’s more specific than that,” he says. “It’s what else they did to get the FISA, to ensure they got the warrant on Page. It’s as bad or worse than using the dossier. It’s another thing they hid as part of a counterintelligence investiga
tion.”

  What did they do? Nunes spreads his arms in the air. “Something we hope to have declassified. Something the American public should know about.”

  On October 21, the FBI obtained the warrant. “They were sure they were going to find something,” says Nunes, “the golden ticket.”

  Nunes says the FBI knew Carter Page was not a Russian spy. “They were just using him,” says Nunes. “They were sure they were going to find that he had talked to a Russian or had an email from a Russian, an email from Rosneft, or something, anything. Then they’d leak it to the press. They assumed something had to be there, because they thought Page had all these Russian contacts. They only needed one thing. And they couldn’t even get that.”

  The anti-Trump operation was designed in part to defend against a possible “October surprise” involving Clinton’s communications. Now its other purpose was evident—it was an offensive weapon, too, tailored to obtain the spy warrant. They were breaking in to the Trump campaign. The dossier would find the Crossfire Hurricane group an “October surprise” to deploy against Trump and put an end to the GOP candidate once and for all.

  But they found nothing. And then they panicked.

  Another letter from Harry Reid to Comey, dated October 30, inadvertently put the Crossfire Hurricane team under the spotlight. Reid complained that the FBI had reopened the investigation into Clinton while sitting on “explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government.”

  But the Crossfire Hurricane team’s fishing expedition had come up empty, and they had no leverage in case they were caught.

  An October 31 article in Mother Jones set off alarm bells. David Corn’s breathless report regarding Trump’s ties to Russia quoted Steele—“a former Western intelligence officer”—extensively. He said that the FBI’s response to his revelations had been “shock and horror.” The FBI, he said, had “requested more information from him” and told him that “there was or is a pretty substantial inquiry.” Steele had showed Corn the reports he’d been sharing with the FBI, excerpts of which were published in the article: “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting, and assisting TRUMP for at least five years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.” Corn also passed Steele’s reports to the FBI—another channel meant to legitimize a conspiracy theory. His story was successful in advancing the Trump-Russia narrative, but it also sent the Crossfire Hurricane team looking for cover.