The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  Patel decided to get Fusion GPS’s financial records directly from its bank. But the committee was not accustomed to subpoenaing private, nongovernmental entities. Patel had to convince Nunes that it was the right way to go. He had two weeks of concentrated face time with the boss as they traveled together in the late summer.

  Every August Nunes picks a part of the world to focus on as it relates to the committee’s oversight duties. In the summer of 2017, he chose the Balkans. “We went to maybe ten countries,” says Patel, “visiting with our folks, with foreign government officials, and seeing where we could assist further and what our guys on the ground needed. I spent every night for the entire two weeks, starting in Sarajevo, trying to convince Devin to issue a subpoena.”

  Nunes remembers that he and Patel were standing on the spot where Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in 1914. “He’s talking about this subpoena, and I looked at him and told him, ‘Kash, you’re going to get me shot.’ If we were going to take a shot at them, we couldn’t afford to miss.”

  Patel says he knew it was a pretty drastic step. “So I told him,” Patel recalls, “‘I think I know who paid for this thing, but I need a subpoena. If you give me this subpoena and I’m wrong, I’ll tell you I was wrong, and you’ll shut down this portion of the investigation, and I’ll quit.’”

  Nunes explains that he was enthusiastic about Patel’s proposal but was calculating the political costs in case they misfired. “Kash had the legal stuff covered, but I had to think about the political dimensions,” he says. “Any misstep we made could cost us the support we had from Republicans. Could you imagine if one time, one of these fake news stories were true?”

  As the trip was winding down in northern Italy, Nunes gave Patel the green light. It was after a long day visiting the US Army Africa Command in Vicenza, a town just outside Venice, and the two Americans found themselves in an old-school Italian cafe on an empty square in the five-hundred-year-old town. “It looked like it was out of The Godfather,” says Patel. “We’re both drinking Negronis, and I realized it was a go with the subpoena. Devin looks at me and said, ‘Okay, this makes sense. When we get back, we’re going to do this.’”

  Chapter 16

  THE DEEP STATE DIGS IN

  THE OBJECTIVE MEDUSA team scored its first big win in the fall of 2017. HPSCI litigated with Fusion GPS to get its bank records.

  “That took months,” says Patel. “We issued the subpoena, and finally the court called to say they were going to rule in our favor. The court said we were entitled to see the information, pursuant to our investigation.”

  Nunes was walking on the Capitol Hill grounds when he heard who had funded the dossier. “Jack called me to say it was the Clintons,” he says. “And I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I was actually surprised they hadn’t funded it through a super PAC, but they probably wanted to control it more directly.”

  Nunes thought that now that the dossier’s funding had been made public, that would be the end of it, and their work was done. “You’d think that would have been the turning point,” he says. “We showed how it had been paid for by Trump’s political rivals, so obviously this thing couldn’t be taken seriously anymore.”

  Nunes would be surprised several more times over the next year. No matter what he uncovered about the dossier and the anti-Trump operation, the Russiagate narrative lived on. In fact, the events of October were the first iteration of a pattern that was to be repeated frequently over the coming months.

  First, as the Nunes team was zeroing in on a target, the press posted attacks from political operatives to delegitimize his committee’s work—even before the media had a grasp of the details. After preemptive efforts to derail Objective Medusa investigators failed, the conspirators leaked details to the press in an effort to shape the news as favorably as possible. In that case, Nunes drew heat from congressional rivals immediately after issuing the subpoena for Fusion GPS’s records. The HPSCI chairman, said one of the committee’s Democrats, Eric Swalwell, was “trying to undermine the investigation.”

  Fusion GPS’s lawyer took a shot, too. “This is a blatant attempt to undermine the reporting of the so-called ‘dossier,’” said Joshua Levy, “even as its core conclusion of a broad campaign by the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election has been confirmed by the US intelligence community and is now widely accepted as fact.”

  Shortly before the court’s ruling, Fusion GPS broke the news via an anonymous, preemptive leak to the Washington Post’s Adam Entous, Devin Barrett, and Rosalind Helderman for an October 24 story.

  The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.

  Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.…

  Fusion GPS gave Steele’s reports and other research documents to Elias, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear how or how much of that information was shared with the campaign and the DNC and who in those organizations was aware of the roles of Fusion GPS and Steele. One person close to the matter said the campaign and the DNC were not informed by the law firm of Fusion GPS’s role.

  In fact, Elias had briefed Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook on the dossier. Further, the campaign had repeatedly released statements timed to the release of articles sourced to Steele and Fusion GPS’s work.

  For instance, there was the September 23, 2016, press release posted shortly after Isikoff’s story about Carter Page. Echoing Steele, the Clinton campaign claimed that “Page met with a sanctioned top Russian official to discuss the possibility of ending U.S. sanctions against Russia under a Trump presidency.”

  An October 19 campaign press release repeated Steele’s claims about Page, rehearsed Fusion GPS talking points about Flynn at the RT dinner, and even threw in a handful of names from the May 20 protodossier, such as Felix Sater.

  The Post story caused some anxiety among media friends of Fusion GPS who wondered why they hadn’t been given the leak. “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman complained on twitter.

  “When I tried to report this story,” tweeted her Times colleague Kenneth Vogel, “Clinton campaign lawyer [Marc Elias] pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’”

  In other words, even though major press organizations had known for more than a year that the dossier had been funded by the Clintons—but couldn’t get it confirmed—they still wrote about it as though it were a genuine intelligence report.

  Though the story upset rivalrous media operatives, the revelation of the funding source galvanized support on the right. “It wasn’t that my colleagues were against me before that,” says Nunes. “They figured after I came out about the unmasking that Obama officials had done something bad. But it wasn’t easy to back me when the Left had me under an ethics cloud.”

  Now Republicans became more vocal. “But our eye was on the entire country,” says Nunes. “We still couldn’t get to critical mass—fifty percent of America plus one. If you have public opinion on your side, you can bust a whole bunch of things open. We weren’t there.”

  In retrospect, it’s easy to see why the anti-Trump operation couldn’t stop. There were too many institutions invested in the enterprise to walk away. Chief among them were the Democratic Party and its corporate infrastructure, the press, and the Department of Justice.

  Bank records showed that between May 24, 2016, and December 28, 2016, Perkins Coie paid Fusion GPS $1,024,408. “But they weren’t the only law firm that was giving Fusion GPS money,” says Patel.

  Between March 7, 2016, and October 31, 2016, BakerHostetler paid Fusion $523,651 for its work with Russi
an lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

  The bank records showed that eight other law firms were also paying Fusion GPS. HPSCI’s arrangement with the court prohibited the committee from releasing confidential information contained in the records.

  Three journalists, their names were not released, who reported on Trump-Russia matters had been paid by Fusion GPS. Equally, if not more, significant were the journalists and media organizations that had paid Fusion GPS for information. “Lots of media entities and writers and authors were giving them money,” says Patel. “Individual writers were paying Fusion GPS.”

  Fusion GPS was double dipping, charging media companies for the content that law firms were paying them to disseminate. Why not? Media organizations couldn’t produce their own content, so they paid for material.

  “Fusion GPS very successfully marketed itself as an information-gathering entity,” says Patel. “And prior to this they kept below the radar, which is another talent of theirs. They didn’t divulge their clientele.” Further, he says, “they had a good network of contacts at high-end publications to whom they could offer their own network, like Christopher Steele or Bruce Ohr.”

  Both Steele and Ohr were on Fusion GPS’s payroll. “Formally they were paying his wife, Nellie,” says Patel. “But by extension they were paying the number four guy at DOJ.”

  The bank records showed that Nellie Ohr was one of Fusion GPS’s contractors. She came on in October 2015 and was employed until September 2016. She was paid $55 per hour for a total of $44,000—more than fair compensation for twenty weeks of part-time work.

  Patel recalls that his partner was searching the internet for information about her and found a picture.

  “Here’s Nellie Ohr with her husband,” Jim said aloud. “Bruce Ohr.”

  Patel jumped up from his seat and stared at the photo of the two together. “I said, ‘What the hell?’ I know Bruce, not personally but as the assistant deputy attorney general for organized crime,” he says. “When I was a federal public defender, I had cases against his office. So we found online a photo of them together and an article and we’re like ‘What the hell?’”

  The upper echelons at Justice hated Trump, says the former prosecutor. “If Nellie Ohr was working on this anti-Trump project, then I knew Bruce must be involved, too. It was one of those green-light moments.”

  Patel took his discovery to Nunes. “I said, ‘Hey, by the way, the number four at the Justice Department is running this side investigation. Devin says, ‘Okay, get out of my office if you’re going to be drinking early.’ I was like ‘I’m telling you, sir. I’m right. I know these guys.’”

  Patel knew where to look to get the proof. In the fall, Nunes had started to take him to meetings with Rosenstein and his senior staff at DOJ. Even though HPSCI had subpoenaed DOJ in August 2017 for material on Steele, the dossier, and the FISA warrant, Rosenstein hadn’t been paying much attention. “Once we get into October, he starts to pay attention,” says Patel.

  Rosenstein had come to recognize that there were serious problems with the FBI’s investigation of Trump, and now he was in the middle of it. He indicated that he hadn’t actually read the spy warrant on Page before he had signed the final renewal in June 2017. If so, it was a damning failure. It meant that the deputy attorney general had put his name onto a document that allowed the special counsel he had appointed to spy on the White House based on Clinton-funded dirt.

  Patel asked Rosenstein to what extent the FISA on Carter Page had been verified. “I asked him about the Woods file, and he says, ‘I don’t know what that is,’” says Patel. “I’m thinking, he was the United States attorney for Maryland and a federal prosecutor, and he doesn’t know what a Woods file is. Is this guy being coy, or does he really not know? So I explained it to him, in front of his senior staff.”

  The Woods procedures were designed to minimize factual inaccuracies in FISA applications. A Woods file holds the documents proving assertions of fact. “It’s a verification file,” says Patel. “So every time you assert a fact before the FISA court, there’s a document in a binder, the Woods file, that supports it.”

  Rosenstein’s ignorance of standard DOJ procedures suggested to Patel that the deputy attorney general had really not read the warrant. “That was about the time Rosenstein really started to dislike me,” he says.

  In a subsequent meeting at DOJ, Patel added another item to the list of documents he wanted: the records of every FBI interview, known as a 302, with Bruce Ohr. “I told Rosenstein that I wanted all the Ohr 302s. And he says, ‘None of these exist. You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you think my ADAG was out there running this side investigation, you’re crazy.’”

  Patel’s hunch was right. “Not forty-eight hours after that meeting, I get a call from a guy on Rosenstein’s senior staff who tells me that twelve Bruce Ohr 302s came in,” he says. “So then we went over there and read them—jackpot.”

  The twelve 302s documenting Ohr’s meetings with the FBI start on November 22, 2016. However, they memorialize all of Ohr’s interactions with Simpson and Steele, which began in January 2016 at the latest.

  Those meetings, conversations, and exchanges are crucial to understanding what the FBI and DOJ knew and when they knew it. For instance, it was September 2016, a month before the Page FISA was obtained, when Steele told Ohr that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.”

  Patel filed that away. “The FBI and DOJ knew their main source had a tremendous bias against a target of their investigation, and they intentionally failed to disclose this fact to the FISC,” he says.

  Ohr and Steele had known each other since 2007. They’d worked on the FIFA case together and had been in steady communication about Oleg Deripaska and other matters since January 2016. Yet according to Nellie Ohr, neither she nor her husband had known that Glenn Simpson had hired both her and Steele to investigate Trump’s Russia connections until they met for breakfast on July 30, 2016.

  The story was not credible, according to an Objective Medusa investigator who believes Nellie Ohr lied to Congress.

  Soon after the breakfast, likely in early August, Bruce Ohr met with Andrew McCabe and Lisa Page. Ohr knew them. He’d worked with McCabe when the FBI man had led the Eurasian organized crime task force in New York City. Ohr had been Page’s supervisor when she had been a DOJ trial attorney in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section.

  The FBI had activated Steele as a confidential human source in February, but now Ohr was briefing the Bureau’s deputy director about what its own informant had come up with on Trump and Russia in his Clinton-funded research.

  Ohr met with Lisa Page again later, in August 2016. They were joined by Peter Strzok and several DOJ officials, Bruce Swartz, Zainab Ahmad, and Andrew Weissman. The last two DOJ officials later joined the Mueller team.

  On August 22, Ohr met with Glenn Simpson, who talked about Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen. Ohr relayed to the FBI what his wife’s boss had told him.

  Ohr also passed on his wife’s Fusion GPS work to the FBI. In the fall, she gave him a thumb drive with her work on it, and he handed it off to the Bureau.

  Ohr stayed in contact with Steele throughout the fall of 2016. In September, they met in Washington for breakfast. Steele texted him often. On October 18, he texted: “I have something quite urgent I would like to discuss with you.”

  October 18 was the date of the Steele memo alleging that Carter Page had been offered a bribe—the memo that had helped obtain the spy warrant on Page granted three days later.

  “When I got a call from Chris Steele and he provided information, if it seemed like it was significant, I would provide it to the FBI,” said Ohr. He revered the former British spy. “When I receive information from Chris Steele, I’m not going to sit on it,” he said. “I’ve got to give it to the FBI.”

  On November 1, 2016, Steele was fired by the FBI for speaking to the
press. Ohr became his back channel to the FBI. Ohr first met with FBI agent Joe Pientka, who became his handler. Ohr’s November 21 meeting with Pientka was documented in the first 302.

  Now Bruce Ohr was servicing his wife, his wife’s colleague, and his wife’s boss.

  Ohr met with Simpson again in December. Simpson gave him a thumb drive that contained what became known as the Steele Dossier, which the DOJ lawyer handed over to the FBI.

  Shortly after Comey was fired on May 9, McCabe asked Ohr to reach out to Steele.

  The twelfth Ohr 302 is dated May 15, 2017.

  After the special counsel was named May 17, Steele told Ohr he wanted to speak with the Mueller team.

  Ohr continued to meet with the FBI at the Bureau’s request, as Steele’s cutout, until late November 2017. The 302s of the post–May 2017 meetings were held in the custody of the special counsel and never disclosed to Congress.

  Ohr said he had warned his DOJ and FBI colleagues prior to the FISA application that Steele had it out for Trump. Nonetheless, for more than a year, the DOJ senior official ran errands for anti-Trump political operatives: Steele, Simpson, and his wife, Nellie.

  The term “Deep State” originated in the Middle East, describing the human bedrock of hard-security regimes, such as those of Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan, managed by an entrenched network in which the military and security establishment intersect with political and corporate interests.

  That’s also true of Washington’s permanent bureaucracy, the men and women behind the attempted anti-Trump coup. But the character of the US Deep State is different, the men and women softer.

  They’re educated suburbanites, many with law degrees. They exchange tips about curing and grilling meat, drink craft beers, and text their girlfriends on their way home to put their children to bed and kiss their wives good night. They share state secrets with journalists in exchange for basketball tickets.