by Lee Smith
The former spy told Kavalec that “Manafort has been the go-between with the campaign.” But Manafort had left the campaign nearly two months previously.
Steele told the State Department official that Carter Page had had two secret meetings with Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin earlier in 2016.
According to the dossier, however, Page had had only one meeting with Sechin, during his July 2016 trip to Moscow. But there are two separate reports of the same meeting. The first is dated July 19. The second, dated October 18, revises the account of the meeting to allege that the Trump aide is part of a bribery scheme.
As Kash Patel said of the actions described in that second report, “a US person, who is believed to be acting as a foreign agent, and commits a crime” is what you get a FISA for.
Steele’s October 11 meeting with Kavalec was one week before the date of the second report; the former spy appears to have inadvertently revealed that his employers were cooking up a memo tailored to obtain the spy warrant.
Steele told Kavalec that “Presidential Advisor Vladislov Surkov and Vyacheslov Trubnikov (former head of Russian External Intelligence Service—SVR) are also involved.”
But according to Kavalec’s handwritten notes, Steele told her that Surkov and Trubnikov had also been sources for his reports. So were the two Russians plotting to undo US democracy, or were they warning Steele about Putin’s plans to use Trump to undermine NATO?
Surkov was a well-known figure in State Department Russianist circles during the latter years of the Obama administration. He was Moscow’s point man for a bilateral channel to discuss Ukraine. Representing the United States was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland—Kavalec’s boss.
Maybe when Steele’s employer Glenn Simpson was meeting with Nuland he talked about Surkov. But if the Russian really wanted to convey information about Putin’s plot against the United States, why didn’t he just tell US officials directly about Trump’s Kremlin ties? He had several chances during his several meetings with Nuland. She was a Clinton ally, a possible candidate for secretary of state in a Clinton administration. She might have welcomed information damaging to Trump.
As for Trubnikov, Bruce Ohr seems to have confirmed that Steele had claimed him as a source. “One of the items of information that Chris Steele gave to me,” Ohr told Congress, “was that he had information that a former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, had stated to someone—I didn’t know who—that they had Donald Trump over a barrel.”
Stefan Halper knew Trubnikov.
Halper brought the ex–intelligence chief to the University of Cambridge twice, in May 2012 and again in May 2015. Halper claimed that Trubnikov had been one of his sources.
Naming sources for his 2015–2016 Pentagon-funded study, “The Russia-China Relationship: The Impact on the United States’ Security Interests”—Halper listed V. I. Trubnikov. He described him as a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Halper also listed a second Trubnikov as a source: V. S. Trubnikov, described as the “Former Russian Deputy Foreign Minister and Russian ambassador to India.”
The two are the same person. Vyacheslav Ivanovich (i.e., “V. I.”) Trubnikov is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences—as well as former ambassador to India and onetime deputy foreign minister. He was also once the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service. There is no V. S. Trubnikov on record who served in any of these posts.
Halper was employing a variation of a well-known journalistic trick: reporters use several descriptions of the same person to suggest that their stories are attributed to several anonymous persons rather than to only one unnamed source. For instance, in an article anonymously sourced only to Adam Schiff, a journalist might describe him as “a member of the Democrat leadership,” “a senior intelligence official,” “a veteran California legislator,” and so on.
Many of the descriptions of sources used in the dossier could apply to Trubnikov, including the first two sources named in the very first memo. They assert the dossier’s central claim: that Trump had been compromised by the Russians.
The June 20 report introduces “sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively.” According to the two sources, “the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for at least 5 years.”
It looks as though the dossier author is doubling up on Trubnikov, just as Halper did in his Pentagon report. A former deputy foreign minister and ambassador to India would certainly qualify as a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure, like source A. Source B is almost surely supposed to be Trubnikov.
Speaking separately in June 2016, Source B [the former top level Russian intelligence officer] asserted that TRUMP’s unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material on the now Republican presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.
To put it another way, as Steele told Ohr—the Russians had Trump over a barrel. Could it be true?
Sure, Trubnikov might have said such things to Steele—or his “subsources.” And they might have been true. Maybe the Russians really had been cultivating Trump for more than five years—or since shortly before Halper first spoke with Trubnikov at Cambridge in 2012. Trubnikov might have told them true things, or he might have been seeding the Fusion GPS reports with disinformation to deceive US and UK intelligence services.
But the evidence points to something else.
If Steele really believed that the future of the “Western alliance,” as the dossier put it, was under attack, a former MI6 officer would be expected, at the very least, to remember details from the intelligence reports he’d supposedly written to document the subterfuge.
But the dossier is not an “intelligence” product. It’s a fiction, a literary forgery, populated with real characters, but who did not do or say the things attributed to them. And the dossier’s authors are not intelligence officers but journalists and academics accustomed to running smear campaigns and dirty tricks operations and lying.
Halper misled the United States government regarding the sources of his 2015 China Russia report to the Pentagon. He even invented a source, claiming he had two different men named Trubnikov as sources.
Washington Times reporter Rowan Scarborough proved that Halper was lying by phoning former CIA chief Michael Hayden and others, who denied having been Halper’s sources for his Pentagon research.
It would have been nearly impossible for anyone to corroborate whether a former Russian spymaster had truly told Halper anything about Trump or anything else.
Halper wasn’t a spy; he was a dirty tricks operative with four decades of experience. He was a con man the FBI was determined to protect.
Chapter 21
THE HARVEST
ROWS OF WALNUT TREES line the road to Tulare, California, casting jagged shadows in the morning light. Many have already been harvested, electric shakers tethered to the tree trunks shocking the green nuts from their branches. The weather is still warm in the valley during the day, but within a month the skies will turn gray and the snow will start to fall in the Sierra Nevada.
It’s election time, and Nunes is driving through his home district, California’s Twenty-second. His daughters Julia and Margaret are in the back seat chatting quietly, accustomed to making the Saturday-morning rounds with their father. Their route encompasses the entire district, Tulare and most of eastern Fresno, as well as Visalia and Clovis.
On the highway into Visalia, it’s plain that Russiagate madness has migrated like pollution from Washington, DC, fouling the warm Central Valley air. Billboards in Russian with Nunes’s picture portray him as a Putin stooge.
This is the new local landscape that the national media has shaped. Days before the Nunes Memo was released, MSNBC analyst John Heilemann asked Connectic
ut senator Chris Murphy if “we actually have a Russian agent running the House Intel Committee on the Republican side?”
Many of Nunes’s constituents have been poisoned by the propaganda campaign aimed at him. Outside activists have flooded the district, calling the congressman a traitor.
At a Starbucks in Visalia, a middle-aged woman in dark glasses corners Nunes and his two girls. “This is not why we sent you to Washington,” she says. “Not to support Trump. We’re very disappointed in you. We need to have a town hall for you to answer questions.”
“I’m here for you right now,” says Nunes, putting himself between the woman and his daughters. “What did you want to talk about? Have you contacted my office to set up a meeting?”
“Actually,” she admits, “I’m not in your district.”
The self-styled anti-Trump “resistance” that has zeroed in on Nunes is anything but a progressive grass-roots movement. Rather, it’s a function of Democratic Party donors underwriting tactics designed to protect the privileges and prerogatives of the coastal elite, from the Beltway to Hollywood. The “resistance” is how college-educated leftist masses have been mobilized to march on behalf of political corruption.
“They’re trying to teach me a lesson,” says Nunes during the drive. “‘If you go after the bad things we do in Washington, we’ll come after you at home.’”
Home is partly the sequence of routines determined by the people who inhabit a place. “I’ve had the same friends, known all the same people, since I was a kid,” says Nunes.
For him, Saturdays typically begin with coffee brewed by Basil Perch, the seventy-seven-year-old former mayor of Visalia. Perch holds court every Saturday morning in the offices of his construction firm housed in a local industrial park.
Posters of Perch’s granddaughter’s high school soccer team and photographs of his grandfather as a young man just escaped from the Armenian genocide fill the walls.
Perch sits at the head of a large table surrounded by other local businessmen—such as Mike Fistolera, another builder—who like talking about politics, national and local. “I have people on the inside who talk to me,” he says with a smile. He’s chewing on an unlit cigar and asks Nunes about Washington. Perch likes Trump. “He knows what real leadership is all about,” says Perch. “So does he,” he continues, pointing his cigar at the congressman.
Nunes mostly listens. With Perch and the others, the GOP maverick who’s energized half the nation by taking on virtually every authority and entrenched institution in the national capital is a younger man among the elders, men of his father’s generation.
Nunes’s circle is bound by old-world values drawn from the various immigrant blocs that make up his constituency—among others, Portuguese, like his family, Armenians like Perch’s, and Mexicans, the latest arrivals.
Later we head to a parade ground to watch Nunes’s eldest daughter, Evelyn, drill for her middle school marching band, and it appears at least half of the kids from the dozen or so bands are from Latino families. English is their first language. They don’t speak Spanish because their parents want them to grow up as Americans.
Nunes says he doesn’t have much trouble identifying his supporters from a distance. “Boots, jeans, pocket T-shirts, it doesn’t matter if it’s a white guy or a Mexican guy,” he Nunes. “They’re dressed like normal Valley people, own trucks and the like. When you see older retired white bureaucrats or professors in expensive hybrid cars, chances are good they’re not my supporters.”
Before the Russia investigations, Nunes had enjoyed the support of independents and moderate Democrats. He was first elected in 2002 when he promised to take on environmentalists who wanted to divert water into the ocean and choke the land.
“Devin was originally elected because he promised to fight the water wars,” says Ray Appleton, central California’s top-rated radio talk show host.
Appleton started in radio nearly fifty years ago on the music side. The long-haired, gray-bearded, thick-chested sixty-six-year-old in a leather jacket looks less like a conservative pundit than a rocker who is surprised by nothing that humans do. He first met Nunes during his initial congressional race. “Oddly, I supported the other guy,” Appleton tells me. “But Devin was the best man for the job. Even his opponent said so. Now we’re all close friends.”
The 2018 race was hardly as cordial. The Democrats spent more than $9 million on his opponent’s race. Local political analysts estimate that they spent another $2 million in dark money. That made his opponent, who had no prior political experience, one of the biggest fund-raisers in the entire congressional election cycle. Money on that scale buys a lot of mail pieces and TV ads in a small media market like the Central Valley. Nunes’s opponents inundated the safely Republican district with attack ads. They weren’t trying to unseat Nunes but to punish him—and his family.
After the attacks on his family and the death threats in the run-up to the release of the memo, the anti-Nunes operation gathered steam, with operatives and the press looking for any dirt with which to smear him.
Esquire magazine sent reporter Ryan Lizza to Iowa for a story purporting to blow the lid off a “secret” farm owned by Nunes’s father. It was hardly any secret; Nunes senior had moved to Iowa more than a dozen years before to help his younger son. Lizza tracked Nunes family members who had become concerned after they’d discovered the reporter had been fired from a job for sexual misconduct.
They went after Nunes’s family in California, too. In September, a film crew trespassed on Tulare land farmed by his Uncle Gerald to generate a story out of his outrage and put it on film.
“The point was to use me as another thing to go after Devin,” says Gerald, a broad-chested man with the forearms and permanent tan of a professional baseball coach. He drives me on a tour of the dairy farm, first bought by his grandparents. He points to the wooden house where he grew up, a little more than a decade before his nephew was born. Hundreds of light brown cows are grazing in the afternoon sun.
“Cows are great animals,” says Devin Nunes. “But it was always my goal to be in the wine business. My mother’s father owned a vineyard and grew grapes.”
Nunes’s agricultural background is a frequent point of attack for his Deep State adversaries and the press. “When I’m home in California, I do a lot of interviews from the World Ag Expo in Tulare because it’s closer to my home than the TV studios. An extra benefit is that the tractors in the background drive the Left crazy. One thing I’ve learned is that it’s really easy to troll these people.”
Clovis is a small, bright California town that looks like a set out of a western produced by conservatives: clean, polite, and devout.
Nunes steps into a coffee shop owned by a former NFL linebacker, Zack Follett, an evangelical Christian who starred at Clovis High School before going on to the University of California at Berkeley. After a neck injury brought his career to an end, he opened a chain of Christian coffee shops. A few college students are scattered around the shop, sipping caffelattes with their laptops open, writing term papers on the Bible.
Nunes waits in line for coffee, shaking hands with supporters and deflecting praise with a short laugh. A man in operating room scrubs wants to speak with him about the investigations.
Josh LeRoy, a thirty-seven-year-old medical device salesman, tells Nunes that many of his friends and family follow his efforts to hold the conspirators accountable.
“I’m not starstruck or anything,” LeRoy tells me later. “If it was Michael Jordan, I wouldn’t care. But I felt I needed to thank Devin for what he is doing for our country because I truly feel he is risking his life fighting for us.”
LeRoy didn’t know about the death threats against Nunes. “It takes real courage,” he says. He notes one of the most interesting aspects of the Nunes phenomenon: “The only guy to take a stand is from California,” says LeRoy, “the most liberal state of the union.”
It’s not easy to become a national figure from a sta
te dominated by left-wing politics. Nunes became a national figure not by adjusting his message to gain admirers around the country but by projecting the values of the local community that raised him.
LeRoy asks when the documents the HPSCI chair asked for will be declassified.
It’s a year and a half into the investigation, and Nunes is still surprised that so many people who come up to him know all the details of the plot against Trump, the figures involved—Comey, Brennan, Steele, Simpson, McCabe, Strzok and Page, the Ohrs—and the status of HPSCI’s investigation. The first rallying cry was to release the memo. Now it’s to declassify the documents.
After the Objective Medusa team had pushed out the memo, Patel argued that the best thing would be if Americans could see for themselves what the Crossfire Hurricane team had done. “We assembled a number of buckets of information provided to us by the FBI and DOJ that would best tell the story without jeopardizing national security interests,” he says.
During the summer, Nunes had asked the White House to declassify the information. “It was pages ten to twelve and seventeen to thirty-four of the third and final FISA renewal,” says Patel. “There was also the twelve Bruce Ohr 302s—which is just a loose description because they’re not just about Bruce Ohr. And finally exculpatory information that was withheld from the FISA court.”
Patel says that he considers the last item the most significant. “For me as a prosecutor,” says the former DOJ lawyer, “the biggest thing in the world is Brady.”
The “Brady rule,” established by the Supreme Court in Brady v. Maryland (1963), requires the prosecution to turn over exculpatory evidence.