The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  Langer began embedding critiques of the press’s performance in his comments to the media. For instance, when CNN requested comment for one 2018 story involving the congressman, Langer fired back, “It’s unsurprising to see the left-wing media spin Chairman Nunes’s routine observations as some nefarious plot, since these same media outlets spent the last year and a half touting a nonexistent Russia collusion conspiracy.”

  Langer decided he needed a new communications strategy. “Number one, to hell with these guys,” he says. “And number two, we have to push back.”

  Nunes had seen evidence of a real scandal: Obama officials had unmasked Trump associates and leaked their identities to the press. The leaks were criminal, abuses of power that violated the privacy rights of US citizens. Further, using national security surveillance programs to push a political operation risked provoking a popular backlash demanding an end to programs keeping Americans safe from terrorism. The leakers had put Americans into danger.

  The Democrats played to block by getting Nunes put under investigation. That amplified calls for the HPSCI chairman to hand over the reins of the Russia probe.

  The campaign against him was financed by left-wing money. Three progressive activist groups, MoveOn, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Democracy 21, filed complaints with the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) accusing Nunes of having leaked classified information during the March 22 press briefing.

  “Anyone can file a complaint with the OCE against any member of Congress,” says Langer. “Some groups use that as a weapon. Others use it to puff themselves up by filing some frivolous complaint against congressmen they don’t like so they can issue a press release. The OCE gets tons of complaints, and the vast majority of them probably never get a second look. There’s no way they can handle all of these, but the House Ethics Committee picked up the complaint from OCE and decided to investigate it.”

  The investigation was politicized from the outset, he explains. “Before they announced they would take this complaint, four of the five Democrats on the Ethics Committee had publicly denounced Devin for his unmasking revelations. Some accused him of leaking classified information; others said he needed to be removed as chairman. That’s clearly prejudgment, and those members should have recused themselves from the investigation. But that’s not what happened.”

  On April 6, Nunes decided to step aside from leading the Russia investigation. “I had to,” he recalls. “I was in the valley of death, and there was no other way out. They’d start sticking cameras in the faces of Republicans all over the Hill, demanding that I be forced out of the chairmanship.”

  Also, Nunes had seen evidence of a separate issue that would determine the course of HPSCI’s work: the FBI had used the Steele Dossier to obtain the spy warrant on Carter Page. If he kept fighting the Russia investigation, he’d cut himself off from what he already understood was the real issue. He asked other Republican committee members to take over the investigation: Mike Conaway, Trey Gowdy, and Tom Rooney. “I thought it would be over soon,” he says. “I was thinking that people were reasonable and there was no evidence of any wrongdoing, so this would be cleared up in two weeks, by the time the Easter break ended.”

  Conaway, on the other hand, remembers thinking that it was going to take some time. “I’ve served as chairman of the Ethics Committee, so I knew those things take forever,” he tells me.

  The eight-term congressman from Texas had been a military policeman in the army. Nonetheless, it was impossible to keep Adam Schiff in line. Conaway remembers his first meeting with HPSCI’s top Democrat after he’d taken over the investigation. “I looked for Adam Schiff the next day and found him in the cloakroom,” he says. “I said, ‘Hey, Adam, I’ve been asked to take over the Russia investigation,’ and he said, ‘Great, let’s work good together.’ I said, ‘Now, Adam, I am not going to go on TV, and I’ve asked my guys to not go on TV. Would you do the same? Would you and your guys get off TV and let’s conduct this investigation the way it ought to be done, behind the scenes?’ He looks at me incredulously and said, ‘Well, I have to ask permission from Nancy Pelosi to do that.’”

  Conaway was stunned. “It never occurred to me to ask Paul Ryan anything like that. I was relatively successful with myself. I was not on TV at all. I was totally unsuccessful with convincing Adam and his team to get off TV.”

  Schiff instead became the television face of the committee. He was a regular on CNN, forecasting nearly nightly that evidence of Trump-Russia collusion was just over the horizon.

  Radio host John Batchelor came to refer to Schiff as “Pathfinder”—an advance scout illuminating the routes by which Trump might be impeached for collusion.

  The nickname caught on with the Nunes team: “Pathfinder has found another path to collusion” became a regular quip among committee staffers every time Schiff stretched a new lie across the same worn bow.

  The Left hung on every word that crossed Schiff’s lips as he staged his campaign through the same media he fed with leaks and disinformation. Schiff was among those other figures—former Obama aides, Clinton operatives, corrupt law enforcement and intelligence officials, and the press—who poisoned the American public sphere with the collusion hoax.

  There was so much going on during that March and early April period, says Langer, that he wasn’t able to see how much had changed and how quickly. “It was just such rapid fire that I didn’t really have time to take a step back and think about it,” he says. “But after Devin stepped aside from leading the Russia investigation, I could look at it with some perspective. Then I put it all together in the same way Devin already had: they were using Russia to take down Trump.”

  Langer says that April period was a low point for the committee. Nonetheless, finding that the FBI had used the Steele Dossier to obtain the FISA warrant pointed HPSCI in a new direction.

  “I couldn’t have dreamed they’d be that dirty,” says Nunes. “As soon as we saw they’d abused the FISA process, we opened up the investigation right away because the FISA issues bled into other matters, like how they started the whole investigation. It was all a setup.”

  It was then he realized he’d come across the biggest political scandal in US history. “They used the intelligence services and surveillance programs against American citizens,” he says. “They spied on a presidential campaign and put it under a counterintelligence investigation so they could close it off and no one else would see what they were doing. They leaked classified intelligence again and again to prosecute a campaign against a sitting president. Ninety percent of the press was with them, and the attorney general was out of the picture.”

  That meant it was up to Nunes and his team to expose the hoax, get out the truth, and uphold the rule of law. Any offense they devised would involve going against the top levels of the DOJ and FBI, congressional opponents, the media, and the more than half of the country that had swallowed the collusion narrative.

  Strangely, Nunes’s team liked their odds. Help was on the way. At the end of March, the HPSCI chair met with a former public defender and onetime DOJ prosecutor and offered him a job. With Kashyap “Kash” Patel on board, the momentum would shift. Objective Medusa was about to begin.

  PART TWO

  INVESTIGATING THE INVESTIGATORS

  Chapter 13

  OBJECTIVE MEDUSA ON OFFENSE

  THERE WAS AN UPSIDE, says Nunes, to stepping away from leading HPSCI’s Russia investigation. “Knowing that there was no collusion, nothing on Trump, I could focus on the other things we’d started to find, like the unmaskings, FISA abuse, and other related matters.”

  On March 8, Nunes had written the Justice Department asking for copies of any applications submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “We were doing due diligence for the Russia investigation,” he says, “and we wanted any documents we thought might exist regarding a counterintelligence investigation.”

  There was a FISA warrant on Carter
Page. Nunes was briefed on it in mid-March. That was thanks partly to the efforts of Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and his staff would come to play an important role in uncovering FBI and DOJ crimes and abuses. The work of Grassley and his staff reinforced the work of Nunes and his team.

  The Senate Judiciary Committee had long been accustomed to looking at irregularities at the Department of Justice and the FBI.

  Grassley made sure HPSCI saw the FISA warrant. Grassley knew how to pressure DOJ. “Senator Grassley made it clear that his committee wouldn’t confirm Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general unless he saw the FISA,” says Nunes. “Since we’d been asking for it, Grassley made sure we saw it as well.”

  They saw that the FBI had used the Steele Dossier to obtain a warrant to spy on a US citizen. Not being able to say anything about it, while the media launched false allegations of collusion against the Trump administration daily, caused heartache for HPSCI Republicans. “All the members wanted to disclose it,” remembers Nunes. “We’re the ones with the sole jurisdiction for oversight of the intelligence community. So it was our responsibility, and Congress is counting on us when red flags pop up.”

  But they couldn’t say anything, not to the US public, not even to fellow members of Congress. The FBI and DOJ had buried it, like so much of the anti-Trump operation, under the heading of classified intelligence.

  Then an April 11, 2017, Washington Post story disclosed news of the FISA warrant on Page. The story, written by Ellen Nakashima, Devlin Barrett, and Adam Entous, was meant to further bolster the narrative that the Trump team had coordinated with Russia. The FBI had been so worried about signs of the Trump team’s friendliness toward Russia that it had used its most intrusive form of intelligence collection to monitor a US citizen.

  But for the anti-Trump conspirators across the US government and in the press, it was just a means of building the momentum necessary to take down the president.

  Just a few days later, Kashyap Patel joined Nunes’s team. HPSCI staff director Damon Nelson asked the chairman why he hadn’t gone through the normal hiring process. It was a decision Nunes had made on the spot. “I wanted him,” says Nunes, “and we needed him.”

  Nelson named the new hire the lead investigator. Patel helped take back the initiative after the ethics complaint pushed Nunes off leading the Russia investigation.

  At first Patel’s new colleagues didn’t know what to make of him. As a former prosecutor, he was always looking for the win. That didn’t comport well with the give-and-take that had previously governed HPSCI’s bipartisan ethos. The committee’s job was to pass legislation helping the intelligence community and provide constitutionally mandated oversight.

  But now the committee was returning to its original purpose when it had been established in the wake of the scandals that had rocked the intelligence community in the 1970s: to investigate crimes and abuses of an out-of-control intelligence community violating the rights of US citizens.

  As a New Yorker, Patel’s style sometimes clashed with those of the easygoing Californians, southerners, and midwesterners who made up the HPSCI staff. And his colleagues didn’t know what to make of what he was saying about the upper echelons in federal law enforcement.

  “He was always going on about the top people at DOJ and FBI,” says a former Army Special Operations officer on Nunes’s team, “and at one point I turned to him and told him, ‘Give it a rest.’ But Kash was right.”

  Nunes told his team he trusted Patel. “I wanted Kash to lead, and I wanted them to follow his lead,” he says. “I hired him to bust doors down and didn’t want them to get in his way.”

  Another HPSCI staffer remembers being skeptical at first. “Kash proposed a heroic quest,” says Patel’s investigative partner, “Jim,” who asks that his real name not be used.

  Together, their diverse temperaments, legal training, professional experience, and physical appearance were a study in contrasts, like something scripted for a police drama. Patel went in headfirst, while his investigative partner was more reserved, more cerebral.

  “Kash had a grand vision for the investigation,” says Jim. “We said, ‘We’ll believe it when we see it.’”

  Patel likes to mix it up in the corners. He’s a lifelong hockey fanatic. He coaches youth hockey in the Washington, DC, area and skates defense for the nationally renowned Dons, an amateur team named after the hockey commentator and fashion legend Don Cherry.

  Patel grew up on Long Island cheering for his local franchise, the New York Islanders, and was born in Queens, like the forty-fifth president. He says he knew Trump was going to win the moment he came down the escalator. “One, he’s from New York and doesn’t like to lose. He plans everything. Two, no one dominates the media like that guy. So everyone calls me crazy for eighteen months, but I was right.”

  We’re sitting in one of the few remaining Washington, DC, bars where smoking cigars is permitted. Patel hands me a Gurkha, made by a friend in Miami, Kaizad Hansotia, and lights it. He says he was expecting that there would be irregularities with the FBI’s Russia investigation. He knew the Crossfire Hurricane group: McCabe, Strzok, Page. “They’re really good agents and really good lawyers,” he says.

  The problem, he says, was that there was no accountability in significant parts of Obama’s Justice Department, often even when dealing with high-profile cases. “We had great terrorism cases just sitting on the shelves at DOJ and no one would approve them, because the bureaucracy was so bad. I joked that if you want to move quickly through DOJ, keep screwing up. Everyone who’s implicated in your mistakes has an interest in covering it up, so they’ll promote you.”

  There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the way the upper echelons worked. It was out of the ordinary, Patel thought, that Comey had never investigated the DNC’s servers after the alleged hack. “Instead, Comey just accepted CrowdStrike’s assessment,” he says. “Some random outside company that happened to be retained by Perkins Coie, the campaign’s lawyers. I never worked a case involving cyber where the FBI said, ‘Let’s not use our own people on this one.’ You’re supposed to do it yourself, you’re the FBI.”

  For Patel, Comey’s exoneration of Clinton was a stark illustration of everything that was wrong at DOJ. “He hijacked the Clinton investigation,” he says. “That was not his call to make. You don’t go on TV and say, ‘I, the FBI director, am deciding what is a prosecutor’s decision.’ And by the way, all my colleagues in the national security division, all truly apolitical, every one of us would have taken the Clinton case to a grand jury.”

  Patel had had enough. “I was at the doctor’s that day, and he asked why my blood pressure was running so high. I told him it was Comey’s speech. All that just added up over time, and I was thinking ‘I got to get out of here.’”

  When Patel accepted the job with Nunes’s team in April 2017, he didn’t know much about Congress or the Intelligence Committee. “But I was prepared to know who I would be dealing with in DOJ when I came on. I told Devin that we will find that the people running the Russia investigation will have done inappropriate things. That was my experience, having worked with them and seeing it occur. No one believed me. Maybe from an outsider’s view looking in, I might have also called myself crazy for saying that. Because it’s supposed to be DOJ.”

  Still, he told Nunes that if they really found something on Trump’s working with the Russians, they’d have to follow it no matter where it led. “I needed to have assurances of accountability,” he says.

  Nunes and Nelson wanted to start interviewing people immediately. Patel put on the brakes. “I told them, ‘No, not right away we don’t. We do at some point, but witness interviews are window dressing. That’s Investigation 101. What we need are all the documents.’”

  Patel explains that as a public defender he learned that documents are the key to taking on DOJ. “You have much fewer resources as a public defender. Witness testimony is great but if we can g
et the government’s own evidence to show X, Y, and Z, then you’ve got them.”

  The first document was the Steele Dossier. “Did these people named in the dossier actually do the things they’re alleged to have done? I told Devin if they did, then the president’s kind of screwed.”

  Patel read the dossier closely. “At first it looked laughable,” he says. “I mean, I grew up in New York. I don’t know Trump, but I grew up with the guy. Even for him I’m like ‘This is ludicrous.’ So I started by thinking that there were things in it that were either true or not—like did Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen go to Prague. If he didn’t, then that’s a problem proving the dossier is real.”

  But the centerpiece of the dossier, says Patel, is Carter Page. “If Page really did what the dossier claims, then that’s bad. That’s what you get a FISA for: a US person who is believed to be acting as a foreign agent and commits a crime.”

  Page first appears in the dossier in two memos from the mid-July period. Report 94, dated July 19, alleges that Page met secretly with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin during his trip to Moscow in early July. According to Steele, they discussed dropping sanctions in exchange for bilateral energy cooperation. Page has denied the allegations since they were first relayed to him in late July 2016.

  What the FBI knew about Page, however, made him a more attractive target for a FISA warrant. In 2013, Russian operatives working out of the Russian UN Consulate in New York had tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit Page. The former navy officer had helped the FBI make its case against the spies, but he was in the system for a Russia-related espionage matter. The FBI twisted that information to mislead the secret court to obtain the warrant.