The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  On February 9, the Washington Post published the parts of the Flynn-Kislyak intercept that contradicted Pence’s account. The story, coauthored by Greg Miller, Adam Entous, and Ellen Nakashima, was sourced to “nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls.”

  All of those officials said Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit. Two of those officials went further, saying that Flynn urged Russia not to overreact to the penalties being imposed by President Barack Obama, making clear that the two sides would be in position to review the matter after Trump was sworn in as president.

  When McCabe appeared at the White House the next day, he was called into Pence’s office. Priebus and McGahn were there, watching news coverage of the leaked intercept. They were upset. They asked to see the information McCabe had on Flynn.

  McCabe showed the vice president what he had on Flynn. “This is totally opposite,” said Pence. “It’s not what he said to me.”

  Nunes remembers telling senior administration officials that they were out of their minds if they were thinking of firing Flynn. “I told Priebus he’d be next, along with Bannon and McGahn. I told them leave it alone and calm down and revisit it later.”

  The problem was an inexperienced White House staff pressured by the FBI leaking through the press. “The FBI are making it so that Flynn has to go and the media is backing them,” says Nunes. “Remember, Flynn wanted to remake the entire IC.”

  Nunes warned the administration that it didn’t have to satisfy the press’s demands for blood. “What did Flynn actually do?” he asks. “Nothing. Every man has his flaws, but Flynn didn’t have too many of them. People knew he was a man of action and a brilliant tactician. I told the administration that ‘if you give in, they’ll know they can come after any of you. There’ll be blood in the water, and they’re not going to stop.’”

  The national security advisor was fired February 13, three days after McCabe’s meeting with Pence in the White House. Trump told former New Jersey governor Chris Christie that the “Russia thing is all over now.”

  How did Trump not understand what was in store? The rules of the jungle—always attack, never give in—had governed his candidacy. Yet as president, he sacrificed a trusted adviser to the same intelligence officials he openly disdained.

  “He was getting bad advice from some of his advisers,” says Nunes. “He didn’t understand that after they got Flynn, they’d have momentum. After Flynn went down, they believed they could get the president, too.”

  The day after Flynn left the White House, as the press uniformly vilified the general as a liar and a Russian stooge, Nunes issued a statement with a different message:

  Michael Flynn served in the U.S. military for more than three decades. Washington, D.C. can be a rough town for honorable people, and Flynn—who has always been a soldier, not a politician—deserves America’s gratitude and respect for dedicating so much of his life to strengthening our national security. I thank him for his many years of distinguished service.

  The HPSCI chair was one of the few people inside the Beltway who saw what the Flynn affair signaled. Flynn was only the first casualty in a chain of events initiated by the forty-fourth president of the United States. The plot was only just getting off the ground.

  Chapter 11

  BECOMING DEEP THROAT

  RUSSIAGATE, the press claimed, was just like Watergate, but bigger. The commander in chief of the United States wasn’t just corrupt; he’d been corrupted by a foreign power to which he owed his presidency.

  But it was nothing like Watergate. The scandal that had ended with President Richard Nixon’s resignation had begun with a crime.

  On Saturday June 17, 1972, a security guard at the newly completed office and residential Watergate building complex caught five men breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee.

  It’s often forgotten that the burglars were charged for violating federal wiretapping laws and that the main purpose of the break-in was to put Nixon’s opponents under surveillance. He wanted to know what they were doing and find out what they knew about him. The aides who planned the Watergate break-in were also running the “White House plumbers,” a unit tasked to find out who was leaking sensitive material from the White House.

  In that regard, then, it was Obama who was most like Nixon, because Trump’s predecessor used the resources of the federal government, sensitive surveillance programs and staff, to spy on his opponents. It started many years before the collusion narrative swallowed the media.

  As the Russiagate hoax unfolded, it was clear that most of what the Clinton operatives, intelligence and law enforcement officials, and Obama aides had engineered had been rehearsed during the battle over the Iran deal. Most obvious was the echo chamber, created by Ben Rhodes to win the Iran deal and repurposed to push the Trump-Russia story.

  And it was during the Iran deal that the Obama administration first ran a smear campaign to tar political opponents as disloyal. If it was easy to convince the press that the Trump campaign was full of Kremlin assets, it was because just two years before, the Obama White House had gotten the media on board for a campaign employing anti-Semitic tropes to paint Iran deal opponents as more loyal to Israel than to the United States.

  At the same time, the administration spied on its opponents. The White House monitored the communications of Israeli officials to reverse target the US congressional and Jewish community leaders with whom they were speaking and meeting. Several pro-Israel activists and Jewish community leaders tell me they were aware at the time that they were under surveillance.

  “I was warned that my conversations with senior Israeli officials were possibly being monitored,” says Noah Pollak, formerly the director of the Emergency Committee for Israel, a nonprofit organization that opposed the nuclear agreement with Iran. He and the other pro-Israel officials recognize that there is good reason to monitor the communications of foreign officials, even those of a friendly state such as Israel. “The Israelis probably do the same to US officials,” he says.

  But there were no compelling national security reasons to use surveillance programs against Americans engaged in legitimate political activism that, due to the nature of the policy under debate, involved conversations with foreigners. Yet the identities of pro-Israel activists and Jewish community leaders were unmasked in classified intercepts and fed to the Obama White House’s war room, where operatives devised strategies to counter their opposition to the Iran deal.

  Pollak says he was told of three different instances in which Obama officials responded quickly to conversations between senior Israeli officials and US citizens. “The administration did things that seemed incontrovertibly to be responses to information gathered by listening to those conversations.” In one case, he says, “an Israeli official was on the phone with a prominent American rabbi who mentioned that he would be visiting Elie Wiesel in a day or two to encourage him to come out publicly against the deal. The rabbi was shocked to learn, upon meeting Wiesel the next day, that an administration official had just contacted him asking to discuss the Iran deal.”

  Says Pollak, “At first we thought these were coincidences and we were being paranoid. Surely none of us are that important. Eventually it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on via the Israeli officials we were in contact with. The administration had defined achieving the nuclear deal as a vital national security interest, and this opened the door to treating those attempting to prevent this achievement—including Americans—as something akin to a threat.”

  In spying on the representatives of the American people and members of the pro-Israel community, the Obama administration learned how far it could go in manipulating surveillance programs for its own domestic political advantage. In both instances, the ostensible targets—first Israel and then Russia—were simply instruments used to go after the real targets at home.

  Obama
administration officials also learned which journalists they could trust with sensitive operations. Since leaking classified intelligence is a felony, a crucial concern was the reliability of the intermediaries chosen to publish it. One reporter who earned their trust was Adam Entous.

  In December 2015, Entous, then working at the Wall Street Journal, reported on the Obama administration’s surveillance of Israeli officials. In his telling, it was only by accident that Obama deputies had listened in on Americans.

  “The National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups,” wrote Entous. “That raised fears—an ‘Oh-s—moment,’ one senior U.S. official said—that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.”

  According to Entous, the blatant abuse of surveillance programs to spy on US citizens was an innocent mistake. The Obama administration was just trying to find out how Israel was planning to oppose the Iran deal. “White House officials,” he wrote, “believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign.”

  But it was only US lawmakers, not the prime minister of Israel, who had the ability to block the deal. Administration officials were going after Americans. They knew that they were doing something bad and worried that they were going to be caught.

  As Entous wrote, “Wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold.”

  In other words, the chief executive tasked intelligence officials to pass along intercepts of politically important communications involving Americans. Some of the times, those conversations were between Israeli officials speaking about US citizens.

  “The NSA has leeway to collect and disseminate intercepted communications involving U.S. lawmakers if,” wrote Entous, “foreign ambassadors send messages to their foreign ministries that recount their private meetings or phone calls with members of Congress, current and former officials said.”

  The Entous story, cowritten by Danny Yadron, had been leaked to defuse a potential scandal and shape it favorably toward the Obama White House.

  With Trump’s election, Entous became a favored pass-through device for leaks of classified intelligence purposed to damage the incoming administration. He moved to the Washington Post, the landing spot for a few Journal reporters who wanted to play a more active role in the anti-Trump resistance that the Post was leading.

  Entous had the lead byline on the December 9 Washington Post story mentioned earlier: “Secret CIA Assessment Says Russia Was Trying to Help Trump Win White House.” It was through leaks of classified intelligence to the press that Obama’s intelligence chiefs announced that they had changed their assessment of Russia’s role in the 2016 election. They now believed Putin had worked to help Trump win.

  Entous was one of three bylines, along with Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima, on the February 9, 2017, story leaking the intercept of Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak.

  Yet the most illuminating of Entous’s Russia-related scoops was a December 31, 2016, Washington Post article reporting that Russian hackers had penetrated the nation’s power grid through the computer system of a Vermont utility company. According to US officials, “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility.”

  After the story posted, the utility company reported to have been hacked, Burlington Electric, released a statement explaining that a laptop unconnected to the company’s grid had been affected by malware. There had been no threat to the utility, never mind “the nation’s electrical grid,” as the anonymous US officials had claimed.

  The story was false—which Entous or his cowriter, Juliet Eilperin, would have discovered had they contacted the electricity company before the story was published. They didn’t because the story has not been learned from sources on location. Rather, it had started with anonymous US officials who had leaked a false story to advance the Russiagate narrative.

  If Entous had first earned the trust of Obama officials by shaping the Iran deal surveillance scandal favorably, the Vermont utility story showed that he was willing not to ask basic questions, so long as the narrative was aimed at hurting Trump.

  Devin Nunes’s communications director, Jack Langer, says that as the collusion narrative developed over time, he saw a sociological pattern emerging. “There was a pecking order of journalists that aligned with the traditional media hierarchy. The Washington Post and New York Times were the ringleaders or trendsetters. Then you have everybody else who simply follows their lead and is afraid to do anything that strays out of the narrative that’s coming down from that clique.”

  But there was an even smaller group within that elite, a handful of journalists including Adam Entous, Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, and Devlin Barrett at the Washington Post and Matt Apuzzo, Matthew Rosenberg, Mark Mazzetti, Michael Schmidt, and Adam Goldman at the New York Times. They were entrusted with the most sensitive information, often classified, that advanced the anti-Trump operation.

  The small group of journalists corresponded to the select Crossfire Hurricane team, insulated from the rest of the FBI and DOJ and responsible for the day-to-day management of the coup: McCabe, Strzok, Page, and Ohr, with Comey as the grand, sometimes distant, leader. Comey took the lead in setting up Trump with the dossier briefing in January.

  After Trump’s win, the Crossfire Hurricane team supplemented Fusion GPS’s work, handing out Trump-Russia stories to media that needed content but no longer had the resources to produce it on their own. And this was a story that drove traffic for an industry hemorrhaging consumers and revenue.

  Just as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate reporting had made the Washington Post one of the most famous newspapers in the world, the Russiagate coverage boosted the media’s sagging numbers.

  Consider Woodward’s home, the Post. Between 2004 and 2015, the paper’s daily circulation shrank by more than half, from 726,000 to 360,000. But in 2017, Russiagate helped double the Post’s digital subscription number to one million, landing it in third place behind the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

  Everyone wanted a piece of Russiagate. It boosted news organizations as well as individual careers. Reporters who attached themselves to Fusion GPS got promotions, raises, job offers, TV contracts, and book deals. Some reporters even identified themselves as Trump-Russia correspondents. The beat was make-believe, covering a conspiracy theory that Clinton operatives had dropped into the public sphere. It’s as if an elite cadre of reporters had been assigned to cover the secret global conspiracy of Jews who rule the world and foment war, as described in the famous Russian intelligence forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and then called themselves “Protocols correspondents.”

  Yet Russiagate was a genuine financial category, a subindustry that drove traffic and thus convinced much of the press that it was producing real news.

  Some journalists said they repented having gone too easy on Obama and promised they’d never again flinch from the truth. That was nonsense, for they ignored the massive Obama-era scandal unfolding before them in real time. Obama’s FBI had run an espionage operation against a presidential campaign, which his CIA, FBI, and national intelligence directors rolled into a coup.

  Naturally, the media congratulated itself on partnering with Clinton operatives and Obama officials to target Trump. Even before Trump’s election, the New York Times’ media reporter, Jim Rutenberg, opined that “normal standards” of journalism might have to be discarded when covering a “potentially dangerous” man such as Trump.

  An MSNBC anchor compared journalists to firemen rushing into a burning building to save the truth. The Washington Post adopted a new motto, resonant with Orwellian forebodings: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It was coined by the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who said he had heard
the paper’s own Bob Woodward use the phrase once, when he had been talking about his latest book on Watergate, The Last of the President’s Men.

  Now the entire press corps was Woodward and Bernstein, every journalist a part of something meaningful. They weren’t just covering events but had a role in history. The story they were part of—the disinformation campaign they were pushing—was as momentous as Watergate.

  The few clear-eyed press critics remaining, such as Howard Kurtz at Fox News, tried to disabuse colleagues of their delusion. He noted that unlike in the case of Watergate, there was no evidence that Trump or his advisers had broken any laws.

  From that perspective, the Washington Post had come full circle. Having become famous for breaking a big story about the abuse of executive power, four decades later Congress’s hometown paper became the flagship of a shadow campaign pushed by executive branch officials such as Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe.

  But there’s another way to see the Post’s trajectory, a perspective that alters the popular understanding of the Watergate legend. From this point of view, the seeds of the press’s collapse were sown at the moment of what is typically characterized to be its greatest triumph.

  In the Watergate legend, Woodward and Bernstein’s source was a whistle-blower, a man of conscience serving the people he had protected for decades as a federal agent. That was Mark Felt, the second-highest-ranking official at the FBI.

  But Deep Throat, Felt’s alter ego, was a disgruntled senior bureaucrat who believed he was entitled to succeed J. Edgar Hoover and fumed when Nixon passed him over for the Bureau’s top job. Instead of going public with what he knew about a crime, a senior law enforcement official used tactics he’d learned in Hoover’s FBI to go after his enemy: the commander in chief.