The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  It was still months before news would break that the conservative Washington Free Beacon had taken Fusion GPS’s Trump opposition research until May 2016 but had had no role in funding Steele’s work. When Comey made his claim in January 2017, there was no evidence that Republicans had had anything to do with the dossier. Either Comey was mistaken or was lying, or Fusion GPS had fed him yet another falsehood that served them both.

  Comey also failed to disclose to congressional leaders that Steele’s reports had in fact been paid for by the Clinton campaign. Unlike his claim regarding Republicans, there was evidence of DNC involvement—which the Crossfire Hurricane team did its best to hide in the application for the spy warrant on Carter Page.

  “Comey seemed to know things that aren’t so,” says Nunes, “and not know things that are so.”

  The publication of the dossier echoed themes from press stories that had appeared in the months leading up to the election. That was for two reasons: one, Fusion GPS had inserted already published news, such as the misreported Washington Post story about the RNC platform, into the dossier to make Steele’s reporting seem genuine; and two, because Fusion GPS had given Steele’s memos to the press, including the July report on Carter Page and Igor Sechin, to build the Trump-Russia echo chamber.

  For instance:

  MEMO 80, Dated June 20:

  The Russian government had sexually compromising material on Trump. The material Moscow had on Clinton wasn’t embarrassing and was controlled by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

  That appeared to confirm a Kurt Eichenwald story in Newsweek on November 4 that had made those same claims days before the election.

  MEMO 94, July 19:

  Carter Page met with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin during his July trip to Moscow and discussed sanctions relief in exchange for bilateral energy cooperation.

  That had been reported in Isikoff’s September 23 story.

  MEMO 95, undated, written after the Democratic National Convention and before July 30, the date of the subsequent memo:

  The Kremlin had hacked the DNC.

  That had been widely reported in the press, first in a June 14 Washington Post article by Ellen Nakashima. The finding had been made by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm employed by the Clinton campaign. CrowdStrike had been hired on the recommendation of former DOJ official Michael Sussman, a lawyer at Perkins Coie—the firm that had hired Fusion GPS for the Clinton campaign.

  The Trump team had agreed to sideline the Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue.

  That lined up with the July 18 Washington Post story by Josh Rogin claiming, that the RNC had weakened its platform on Ukraine at the behest of Trump officials.

  Moscow was using Russian émigrés in New York, Washington, DC, and Miami to run operations.

  That claim had appeared in Eichenwald’s November 4 Newsweek article, reporting that Moscow’s “operations have also been conducted in the United States, primarily out of New York City, Washington, D.C., and Miami. Those involved include a large number of Russian émigrés.”

  MEMO 100, August 5:

  Reports of conflict between Putin advisers Sergei Ivanov and Dmitry Peskov. Ivanov was angry that Peskov had gone too far in pushing the pro-Trump operation and advised “only sensible course of action now for the Russian leadership was to ‘sit tight and deny everything.’”

  Conveniently, the two supposedly rivalrous Putin deputies, Peskov and Ivanov, had been seated at the same table as the Russian president and Flynn at the December 2015 RT dinner. Though most photos of the event were cropped to include only Flynn and Putin, a widened angle shows the two Putin aides.

  MEMO 101, August 10:

  The Kremlin was engaging with several high-profile US players, Carter Page, Jill Stein, and Michael Flynn, and had funded their recent visits to Moscow.

  That referred to the December 2015 RT banquet, at which Stein and Flynn had sat at the same table with Putin. Flynn had explained that he had been paid by his speakers’ bureau. It’s not publicly known whether Russian officials paid for Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow.

  MEMO 105, August 22:

  Former Trump campaign convention manager Paul Manafort had been discussed in a secret meeting between his former client Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and Putin.

  The press had widely asserted that Manafort’s client Yanukovych was pro-Putin.

  Further, claimed the memo, Yanukovych had “authorized kick-back payments to MANAFORT, as alleged in Western media.”

  A New York Times article by Andrew E. Kramer, Mike McIntire, and Barry Meier had reported on the payments. The article had been published on August 20, two days before the date of the memo. A source for the Times article, Ukrainian political operative Serhiy Leshchenko, was also a Fusion GPS source.

  MEMO 112, September 14:

  The Russian owners of a financial institution, Alfa Bank, were close to Putin.

  That echoed an October 31 Slate story by Franklin Foer claiming that Alfa Bank’s computer servers were in contact with those of the Trump organization. Putting the Foer story together with the dossier memo connected Trump to Putin via Alfa Bank.

  Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussman was a source for Foer’s article and also passed the information to the FBI.

  Immediately upon publication of the Foer article, the Clinton campaign issued a press release about the story, which Clinton operatives themselves had planted. Candidate Clinton retweeted the statement on her timeline the day the story was published: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”

  MEMO 113, September 14:

  “Azeri business figure Araz AGALAROV… had been closely involved with TRUMP in Russia.”

  That seemed to confirm the Washington Post’s June 17 story by Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman, and Michael Birnbaum in which the Agalarovs had boasted about how close they were to the Republican candidate.

  The Agalarovs, featured extensively in the protodossiers, were also reported to have offered Donald Trump, Jr., dirt on Hillary Clinton, leading to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting.

  MEMO 136, October 20:

  The Prague offices of a Russian “parastatal organization,” Rossotrudnichestvo may have been used to host a meeting between Kremlin officials and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

  That, too, had been in Eichenwald’s November 4 Newsweek article, in which he had claimed that “a Trump associate met with a pro-Putin member of Russian parliament at a building in Eastern Europe maintained by Rossotrudnichestvo.”

  Some memos, however, were out of sync with news reports. For instance, Memo 86 contends that the “FSB leads on cyber within Russian apparatus.”

  A week before the dossier was published, an Obama administration press release announcing sanctions for election interference had claimed that the GRU, Russian military intelligence, was in charge of cyberactivities, saying that the FSB “assisted.” Either a former top MI6 Russianist got it wrong, or the Obama White House was pointing in the wrong direction.

  Other memos simply sounded false. Memo 95 claimed that the reason for using WikiLeaks to dump the DNC emails had been “plausible deniability.”

  WikiLeaks had long been accused of having ties to foreign intelligence services, including Russia’s. Julian Assange hosted a talk show in 2012. After WikiLeaks had published the emails, the press had assumed immediately, and with evidence provided only by the Clinton campaign’s computer specialists, that the organization was acting on behalf of Russian intelligence.

  Memo 111 claims that Putin aide Sergei Ivanov was fired in August because he had “advised PUTIN that the anti-CLINTON operation/s would be both effective and plausibly deniable with little blowback” and was proven wrong. However, according to previous dossier memos, he’d argued against the operation.

  In Memo 100, for instance, Ivanov “laments Russian intervention in US presidential election and black PR against CLINTON and the
DNC.” According to that report, it was his rival Peskov who was the “main protagonist” in the “Kremlin campaign to aid TRUMP and damage CLINTON.”

  It appears that Steele’s sources switched stories in order to explain Ivanov’s unexpected dismissal.

  Still other dossier claims were definitely false. Memo 105, for example, described a secret August 15 meeting between Yanukovych and Putin near Volgograd, a Russian port city. Putin had indeed visited Volgograd on August 15, for one day. Yanukovych, however, didn’t get there until August 18, three days after Putin left. It would have been hard to miss Yanukovych’s arrival, since he pulled into the river port on a triple-decker yacht.

  Steele’s sources got it wrong. Perhaps a Fusion GPS employee had simply pulled the wrong date off the internet.

  The publication of the dossier provided a road map of the media campaign. The fact that Comey had briefed Trump on it showed that the press and the intelligence community had joined forces.

  Strzok texted Page on January 10 to tell her he was watching CNN as the story about the briefing led the news. “We’re discussing whether, now that this is out, we use it as a pretext to go interview some people.”

  It was standard operating procedure for the Crossfire Hurricane cell. “They use a story they’ve planted to go out and interview people,” says Nunes. “All through their investigation, they planted a story with journalists, then picked it up as a predicate to investigate more. They did it to get the FISA and did it again in January. I don’t think that’s how most Americans want law enforcement to work, for the FBI to plant bogus stories on people then investigate them.”

  How did the US press corps become a partner in a coup?

  CNN’s January 10 story was seminal. But already by the summer of 2016, when the press had first partnered with the Clinton campaign and intelligence officials, the United States’ most prestigious media brands—the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, and others—were in transformation.

  No one had ever doubted that the press leaned left. The last Republican the New York Times had endorsed for president had been Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. But this was different. It was no longer simply media bias. The press had become a slicker version of third-world media, a state-owned political communications apparatus armed to advance the ruling party’s agenda and to threaten and terrorize the opposition.

  In a lecture at University of California, Berkeley, the week after he left the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Simpson explained the problem succinctly. “It used to be the newspaper model that people who were shopping for used cars would inadvertently subsidize investigative journalism,” he said. “People looking at bottom lines don’t even consider investigative journalism a loss leader any more. They just consider it a loss.”

  The old financial model of newspapers depended on advertising: retail, like department or jewelry stores, and classified. The three big categories in classified advertising were employment, real estate, and automotive—the used cars that Simpson was referring to.

  The Village Voice, America’s first, and now defunct, alternative weekly, was sustained largely by its real estate classifieds. New York City apartment hunters lined up at the Times Square newsstand late Tuesday night to make sure they had an early copy of Wednesday’s paper.

  I was at the Voice in the 1990s when the meteor hit, vaporizing the old financial model on contact. With the advent of the internet, all those listings now appeared on line, for free. Craigslist alone, with classified listings for urban areas around the country, demolished the economic pillar of virtually every media market in America. The press panicked. The Voice’s publisher decided that the paper was going free. How could he keep charging $1 for what consumers could get for nothing?

  Thus it was the media itself that first devalued the media. By making news, reporting, and opinion free, the press told consumers as well as producers—journalists—that its product, journalism, was worth zero.

  By crippling newspapers, the internet had damaged the entire ecosystem. Newspapers were at the core of the US media, the content not only filling their own publications but also feeding other media, particularly television.

  TV is an expensive medium. Producers can’t afford to waste valuable airtime on stories that scare or bore advertisers. The print press allowed producers to watch a story unfold over a few days or weeks to see whether it was worth dispatching a news crew and chewing up valuable broadcast minutes.

  Local newspapers fed the magazine industry, too, stories as well as talent. The most ambitious writers in smaller papers across the country—investigative journalists, feature writers, humorists—all hoped for the day they’d get tapped to write for the big glossy magazines, regional publications, such as Texas Monthly, or the giants, such as Esquire or The New Yorker.

  When the press’s ad-based revenue model collapsed, why didn’t media executives do the logical thing and raise the price to consumers? Yes, they would have lost some readers and have had to cut staff and departments, but they’d have established a fundamental defense of the product, the industry, and the institution itself—that news is worth paying for.

  It took the New York Times more than a decade to settle on billing consumers—after giving away content, charging for it, giving it away again, then billing for “premium content,” and so on. By then it was too late. The financial collapse of the press was followed by its professional and ethical collapse. Entire papers went under, and even at those that survived, the most prestigious enterprises, the costliest, went first.

  “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, told The New York Times Magazine in 2016. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington.”

  That was true of the Trump-Russia beat, too. All of it came out of Washington or New York and was sourced to anonymous US officials. No one covering a national security story allegedly about a foreign government controlling the commander in chief thought to report from what was, by the logic of the Trump-Russia narrative, the real center of power: Moscow.

  Investigative teams were hit as hard as foreign bureaus. Those units had always been considered financial drains, swallowing up salaries that supported investigations lasting weeks or months that might not pan out in the end.

  But just as Obama’s communications team had rotated in for the foreign bureaus, the investigative teams were replaced by opposition research firms—such as Fusion GPS. “We’re hoping to continue to do investigative work,” Simpson told the Berkeley audience in 2009. He explained that he’d “formed a private company to pioneer yet another new model to fund investigations. We hope that people who have an interest in ferreting out corruption will come to us and fund us, they don’t even have to have pure motives. They might want to investigate a competitor.”

  The press outsourced investigative work, reporting, because it couldn’t afford it. So who would pay? Corporate clients, law firms, and lots of political groups.

  It is always election season in the United States, national or state or municipal, and there’s always a paying client who wants the dope on his or her opponent—and wants it distributed to the press.

  But publishing that material puts the media into the middle of political operations. Whether media organizations and journalists take sides in those operations or not is irrelevant; the content they produce is a political instrument paid for by groups pushing their political interest. Eliminate that content—content that the press can no longer afford to produce—and an enormous chunk of media disappears, taking thousands of jobs with it.

  Thus there was no chance that journalists would ever report honestly about Fusion GPS’s role in driving the anti-Trump operation. Sure, journalists were scared of crossing Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, but the problem was much more fundamental: opposition research is the cornerstone of the media’s
new financial model.

  Scores of journalists and press organizations had seen or been briefed on the Trump-Russia protodossiers months before Steele’s name was stamped on the weaponized version, but none of them had ever come forth to say what they knew. They couldn’t afford not to join the plot against Trump. The culture of journalism had changed along with the economic model.

  As Washington became the country’s media mecca, the city’s sociology replaced that of the former press capital. It’s difficult to imagine the hundreds of wizened New York reporters and editors who since the 1970s had run thousands of stories about Donald Trump—the loudmouthed real estate mogul, the tabloid celebrity, the sharp with the model on his arm, the TV star—falling for the line that he was a Russian spy.

  Any reporter could have figured it out in the time it took to ride the subway out to Brighton Beach, home of one of the world’s largest Russian diasporas, and ask a handful of bouncers and bartenders. After the first half dozen laughed, after the first three vodkas, a savvy journalist would have gotten the picture.

  The sociology of Washington, on the other hand, is not only more political but also more gullible, more cynical. It’s a city of half a million student council presidents, ready to adopt any opinion that advances their careers.

  The press had become a testing ground for operatives, earnest, underpaid, and dense. Without its absolute commitment to the anti-Trump plot, the coup would never have stood a chance.