by Lee Smith
Chapter 19
THE CAVALRY ARRIVES
AFTER THE MEMO WAS RELEASED, Nunes’s colleagues swarmed to congratulate him. The Republican conference gave him a standing ovation. Members came to the HPSCI chairman on the House floor to express their support and urge him on.
“Every time we took another step forward, more people joined us,” says Nunes. “It was a bit different from the year before, when I’m under an ethics cloud and it was harder to find friends.”
Indeed, two months before the memo’s release, the House Committee on Ethics had cleared Nunes after an eight-month investigation of complaints by left-wing groups that he’d divulged classified information while discussing unmaskings by Obama officials.
It was hard for the Objective Medusa team to know just then if it had severed several snakes at the head or just one. But it was a win, and the moment, says Langer, felt different. “Conservatives, Republicans were fully engaged and really started caring about the issues we’d been working on for a year. It was new for us to have what seemed like a whole army of people behind us. The mainstream media universally attacked our memo and championed Schiff’s memo, but all these people just didn’t believe them anymore.”
Representative Mike Turner, a member of the Intelligence Committee, gives Nunes all the credit for driving forward. “If Chairman Nunes had not led HPSCI into the investigation of the roots of how the Russia investigation began,” he says, “there are critical pieces of information we’d have never known.
“And once he’d established there was abuse of power at the FBI and DOJ as a result of partisans attempting to harm Trump, it also shaped the Mueller investigation. The chairman uncovered those facts, foundational evidence that undercuts the credibility of the Russia investigation. Mueller couldn’t ignore those facts and continue to pursue rumor and innuendo.”
The Objective Medusa team’s findings cornered the special counsel. The foundational evidence, as Turner puts it, also exposed a network of corruption at the highest levels of the national security bureaucracy.
“Comey, Clapper, and Brennan did an incredible disservice to the agencies they ran,” says Turner. “You can see them on TV today, their constant willingness to spin rumor and malign others. They didn’t acquire those traits after they left government. That’s how they ran those agencies, with willingness to hurt others, contrary to the purpose of those agencies and our rights.”
The conservative press also rallied. A number of journalists had staked their names to a story about widespread corruption in the intelligence community that even many Republican-friendly organizations had shied from. The release of the memo vindicated them.
“I’d been on the story since the Democratic National Convention in July,” says FOX Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. “There was an announcement on the floor that the Russians had hacked the DNC’s emails, and in the next few hours word started getting out that they’d done it to help Trump. This didn’t make sense.”
She had run into Nunes in the spring, shortly after he’d stepped aside from the Russia investigation. “I invited him to come on the show,” says Bartiromo.
With that Nunes began a string of regular appearances on Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futures, during which the two broke important news on the FISA abuse story. “We got lots of pushback from all sorts of corners,” says Bartiromo. “I’m proud me and my staff stuck with the story.”
The memo was further reinforced by other documents released at the same time. The first was a letter to the Justice Department from Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) chairman Chuck Grassley.
“After Grassley’s letter came out,” Nunes remembers, “the press ignored it. They didn’t attack the senator for saying the same thing we’d said. We were taking all the fire.”
The SJC staff and Nunes’s team were pushing in the same direction at the same time, using many of the same underlying documents. The heavily redacted Grassley letter was dated January 4, and the memo went to the White House on January 18.
The release of the Nunes Memo on February 2 automatically declassified much of the classified source material also used to write the Grassley letter. On February 6, the letter was rereleased in much less redacted form. The key findings were nearly identical to those of the memo:
• The bulk of the FISA application consisted of dossier allegations.
• The application failed to disclose that Steele’s ultimate clients were the Clinton campaign and the DNC.
• Bruce Ohr, whose wife worked for Fusion GPS on the Trump-Russia project, warned the FBI that Steele was “desperate” that Trump not get elected.
Like HPSCI, Grassley’s staff recognized immediately that the dossier was a fraudulent document. However, the manner in which it had been composed—attributing information to anonymous second- and third-hand sources—protected Steele against charges that he’d lied to the FBI. Even if he were caught out in an obvious falsehood, he was protected by attributing it to a source’s source, whose identity he was unaware of.
But there was one way to catch Steele out. As the memo also noted, the FBI had claimed that Steele had not spoken with the press before the October 31, 2016, article that had led to his dismissal. But Steele had admitted to a British court that he had spoken with the press in the summer and fall of 2016, including Yahoo! News, which had published the Isikoff article used as evidence to obtain the FISA.
The FBI had said that Steele hadn’t spoken with Yahoo! News.
One of them was lying, either the FBI or Steele. Or both. Grassley meant to force the issue by referring Steele to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation.
The second significant document of the postmemo period was ready to go on March 22. But it wasn’t until April 27 that DOJ released a heavily redacted version of HPSCI’s Report on Russian Active Measures, a 253-page document memorializing the Nunes team’s work on the Russia investigation.
“For the Russia Report, we separated out our work on FISA abuse and the other issues,” says Nunes. “The report focused on Russian election interference—how they did it, how the US government responded—and issues that came out of that particular investigation, like leaks of information from the 2017 intelligence community assessment.”
Significantly, the Russia Report found that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, “now a CNN national security analyst, provided inconsistent testimony to the Committee about his contacts with the media, including CNN.”
Both Clapper and the CNN journalist with whom he was in contact, Jake Tapper, denied it.
Clapper told Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler that the first time he had “had any interaction with Tapper” was on May 14, 2017, months after he’d resigned as director of national intelligence (DNI). Moreover, Clapper told Kessler that he had not leaked the dossier when he was in government or talked about it with the media.
The former spy chief blamed Republicans for spreading a false story. However, even Adam Schiff’s separate Russia investigation report noted that Clapper acknowledged having spoken with Tapper while he was still serving as DNI.
“Our report stands up very well,” says Nunes. “The problem is that it’s terribly overredacted. It would have been better if people had been able to read more of what was in there.”
Because HPSCI’s Russia Report cleared Trump of “collusion,” media talking heads dismissed it as a whitewash.
News analysis published the day the lengthy report came out showed that pundits had not needed to read it before passing judgment.
“Although [the report] is meant to exonerate President Trump and everyone around him,” wrote the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent, “what it actually does is bring the utter degradation and disgrace of that committee to its fullest expression.”
Some of the reporting on the Russia Report struck a pose of even-handedness. “Though the report,” wrote the Washington Post’s Matt Zapotosky, Karoun Demirjian, and Greg Miller, “… o
ffers little in the way of new information, the dueling documents give each side of the aisle ammunition to support its long-held arguments about how and why Russia interfered in the 2016 election.”
However, it’s worth keeping in mind that “one side of the aisle” was pushing a conspiracy theory in partnership with intelligence bureaucrats, political operatives, and a media industry that cloaked its role behind a pretense of objectivity.
In writing about the Russia Report, journalists were covering an investigation of a series of abuses and crimes in which they’d participated. And so, because they themselves were part of the scandal, it wasn’t a scandal.
Read alongside the press’s hystericized daily coverage of the collusion conspiracy theory, the temperate language used to describe HPSCI’s account of two attacks on US institutions (one by the Russians, another by Clinton operatives and Obama officials) is an exercise in gaslighting.
HPSCI Republicans, wrote the New York Times’ Nicholas Fandos and Sharon LaFraniere on April 27, “faulted aides to Hillary Clinton for secretly paying for opposition research that included information from Russian sources, and castigated federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies for failing to counter Russian interference as well as for purported investigative abuses and allegedly damaging national security leaks.”
Nunes was not shocked when Democrats and the press dismissed the report. “But it stands up,” he says.
HPSCI produced forty-four findings and twenty-six recommendations that hit all the key parts of Russian actions and the Obama administration’s flawed responses.
“The sign of a BS report is that it has no recommendations,” says Jim. “We had them. We got it right.”
Eight staffers had worked on the report every day, and committee members had been closely consulted. Damon Nelson had written a lot of the report, including the introduction. “He was an excellent writer,” says Patel, “always drafting and redrafting.”
But Nelson’s primary responsibility, says Jim, “was to take care of the team, especially as it got to the end of the year in 2017 and we were in here every weekend. We took Christmas Eve and Christmas off, and that was it. We had a responsibility to get it done. It was clear to us early on that it was an important moment, an epochal moment.”
The Russia Report, say HPSCI staffers, is part of Nelson’s professional and political legacy. “We’re all extremely proud of that work,” says Langer. “And Damon was responsible for it.”
Nelson had insisted that the report avoid anything that could be construed as partisan. “Damon believed that since we were uniquely positioned to get this information to the public,” says Patel’s investigative partner, “it was his responsibility to history to get out a report that was as clinical as possible.”
The paradox, says Patel, is that “half of it is still redacted.”
One of the significant redactions is the finding regarding the Russian troll farms. “We showed how the Russian troll farms work,” says Nunes. “We identified the Internet Research Agency a year before the Mueller report came out. But the DOJ and FBI kept Americans from being able to read that information. We lost a year in educating the American public about what happened in the 2016 elections.”
HPSCI fought against the extensive redactions. “But for a long time, the only thing they agreed to unredact,” says Langer, “were two pages where Comey and McCabe said the agents who interviewed Flynn about his conversation with the Russian ambassador didn’t think he was lying.”
Comey was promoting his book at the time, says Langer, “claiming he didn’t know anything about the agents saying they didn’t think Flynn lied, so we pressed hard to get it unredacted.”
Although the report did not focus on FBI and DOJ investigation abuses, key findings still reinforced the memo and showed the wide scope of the anti-Trump operation. For instance:
• Executive branch officials did not notify the Trump campaign that members of the campaign were assessed to be potential counterintelligence concerns.
• When asked directly, none of the interviewed witnesses provided evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
• The judgments made by the Intelligence Community Assessment regarding Putin’s strategic intentions did not employ proper analytic tradecraft.
• Leaks of classified information alleging Russian intentions to help elect candidate Trump increased dramatically after election day, November 8, 2016.
Producing the memo had overextended the resources of the committee’s small team. “We have oversight on seventeen agencies,” says Nunes. “We had other important issues we needed to get back to.”
Further, the fight to get the memo out had drained both Nunes and his staff. They’d taken fire from the national security bureaucracy, the press corps, and other political operatives, but even in the glow of the memo’s release they realized they couldn’t go through the same process again.
“We were not going to do another memo,” says Patel. “So there were two more steps—first was the task force. And for our closing move, we’d ask the president to declassify information that we’d identified.”
Nunes brought in the Judiciary and Oversight Committees to share responsibilities. The task force tapped the energies of GOP legislators increasingly angry with executive branch officials who were slow-rolling or outright ignoring their requests for documents and information.
Rod Rosenstein in particular had identified himself as a hostile. Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina wanted to impeach him. Ironically, it was the HPSCI chairman Rosenstein had openly opposed who kept the deputy attorney general from being impeached. “They had the votes,” says Nunes.
During a vote on the House floor, Nunes convened a meeting with Jordan and Meadows, as well as House speaker Paul Ryan, Trey Gowdy, and Virginia’s Bob Goodlatte. “I said that if we impeach Rosenstein, they’re going to shut everything down,” he told his colleagues. “They won’t give us anything. So let’s set up this task force and keep the investigation going.”
The next week, Ryan introduced the task force, comprising members of the Oversight, Judiciary, and Intelligence Committees, to the House Republican Conference. The members were enthusiastic. Texas’s John Ratcliffe of Texas joined, bringing more prosecutorial experience to the initiative.
Patel walked members through the essential material the Objective Medusa team had uncovered. “I discussed some of the stuff we’d seen, the documents they might want to look at, and who they might want to interview,” he says.
The task force wound up interviewing all of the major FBI figures involved in the conspiracy—Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, lawyers James Baker and Sally Moyer, as well as DOJ senior official Bruce Ohr and his wife, Nellie.
The other issue handled by task force colleagues was the Strzok-Page texts. The DOJ’s inspector general had found the texts in July 2017, and Mueller had removed Strzok from the special counsel.
“Kash had noticed he was reassigned from the special counsel and said, ‘Someone doesn’t just get moved from one of those jobs unless he’s done something bad,’” says Nunes.
HPSCI requested the documents pertaining to why Strzok had been moved to a notably less prestigious posting. In the early fall of 2017, Nunes’s team received what they were told was the entirety of the Strzok-Page texts.
“We asked Rosenstein and Wray point-blank if this was everything, and they said, yes, they gave us everything that’s relevant,” says Nunes. “I think they were being honest. But someone behind them wasn’t giving us everything. Someone at the FBI was obstructing our investigation. But these guys think it’s a game.”
The FBI handed the Objective Medusa team puzzle pieces.
“When we started getting the texts, the FBI gave them to other bodies that demanded them, too,” says Nunes. “The Senate, House Judiciary Committee, House Oversight, and us. We were all given different text messages. It was li
ke they were dumping a bunch of different puzzle pieces on different committees—and good luck figuring it out.”
It was impossible to piece the story together. “For instance, we’d get piece A and B of a certain text exchange,” says Nunes. “Another committee got C and D. Someone else got G and H. No one got E and F—and the missing pieces always turned out to be the worst stuff.”
Nunes credits Mark Meadows for putting it together. “He wouldn’t stop until he got all the texts. He’s the repository for the text message puzzle,” says Nunes. “He’s been building it.”
The four-term congressman credits his staff. “I’ll give you an analogy,” says the fifty-nine-year-old Meadows. “The FBI threw everything in a big garbage bag and said, ‘There it is.’ So starting in November 2017, our staff dug through the garbage to find what was hidden to keep the truth from the American people. Most of what people understand about the text messages came from the work of our great staff.”
The FBI tried to get ahead of the Strzok-Page texts story and spin it. A December 2, 2017, Washington Post article by Karoun Demirjian and Devlin Barrett contended that Strzok had been wronged. “I had the occasion to work closely with Special Agent Peter Strzok and never experienced even a hint of political bias,” an anonymous former official told the Post. Strzok wasn’t just a “competent counterintelligence official,” the source continued, but also “a role model.” The country, the source concluded, “is tearing itself apart, and men like Pete Strzok are victims.”
Nunes’s communications director had become accustomed to the press’s role in protecting Crossfire Hurricane. “Publishing preemptive leaks was a regular service the Post and Times offered to its leakers and allies,” says Langer.
The text messages did not paint the same heroic portrait of Strzok as the Post’s sources, which was why FBI tried to cloak them with extensive redactions.