The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  They said it was—but that didn’t stop FBI and DOJ leadership from attacking the memo, frequently as anonymous sources in the press, as a dire threat to national security.

  “What people lose sight of,” says Patel, “is that the memo was entirely based on the documents that FBI and DOJ produced to us and the sworn testimony of the witnesses.”

  On January 18, HPSCI Republicans voted it out of committee.

  Patel explains that it was ultimately the White House that declassified the information. “We used our committee’s rule as a mechanism to get the memo out of the committee and to the White House.”

  White House lawyers took it under consideration. During the wait, Patel and his colleagues briefed Republican members. “I don’t think this ever happened before,” says Patel, “but every single Republican member came down to the committee spaces. We had open time slots for them to walk in, and we’d have copies for them to read. Then we briefed them on it.”

  The members, says Patel, “were shocked. Shocked that a political party had funded research into the opponent’s campaign and took it to the secret court and got a warrant with it and used it to record people during the campaign.”

  It was the first time that other House members had any insight into what HPSCI had known for nearly a year.

  “These members trust us because we’re the ones that have eyes on these classified programs,” says Nunes. “And if one of these program goes awry, we have an absolute obligation to bring this to the rest of the House.”

  After they read the memo, says Nunes, “a lot more members of Congress became interested.”

  The Objective Medusa team knew they were on the verge of a big win.

  “Conservatives were very supportive of our efforts to get the memo out,” says Langer. “There was a sense that Devin was onto something and it was important.”

  Grassroots enthusiasm was apparent on social media, where Twitter users started a hashtag backing the Objective Medusa team’s efforts: #ReleaseTheMemo. Its popularity made it another target for operatives defending Deep State corruption.

  “Another move to discredit our work,” says Langer, “was the idea that #ReleaseTheMemo was the endeavor of Russian bots. It was part of this ridiculous media operation claiming that not only were all the Trump people compromised by Russia, but anyone casting doubt on that was also compromised by Russia.”

  After the 2016 election, a gathering of anti-Trump activists—including John Podesta, Jake Sullivan, Michael McFaul, David Kramer, and William Kristol—raised money to track Russian cyberefforts against Western democracies. Their organization, Hamilton 68, claimed that the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag was yet another Russian-backed cyberoperation.

  “Predictably, Schiff and Feinstein jumped on that and sent letters to Twitter and Facebook,” says Langer. “Yes, senior Democratic officials demanded an investigation of a hashtag. Both social media platforms responded that they didn’t find any unusual Russian bot activity.”

  If Hamilton 68’s accusations gave evidence of how absurd and paranoid US politics had become in the postdossier age, a more serious operation to discredit Nunes’s work zeroed in on HPSCI members and staffers themselves. It was the culmination of the first campaign in US history waged, funded, and staffed to defend the systematic corruption of rogue law enforcement officials.

  Patel was targeted by a number of hit pieces, most prominently a February 2, 2018, New York Times article by Katie Rogers and Matthew Rosenberg. It featured a slanted account of his efforts to speak with Christopher Steele’s lawyer in London. Articles in the Washington Post and on The Daily Beast hit the same talking points.

  “For the press to publish a series of hit pieces singling out one staffer was a real low,” Langer says. “The point was to make an example of Kash, to single him out and intimidate anyone else who thought of stepping up. The message was ‘Don’t think you’ll be spared, either.’”

  The communications director remembers the two-week period while the memo was at the White House.

  “Kash was showing it to members, but this was a classified document,” says Langer. “No one outside Congress had read it, but it’s still being attacked in the media. ‘It’s going to destroy national security.’ ‘It’s full of lies.’ ‘HPSCI misrepresented testimony,’ et cetera, et cetera. But none of these reporters had seen the memo. None of them knew what was in it. As always, they were just reporting whatever the Democrats told them to say.”

  The entire Democratic apparatus was on message.

  “The Democrats knew it was bad,” says Nunes. “DOJ knew it was bad because they were trying to cover it up and they were trying to stop this from getting out publicly—that the bulk of the FISA application was made up of oppo research and fake news stories. Comey and Clapper and Brennan were out selling the same message about how bad this was going to be for national security—when they knew that they’re the ones who were responsible.”

  It was during that period that the anti-Nunes operation took an even more dangerous turn. “They started to target my wife and the rest of my family,” says Nunes.

  Activists filed a California Public Records Act request for the emails of his wife, an elementary school teacher. She was targeted on social media, and after her contact information was published, they sent her harassing emails. They were doxxing teachers and administrators at the school and said that Mrs. Nunes was teaching racism and bigotry.

  “There was a political structure built to bring tremendous pressure on me and my family to stop me from investigating,” says Nunes. “It was clearly being run by professionals. They used technology to mimic my phone number so that family members thought that I was calling them. And then they made it sound like I was kidnapped and that I’d better back off or something bad’s going happen to me and them.”

  Nunes and Langer alerted the United States Capitol Police. “They found a few nut jobs, but we get those all the time,” says Nunes. “This was a sophisticated operation. Nearly every one of my family members, and I’m talking about extended family members—aunts, uncles, cousins, as many as two dozen family members—got one of those calls. So clearly they had a whole plan where they called to threaten all of those people.”

  Some of the calls were worse than others, Nunes remembers. “They called my grandmother, who was ninety-eight at the time,” he says. “Maybe the worst was to my mother-in-law. It was early in the morning, multiple calls from what appeared to be my number, and someone on the other end is saying her son-in-law is in danger and will be harmed if he doesn’t back off.”

  The attacks on Nunes and his family resembled the experiences of others who›d been in conflict with Fusion GPS. The journalists who’d reported on Fusion GPS’s corrupt Venezuelan corporate clients had been harassed. One of the reporters, Alek Boyd, said that his two young daughters had been threatened.

  Nunes’s wife and daughters were under twenty-four-hour security, and the local sheriff had a deputy on campus at Mrs. Nunes’s school.

  “They didn’t want any of what we’d found to come out,” says Nunes. “And they did everything they could to stop it.”

  Prior to publication, the media’s job was to discredit the Nunes Memo by warning that it represented a threat to national security.

  “The FBI is essentially labeling this a partisan document that uses lies to undermine law enforcement,” wrote the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake on January 31, 2018.

  That is, Nunes was pushing falsehoods on behalf of Trump.

  Lawfare editor Benjamin Wittes, a reliable Comey mouthpiece, told MSNBC on January 31 that Nunes, “with the active support and involvement of the President of the United States, is committed to releasing to the public a document that the FBI says has grave concerns, contains sufficient omissions of fact as to be effectively a lie, and that the Justice Department describes the release of as an extraordinarily reckless act.”

  The memo, we were to believe, was based on a conspiracy theory weaponized to destroy th
e federal law enforcement agencies.

  “The question is not whether there was a plot against Trump at the FBI, as the Nunes memo reportedly alleges,” Vox’s Zack Beauchamp wrote on January 30. “There is no evidence for such a claim, and it doesn’t pass the smell test. The real question is this: Will the FBI and Justice Department remain semi-independent agencies that check the president’s authority—or will they be brought under President Donald Trump’s direct control?”

  Time’s Elizabeth Goitein agreed. “This is not a matter of dueling conspiracy theories,” wrote the former Senate aide on February 2. “… The hypothesis that Trump and his congressional allies hope to exercise political control over the Justice Department is more than likely.”

  On February 2, 2018, the Nunes Memo was released. “It was a defining event,” says Langer. “Despite the nonstop media attacks both before and after it came out, it convinced millions of Americans that there were major problems with the way the government and the intelligence agencies investigated Trump.”

  The memo laid out plainly the facts that Objective Medusa had uncovered during its investigation of the “Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and their use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during the 2016 presidential election cycle.”

  Nunes and his team had shown that the DNC and the Clinton campaign had paid Fusion GPS to “obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.” The memo showed that the Steele Dossier had formed an “essential part” of the Carter Page FISA application. Furthermore,

  • Neither the initial October 2016 application, nor any of the three renewals, had disclosed the role of the DNC or Clinton campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, “even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.”

  • The FISA application had used circular reporting by citing as evidence Michael Isikoff’s September 23, 2016, article. The article was derived from information leaked by Steele himself. The application assessed that Steele had not directly provided information to Yahoo! News. But Steele had admitted in British court filings that he had met with a reporter from Yahoo! News in September 2016.

  • Even after the FBI had officially terminated its relationship with Steele, the Bureau had used his reporting via senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr. Steele had told him two months before the election that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.”

  • Ohr’s wife, Nellie, had been employed by Fusion GPS to compile opposition research on Trump. Ohr had later given his wife’s work for Fusion GPS to the FBI. The FBI had never disclosed the Ohrs’ relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS to the secret court.

  Patel’s early suspicions had been borne out. The FBI had never disclosed any of those facts to the FISA court, though it was aware of all of them before submitting the application to spy on a US citizen.

  Conservatives around the country might as well have waved the memo like a battle flag. Having had to defend a Republican president from a conspiracy theory for a year and a half, now there was evidence that it had been a fraud engineered by Clinton operatives and Obama officials.

  In vindicating Trump, the memo had also documented a terrible sequence of events. The FBI’s actions had done lasting damage to its reputation and convinced at least half the country that the law could be turned against them—simply for backing the wrong candidate.

  Further, the FBI’s actions had put national security at risk. Powerful tools designed to keep Americans safe from terrorism had been used to prosecute a political operation against a presidential campaign. The world’s most famous law enforcement agency had squandered the confidence of those it was sworn to protect. How, at this point, could the FBI be trusted to tell the truth about anything?

  After the memo’s release, the media seamlessly shifted tactics. Having spent weeks decrying the reckless threat the memo posed to national security, they collectively announced, “Nothing to see here.”

  “The Nunes Memo is a dud,” Vox’s Beauchamp wrote the day it was released. The writer who just days before had feared that the memo would be used to cleanse DOJ now argued, “There is absolutely nothing here.”

  Where Lawfare’s Wittes had once predicted doom, he now approvingly cited his friend James Comey’s tweet, dismissing the memo as a waste of time.

  “That’s it?” Tweeted the former FBI director. “Dishonest and misleading memo wrecked the House intel committee, destroyed trust with Intelligence Community, damaged relationship with FISA court, and inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen. For what?”

  The message rippled through the media with impressive uniformity: it was a nothingburger.

  “In modern parlance we’d call it a nothingburger,” wrote the New York Times’ Bret Stephens on February 2, “but the bun is missing, too.”

  “Devin Nunes and the nothing burger memo,” wrote Washington Monthly’s Nancy LeTourneau the same day.

  “This memo is a Nunes Nothingburger,” Massachusetts senator Ed Markey posted on his Facebook page.

  “‘Nothingburger’ doesn’t do this memo justice,” wrote Esquire’s Charles Pierce on February 2. “This is threadbare. This is shabby. This reveals absolutely nothing.”

  “Worse than a nothing burger,” said California congressman Ted Lieu.

  “The memo itself is really just a bad joke,” wrote the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman on February 2. A rebuttal memo being prepared by Adam Schiff, they wrote, “will likely make Nunes’ effort look even more absurd.”

  Two weeks later, HPSCI voted to release Schiff’s report. It was riddled with falsehoods and errors. To take only a few from the ten-page document:

  Steele’s reporting did not reach the counterintelligence team investigating Russia at FBI headquarters until mid-September 2016.

  That was false. Ohr had briefed McCabe and Lisa Page on Steele’s reporting shortly after he saw Steele on July 30, 2016. Later in August, Ohr had again provided law enforcement officials with Fusion GPS–generated research attributed to Steele.

  FISA was not used to spy on Trump or his campaign. As the Trump campaign and Page have acknowledged, Page ended his formal affiliation with the campaign months before DOJ applied for a warrant.

  That was misleading. The FISA had allowed the FBI to collect backward and monitor any relevant electronic communications that had taken place before the spy warrant was granted.

  The Majority mischaracterizes Bruce Ohr’s role, overstates the significance of his interactions with Steele, and misleads about the timeframe of Ohr’s communication with the FBI. In late November 2016, Ohr informed the FBI of his prior professional relationship with Steele and information that Steele shared with him (including Steele’s concern about Trump being compromised by Russia). He also described his wife’s contract work with Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele separately. This occurred weeks after the election and more than a month after the Court approved the initial FISA application.

  That was false. Ohr had met with the Crossfire Hurricane team before the election to push information paid for by the Clinton campaign to the FBI. After Steele was fired, Ohr had served as his back channel to the FBI.

  We would later learn in Papadopoulos’s plea that the information the Russians could assist by anonymously releasing were thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

  That appears to confirm that the emails Mifsud mentioned to Papadopoulos were not the DNC emails but those that Clinton had deleted from her private server.

  A useful response to the Nunes Memo came, surprisingly, from the Crossfire Hurricane team. According to the memo’s last lines, the Strzok-Page texts describe “a meeting with Deputy Director McCabe to discuss an ‘insurance’ policy against President Trump’s election.” A few months after the memo was released, Strzok and Page themselves explained to Congress what they had meant. The “insurance policy,” t
hey said, did not refer to actions to be taken in the event of a Trump presidency. Rather, it referred to a specific detail regarding the Russia investigation: a source.

  According to Strzok: “We had received information from a very sensitive source alleging collusion between the Government of Russia and members of the Trump campaign.”

  The Crossfire Hurricane team, according to Strzok, had debated “how aggressively to pursue investigation, given that aggressive pursuit might put that intelligence source at risk.”

  It seems that some inside McCabe’s office that day had argued that since the polls were overwhelmingly in Clinton’s favor, there was no need to risk the source. Strzok had contended that the FBI should push on as aggressively as possible.

  “So my use of the phrase ‘insurance policy,’” said Strzok, “was simply to say, while the polls or people might think it is less likely that then-candidate Trump would be elected, [that] should not get in the way of us doing our job responsibly to protect the national security.”

  Lisa Page corroborated Strzok’s explanation. The “insurance policy,” she said, had referred to the debate among members of the Crossfire Hurricane team. The question, she explained, was “Do we burn sources or not burn sources?”

  Strzok had apparently won the argument.

  As Nunes has said publicly, declassification of the warrant will explain what Strzok meant by “insurance policy.” According to Nunes’s public statements, it’s something as bad as or worse than the Steele Dossier, something else the Crossfire Hurricane group used to obtain the spy warrant.