The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  The Nunes team soon saw that the special counsel was simply a continuation of the slow coup. It even included members of the Crossfire Hurricane team, including the FBI couple Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. But even Strzok privately admitted that the case was a wash. He’d hesitated to join the special counsel, as he texted Page, “because of my gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.”

  The most important thing to know about the special counsel investigation is that by the time Mueller came on, the FBI had been monitoring Trump communications for seven months. Since October 21, it had been looking for just one email or phone call and had come up with nothing. Mueller could have wrapped up the collusion investigation on May 18. Instead, the anti-Trump operation marched on, with the same people and even more power and resources.

  McCabe was now the acting director of the FBI. Christopher Steele was still around, too. Right after Comey had been fired, McCabe had reached out to him through Bruce Ohr.

  The new funding source for the external operation was the Democracy Integrity Project (DIP), run by former Dianne Feinstein aide Daniel Jones. DIP paid Fusion GPS, which Jones called a “shadow media organization,” at least $3.3 million to continue its work, while Steele received $250,000. Another Fusion GPS contractor for the Trump-Russia project, Edward Baumgartner, was paid $125,000.

  The special counsel investigation was a show trial to punish Trump associates. It was conducted behind closed doors so that the Mueller team could shape the narrative through a continued campaign of leaks. With limitless resources, Mueller was accountable only to Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general whose actions were shaped by his fearful responses to the kind of “resistance” activists with whom Mueller had stacked the special counsel.

  “It was a team of dirty cops,” says Nunes. “Andrew Weissmann was the worst. He already had a history as a hard-core anti-Trump partisan.”

  Weissmann, a senior DOJ official, had made his political preferences clear by attending Clinton’s ultimately disappointing election-night party. After Trump fired Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates for refusing to defend the Muslim travel ban in court, Weissmann wrote her a congratulatory note. “I am so proud,” he wrote in the subject line. “And in awe,” he continued in the body of the email. “Thank you so much. All my deepest respects.”

  Weissmann knew about the Steele Dossier. Bruce Ohr had briefed him and Zainab Ahmad, another lawyer named to the special counsel investigation, in the summer of 2016 about Steele and Simpson’s work.

  The special counsel team was a hunting party of more than a dozen Clinton and Obama activists who’d accepted Mueller’s invitation to shoot Trump associates in a barrel.

  • Jeannie Rhee had donated more than $16,000 to Democrats since 2008. She’d defended Hillary Clinton in a 2015 lawsuit seeking access to her private emails. Rhee also represented the Clinton Foundation in a racketeering lawsuit and Ben Rhodes during the House Select Committee on Benghazi investigation.

  For a time, Rhee represented Clinton associates for HPSCI’s Russia investigation. Her joining the special counsel was an obvious conflict of interest.

  • Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s former chief of staff at the FBI, represented Justin Cooper, a former Clinton aide who had helped set up Hillary’s private email server and destroyed her electronic devices with a hammer.

  • Greg Andres donated $2,700 to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s 2018 campaign. Andres’s wife, Ronnie Abrams, a US district judge in Manhattan, had been nominated to the bench in 2011 by Obama.

  • Andrew Goldstein contributed a combined $3,300 to Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012.

  • Kyle Freeny contributed a total of $500 to Obama’s presidential campaigns and $250 to Hillary Clinton’s.

  • Rush Atkinson donated $200 to Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

  • Kevin Clinesmith was an FBI lawyer who’d worked on Crossfire Hurricane as well as Midyear Exam. His text exchanges with colleagues after Trump’s election are indicative of the Mueller team’s sensibility.

  “I am numb,” Clinesmith wrote after the election. “I am so stressed about what I could have done differently.”

  Everything he held most dear was at risk—which was what? The peace and security of his fellow Americans? Their fundamental liberties? The Constitution? No, the policies of the previous president.

  “I just can’t imagine the systematic disassembly of the progress we made over the last 8 years,” he texted colleagues.

  The work of law enforcement officials was to use the resources of the federal government to ensure that taxpayers didn’t stand in the way of the progress of which they were too ignorant to be grateful.

  “We have to fight this again,” Clinesmith wrote. “Viva le resistance [sic].”

  The special counsel investigation was the instrument he and his colleagues would use to rewrite history and undo an election.

  For Mueller it was personal. If the job of the special counsel required covering up the abuses of power and subsequent crimes committed by US intelligence officials and the Obama administration, it was a small price to pay. As the father of the post-9/11 FBI, he had been partly responsible for the dominant culture of the FBI’s upper echelon. He was protecting his legacy.

  A week after Mueller started as FBI director on September 4, 2001, his job description abruptly changed. The post-9/11 FBI had to be able to prevent terrorist attacks, which meant, according to the Bureau’s website, that it “needed to be more forward-leaning, more predictive, a step ahead of the next germinating threat.”

  Mueller set about transforming the United States’ federal law enforcement organization into an intelligence agency.

  Equally important, 9/11 further centralized the Bureau. A natural consequence of bulking up headquarters to coordinate with other agencies as well as foreign governments on counterterrorism operations was that the Bureau wielded more influence.

  The FBI was the central piece not only protecting the national interest but also preventing the overriding worry of the political class—another massive terror attack on the homeland—from becoming reality. Power, money, and prestige flowed from throughout the Beltway to the Bureau.

  Retired FBI agent Mark Wauck says the corporatization of the FBI was under way long before the 2001 attacks. “William Webster was appointed to run the Bureau in 1978,” says Wauck, who joined the FBI the same year. “He was a federal judge who didn’t know how to run a law enforcement agency, so he used a management model that IBM pioneered: management by objectives. This had an enormous effect on the FBI over the years.”

  The new model set goals and standards for achievement that had to be checked off before agents got promotions—e.g., subpoenas served, arrests, indictments, convictions. Further, explains Wauck, “the corporate model required agents to cycle back through headquarters every few years or so to advance their careers.” Promotions flowed from FBI headquarters.

  Wauck argues that 9/11 hastened the Bureau’s entry into the intelligence community, but it had already been under way before Mueller took over. “The Hanssen thing started it,” says Wauck. He’s referring to FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who sold secrets to the Soviets, then the Russians, starting in 1979 until his apprehension in February 2001. “It was seen as a tremendous failure for the Bureau,” adds Wauck, “and it was.”

  According to Wauck, the FBI had looked with disdain on the CIA after CIA officer Aldrich Ames had been arrested in 1994 for spying on behalf of Moscow. “The idea was that this was something Agency eggheads did,” he says. “We at the FBI don’t betray America. Then along comes Hanssen. It was a huge intelligence failure. We didn’t know, and we kind of did.”

  Wauck knew, and he said something. It wasn’t easy. Hanssen was his brother-in-law. Wauck prefers not to talk about the painful episode, except to note that his warnings were not heeded when he first identified Hanssen to his superiors as a potential problem in 1990.

  Thus 9/11 echoed the Hanssen case. The 9/11 Commission Report faulted the
FBI, the CIA, and the firewall that prevented them from sharing the intelligence with each other that might have saved American lives. In both cases, the information had been there but there had been no incentive to piece it together.

  Thanks in part to the efforts of Mueller’s FBI, there was no major catastrophic Islamic terror attack following 9/11. However, in its eagerness to prevent another major attack, the FBI became nearly fanatical in its pursuit of suspects.

  Weeks after 9/11, anthrax mailed to various destinations killed five people and infected another seventeen, while shutting down Capitol Hill and Washington’s mail system. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published the ramblings of a conspiracy-minded college professor who identified a virologist named Steven Hatfill as the culprit.

  Mueller told congressional leaders in January 2003 that bloodhounds trained to sniff anthrax had confirmed that Hatfill had been responsible for the letter attacks. He was wrong. Hatfill was cleared in 2008 and won a $5.8 million settlement from the US government. Having wasted millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money without ever arresting the actual criminal, Mueller refused to admit that he or the FBI had erred.

  Mueller was incapable of admitting he was wrong. In 2002, he directed his agents to oppose pardons for four wrongfully imprisoned Massachusetts men. They’d been framed by dirty FBI agents in order to protect one of their confidential sources, a Boston mobster who’d actually committed the murder for which the four men had been jailed. In 2006, the estates of the four men, two of whom had died in prison, were awarded $102 million for their wrongful decades-long imprisonment due to FBI misconduct.

  Mueller was a zealot and his virtue a charity funded by the US public. Wauck remembers a talk he gave at Georgetown University a year after the former director left the FBI. “He said, ‘I became a prosecutor because I like putting people in jail, and going through the trials,’” he recalls. “It’s a remarkable statement. It shows a real detachment from other human beings. When I was dealing with criminals, even with what you might call lowlifes, I tried to see where they were coming from, at least that they were human beings. Most of them aren’t monsters. Taking away someone’s liberty is a big thing.”

  Mueller became a high priest of the Beltway bureaucracy. And the institution he led became a reflection of him, as well as the culture that had produced him.

  “We do have a governing elite,” says Wauck. “And it consists largely of lawyers. People who run executive agencies are lawyers, and the courts have taken an increasingly large role in determining how we live.”

  Wauck remembers the beginning of his law career and witnessing the change. “When I was in law school in the midseventies, they were proposing new theories of the law, even the concept of a trial,” he says. “The traditional notion of a trial, the process of examination and cross-examination, was that it was the most powerful method for getting at the truth. But people started to scoff at that and the idea that there was any such thing as the truth.”

  That kind of relativism wasn’t just in the law schools; it reflected larger trends in the entire country. “By the beginning of the twenty-first century, everyone had grown up with these ideas,” says Wauck. “The bureaucracy mirrors where we are as a society.”

  Students who’d internalized those theories as undergrads found them reinforced in law school and were primed by the time they entered the workforce. Those who joined law enforcement seeded their values in the bureaucracy, US attorneys offices, Main Justice, and eventually the FBI.

  “The Bureau was taken over by the legal elite,” says Wauck. “Even a guy like McCabe is a lawyer. The FBI is run by former prosecutors: a Boston Republican, like Mueller, or guys from the Southern District of New York, like Comey.”

  But if prosecutions aren’t for finding the truth, what was the point of going through with them, except as a statistic to be checked off before getting a promotion? “The law and law enforcement institutions became a tool for shaping the country according to the preferences of its governing elite,” says Wauck.

  This is how, explains Wauck, you get a figure like FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith worrying that the FBI hadn’t done enough to protect Obama’s policies. The special counsel was a team of legal activists using the law to advance the political inclinations and privileges of the United States’ bureaucratic aristocracy. “The upper layers of the FBI,” he says, “have become populated by people like that.”

  Mueller’s show trials confirmed what many Americans already suspected: that in spite of all the fine rhetoric, we are not all equal under the law and the ruling class sees its own interests as being identical with the public good.

  “DOJ is a great institution,” says Patel. “Their one big problem is that they never admit they’re wrong. And when you show them that they’re wrong, they double down on it and it ends up screwing them. And that’s how I won a lot of my federal public defender cases against the Justice Department. I’d find out what they did wrong and give them an out, and they wouldn’t take it. And then the judge would be like ‘You guys effed up. Kash, your clients can go home.’”

  In midsummer, Patel was still looking for answers about Steele and his notorious reports. The lead Objective Medusa investigator saw an opportunity to learn more during a HPSCI staff trip to England.

  Part of the committee’s work under Nunes involved visiting sensitive intelligence sites around the world that were vital to the US intelligence community. “I went to England,” says Patel, “with a former committee staff monitor, Doug Presley, to look into a topic that was very important to the committee.”

  Patel figured that as long as he was in Steele’s vicinity, why not continue that work as well? He and Presley found a pleading in the British court system on behalf of Steele. He’d been sued for libel by Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian tech expert accused in a Steele memo of targeting DNC computer systems.

  In the court filings, Steele had said he had briefed several news organizations—the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, The New Yorker, and Yahoo! News—in late summer to early fall 2016. Further, instead of attesting to the veracity of his Trump-Russia investigation, Steele had punted.

  “His lawyers decided not to assert a truth defense,” says Patel. “He said the intelligence he collected was raw and unverified. He had not put it through the process that he had learned as a professional, to analyze it, to run it against other things, tradecraft that you normally use to say whether this legit or not.”

  That was a significant admission, and Patel and Presley wanted to know more. They checked back at the home office to get the go-ahead to look into it. “I told Damon, ‘Steele is represented by counsel,’” says Patel. “‘So let’s reach out to his lawyer and ask if Steele will participate in our Russia investigation since he and his dossier are central pieces of it.’”

  Steele’s lawyer was in London. On the day they were headed back to the United States, Patel and Presley stopped in at the lawyer’s office. “We found she was unavailable and left contact information and asked if she could call us,” says Patel. “We later found that we’d apparently upset her.”

  Langer steps in to explain how the story immediately began to circulate through the press, even as Patel was in midflight. “I started getting calls from multiple reporters at the same time, all with the same story,” he says. “Patel and Presley flew to London to try to ambush Christopher Steele.”

  The point of the story was to show that the Nunes team was unethical because Patel and Presley had tried to approach Steele directly even though they knew he was represented by counsel. They later figured out how that particular piece of fake news had taken off. “Fusion GPS’ attorney Joshua Levy was assisting Steele’s lawyer,” says Patel. “She called Levy, who started shopping the story, just making stuff up.” Levy denies this.

  Patel hit the ground to find himself in the middle of a manufactured story. “I land at Dulles, turn on my phone, and as I’m walking off the plane, my phone rings. ‘Oh, hey, Kash, what�
�s going on? This is Adam Goldman from the New York Times.’ I’ve never talked with him before, and he says, ‘Hey, what are you doing in London? I hear you’re tracking down Steele.’”

  Langer regrets that he wasn’t able to keep Patel and the other HPSCI staff members out of the media storm. “It was my responsibility,” he says. “It was my biggest regret that I couldn’t protect my own guys. It’s a hell of a thing for staffers to have their names splashed all over the media like Kash and Doug did. All they did was try to make contact with Steele’s lawyer. But a lot like the Midnight Run story, it was spun as another example of the bizarre, out-of-control Nunes team.”

  He continues, “The press attacks on Kash were relentless. Not long after the London story appeared, The Daily Beast ran a piece quoting some anonymous source—obviously a HPSCI Democrat—calling Kash Nunes’ ‘Torquemada.’”

  Patel’s family and friends, as far away as India, wanted to know why he was the focus of so much negative press attention. “Every time they hit me with a manufactured story,” says Patel. “I knew I was over the target.”

  He brushed it off and redoubled his efforts to get answers about Steele and his dossier. “After doing a lot of fraud cases and tracking terrorism finance networks at JSOC, I learned the easiest thing to do is go after the money,” he says. “So I said, ‘We have to find out who paid for this thing, because Steele didn’t just do it and no one paid him. Maybe the government paid him or the Bureau paid him. Maybe the CIA paid him.’ I was thinking of eighty-eight different possibilities. I was not thinking the DNC and the Hillary campaign paid him, because that was just insane.”

  HPSCI had previously tried to get Fusion GPS’s records but without success. “We’d written letters to more than a hundred witnesses asking for documents, and many complied; a few did not, which was their right,” Patel says. “When we got to Fusion GPS, they shut us down hard and fast immediately.”