The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  “It is the duty and the ethical responsibility of the DOJ to provide that to the court,” says Patel. “It would be one thing if DOJ went in there and said, ‘We didn’t have this in our system. There was no way for us to know this.’ And sometimes that happens. But in this instance we found the documents that showed they knew the exculpatory evidence existed. They created it, they could have presented it and chose not to. They withheld it from the court.”

  On September 17, Trump had ordered the material to be declassified. A few days later, Andrew McCabe had appeared to send a warning to the DOJ official who could convince Trump not to declassify.

  A New York Times story by Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt sourced in part to McCabe’s memos reported how in May 2017, Rod Rosenstein had talked about recording the president and invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove him from office.

  Rosenstein denied it in a comment to the Times. In a Washington Post article intended to douse the fire the Times piece had started, an unnamed Rosenstein ally claimed that the DOJ official had been joking. The comment had been meant sarcastically, “along the lines of: ‘What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?’”

  The light McCabe had shone on Rosenstein’s zeal to topple the president just a year before might have helped remind the deputy attorney general that there were plenty of documents memorializing the misdeeds of many, including Rosenstein. In any event, Rosenstein dissuaded Trump from declassifying documents that would have spelled trouble for the Crossfire Hurricane team. On September 21, the president tweeted:

  I met with the DOJ concerning the declassification of various UNREDACTED documents. They agreed to release them but stated that so doing may have a perceived negative impact on the Russia probe. Also, key Allies called to ask not to release.

  Therefore, the Inspector General has been asked to review these documents on an expedited basis. I believe he will move quickly on this (and hopefully other things which he is looking at). In the end I can always declassify if it proves necessary. Speed is very important to me—and everyone!

  Nunes and his team recognized Rosenstein’s hand immediately. Using the “allies” as an excuse, says Patel, was the same thing DOJ had done when it had resisted providing the information HPSCI had requested for the memo.

  “I imagine something like: Rosenstein called his counterparts in the UK to say, ‘Hey, this is a really sensitive investigation. I’d appreciate if you agreed with me that the disclosure of any information would jeopardize our relationship.’ And the guy over there says, ‘Yeah, that sounds good. Tell the president we agree with you.’ So Rosenstein goes to Trump and says, ‘I talked to England. They said they don’t want to jeopardize our relationship.’”

  Patel says he can’t help but be impressed by Rosenstein’s ability to maneuver in tight places. “He’s a very good bureaucrat. That’s how they operate. I’ve been in those meetings. It’s very easy for them to gloss over embarrassing details and use the institution as a shield.”

  Rumors circulated that the Australians and British were worried about having their role in Crossfire Hurricane exposed. Nunes and Patel discount the likelihood that foreign governments had participated in the operation.

  Australia wasn’t involved, says Nunes. “It was not official Five Eyes intelligence that opened the investigation.” It was a rumor that Downer had passed to the State Department, which had relayed it to the FBI.

  Patel speculates on what the UK intelligence services might or might not have known about the operation. “My hunch is that England doesn’t know the depth of what the FBI did over there and how they did it,” he says.

  He explains the steps the FBI must take to investigate crimes on foreign soil: “The FBI cannot just go and run an investigation in a foreign country.” They must be invited by that country. That is a mandatory requirement. So they contact our embassy there and say we need help. And sometimes there’s an FBI representative in the embassy, the legal attaché. We get the invitation, tell them who will come, and what we intend to do. You can’t just unilaterally go in, especially in a place like England. No way.”

  Patel thinks the DOJ and FBI were not forthright with London. “I suspect Rosenstein was worried about that coming out,” he says. “That’s one reason why he scared off the president on declassification. That’s why he fought us on the FISA and the memo, on declass, and why he fought us on these documents every step of the way.”

  Objective Medusa didn’t get the documents declassified in September. But there was an upside. “I always said that when DOJ and the FBI started shooting at each other like McCabe and Rosenstein did, it means we won,” says Patel.

  Conservatives argued that declassification would have helped at the polls. Making public more details of the coup might have turned voters against a Democratic Party that had paid a foreign spy to undermine a US presidential campaign.

  Nunes isn’t sure. “If those same voters weren’t already moved to anger by what we’d shown in the memo, they were never going to wake up. But of course, had the same thing been done to Hillary, they’d have been burning tires in the streets.”

  Nothing will happen, says Nunes, until there’s a new attorney general. “Trump couldn’t fire Sessions before the elections, or that would definitely hurt at the polls,” he says. “But no matter what happens on Tuesday, Sessions is gone after the election.”

  It’s election day 2018. Nunes is far up in the polls but isn’t optimistic about the Republicans’ chances in the House. And he’s distracted. HPSCI staff director Damon Nelson has been diagnosed with a serious illness that struck suddenly. He’s dying. Nelson kept the committee, the congressman, and the staff focused, sharp, and optimistic during their hardest days of the last eighteen months.

  “All of my friends and family know Damon, too,” Nunes of his old high school friend.

  Robert Quinn is another old friend, Nunes’s roommate at Cal Poly and a pistachio farmer. Quinn’s father, Ron, pulls me outside for a smoke. He’s a Marine Corps veteran who fought in Vietnam and went back to the farm when he returned. “I learned the most important thing in my life in the Marines: don’t quit, don’t surrender,” says the elder Quinn. “I like to think Devin got some of that from me. I’m really proud of him. I’ve known him since he and Robert were kids. When he first got into politics, I encouraged him to do it and told him he’d win.”

  Most of Nunes’s circle are at the election-night gathering in a large Portuguese American meeting hall in a rural area outside Tulare: Nunes’s wife and children, his Uncle Gerald, and Basil Perch.

  Supporters, some of them in Team Nunes baseball caps, fleeces, and T-shirts, wait in line for tacos and beer. The mood is festive, and with Nunes up by thirteen points, most are watching the national results. Weeks after the election, Nunes’s winning margin will close to six points. Part of that is because of ballot harvesting.

  “The Democrats are out registering everyone,” the congressman explains. “Then they go pick up the ballots from people’s houses.”

  With the Democrats’ victory in the House, Nunes lost the gavel and Adam Schiff took control of HPSCI. The Objective Medusa team had always known they were running against the clock. But they finished their work on time.

  They showed that law enforcement had used a politically funded document to spy on a presidential campaign. They showed that after the election, the sting operation had turned into a coup. They showed that the press had partnered with dirty cops and political operatives to topple Trump and undo the laws, principles, and institutions that sustain the country. Nunes and his team uncovered the biggest political scandal in US history: a governmentwide plot targeting not only the commander in chief but also the American public as a whole.

  In retrospect, it’s not surprising that in this instance, the defense of the United States started in the Central Valley. Nunes’s constituents are the descendants of the people who populated John Steinbeck’s novels, his most famous—The Grapes of Wrath—set only mil
es from the Portuguese American meeting hall.

  The immigrants, from the Azores and Armenia and Mexico and elsewhere, together with the internal refugees who fled the Dust Bowl, turned this area into the world’s most fertile region. The farmers, small-business owners, and others celebrating Nunes’s victory together tonight inherited the instinctive generosity and native shrewdness of the men and women who settled the district.

  Yet their success, often their survival, required a certain hardness. It demanded that they have not only a feel for the land but also the ability to read human nature. Not being able to discern character, to spot at first glance a predator, no matter how well he spoke or what he promised, left those they were supposed to protect vulnerable.

  That’s why the establishment, the press, the permanent bureaucracy, the tech oligarchs, the urban aristocrats, the Deep State, and all the rest of the ugly beautiful people, will never forgive Devin Nunes. It belittled them that he didn’t care he wasn’t their sort but was proud to be a farm kid, a townie with dirt under his fingernails. What truly drove them mad was that for all their trappings of power, their genuine ability to bend outcomes to their own will, their claims to expertise, their false prophesies, and above all their threats, he saw through them.

  Chapter 22

  THE POSSESSED

  NUNES WAS RIGHT. Jeff Sessions was fired on November 7, one day after the midterm elections. He was, as Nunes had said, an honorable man.

  Yet he had not been prepared to do what the job of attorney general required at the time: put down a coup rooted in the institution he led, the Department of Justice.

  The president who had hired him was angry. By recusing himself, Sessions had given the conspirators an open shot to topple the commander in chief. Trump was also right: the special counsel investigation was a witch hunt, with dire consequences for the republic.

  The investigation was based on a conspiracy theory. The media rationalized the paranoid fictions attributed to Christopher Steele by arguing that none of them had been disproven. Thus the burden was on Trump and his associates to prove they were innocent.

  The charges didn’t have to be tested in a court of law; lives could be destroyed by allegations drawn from a dark dream world. It was up to the accused to demonstrate that they weren’t witches.

  That reversal perverted the founding principle of the US legal system—the presumption of innocence—while opening the door to superstition and fanaticism. What gruesome myths and imaginary horrors would the public not believe now that the media had legitimized the Steele Dossier, now that a special counsel had been named to investigate a fantasy produced by a corrupt elite to defend its privileges?

  Despite the pandemonium that filled the vacuum left by Sessions’s recusal, Nunes sees an upside. “If he hadn’t been the AG, we might not have known how bad it was,” he says.

  That is, it wasn’t just Sessions who was taken by surprise. No one outside the circle of conspirators had known how deep the rot ran. Not even the chairman of the congressional committee tasked to oversee the intelligence community had known how bad it was—until senior US intelligence officials went to war against the United States.

  It’s several months after the midterms, and Nunes is sitting with friends in the backyard of his Tulare home. Ray Appleton, the radio talk show host, is here; so are the Kapetan brothers, a handful of other constituents, and a few writers. Nunes is grilling beef and pouring his Alpha Omega wine.

  “If an attorney general had come in who knew what he was doing, they wouldn’t have tried any of the stuff they pulled,” says Nunes. “Or after the Flynn leak, another AG would’ve sent a hundred FBI agents to find the leakers and that’s the end of it. But these guys thought they had free rein to do whatever they wanted. And so they were actually drawing a map for us of all the bad things they’d done and were capable of doing.”

  Nunes’s assessment of the last two years is blunt. “The whole special counsel investigation was a fraud,” he says. “They knew from the beginning that there was no collusion, but they moved it forward to set an obstruction of justice trap.”

  Like the FBI’s investigation and the FISA on Page, the special counsel was based on the Steele Dossier.

  “Remember that at the beginning we thought Mueller was going to do a good job,” says Nunes. “Then Rosenstein goes and writes a memo in August about the scope of the investigation. They wouldn’t show it to us or any of the other oversight committees. Kash and Gowdy started asking questions about it. But it was a big black hole.”

  The first evidence of what was in the scope memo came from Paul Manafort’s trial in a Virginia court. The judge asked to see it, and a heavily redacted version of the scope memo was published. According to the few lines not redacted, the memo includes allegations that Paul Manafort:

  Committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election for President of the United States, in violation of US law.

  Manafort was convicted of offenses ranging from bank fraud to tax fraud—but nothing remotely connected to Russian election hacking, the charge Mueller had been tasked to investigate.

  “The only place those Russia allegations are made is in the dossier,” says Nunes. “So our belief is that the dossier is part of the scope memo, and that there’s more dossier stuff that was given to Mueller.”

  Nunes shakes his head. “The dossier is part of the special counsel’s scope memo. Absolutely incredible.”

  The Objective Medusa team had taken the dossier apart—showed who had paid for it and how the FBI had used it to get a warrant to spy on Trump. Nunes and his team had forced the conspirators to switch horses. The FBI claimed it hadn’t started investigating until it had found out what the mysterious Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud had told George Papadopoulos about Clinton’s emails.

  “Mifsud,” says Nunes, “is their Achilles’ heel. If we get that, the entire operation is exposed.”

  Even though HPSCI came under control of the Democrats with their election victory, Nunes has no intention of stopping. Rather, he seems energized. Trump has a new attorney general who looks like he’s serious about holding accountable the men and women who plotted against the president. And, says Nunes, Mueller’s due to file his report any day.

  A guest asks Nunes how he’s so sure. For months the report has been rumored to be on the way. But that was a rumor planted to keep Trump off balance and Republicans quiet.

  Mueller had to sustain the possibility of “collusion” at least through the election. Any lingering doubts or suspicions about Trump in voters’ minds might help the Democrats take the House, an essential step in bringing down the president. If the Republicans held the majority, to whom would Mueller hand off obstruction charges? Devin Nunes?

  The HPSCI ranking member explains how he knows the special counsel is wrapping up. “On March 4, the DOJ said the new attorney general doesn’t have to recuse himself from the Russia investigation,” says Nunes. He pauses to emphasize the absurdity of the idea: “The top lawman in the country is cleared to do his job.”

  He continues, “On March 14, Andrew Weissmann announces he’s leaving the special counsel. That’s Mueller’s ‘pit bull.’ If he’s leaving, they’re done. The report will drop on a Friday because these guys have been dropping stuff on Fridays since after the 2016 election.”

  Nunes settles on two Fridays down the road, March 22. He is reminded that that’s the one-year anniversary of the date HPSCI released the Russia Report and the two-year anniversary of his walk into the valley of death.

  The year before that, Trump had given his March 21 interview to the Washington Post, after which Clinton operatives and the FBI had begun to target Page and Papadopoulos.

  As it happened, much of the struggle between the Objective Medusa team and the Deep State the last several years, the contest between light and darkness, turned on the vernal equinox.

  Evidence o
f a flanking movement to encircle Mueller began to appear more than six months before Trump appointed the new attorney general. What checked the momentum of the Paper Coup was more paper.

  On June 2, 2018, the New York Times published a letter that Trump’s legal team had sent to the special counsel. It’s unlikely that the White House leaked a letter showing that the president’s legal team was overmatched.

  However, if it was the special counsel that leaked the correspondence, it was a blunder. The Times’ accompanying commentary noted that the Mueller team was up to no good.

  In the letter, the president’s lawyers argued that he could not have obstructed the FBI’s investigation of Flynn by expressing to Comey his hope that the FBI director “could let it go.” The lawyers cited what they believed to be the relevant statute, which forbids “anyone from corruptly, or by threats of force or by any threatening communication, influencing, obstructing, or impeding any pending proceeding before a department or agency of the United States, or Congress [author’s italics].”

  Since there was no precedent holding that an FBI investigation is a “proceeding,” the president was in the clear.

  Alongside this passage from the letter, the Times published an annotation written by reporter Charlie Savage, guided by “legal experts” who had been briefed on the Mueller team’s strategy—or had crafted it themselves. They argued that Trump’s lawyers were operating according to an “outdated understanding of the law.” The Times reporter cited a different statute, which “criminalizes the corrupt impeding of proceedings even if they have not yet started—like the potential grand jury investigation an F.B.I. case can prompt.”

  The special counsel was rolling out a novel theory. It didn’t matter if there was no proceeding pending; Trump could be charged with obstruction if the intent behind his actions was deemed corrupt.