The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  “The biggest tool for counterintelligence investigations is a FISA,” says Patel. “So once an investigation is opened, you pick the easiest target to get a FISA on, even if it’s not the actual person you want.”

  Page was the point of entry to gain access to the communications of the Trump team. The dossier, synchronized with Fusion GPS’s media narrative around Page, was what the Crossfire Hurricane team used to jimmy the lock.

  The July 19 Steele report alleging that Page had had a “secret meeting” with Sechin checked off an important box for the FISA application process. A warrant is granted to find out about the target’s clandestine activities on behalf of a foreign power. To obtain a FISA on a US citizen also requires showing probable cause that those clandestine activities involve or may involve a crime. There is no crime alleged in the July 19 memo. The substance of Page’s supposed meeting is not criminal. Removing sanctions on Russia in exchange for bilateral energy cooperation would be a matter of policy.

  The criminal predicate for the FISA warrant was introduced subsequently, in a memo, Report 134, dated almost exactly three months later, October 18. Report 134 is a revision of the July 19 memo that was directed by someone who knew the requirements for obtaining a FISA. The October 18 version described the same meeting in early July and appears to be related by the same “intimate” of Sechin’s who had reported the meeting to Steele’s intermediary in July.

  This time, however, Sechin’s “close associate” provided a different account. Instead of offering bilateral energy cooperation in exchange for convincing Trump to relieve sanctions, Sechin tells Page that he will profit personally. According to the memo, Page was offered “the brokerage of up to a 19% (privatised) stake in Rosneft in return.”

  That’s bribery. The scheme would have made Page a wealthy man. The brokerage fee would have amounted to at least tens of millions of dollars as a percentage of a deal worth more than $10 billion.

  Adam Schiff and media pundits claimed that Rosneft’s eventual sale of a 19 percent stake proved the veracity of the dossier. However, the 19 percent figure would have been easy to pull off the internet. By spring 2016, it was widely reported that Russia was looking to sell off between 19 and 19.5 percent of Rosneft. Nevertheless, the figure may have proved persuasive to the FISA court; a specific number is more persuasive than vague allegations of a bag of cash.

  The Trump adviser, according to Steele, “expressed interest and confirmed that were Trump elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.” The memo tied Page’s potentially criminal actions to Trump himself. According to Steele’s source, Page was “speaking with the Republican candidate’s authority.”

  The July 19 memo regarding Sechin and Page’s meeting is documented word for word, as if it had been cut and pasted from the dossier into the FISA application. The allegations are repeated in the three subsequent FISA application renewals. However, the revised October 18 memo alleging bribery is not apparent in any of the four applications.

  Since it is the later memo, alleging a potential crime in connection with clandestine intelligence activities, that fulfills the requirements of a FISA warrant, it is likely that the information is under redaction. It is not hard to see why the FBI and DOJ would seek to conceal the fact that a falsified document dated October 18 was used to obtain a secret surveillance warrant three days later, October 21.

  Patel says the money that Page was supposed to have collected from the deal with Sechin was another aspect of the dossier that could be found to be true or false. “It’s hundreds of millions of dollars,” he says. “You could find out if Page has that kind of money. We called him in and spoke with him. He obviously didn’t have that kind of money. It was clear the story in the dossier was nonsense.”

  The purpose of HPSCI’s Russia collusion investigation was to find out if anyone in the Trump campaign had really made deals with the Russians. But if the supposed linchpin of the Trump-Russia collusion scheme was innocent, what was the evidence?

  Patel’s next step was to collect all the investigative documents surrounding Crossfire Hurricane. “I knew I had to get the documents leading to the production of the FISA,” he says. “I wanted to know what the government knew, when they knew it, and if there were any material omissions in the FISA application.”

  Once they secured the documents from the FBI, Patel and the Intelligence Committee moved to interviews to get people on the record. Did anyone have proof that the Trump team had colluded with Russia?

  “I had to tell a lot of people that collusion isn’t a crime,” says Patel. “It sounds bad, but it doesn’t exist, it’s a legal fiction. But I was like, okay, we’ve got to use that because it’s in the media and everybody’s already using it.”

  The important thing was to determine if there had been any criminal activity. Patel, along with HPSCI members Trey Gowdy, Tom Rooney, and Mike Conaway, and their staff came up with the “three Cs”: collude, conspire, coordinate.

  “Conspiracy is a real crime,” says Jim. “Coordination isn’t a crime, but it was a way to explain in layman’s terms a predicate for conspiracy. So did anyone see any coordination between the Trump team and Russia?”

  Nunes’s committee interviewed officials from the Obama administration, the law enforcement and intelligence communities, and the Trump campaign. It was the same line of questioning for all of them.

  “We asked them the three Cs straight up,” says Patel.

  He runs down a partial list:

  “‘Do you, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, have evidence of the three Cs?’

  “‘No, I don’t.’

  “‘Do you, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates?’

  “‘No.’

  “‘Do you, Jim Comey?’

  “‘No.’

  “‘Do you, Andy McCabe?’

  “‘No.’

  “‘Do you, John Podesta?’

  “‘No.’

  “‘Do you, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS?’

  “‘No.’”

  A number of witnesses tried to sidestep Patel’s line of questioning.

  “And I said, ‘Hang on. I’m not asking if you thought it happened or if you heard it happened,’” Patel says. “I said, ‘Do you have information that exactly addresses this issue? If you tell me it exists, we’ll go get the documents, we’ll go get the people, we’ll use subpoenas.’ We weren’t hired to clear Donald Trump. We were charged with figuring out what happened.”

  The investigation, he says, was going to reveal whether there was collusion or not. “It’s a finite question. We weren’t trying to solve an unsolvable murder. Donald Trump got elected. We knew the Russians definitely did some squirrely stuff, hacked some things and whatnot. The issue was, was there evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign said anything to the Russians like ‘Trump wants to be president, you help him, he’ll help you down the road’? We asked every single person we interviewed, and not a single person answered affirmatively to that question.”

  There was nothing.

  “So if no one had any evidence,” says Patel, “including the principals that were running the investigation, then maybe it didn’t happen. It became evident that the answer was no across the board. I didn’t expect to find that clean of an answer. But we did.”

  If there was no evidence of collusion, conspiracy, or coordination, what had happened? The FBI had opened an investigation on the Trump campaign and had obtained a surveillance warrant without any real evidence. Something was very wrong.

  Patel had already warned Nunes and the staff that they were going to find irregularities in what the FBI and DOJ had done. “Once we discovered bad action by FBI and DOJ, our driving force became proving what they knew and when they knew it, especially when it came to the Carter Page FISA,” he says. “Misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a seriously grave offense for which there must be accountability. And we felt the evidence would speak for itself; the fight was obtaining it for the public to
see.

  “I said from the beginning that Jim Comey and Andy McCabe are not squared away guys,” he adds. “I knew that something was up.”

  Not everyone saw it that way, says Patel’s investigative partner. “Many of these people coming from the IC, especially Comey, had gotten a lot of mileage out of being the source of disclosures to members and had given the appearance of candor. This is the guy who comes and tells us secret stuff,” says Jim. “The inclination was to trust him.”

  But Patel had worked with Comey and the others. “You cannot put on paper the value of sitting in a room with people,” he says. “My job has always been to read people. I was a trial lawyer. I had to read juries. I was pretty good at being able to read people and find their biases. I said the same thing when I was running this investigation: ‘I know these guys, I know their biases. I’ve been in a room with them. They present well. But they have agendas. And they tailor their investigations to reflect those agendas, at least the high-profile ones.’”

  The fundamental problem with the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was the Crossfire Hurricane group. Now it was time for the Nunes team to pivot; they were going to investigate the investigators.

  “I told Devin that our investigation is going to be a thing,” says Patel. “I told him we needed a name. It’s going to be big.”

  HPSCI was investigating Russia collusion, but now it was turning its attention to what law enforcement authorities might have done during the course of Crossfire Hurricane: unmasking, FISA abuses, and other related matters.

  “There are so many parts to this,” Patel remembers telling Nunes. “There were so many snakes on one head. I told Devin, ‘We need to cut off the head, like Medusa.’ So that’s what I called it: ‘Objective Medusa.’ It was our thing.”

  Chapter 14

  THE PAPER COUP

  PATEL’S WARNINGS about the FBI’s top echelon were starting to make an impact. Nunes had had his suspicions about Comey and McCabe previously, but his awakening came soon after Patel joined.

  “I expressed my concerns about the unmaskings in March,” Nunes remembers. “I wanted to speak to the FBI director and called him repeatedly. A month later I see Comey coming in for an informational meeting on Russia, and I told him I’d been trying to get ahold of him to look into the unmasking.”

  The FBI director lied to him. “Comey says, ‘Oh, if I’d only known, Mr. Chairman, I’d have called right away.’ So that’s when I knew he was crooked. He wouldn’t meet me to discuss unmasking because clearly his guys are involved in it. He’s a liar and a con man.”

  Patel acknowledges that his perspective on the FBI’s top two officials went against the grain. The FBI is a respected institution, and Comey had cultivated a following not only in the law enforcement community but also among the press and bureaucracy intellectuals, such as Benjamin Wittes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and editor in chief of Lawfare, a national security blog. Wittes played a large role in pushing the collusion narrative through his blog and on Twitter, where he posted images of cannon going off—Boom!—every time a new leak promised to topple Trump. He continued to promote his friends in law enforcement even after the scale of their abuses and crimes became clear.

  Patel says he understands why so many of his new colleagues initially defended Comey and McCabe: “Comey’s the director of the FBI and McCabe’s his deputy. They must be as good as they say they are.”

  Patel stipulates that they were good lawyers and good agents, but there was something wrong with the self-images they’d created. The problem was more than vanity, it was hubris.

  Virtually every meeting room in Washington is packed with men and women who are vying to be smartest in the room. What made Comey and McCabe different was the power they had at their disposal to arrange the world in accordance with their preferences. They could shape reality. They could destroy the president with an investigation. Imagine what they could do to anyone else who got into their crosshairs.

  “They’d inverted the principles of constitutional democracy,” says Patel’s investigative partner, Jim. “In their view, elected officials were accountable to unaccountable bureaucrats.”

  Comey and the Crossfire Hurricane team thought they could decide an election. “Comey sees himself as the protector of America,” says Patel. “He has an ego that can’t fit on planet Earth. McCabe was his protégé, and they thought the world of each other, and they would say that publicly every chance they got.”

  Patel saw something else: “McCabe was overseeing the Clinton investigation after his wife got nearly seven hundred thousand dollars from Clinton allies for her run at a state senate seat. That’s a lot of money. And they never thought that was a problem. McCabe didn’t think to recuse himself from the email investigation.”

  Instead, says Jim, “McCabe fought recusal tooth and nail. He thought he was above reproach because his boss did.”

  “Comey said they weren’t going to prosecute Hillary for leaks of classified information, when the whole world knew that she’d leaked classified information,” says Patel. “And they went back and forth on whether or not she intended to leak it. It was a total fabrication, because the statute requires no intent. And so I thought, if they did it there, and knowing how they operate, it’s possible they did something here, too, while investigating another presidential campaign.”

  That fact alone still brings Patel up short. “Comey had both presidential candidates under investigation. That’s J. Edgar Hoover style.”

  Nunes had become convinced that Comey was a con man after he’d lied to his face in April. But he knew there was something wrong with FBI director Comey’s March 20 testimony in front of HPSCI. “We’d been hearing since the election about Trump and Russia,” he says. “It’s everywhere in the press. I wanted to get his testimony because I wanted to do as much in public as possible to force them to say they didn’t have anything. I thought Comey would be a calming influence. I thought he would answer questions and say, ‘Okay, we’re interviewing a few people, but this is not about the president.’”

  But because the Crossfire Hurricane team had nothing on Trump and because of all the evidence of their own wrongdoings, Comey had to stay on offense.

  “The March 20 hearing was to give the FBI a chance to come clean,” says Nunes. “‘Okay, what do you have? You got nothing, and we know it because you never showed it to us.’ We were calling his bluff,” says Nunes. “And Comey doubled down.”

  After the chairman made a brief introduction, ranking member Adam Schiff took the microphone. Allocated five minutes, Schiff spent nearly twenty legitimizing a conspiracy theory by reading the dossier into the Congressional Record and parceling out other parts of the dossier to Democratic members. He cited Steele, whose “Russian sources tell him that [Carter] Page has also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin.” Further, said Schiff, “according to Steele, it was Manafort who chose Page to serve as a go-between for the Trump campaign and Russian interests.” He then set the stage for Comey’s big revelation: the FBI director, he said, “may or may not be willing to disclose even whether there is an investigation.”

  Comey thanked the committee, then made his move:

  I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.

  Nunes was surprised. “I had no idea he was going to pull that stunt,” says the congressman. “Comey leaves the whole world with the impression they were investigating Trump while playing word games that they were only investigating the campaign.”

  Nunes later came to realize that Comey’s testimony had drawn a larger circle around the anti-Trump operation. “At the time we didn’t know the FBI was
in on it,” he says. “We knew Obama people were, because of Obama’s dossier. But we thought the FBI was clean.”

  The FBI had been investigating Trump and his associates since winter 2015–2016. It had been monitoring Carter Page’s communications for five months at that point and still had nothing to tie Trump to the Kremlin. If the conspirators were going to topple Trump, they needed another instrument. Comey supplied it.

  In announcing the investigation, Comey set a trap: if Trump fired him, he’d become vulnerable to charges of obstructing an ongoing investigation.

  It was the first in a series of obstruction traps designed to hem in the president. Any attempt at self-preservation, to flush out the conspirators who were determined to end his presidency, would only put him in further danger.

  The plotters were counting on the apprentice chief executive to make a mistake. In the meantime, they’d buy themselves enough time and maybe find something else they could use to remove him from the White House. He wasn’t their president, so he wasn’t really the president at all.

  “A successful coup,” says Edward Luttwak, the author of Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, “requires the conspirators to take over a small but sufficient part of the government apparatus. For instance, if the country has a million soldiers but they are on remote fronts, a garrison of three thousand men in the capital can make and unmake governments.”

  Imagine that the top military brass is plotting to overthrow the commander in chief. Now move them out of the Pentagon and drop them into the same high-level posts—number ones, their deputies, deputy assistants, and so on—at the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation. It would be a bloodless uprising, not a military putsch. They’d encircle the White House not with tanks but with paper: memos, letters, and legal documents as well as falsified reports, such as the Steele Dossier.