by Lee Smith
“The redactions on the texts would not allow for the true story to come out,” says Meadows. “That true story is obviously one of bias, but it’s also one of a coordinated effort with others in the intel community to make sure that the ‘collusion’ narrative was not disposed of quickly.”
Meadows explains that what he learned came from unclassified text messages. The text messages sent to Nunes were classified. “We never gave Meadows the texts we got,” says Nunes. “They were supposedly classified. But they shouldn’t have been. It didn’t deal with national security issues. They just hid everything under a classified counterintelligence investigation.”
The redactions obscured the role of the previous White House. “There were key meetings with Obama officials,” says Meadows. “For instance, there’s a meeting with White House chief of staff McDonough in which the FBI/DOJ is briefing him on what appeared to be the Russian investigation on August 10, 2016. There’s no doubt that Obama officials were involved. But to opine on their motives would be something that I can’t do. I think if you were to ask them they would say they were trying to make sure that they were protecting the integrity of our election system from the Russians.”
It’s not easy to make that case for some Obama officials. The name of the former CIA director, Meadows says, was redacted and kept out of text messages given to Congress. “Brennan knows that there was no coordination, collusion, or conspiracy. He knew that when he left. If he were honest, he would acknowledge the type of work that he not only knew of but also was involved with that would indicate there was no coordination at all with the Russians.”
Chapter 20
THE FORGERS
THERE WAS ANOTHER THING the Objective Medusa team wanted. The subject matter was delicate, but even at that stage Nunes and his team couldn’t have imagined the response.
“FBI and DOJ went nuts,” says Langer. “They started leaking to reporters that Nunes is going to get people killed.”
On April 24, 2018, HPSCI sent a classified letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, asking for documents regarding sensitive matters. “We didn’t want to subpoena them right off,” says Patel. “The way things worked with the DOJ was that they said if you want something, just call us or write us. But they would never come through. So in this instance we wanted some specific information. We didn’t get it. A week later we issued a subpoena stating that we wanted the stuff that we asked for in the classified letter.”
A May 8 Washington Post article by Robert Costa, Carol D. Leonnig, Devlin Barrett, and Shane Harris reported that “Information being sought by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes could endanger a top-secret intelligence source.” The article’s headline noted that the source had “aided” the special counsel investigation.
That was the first in a handful of May 2018 stories in the Post and the Times illustrating the press’s new role in prosecuting the operation.
The previous month, the staffs of the two papers had been awarded a joint Pulitzer Prize for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
Many of the twenty stories cited by the Pulitzer committee were sourced to leaks of classified information. Thus the print press had bestowed its highest honor on rogue FBI and DOJ officials who’d coordinated with media operatives in a plot to topple the president.
It was a crime spree, says Patel. “A select few members of the law enforcement agencies charged with the sublime duty of enforcing the law, were the ones regularly breaking it by disclosing classified information to the media for a preemptive story to defuse their next identified failure. HPSCI could have easily done the same but never did. Instead we chose to follow a path the shameful few in law enforcement felt was beneath them.”
The May 2018 stories in the Post and the Times highlighted how the nature of the operation had changed: the press had gone from offense to defense.
With the lead actors in the Crossfire Hurricane group flushed from the FBI—Andrew McCabe was fired in March 2018, Lisa Page resigned in May, Peter Strzok would be gone by the summer—the media lost inside sources.
More important, Nunes and his team were putting points on the board. Now the job of the media was to stop Nunes and protect dirty cops. The Times and the Post became the public custodians of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
As the media’s offensive campaign had depended on leaks of classified information, so did the defensive campaign, relying on leaks regarding a counterintelligence investigation, which is classified by definition.
A May 16 Times story by Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, and Nicholas Fandos revealed key details of the investigation, including the pop culture–inspired name of the FBI’s probe: Crossfire Hurricane.
DOJ invited Nunes and an HPSCI colleague, Trey Gowdy, to a briefing on Friday, May 18. The night before, they were told that no documents would be forthcoming. The two congressmen pulled out of the meeting.
“We knew they were going to try to set us up,” says Nunes. “They wanted to leak details of the investigation to the media and say we were the ones leaking. All they needed in the press reports was a line to the effect that Nunes and Gowdy had been briefed.”
Nevertheless, the Times and the Post both went ahead with their Friday, May 18, articles, revealing further information regarding a confidential human source used in the investigation.
“The informant,” reported the Times’ Adam Goldman, Mark Mazzetti, and Matthew Rosenberg, “is well known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A. in past years, according to one person familiar with the source’s work.”
“In mid-July 2016,” wrote the Post’s Robert Costa, Carol D. Leonnig, Tom Hamburger, and Devlin Barrett, “a retired American professor approached an adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign at a symposium about the White House race held at a British university.… But the professor was more than an academic interested in American politics—he was a longtime U.S. intelligence source.”
Though neither article disclosed the source’s identity, it was easy to discern who it was—thanks to Chuck Ross’s important March 25, 2018, article on Daily Caller reporting how an American professor from the University of Cambridge had tried to frame Papadopoulos.
Within days, the Post did publish his name—in another story with Robert Costa getting the lead byline: “Who Is Stefan A. Halper, the FBI Source Who Assisted the Russia Investigation?”
Costa, it turned out, had known him for years. “Stefan Halper was my professor at Cambridge,” he tweeted on May 21. “Took his course, went to his dinners. Stayed in touch over the years. Last spoke with him in 2015. A China hawk, moderate R, highly-connected and gregarious academic.”
Nunes wanted to know how many informants the FBI had used against the Trump campaign and when they had been sent in. Had any informants been used before the date the FBI claimed it had opened Crossfire Hurricane, July 31, 2016?
That date, as Patel had explained, had only served to give the FBI bureaucratic cover. Clearly the FBI had been looking into Trump and his associates before the investigation had opened. The July 31 date was a fault line dividing the issues the FBI was willing to discuss from those it wanted to hide.
A timeline bracketing the July 31 date may better illustrate the nature of the operation, a timeline based on the dates that Halper, or his associates, came into contact with the Trump team.
• January 2016: Halper associate Christopher Andrew, a University of Cambridge professor, invites British academic Svetlana Lokhova to dinner on behalf of Halper. The former Reagan aide used Lokhova to dirty National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in a media campaign that served as the basis of an investigation of Flynn.
• March 2016: The Ge
orge Papadopoulos operation, in which Halper will play a central role, commences when a Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, meets Papadopoulos.
• April 2016: Mifsud allegedly tells Papadopoulos that the Russians have thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
• May 2016: Alexander Downer meets Papadopoulos in May and passes information to US authorities, which leads to the opening of Crossfire Hurricane in July. Trump adviser Stephen Miller is invited to participate in a July symposium at the University of Cambridge arranged by Halper’s academic department. Miller declines.
• June 2016: A Halper associate at Cambridge, Steven Schrage, invites a former Trump adviser, Carter Page, to the July symposium. Page accepts.
• July 2016: Halper first meets with Page at the Cambridge symposium on July 11 and tries to draw him into a conversation about Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Downer also speaks with Page, who is sitting next to him during the keynote address delivered by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright.
• August 2016: Halper invites Page to visit him in Virginia. Contacts between the two increase as the FISA application is being drafted. Halper emails Trump foreign policy adviser Sam Clovis and arranges to meet with him.
• September 2016: Halper writes to Papadopoulos, inviting him to London. Both Halper and a US government undercover investigator, Azra Turk, seek to elicit information regarding Clinton emails supposedly held by the Russians.
• Fall 2016: A Halper associate, the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove, reportedly meets with former MI6 agent Christopher Steele and encourages him to share his findings with active British officials.
• December 2016: Halper begins to brief the US and UK press on allegations regarding Flynn and Lokhova.
• February 2017: Christopher Andrew writes an article alleging that Lokhova compromised Flynn.
• March 2017: The Halper campaign targeting Flynn and Lokhova continues with articles in the Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.
• September 2017: Halper speaks with Carter Page for the last time; the FISA warrant on Page expires.
• May 2018: FBI and DOJ leaks to the Washington Post and the New York Times partially reveal Halper’s role in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Halper’s allegations regarding Flynn and Lokhova appear in the Post and Times.
The timeline shows that Halper was more than just a source; his contribution appears to have been even more significant than Steele’s.
Christopher Steele took over MI6’s Russia desk in 2006, a trying year for British intelligence’s Russia-related operations.
In November, Alexander Litvinenko, a high-profile defector from the FSB (the Russian secret service, successor of the KGB) who had been granted asylum in the United Kingdom in 2000, was murdered in London. Steele, according to British news reports, had been Litvinenko’s case officer.
Sources are valuable commodities, to be protected at all costs. Yet how was it possible to protect a man as reckless as Litvinenko? He had used London as a rostrum from which he had regularly denounced Putin, claiming there were tapes of the Russian leader proving that he was a pedophile.
Litvinenko needed money. The £2,000 MI6 was paying him monthly was not enough to keep his family afloat in one of the world’s most expensive cities. When an Italian official investigating Moscow’s infiltration of Rome’s political establishment offered Litvinenko work in 2003, he jumped at the chance.
In 2001, the Italians had set up a commission to study the claims made by former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin. He had defected to the United Kingdom in 1992, taking with him notes on the KGB’s foreign operations, including reports on Western officials compromised by Russian intelligence.
However, not everything Mitrokhin told Western officials was true, says Svetlana Lokhova. The Cambridge historian who says she was smeared by Halper had worked extensively in the Mitrokhin archives. Her former professor Christopher Andrew had cowritten several books with the Russian defector, including The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB.
“After the Soviet Union broke apart, you had all these former KGB spies who were broke and with no way to make a living,” Lokhova explains.
Like spies from time immemorial, Mitrokhin found he could improve his quality of life by giving the other side information it valued. He talked to Western intelligence agencies and kept talking for as long as he was paid to do so.
Mitrokhin did not have copies of actual KGB files. “He had taken notes on the files that he’d seen,” said Lokhova. “Some of those notes were ambiguous or led to different interpretations. Much of the time Mitrokhin was telling the truth, but other times, he was just saying what Western intelligence services or politicians wanted to hear. He was getting paid to talk.”
Mitrokhin pioneered a post–Cold War cottage industry: billing Westerners for stories about how Moscow manipulated other Westerners. Litvinenko picked up where Mitrokhin had left off. At first the Italians wanted to know if the KGB had compromised senior officials in the past, but by the time Litvinenko came on, the commission convened by Italian officials had become a weapon that then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was using against his current opponents. Litvinenko said that Democratic Party leader Romano Prodi was “the KGB’s man in Italy.”
Litvinenko’s information, according to reports, “was very difficult to verify and cross-check. It was a little bit out on a limb.”
Litvinenko was poisoned in a London hotel, and Steele led the inquiry into his death. Steele, according to reports, was among the first to claim that Litvinenko’s murder had been a Russian state operation. Within months, Steele left MI6.
In the private sector, the former MI6 Russianist’s work often involved Russia-related matters. It’s true that he hadn’t been to Russia since the early 1990s, but there were plenty of sources at hand, thousands of Russians in London alone, including oligarchs who parked their cash in the British capital. Steele worked for one of them, Oleg Deripaska.
Steele cultivated a reputation as the man to see for Russia-related issues. He frequently coupled his work with similar projects for other clients, sometimes getting paid twice for the same job. The public record suggests that the accuracy of Steele’s information on Russia was mixed at best.
For instance, in 2009, when Steele was hired to investigate Russia’s bid for the 2018 World Cup, he made inroads with the FBI by introducing its agents to Andrew Jennings. The British journalist had been following FIFA corruption for nearly a decade, and his information helped the FBI’s investigation.
As for Steele’s own investigation into Russian corruption in the World Cup bid, UK authorities buried his uncorroborated allegations. He nonetheless leaked them to the press.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Steele was hired by a private client to write reports on the situation. He shared those memos, reportedly more than a hundred of them, with State Department official Jonathan Winer. According to a former State Department official, “occasionally, [Steele’s] sources appeared to exaggerate their knowledge or influence.”
The information Steele gave to US diplomats actually belonged to the client, without whose permission to share it, he would have been giving away proprietary information. What’s more likely is that the client was paying Steele at least in part to distribute his reports to the State Department.
Another private client hired Steele for a different Russia-related job. According to New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s March 12, 2018, profile of Steele, the former MI6 man called that investigation “Project Charlemagne.” It touched on Russian election interference in Europe, the Kremlin’s use of social media warfare, its “opaque financial support” for European politicians, and its relationship with former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and France’s right-wing firebrand Marine Le Pen.
In other words, Steele was carrying on Litvinenko’s work. Except where the Russian was hired to accuse Berlusconi’s rivals of working with the KGB, Steele’s job wa
s to turn the tables on the former Italian prime minister and accuse him of cozying up to Putin. He claimed that the Kremlin’s goal in supporting right-wing European politicians was to “destroy” the European Union to bring an end to its Ukraine-related sanctions.
But that makes no sense. The European Union is the number one foreign consumer of Russian energy, a sector that accounts for more than half the country’s revenues. Why would Putin want to destroy Moscow’s most important customer and send the Russian economy into a tailspin?
Most famously, there was the Trump-Russia research, which Steele gave to the FBI and the press as well as his employee, the Clinton campaign. Steele admitted in a British court that his reports on Trump had not been verified.
Despite the media testimonies regarding Steele’s talent for uncovering Russian intrigue, the public evidence shows that Steele was bad at his job—unless his job was to use his spy credentials to fool people into believing all the things he said about Russia, as Mitrokhin and Litvinenko had.
Glenn Simpson usually accompanied Steele when he briefed the press because the former MI6 agent didn’t know the details of the reports he was supposed to have written.
On October 11, 2016, Jonathan Winer introduced Steele to a State Department colleague. It was a week before the first FISA and a little less than a month before the election. Steele downloaded everything Fusion GPS had on Trump and Russia.
Foreign service officers take good notes. Learning to report meetings and interviews with foreigners quickly and accurately is one of the most important parts of a US foreign service officer’s training. The notes of career foreign service officer Kathleen Kavalec are evidence that Steele was not the author of the dossier.
Steele told her that the Russians were running operations through their consulate in Miami. Kavalec remarked in her notes that there is no Russian Consulate in Miami. Steele had flubbed his line. The dossier never mentions a Miami consulate. Rather, Dossier Report 95 claims that the Russians were using consular officials to run operations in Miami, as well as in New York and Washington.