The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  Chapter 10

  BLOOD IN THE WATER

  OBAMA HAD WARNED TRUMP about hiring Michael Flynn. It was two days after Trump’s victory. The president-elect was bewildered. Of all the things Obama could have been discussing with his successor, he devoted valuable time to running down Flynn. That should have told Trump that something was up.

  The outgoing president’s primary concern was to protect the Iran nuclear deal. Flynn had been critical of it even while inside the Obama administration. Now, as counselor to a commander in chief who’d called the agreement catastrophic, Flynn had a shot at dismantling the forty-fourth president’s signature foreign policy initiative.

  According to officials, some of Obama’s concerns about Flynn were Russia-related. There was his attendance at the 2015 RT banquet in Moscow, as well as “other contacts with Russia.”

  Flynn had first gone to Russia in June 2013 as Obama’s DIA chief to visit military intelligence headquarters and meet with senior officers. Flynn believed it was possible to cooperate with the Russians on counterterrorism. Obama wanted to coordinate operations in Syria and share intelligence with the Russians.

  The only other reports related to Flynn and Russia were the false allegations Stefan Halper had made about Flynn’s 2014 visit to the University of Cambridge and his supposed dalliance with Moscow-born British historian Svetlana Lokhova.

  Was Obama aware that Halper was running a dirty tricks operation to frame Flynn? We don’t know, though it’s clear that Obama wanted to be kept in the loop on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. The president, Lisa Page had texted Peter Strzok, wanted to know everything about what they were doing.

  Strzok said he was worried that if Trump was elected, some of the people they were investigating “might be named to senior national security positions.” Strzok was referring not to Carter Page or George Papadopoulos or even Paul Manafort but to the former head of the DIA, Michael Flynn.

  Obama had allies throughout the intelligence community, hundreds of them. And they had their own reasons to go after Flynn. “Flynn was talking about remaking the NSC staff and getting rid of the Obama holdovers to put Trump’s people in there,” says Nunes. “He was going to cut the NSC staff down to a third of its size under Obama.”

  Even more significantly, Flynn was going to address the problems with the intelligence community as a whole. “He wanted to remake the entire IC,” says Nunes. He had Trump’s ear. They were going to drain the Swamp.

  “Flynn was going to have everyone in the senior intelligence service turn in their resignations,” says Nunes. “That’s hundreds of people, all across the IC spectrum. That didn’t mean they were all going to go, but they had to justify what they were doing.”

  Most wouldn’t have made the cut. “There were lots of bad apples,” says Nunes. “Flynn served with many of them. They’d been appointed by Obama, and he knew what they were like. Lots of them didn’t do anything. They were put in those places by bad characters. Look at the Crossfire Hurricane group. How do you think they managed to have all those people in exactly the right place with no one watching them?”

  Flynn was an existential threat to hundreds of Americans whose job was to spy on foreigners, undermine the ability of their governments to function properly, and then lie about it with a straight face. They had turned that skill set against their own government. They regarded, with some justification, the man who was to be Trump’s Swamp drainer as their enemy.

  The 2017 intelligence community assessment flagged RT as a major cog in the Kremlin’s disruption operations, though practically no one in the United States watches it. But the fact that it was featured in Obama’s dossier was intended to underscore the seriousness of Flynn’s appearance at the network’s Moscow banquet the previous year. Obama’s intelligence apparatus knew the real story: that Flynn’s speakers bureau had arranged the trip, which had been cleared with his former agency.

  Nonetheless, reporters had been told that Svetlana Lokhova was behind the RT dinner. “The UK and US press were briefed on my supposedly compromising Flynn at the February 2014 Cambridge dinner,” says Lokhova. “And my alleged involvement arranging Flynn’s attendance at the December 2015 RT banquet.”

  It appears that Halper took his story public well after her brief contact with Flynn. Had Halper sent the story back to Washington immediately after the February 2014 meeting, it’s unlikely that Lokhova would’ve been put in front of the next DIA chief as well. A May 1, 2015, email from Cambridge Security Initiative invited her to meet with General Vincent Stewart when he visited Cambridge for the joint DIA-CSI project that Flynn had arranged.

  It was a full year after the RT dinner that Halper spread his story to the press. Lokhova says that an American journalist told her that the briefings about her and Flynn had started in December 2016. “He said no one could publish the stories then because they only had one source at the time,” she says.

  It was Halper’s Cambridge colleague Christopher Andrew, Lokhova’s professor, who gave a boost to the stalled media campaign against her and Flynn. Andrew wrote a February 29, 2017 article for the London Sunday Times hinting at the possibility that Flynn had been ensnared by a Russian agent. “After that article,” says Lokhova, “all the journalists could report it. Andrew’s piece stood up the rumors Halper started.”

  Now the media operation was in full swing, and by late winter, Lokhova was fielding calls from British reporters, including Nick Hopkins from The Guardian and American journalists, as well as Rob Barry from the Wall Street Journal.

  A March 18 Wall Street Journal story by Barry, along with Carol E. Lee, Shane Harris, and Christopher S. Stewart, claimed that Flynn didn’t report “his interaction with Ms. Lokhova to security officials in the Defense Department.” According to the article, the contact between Flynn and Lokhova “came to the notice of U.S. intelligence.” The source of the story was “a former senior U.S. official with knowledge of the matter.” In the manner of typical Trump-Russia journalism recycling past, uncorroborated articles, the article quoted extensively from Andrew’s piece about the Cambridge dinner. “Andrew,” the Journal reported, “described a woman of dual British-Russian citizenship who showed Mr. Flynn a number of historic Russian documents, including an ‘erotic postcard’ that Joseph Stalin sent to a young woman in 1912.”

  The Cambridge professor had set up his student on behalf of Halper, who had been tasked to destroy Flynn. According to Andrew, the Journal story continued, “Flynn asked the woman to travel with him as a translator to Moscow on his next official visit but that the trip never materialized.”

  Andrew, an auxiliary of Halper’s operation, had insinuated that his former student was a Russian spy who’d honey-trapped Flynn. Lokhova pauses briefly. Her daughter is playing at her feet. In painting her as a Russian spy, Andrew suggested she’d betrayed England, the country where she’d made her life whole.

  “He betrayed me,” says Lokhova. “My old professor. I’d studied with him since I was eighteen years old, half my life. I’d just given birth, and now the press is laying siege to me and my new family. It was horrible. I guess anyone can betray anyone.”

  But at the time, Lokhova still didn’t understand what Andrew was doing. Her former professor had also convinced her to speak with Washington Post journalist David Ignatius. “He told me that he trusted Ignatius and I should speak to him,” she says. “He said Ignatius had the ‘inside track’ on Flynn.”

  Ignatius is an intelligence community insider, his column a traditional platform for both information and disinformation leaked by US as well as foreign intelligence services. He was in London in early March and offered to come up to Cambridge to meet her.

  “Ignatius wanted to talk about Flynn and the 2014 dinner,” says Lokhova. “But I told him not to bother, the story was nonsense. Ignatius said he was surprised because he’d always found Stefan Halper to be a very reliable source.”

  There were two operations targeting Flynn in which Ignatius was offer
ed a part. He eventually passed on the one smearing Lokhova and accepted the other.

  On January 12, 2017, Ignatius published a story entitled “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” The White House hadn’t taken more serious action prior to the election, Ignatius explained, because it “probably feared that further action might trigger a process of escalation that could bring even worse election turmoil.” That made no sense. Just a week prior to the Ignatius article, Obama’s spy chiefs had produced an official document claiming that Russia had interfered in an election to help elect its preferred candidate, Trump. If that had been true, then from the perspective of the losing party, Obama’s party, nothing could have caused “worse election turmoil.”

  Ignatius’s column was really a platform to attack Flynn. He cited Obama’s dossier and Fusion GPS’s talking points about the RT dinner:

  Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s choice for national security adviser, cultivates close Russian contacts. He has appeared on Russia Today and received a speaking fee from the cable network, which was described in last week’s unclassified intelligence briefing on Russian hacking as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.”

  Then Ignatius threw a bomb:

  According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions?

  Intercepts of foreign officials are classified. The Ignatius story was more evidence that senior Obama officials were waging a criminal campaign by leaking classified intelligence as part of a political operation against the Trump team.

  That was the real story: US officials were waging a criminal campaign against the president-elect.

  “If we’d had a real press on the job,” says Nunes, “the story would have been about who leaked the intercept and Flynn’s name. Not the fact that he talked to the Russian ambassador; that was his job. A normal media would have pointed out that a crime had been committed and then looked for the criminal who leaked to the press.”

  But the January 10 CNN story had changed all that. It had ushered in the postdossier era, in which the United States’ most prestigious media organizations enlist themselves in political operations.

  “On January 10, the dossier comes out in the press and it’s a joke,” says Nunes. “It flopped. But two days later, Russia was back in the news. Flynn was used as the catalyst. They leaked the fact that he was speaking with the Russian ambassador to blow the Russia investigation sky high. The Russia story was reenergized with the Flynn leak.”

  Ignatius alleged that Flynn had crossed a line by speaking with Kislyak about Obama policy. “The Logan Act,” he wrote, “… bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about ‘disputes’ with the United States. Was its spirit violated?”

  Jack Langer remembers the media uproar over the 1799 law, which had never been successfully prosecuted. “It was ridiculous,” he says. “No one takes the Logan Act seriously, including reporters, and no one gets in trouble over it. It’s just something both sides in Washington, for messaging purposes, like to accuse each other of violating. But the press was acting like Flynn had murdered somebody. A reporter asked Devin a question about it and Devin said, ‘Oh, you’re a Logan Act guy?’ Then he smiled.”

  Still, the media noise further pressured the already harried transition team. The incoming administration’s anxiety was evident days later when Vice President–elect Mike Pence appeared on Face the Nation. During the January 15 interview, Pence disputed the Ignatius allegations and said that Flynn had not discussed the sanctions with the Russian ambassador.

  “I can confirm, having spoken to him about it,” said Pence, referring to Flynn, “those conversations that happened to occur around the time that the United States took action to expel diplomats had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions.” Reportedly, a US official who knew about the intercept said at the time that “either Flynn had misled Pence or that Pence misspoke.”

  The first scenario became the standard version of events. It appears it was more complicated than that.

  As a career intelligence officer, Flynn knew that the communications of the Russian ambassador were regularly monitored. As the incoming national security advisor, it was his job to speak with foreign officials. He would have been derelict in his duties had he not asked for patience from an ambassador whose country had been put into the middle of a dirty tricks campaign engineered by the outgoing administration.

  Here’s what actually happened: There were reports December 28 that the Obama administration was planning to take punitive measures against the Russians. That evening Kislyak texted Flynn: “Can you kindly call me back at your convenience.” Flynn put him off. He was working with his deputy, K. T. McFarland, and the transition team to formulate a response. The transition team was concerned that the sanctions would affect the incoming White House’s foreign policy goals and did not want Russia to escalate.

  On the 29th, McFarland sent an email to transition team members about the sanctions and said that Flynn was speaking with Kislyak that evening. It’s not clear whether Pence was briefed on the phone call at the time or on sanctions. As head of the transition team and vice president–elect, he probably should have been.

  But the transition period was chaotic, hampered by a lack of bureaucratic discipline that reflected the president-elect’s lack of political experience. On top of that, the outgoing administration had put into question its successor’s legitimacy; Obama’s dossier claimed that Trump owed his victory to Putin. Every day the transition team was fending off some new story linking Trump and his associates to the Kremlin.

  Perhaps most important, the sanctions issue was itself complex. There were two relevant rounds of sanctions that could easily have been confused.

  First, there were the sanctions the Obama White House had imposed after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. The latest sanctions, however, had been imposed as the Obama administration was walking out the door. They had been intended to box Trump in and add further luster to the collusion narrative.

  Flynn denied to the Washington Post that he’d discussed sanctions with Kislyak. It’s likely he didn’t think of the actions that Obama had taken against the Russians in December as real sanctions; Nunes didn’t.

  “Anyone who knows the Russia sanctions issue knows that the real sanctions are the ones we imposed with our allies for annexing Crimea,” he says. “I never considered what Obama did in December to be sanctions. It was a classic Obama move: make noise and do nothing. Everyone shrugs their shoulders and laughs.”

  It’s not hard to see how in that environment the transition team’s communications regarding Flynn’s call with Kislyak might have been muddled.

  The day after the Ignatius story appeared, a transition team official told the Post, “I can tell you that during his call, sanctions were not discussed whatsoever.”

  The same day, incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that the conversation between Flynn and Kislyak had dealt with “the logistics” of a postinauguration call between Trump and Putin. “That was it,” said Spicer, “plain and simple.”

  Whatever the reason for the miscommunication, whether the burden was on the transition team or on Flynn, the Crossfire Hurricane group saw the gap between Pence’s televised statements and what Flynn had told Kislyak as a window of opportunity.

  Comey waited until after the inauguration. More than a week after Pence’s TV interview, he told McCabe to send agents to interview Flynn. The FBI director admitted that it was something he “probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized… administration.” With other administrations, he said, “if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you woul
d work through the White House Counsel and there’d be discussions and approvals and it would be there. And I thought, it’s early enough, let’s just send a couple of guys over.”

  Just as Comey had deceived Trump two weeks before and interviewed him as part of a counterintelligence investigation, he had the Crossfire Hurricane team to do the same to the national security advisor. McCabe called Flynn and told him that “people were curious about his conversations with Kislyak.”

  Flynn replied, “You know what I said, because you guys were probably listening.”

  McCabe dispatched Strzok and another FBI agent, Joe Pientka, to interview him at the White House. They asked if he “recalled any conversation with Kislyak in which the expulsions were discussed, where Flynn might have encouraged Kislyak not to escalate the situation, to keep the Russian response reciprocal or not to engage in a ‘tit for tat.’”

  Flynn hedged. “Not really,” he said. “I don’t remember. It wasn’t ‘don’t do anything.’”

  On January 26, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates went to the White House to warn lawyer Donald McGahn that Flynn might have misled the vice president. She said that since the Russians knew that there were discrepancies between what Flynn had said to Kislyak and what he had apparently told Pence of their conversation, the national security advisor might be vulnerable to blackmail.

  Yates was fishing. The FBI knew what Flynn had said—it had the intercept—and Flynn knew the FBI knew what he had said. Since everyone knew what the national security advisor had said, there were no grounds for blackmail.

  But Pence was still in the dark. The Crossfire Hurricane team planned to enlighten him. They bided their time.

  McCabe was scheduled to brief Pence’s staff on February 10. The briefing appears to have been timed to another leak of classified intelligence.