by Lee Smith
Those involved in the attempted anti-Trump coup didn’t risk capture, torture, and execution for plotting against the head of state. Nor did they have to arrange in secret for troop movements to surround the presidential residence. Uniquely, this coup, the Paper Coup, was conducted openly. The journalists who could have exposed the plot went to the same parties as the spies.
Everyone talked about it all the time. Strzok and Page texted each other like teenage girls. They texted about leaking information to journalists. They texted about planning a cocktail party for the judge who had handled the Flynn case, Rudolph Contreras.
When the Ohrs met with Steele and his associate for breakfast on July 30, it wasn’t in some empty lot or field but in a hotel restaurant named after J. Edgar Hoover. Ohr walked into government buildings and briefed officials on the progress of the coup. FBI and State Department officials documented their conversations with the DOJ lawyer.
But like third-world coups, this one was a function of intersecting networks. One was a specialized professional network that cut across the various US government institutions and numerous fields: law enforcement, academia, and the media.
Nellie Ohr, for instance, said that she views herself “as part of a community of people who are interested in Russia.” The Russia community was one of the networks at the center of the coup. The fifty-eight-year-old Ohr got her PhD in Russian history from Stanford and taught at Vassar in the 1990s.
“Chris Steele,” said Mrs. Ohr, “was part of that community.” There were many others in the Russia community, such as Edward Baumgartner, the other Russian linguist Fusion GPS contracted for the Trump project. He graduated from Vassar in 1995, while Nellie Ohr was teaching there.
Bruce Ohr had targeted Russian gangsters as chief of the DOJ’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section. Andrew McCabe had been in charge of the Eurasian organized crime task force in New York City, also going after Russian criminals.
Glenn Simpson had first become fascinated with Russian organized crime while he was a journalist at the Wall Street Journal. “We had a shared interest in that topic,” Nellie Ohr said of her former employer.
The Russia community in Washington was extensive, with many playing roles in the coup. David Kramer, a longtime aide of John McCain, worked on Russia issues at the State Department. At the late senator’s request, after the election, Kramer flew to England to meet with Steele at his home, where the former MI6 man gave him what would become known as the Steele Dossier. When he returned to the Beltway, Kramer met with Simpson, who also handed him pieces of the dossier. Kramer then gave the dossier to McCain, who gave it to Comey. He also passed on Steele’s reporting to Carl Bernstein at CNN, Rosalind Helderman, and Tom Hamburger at the Washington Post, Julian Borger at The Guardian, David Corn at Mother Jones, Peter Stone at McClatchy, and Ken Bensinger at BuzzFeed, which published it on January 10, 2017.
Like Kramer, former Obama ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul frequently provided quotes critical of Trump for Fusion GPS-generated Trump-Russia stories. Kathleen Kavalec was a Russianist at the State Department who spoke with Steele in October 2016 and Ohr a month later. She thanked the DOJ official for stopping by and sent him the link to a Financial Times article about the Trump team’s alleged ties to Russia. The story was based on his wife’s reporting for Fusion GPS.
The Russia network was a self-generated echo chamber. Everyone believed the same things about Russia and Trump because all they knew was one another’s work, which they transmitted to others in the network.
Victoria Nuland was another Russianiast at the State Department, where she was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. According to Bruce Ohr, Glenn Simpson was meeting with her in the fall of 2016.
Jonathan Winer worked at the State Department with Nuland and Kavalec. Winer had been working on Russia affairs since the late 1990s, when he met Bruce Ohr.
Nunes’s announcement in February 2018 that he was looking into the State Department’s role in the FBI’s Russia investigation prompted Winer to explain himself.
He wrote in a February 8, 2018 Washington Post article that he had first met Steele in 2009 and had become his main contact in the Obama State Department. Steele shared his Trump-Russia reports with Winer in September 2016.
Winer wrote that he’d given a summary of Steele’s reports to Nuland, who said secretary of state John Kerry needed to be made aware of Steele’s material.
Nuland and Winer’s stories didn’t match. She claimed that she’d heard about Steele’s work months before, in late June or early July. She said she’d believed it wasn’t in the State Department’s “purview” but was rather the FBI’s business, and gave the ok for FBI agent Michael Gaeta to meet with Steele in London.
Winer wrote in the Post that he was an old friend of Sidney Blumenthal, who in late September gave him the Trump-Russia reporting he and fellow Clinton operative Cody Shearer had compiled. Winer passed the Shearer-Blumenthal work to Steele.
Winer also spoke with Simpson at the time. The State Department official was a source for the stories that Isikoff and Corn sourced to Steele. Winer vouched for Steele’s reputation. He arranged for Steele to meet Kavalec a month before the election.
Evelyn Farkas was a Russianist at the Pentagon. In March 2016, she described how she had encouraged her former administration colleagues to disseminate intelligence on Trump-Russia throughout the government. That process increased the likelihood of leaks to the press.
Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum was another member of the community of Beltway insiders interested in Russia. Her husband, Radosław “Radek” Sikorski, had held high-level posts in the Polish government. Starting in July 2016, Applebaum wrote dozens of columns based on Fusion GPS’s conspiracy theory.
Stefan Halper was also part of the Russia community, having written studies for the Pentagon that dealt with Russia.
The professional networks intersected with smaller, more intimate units: couples, people in love, or people yoked together through some sort of shared interest or conviction.
The Ohrs were an important couple, one of the coup’s nodes. The operation passed back and forth between them, with Fusion GPS and FBI as the two terminal points.
There were other Fusion GPS pairings as well, including Christopher Steele and his wife, Katherine, a former British government official, who defended her husband on social media.
So did Glenn Simpson’s wife, Mary Jacoby. Also a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Jacoby felt her husband hadn’t gotten enough credit for the coup. “It’s come to my attention that some people still don’t realize what Glenn’s role was in exposing Putin’s control of Donald Trump,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “Let’s be clear. Glenn conducted the investigation. Glenn hired Chris Steele. Chris Steele worked for Glenn.”
Patel agrees. “Simpson ran a lot of the operation,” says the lead Objective Medusa investigator. “Fusion GPS ran the media operation, and they ran both Steele and Bruce Ohr, aided by his wife.”
But Simpson had also inadvertently given away the operation. He lied about his encounters with Ohr. He told Congress that he and Ohr had met only after the election. Patel knew otherwise based on FBI interviews. In November 2017, Simpson appeared before HPSCI. Unlike his Fusion GPS colleagues Peter Fritsch and Thomas Catan, who had invoked the Fifth Amendment, he talked.
“He couldn’t help himself,” says Patel. He asked Simpson if he’d ever been in contact with the FBI or DOJ.
“After the election,” said Simpson. “During the election, no.” He said that Steele had suggested he give some information to “a prosecutor named Bruce Ohr.” Simpson said it “was sometime after Thanksgiving.”
But Patel knew that Simpson and Ohr had met before the election, too.
Once Simpson lied in his congressional testimony, Patel was done. “I didn’t want him to have a chance to change his story,” says the former prosecutor. Patel believed that Simpson had committed a felony.
> There were other Fusion GPS couples, such as Neil King, Jr., another former Wall Street Journal reporter brought on by his onetime colleagues Simpson and Fritsch. King’s wife, Shailagh Murray, had also once worked as a journalist. She had become Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director in 2011. She had been named a senior adviser to Obama in March 2015, in time to push the Iran deal to the echo chamber.
Most notoriously, there were Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. At the same time Patel uncovered the Ohrs’ role, he also found out the FBI couple’s secret. “We learned that Strzok had been reassigned to human resources,” says Patel. “Having worked with tons of FBI folks, I knew what happened. I told my guys that if you’re running high-level investigations, like big counterintelligence investigations, you only get reassigned to HR if you’re sleeping with someone in the building or doing something else you shouldn’t have been doing.”
Nunes and Patel asked for all the documents regarding Strzok’s reassignment. The text messages that the FBI and DOJ tried to hide from Objective Medusa investigators would tell an important part of the story.
Chapter 17
THE DECOY
WITHOUT THE BIG TITLES and the national security bureaucracy’s legalistic self-defense mechanisms, the story was pretty straightforward: The Clintons hired a bunch of con men who got their dirty cop friends to frame Trump. The press and a corrupt prosecutor handled the cover-up.
The details mattered because the lawmen had used programs designed to keep Americans safe from terrorism as the centerpiece of the sting. The Objective Medusa team was fighting to get the details to the public.
HPSCI had its briefing, what came to be called the “Nunes Memo,” ready by November but was still looking to fill it out with more details. The Objective Medusa team got an unexpected boost in December 2017 when McCabe, then the FBI acting director, testified before the committee that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the secret court without the Steele Dossier’s information.
For nearly a year, the dossier had been celebrated not just as an account of Trump’s corruption but also as a gift from the future promising his doom. If Mueller was the Paper Coup’s high priest, the dossier was its scripture.
“Up until then, everybody’s saying how the dossier was the greatest thing since sliced bread,” says Patel. “And then we started peeling it back and showed it was not credible. And now we have the acting director under oath saying ‘No Steele Dossier, no FISA.’”
The Crossfire Hurricane team countered. They deflected attention away from the dossier by substituting it with a new origin story for the investigation. They tapped the paper of record to take dictation.
A December 30, 2017, New York Times story—“How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt” by Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo—explained how Nunes had gotten it wrong.
What had compelled the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign was not, according to the Times, “a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.”
Langer was hardly surprised that the Crossfire Hurricane team was switching streams. “It’s exactly what you would expect them to do with the dossier hemorrhaging credibility,” says Nunes’s communications director. “Conveniently, the New York Times comes along to save the day. Even if everything in the dossier was false, it no longer matters because suddenly the dossier is irrelevant. So just forget thousands of press stories touting its claims, forget TV pundits going hysterical over it for a full year, forget Schiff reading dossier allegations into the Congressional Record, and forget that the FBI used it to get a FISA to spy on Americans. None of that matters because now the investigation is actually all about George Papadopoulos.”
In April 2016, the Trump campaign volunteer had met with Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud, who’d said that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.”
“During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016,” the Times claimed, Papadopoulos had relayed to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.” On July 31, the FBI opened its investigation.
The story made no sense. If Downer was so concerned about Papadopoulos’s revelation, why had he, a senior diplomat of an allied country, waited two months to report it?
Further, Downer, a former Australian foreign minister, was an ally of the Clintons. He had pledged $25 million to the Clinton Global Initiative. Why had he sat on information that might protect Hillary Clinton’s candidacy? Because, claimed the Times, WikiLeaks had started leaking DNC emails in July. Then “Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts.”
The United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand are part of an intelligence-gathering and -sharing arrangement among the five English-speaking powers called “Five Eyes.” The intelligence agencies of the five countries go through an established process before passing information to one another through official channels.
The issue, as Nunes said publicly, is that there was no official Five Eyes intelligence in the investigation’s originating document. “They were eager to open the investigation,” he says. “And Papadopoulos was the logical choice. They justified opening a broad investigation because they said they got their information from a Five Eyes partner. They didn’t.”
The investigation did officially open on July 31. But as Nunes and Patel explained, that was an arbitrary date that the FBI had provided in order to conceal everything else it had done previously.
The Times story, leaking details of a counterintelligence investigation, served the same purpose by trying to obscure the role the dossier had played. What really mattered, according to the Times story, was that Papadopoulos had drunkenly admitted to the inebriated Downer that he had inside information about how the Russians had dirt on Clinton.
Both Papadopoulos and Downer later denied that they’d been drinking heavily. It was another false detail planted by law enforcement sources, just like the suggestion that Papadopoulos had relayed Mifsud’s information about Clinton’s emails to Downer. Both Downer and Papadopoulos said that the Trump adviser had never mentioned emails.
The story also omitted a key detail: To get the Papadopoulos information into the system, the Crossfire Hurricane team and its partners had purposefully circumvented the normal processes for exchanging intelligence among the Five Eyes partners. It was a career foreign service officer at the US Embassy in London, Elizabeth Dibble, who had passed Downer’s information to the FBI.
“They opened their investigation of the Trump campaign on what genuine intelligence officers call RUMINT,” says Nunes. “That’s rumor intelligence. It means it’s not to be taken seriously. By calling it Five Eyes, they tried to make it sound official.”
Patel agrees. “We’d come to learn that the facts alleged by the FBI were incomplete and misleading.”
The urgency with which the FBI reportedly regarded Downer’s tip—US officials, claimed the Times, were “alarmed”—is incompatible with the timeline.
After the investigation opened, the FBI waited nearly six months before it interviewed Papadopoulos. In the meantime, it obtained a FISA warrant on Carter Page instead of Papadopoulos, the ostensible collusion lynchpin.
The FBI told congressional leaders in January 2017 that it was searching furiously for the mysterious figure who would finally vindicate the Russia collusion narrative. But Papadopoulos was easy to find in Chicago. He spoke voluntarily with FBI agents.
Months passed, and Mueller’s team allowed the former Trump adviser to travel abroad. The FBI arrested him as he reentered the country at Dulles airport in July. He had lied in his January 2017 interview, they said. Nearly six months had passed since then, but the important timeline was Mueller’s.
The special counsel had been appointed i
n May 2017 and needed points on the board. Papadopoulos was an easy win. He pled guilty, and the statement of the offense was unsealed at the end of October. It read:
Defendant PAPADOPOULOS further told the investigating agents that the professor was “a nothing” and “just a guy talk[ing] up connections or something.” In truth and in fact, however, defendant PAPADOPOULOS understood that the professor had substantial connections to Russian government officials.
So did Papadopoulos think that Mifsud was just a big talker? Or did he understand that he was connected to Russian officials?
Mueller was walking a thin line. He needed to tie the arrest to his mandate. Rosenstein had tasked him to investigate “any links/coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of Donald Trump.” To make the arrest resonate with the Trump-Russia narrative, there had to be Russian-related activities.
So why didn’t Mueller just say, as Adam Schiff had, that Mifsud was “Kremlin-linked”? Because there was no evidence for it. Making false allegations in court documents would have put the special counsel at legal risk. The only place where the Mueller team could safely indicate that Mifsud was tied to the Moscow government was in the head of George Papadopoulos—who understood that Mifsud had substantial connections to Russia.
In the real world, the evidence showed something else. The mysterious professor’s closest public links were to Western governments, politicians, and institutions, including the British and Italian intelligence services, as well as the CIA and FBI.
British political analyst Chris Blackburn wonders why the FBI appeared to ignore Mifsud’s professional networks. “When Peter Strzok got to London in early August to look into the Papadopoulos meeting with Mifsud,” he says, “he would’ve found that the professor’s most notable contacts were with high-ranking Western officials.”