The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  Blackburn’s shaking off a midwinter cold and washing down a plate of fish and chips with a beer. The thirty-five-year-old researcher has taken the train down from northern England for a day to walk with me around the London neighborhood where the central scenes of the Papadopoulos drama unfolded—like the hotel where Mifsud told the Trump adviser about the Russians having Clinton emails and where Papadopoulos is supposed to have passed that information to Downer.

  Blackburn’s previous research focused on Islamist terror groups, putting him in touch with senior leaders of global intelligence agencies. He became interested in the Papadopoulos case when he noticed that the photographs of Mifsud he found online were of the former Maltese diplomat posing with Western political, diplomatic, and intelligence figures.

  Why wouldn’t a trained intelligence officer like Strzok find the same? “Maybe the FBI doesn’t know how to use Google,” says Blackburn, laughing huskily.

  Mifsud had told Papadopoulos he had important friends around the world, and indeed he traveled anywhere for the chance to rub elbows with policy luminaries from around the world. At a 2009 conference sponsored by the Italian Foreign Ministry and the Brookings Institution, Mifsud had appeared alongside US foreign policy experts, including former Clinton administration Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.

  Blackburn shows me a portfolio from the 2016 Doha Forum, a conference in the Qatari capital that gathers some of the world’s most famous statesmen. Mifsud had chaired a panel including a former prime minister of France, Dominique de Villepin; the foreign minister of Norway, Børge Brende; a former foreign minister of Spain, Miguel Ángel Moratinos; and a former foreign minister of Italy, Franco Frattini.

  If Mifsud really is “Kremlin-linked,” the Doha panel alone compromised four senior European diplomats whose colleagues in their countries’ intelligence services didn’t know the moderator was a Russian spy.

  “If Mifsud is truly a Russian spy,” says Blackburn, “he’ll go down as one of the most successful agents in history. He’d have penetrated the inner sanctum of European politics, diplomacy, and intelligence.”

  One of Mifsud’s most notable contacts, says Blackburn, is prominent former UK diplomat Claire Smith. “She worked with Mifsud at three different institutions: the London Academy of Diplomacy, University of Stirling, and Link Campus University in Rome.” Her long professional relationship with Mifsud is a significant piece of evidence. “She was on the United Kingdom’s Joint Intelligence Committee,” says Blackburn. “It’s a very significant institution in the UK’s intelligence community, answering directly to the prime minister.”

  Smith also served on the Security Vetting Appeals Panel. “She was vetting UK government employees,” says Blackburn. “So how could she have missed that her colleague was actually a Russian spy?”

  Blackburn shows me a picture of Mifsud standing next to Smith at Link Campus University in Rome, surrounded by the Italian police officers they taught. Link’s president is Vincenzo Scotti, who’s held ministerial posts, including as interior minister responsible for domestic intelligence, in several Italian governments. Scotti is one of the kingmakers of Italy’s current coalition government. In June 2018 he positioned a former Link professor, Elisabetta Trenta, for the job of defense minister. “That was one of Mifsud’s colleagues,” says Blackburn. “So I guess that’s one more senior Western official compromised by Mifsud.”

  So were US intelligence agencies and officers. The CIA held events at Link Campus University, and former National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency officials taught there regularly. So did FBI officials. In September 2016, the FBI’s legal attaché at the US Embassy in Rome sent Special Agent Preston Ackerman to conduct a seminar at Link. It was two months after the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane. He worked in the same office as Christopher Steele’s handler, Michael Gaeta.

  If the FBI thought Mifsud was a Russian agent, why did it continue to send agents to teach at an institution with which Mifsud was affiliated?

  It was at Link that Papadopoulos was first introduced to Mifsud, when the Trump adviser was part of a delegation visiting Rome in March 2016. They struck up an acquaintance and met several times in London over the course of the next few months. Mifsud emailed Papadopoulos from a policy conference in Moscow to say that he was arranging meetings for him with Russian officials. On his return, Mifsud told him that the Russians had Clinton emails.

  “I never heard the words ‘DNC,’” said Papadopoulos. “I just heard ‘The Russians have thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails.’”

  The Clinton campaign was concerned about potentially compromising material that might be revealed in the candidate’s emails.

  Two weeks after Mifsud told him about the emails, Papadopoulos was contacted by Downer. He thought it was strange that Australia’s highest-ranking diplomat in the United Kingdom, a former foreign minister, was reaching out to a then-twenty-eight-year-old Trump campaign volunteer.

  Papadopoulos said there had been no conversation about Clinton or emails. “I don’t remember actually ever sharing that information with this person.”

  Downer said the Trump volunteer had never mentioned emails. He remembered his saying that the Russians had material that could be damaging to Clinton.

  “The FBI opened a full investigation on a presidential campaign,” says Nunes. “It’s unprecedented. And the investigation is based on RUMINT about Clinton emails. Remember that at the time, everyone is whispering about Clinton’s deleted emails. Republicans in Congress are looking for them. It’s normal. And yet the FBI opens an investigation on someone talking about Clinton emails. But as it turns out, it’s not even about emails because Downer said Papadopoulos never said anything about Clinton’s emails.”

  Papadopoulos said that Downer had appeared to be recording him with his phone.

  Months later, another, older figure from the foreign policy community contacted Papadopoulos. Stefan Halper offered him $3,000 to write a paper on Mediterranean energy issues. He arranged for Papadopoulos’s plane trip to London and his lodgings.

  In September 2016, Halper met with the Trump adviser in the British capital. The Cambridge academic brought with him a woman he introduced as his graduate assistant, Azra Turk. Like Halper, she was a spy. The pair asked Papadopoulos if the Trump campaign had softened the GOP platform on Ukraine to appease Putin. They also wanted him to admit that he knew that Russia had Clinton’s emails. Papadopoulos said he had no idea what they were talking about. He said that what they were suggesting amounted to treason.

  In January 2017, FBI agents interviewed Papadopoulos. They asked if anyone had ever told him that the Russian government planned to release information on Clinton.

  “No,” said Papadopoulos.

  “No?” the agents asked.

  They already knew—just as Halper had known to ask Papadopoulos about emails. The FBI was trying, as Halper had, to draw a positive answer out of him.

  It wasn’t until after the agents raised the matter that Papadopoulos identified Mifsud and admitted that the professor had told him that “the Russians had emails of Clinton.”

  “Everyone is asking Papadopoulos about emails,” says Nunes. “Why? Does Papadopoulos look like a guy that knows about emails? So how did the FBI know to ask him about the emails on multiple occasions throughout 2016 and 2017 before having interviewed Mifsud, unless the FBI already received this information directly or indirectly from Mifsud?”

  The FBI interviewed Mifsud in February, a few weeks after it set up Papadopoulos. Mifsud was in Washington, DC, for a policy conference at the Capitol. FBI agents spoke with him in his hotel lobby and let him go. The agents said they hadn’t known what to ask him because Papadopoulos had lied to them. Papadapoulos, according to the special counsel’s sentencing guidelines,

  substantially hindered investigators’ ability to effectively question the Professor when the FBI located him in Washington, D.C. approximately two weeks after the defendant’s January
27, 2017 interview. The defendant’s lies undermined investigators’ ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States. The government understands that the Professor left the United States on February 11, 2017 and he has not returned to the United States since then.

  Why couldn’t the FBI locate Mifsud for a follow-up interview? The press knew how to find him.

  “Mifsud,” according to an October 30, 2017, article by Washington Post reporters Rosalind Helderman and Thomas Hamburger, “told The Post in an email in August that he had ‘absolutely no contact with the Russian government’ and said his only ties to Russia were through academic links.”

  August was a month after Papadopoulos was arrested and two months before his plea deal was unsealed.

  “I want to know how the Post reporters got Mifsud’s name,” says Nunes. “If it’s not from the FBI or the Mueller team, how did they get it?”

  Presumably, if Mifsud had been a secret Kremlin-linked operative, he’d have disappeared once reporters started asking questions about his connections to Russia. But the professor was still on the loose in Europe.

  If Mifsud was a Russian spy, why didn’t the FBI warn US allies about him?

  Two weeks after Papadopoulos’s guilty plea in October 2017, Mifsud was photographed at a London fund-raiser next to the future prime minster of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, then foreign secretary, responsible for the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence services.

  The FBI opened the case because of Papadopoulos’s meetings in the British capital in spring 2016. But nearly a year and a half later, the Bureau continued to keep the United States’ closest partners in the dark about the “Kremlin-linked” professor, even if it risked compromising senior UK officials. It makes no sense.

  But apparently the FBI said nothing to the Italians about the “Kremlin-linked” professor, either, because Mifsud was in Rome, too, where he gave interviews to the Italian press, even after his name went public at the end of October.

  On November 1, 2017, nearly nine months after the FBI had spoken with him in Washington, Mifsud finally went into hiding.

  If Mifsud is really a Russian spy, the United States and its NATO partners will be doing damage assessments for years. But neither the FBI nor the special counsel ever provided any evidence to prove that the mysterious professor is linked to the Kremlin.

  Chapter 18

  THE NUNES MEMO

  “WE WERE CONTINUALLY finding things that shouldn’t have been classified but were,” says Nunes. “None of it was national security information. The FBI was just hiding what they’d done.”

  The Crossfire Hurricane team had buried what they’d done under classified intelligence, a classified counterintelligence investigation, and a secret court. The intelligence bureaucracy had written the rules, so they knew how to get around them and how to use them to keep anyone from connecting the dots, at least in public.

  “Our committee members were increasingly uncomfortable having to sit on what we knew about FISA abuse and other matters,” says Nunes. “We had to get it to the rest of the House members and then ultimately to the American public.”

  He wanted a way to get the information into the light. “But I kept getting a hundred and one ways to ‘No,’” says Nunes. “I wanted a hundred and one ways to ‘Yes.’”

  One possibility was to put it to a full House vote on the floor. “That wasn’t politically appealing to leadership,” says Patel. “Then one of my colleagues found a relatively obscure committee rule stipulating that HPSCI can vote to declassify something if ‘the public interest would be served by such disclosure.’”

  The rule had been created when the committee was first established in the late 1970s. “The idea they probably had in mind was to stop someone like Nixon from secretly spying on Congress,” says Nunes. “They would have never imagined it would be used to uncover a Deep State operation working with the losing political campaign to put the current president under investigation, leaving HPSCI as the only body that could see it happening and then disclose it.”

  In the late fall, Nunes went to meet with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan to discuss the memorandum his staff was writing to make the information public.

  “The document was nearly finished by Thanksgiving,” says Nunes. “I called the speaker and asked to meet with him. I wanted to brief committee members next morning on the plan before Thanksgiving recess. Ryan said his schedule was full all day and asked if I could meet him in his office at night. He pulled out a couple of local Wisconsin beers, and I told him that we’re going to use this rule to get the information out.”

  Ryan supported the plan and wanted to make sure that HPSCI’s case was solid. “There was more information that we wanted,” says Nunes, “and the speaker wanted us to get whatever we wanted to make our case.”

  The press knew that HPSCI was up to something. “They were trying to piece together what we were doing,” says Nunes, “which was the memo. They couldn’t figure it out because we’re so closely held.”

  A December 31, 2017, Washington Post article by Karoun Demirjian reported that Nunes was “convening a group of Intelligence Committee Republicans to draft a likely report on ‘corruption’ among the investigators working for the special counsel.”

  The story was evidence that the press didn’t know what was going on—and that they were trying to split Republicans. “It’s supposed to be a story about Nunes on the ropes,” says Nunes. “They manufactured the story, including fake quotes from Gowdy.”

  According to the Post, then South Carolina Congressman Trey Gowdy was referring to Nunes when he said “I’m interested in getting access to the information and not the drama.”

  “Gowdy called me later to say the quotes were fake,” says Nunes. “The reporter was shouting questions at him about a different issue as he was walking down the hall, and they used those quotes to make it look like we were divided.”

  The Post story served the purposes of Rosenstein and the new FBI director, Christopher Wray, who didn’t want to give HPSCI the documents it had requested. The article showed that Nunes was reckless, which was the message the two bureaucrats took to their meeting with Ryan right after the new year.

  The senior law enforcement officials recited what had become a familiar refrain. “They told Ryan it’s going to do irreparable damage to national security, it’s going to jeopardize our relations with allies,” Nunes recalls. “But the fact that they used the Steele Dossier for the FISA is not some closely guarded national secret. Wray and Rosenstein were trying to short-circuit the whole process and get the speaker to have us stand down.”

  Ryan backed Nunes. “He told Rosenstein and Wray, ‘No, you’re going to give this to Congress,’” says Nunes.

  Nonetheless, the struggle between DOJ and HPSCI continued. In January, Rosenstein clashed with Patel. “He didn’t like that we were questioning DOJ,” says the former prosecutor. “It’s just the mentality over there. It was institutional. It didn’t matter that Rosenstein came in as a Trump appointee. He was on the side of the institution. He fought us on all these documents.”

  As Patel wrestled DOJ for more of the underlying documents, the tension between the two sides grew. It came to a head in the middle of January. “We started questioning him about something, and he flew off his seat and started threatening me,” Patel remembers. “He threatened to investigate us and subpoena our materials.”

  Patel says he was surprised that the Justice Department’s second-highest-ranking official had threatened him for performing his oversight duties. “I guess Rosenstein had forgotten about the whole coequal branches of government thing.”

  “You can’t invoke discovery on Congress,” says his investigative partner, Jim.

  The Objective Medusa team shook off Rosenstein’s threats and got down to writing the memo.

  “I have been and always will be pro-FISA,” says Patel. “I didn’t think we should attack the process, a
nd everyone was in agreement. FISA is a very sensitive tool, and it has great value, and 99.99 percent of FISAs are totally fine.”

  The problem, says Patel, was the mentality at Comey’s FBI. “They thought that no one was ever going to see it, so no one would ever challenge it.”

  Patel and Jim were the two primary authors of the Nunes Memo, along with Gowdy. Nunes says that given the amount of work his former colleague put into the document, “it’s probably more fair to call it the Gowdy Memo.” In one TV interview, Gowdy actually referred to the document as “my memo.”

  The drafting of the memo took about a month, says Patel. “I’d write up a draft and hand it off to one of my colleagues, get corrections, and then we’d go to [HPSCI staff director] Damon [Nelson]. After that, we went to every member of the committee on the GOP side. I think one member had one syntax correction, but substantively they were all on board.”

  The next step was to show the work to the FBI. Nunes asked Patel to meet with Wray.

  “I met with the director and one of his counterintelligence guys, and we showed them the memo,” says Patel. “They came over to our space, and we told them we want to make sure we have this right. They were polite. We spent some time together, and they said they’ll get back to us. And then the director asked Devin if I could go over to the FBI and sit down with two more people.”

  Patel and his investigative partner went to FBI headquarters to meet with Bill Priestap, the head of the counterintelligence division, and FBI attorney Sally Moyer. “We showed them the draft,” says Patel. “We told them that we’re here for as long as they need us to be here. We sat with them for hours. They probably read it twice. We told them, ‘We need to know if there’s anything in here that’s not correct.’ And they said, ‘No, there’s nothing incorrect, but there’s a lot of information that’s not in there.’ We told them, ‘Well, you’re free to tell us whatever information you want, and we’ll put it in. But based on the totality of the information you’ve given us, is this correct?’”