The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  Of the eight criminal referrals Nunes sent to the attorney general, five were what he called “straight-up referrals.” They named specific people and their specific crimes: lying to Congress, misleading Congress, and leaking classified information. The other three, Nunes said publicly, are more complicated, related to conspiracy charges. One regards a conspiracy to lie to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which may touch numerous individuals. The second involves manipulation of intelligence, which may also name several US officials. The third and most innovative of the charges references what HPSCI lawyers call a “global leak” referral.

  As Nunes said publicly, over the last two-and-a-half-plus years, there have been a dozen or more highly sensitive leaks of classified information—including Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak and Trump’s talks with the leaders of Mexico and Australia. The leaks of classified information went to a select group of reporters.

  Nunes believes he and his team have good leads on some of the current and former senior officials who were involved in an intelligence operation to topple Trump by using leaks to the press. The names of those referred are not public and may never be made public. But it’s not difficult to see who may be involved.

  Glenn Simpson, Objective Medusa investigators believed, lied to Congress.

  Christopher Steele was already the subject of a criminal referral issued by Senator Chuck Grassley in January 2018 for lying to the FBI.

  Nellie Ohr, according to Objective Medusa investigators, misled Congress repeatedly.

  Bruce Ohr, says Nunes’ team, also appears to have misled Congress.

  The Crossfire Hurricane team—especially Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page—imagined itself as the next Deep Throat, leaking to the press in order to depose a president.

  James Clapper, according to HPSCI’s Russia Report, gave inconsistent testimony to Congress.

  John Brennan directed the handpicked team of analysts whose flawed tradecraft produced the January 2017 intelligence community assessment.

  In order to get a special counsel named, James Comey leaked classified information to the New York Times.

  Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, who spied on Trump associates, appears to have misled US officials.

  With the referrals, Objective Medusa was done. In exposing the truth, Nunes and his team had given the American public a true accounting of the operation to take down the president. It would be someone else’s job to make sure those behind the plot were held accountable. Nunes handed the attorney general a loaded gun.

  If there is no reckoning, the rift splitting the country will continue to grow. The divide is not between two political parties and their chosen candidates; rather, it is the question that Nunes and the Objective Medusa team’s investigation pushed into the light: Will we be governed under one law or according to a set of privileges enjoyed by an elite confederation of the national security bureaucracy, political operatives, tech oligarchs, and their courtiers in the media industry?

  “I’d rather be us than them,” says Nunes.

  Chapter 24

  CONVICTIONS

  NUNES HAS A NICKNAME for nearly everyone: Baby Cat, Deep State Bill, Deep State Lisa, and Andy Land—that’s how he’s going to refer to and acknowledge the four Objective Medusa team members who couldn’t be named as sources in the investigation of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe.

  Nunes thanks them and nearly everyone else he can think of. The two retired senior army intelligence officers who are among his closest advisers, HPSCI Republicans and their staff, task force members and their staff, the entire House Republican Conference, and everyone else who supported their efforts.

  He has particularly warm words for his late staff director, Damon Nelson, who died in November. “I have lost one of my oldest friends,” he said at the time. “He dedicated nearly his entire adult life to public service.”

  “Losing Damon was a real blow to us,” says Langer. “On the staff level, he was our leader; he kept the whole thing together. Without him, we wouldn’t have accomplished what we did. He was thrown into a tornado, but he handled it all with grace and class.”

  Nunes pours a glass of wine, raises it, and makes sure everyone else’s glass is filled, too. Another bottle comes to the table. The Nunes party is seated in the back of the second-floor dining room of the Capitol Hill Club, a Republican social club a few blocks from the congressman’s Longworth office.

  “This is where Gingrich kicked off the Republican revolution in ’94,” says Nunes. And it’s where the Objective Medusa team walks offstage after nearly two years of fighting unelected bureaucrats who tried to overturn the results of an election and hid their plot behind classified intelligence and a secret court.

  “Maybe we’ll have a reunion in five years,” says Patel.

  “I doubt I’ll ever do anything as significant,” says Jim. “What we uncovered is worth thousands of conservative articles about the dangers of the administrative state. We showed what they actually do.” He adds, “I didn’t know we’d be the tip of the spear in the battle for the republic.”

  “I thought it was going to be a pretty high profile investigation, at least in government circles,” says Patel. “What I didn’t know—”

  “—is that it was going to be the main news story,” says Langer.

  “Right,” says Patel. “I didn’t know that we would be at the center of the media cycle over the next twenty-four months.”

  Langer thinks it will be hard for the press to recover. “The last few years showed that America’s biggest media outlets can’t be trusted,” he says. “They discarded ages-old journalistic conventions designed to keep reporting accurate, while they hyped leaks of badly spun or outright false information—all just to damage the Trump presidency.”

  Nunes had come to see the press’s actions as a cue to keep pushing forward. “The easiest way to cover all this up would have been for them to ignore our work,” he says. “But the more they hit me, the more I knew we were over the target.”

  Before Patel joined the committee, he wasn’t sure he wanted to work on Capitol Hill. “I didn’t even really know what HPSCI was,” says the former prosecutor. Two years later, he’s proud that the investigation fulfilled the committee’s constitutional mandate to provide oversight on behalf of the American public. “I think the investigation was righteous,” he says. “I think we crushed it.”

  But it’s still unfinished. “There’s no actual accountability yet,” he says. “When we have that, then I’ll be satisfied.”

  Nunes agrees that holding the conspirators responsible for what they did is essential. He has faith in the new attorney general, but there’s a lot that has to be done to set things right. “It’s going to be a long time before the FBI has the confidence of at least half of America—conservatives, including members of Congress,” he says. “The fact that Comey was investigating a presidential campaign. They do it behind Congress’ back by not briefing us. And then when we started looking at it, they come after people personally to threaten them. In my case, they spent over ten million dollars to try to cover this up.”

  Taking fire for two years has affected the congressman. He acknowledges that he has become harder—not cynical, exactly, but better prepared to see things he missed before, darker things. It’s still hard for him to believe that Americans did this to other Americans.

  Patel is less surprised. He already knew there were some FBI agents who lied and that a select few filling the senior levels at DOJ hold themselves above the law they’re sworn to uphold. He was prepared not only to see it but to explain it as well. “When they interview you for a job as a public defender,” he says, “one of the first things they ask is, ‘Are you prepared to call federal law enforcement officials liars in court?’ I said, ‘Yes. If that’s what the evidence shows, I’m ready to call them liars.’”

  Someone talks about reforming the FISA court, and Nunes agrees that that’s the very least DOJ has to do. “They’re g
oing to have to admit that the FISA process was abused,” he says. “And there are going to have to be new laws. The easiest call is that there has to be a representative at the secret court for any American they’re thinking of getting a FISA warrant on. If not, they’ll do this again.”

  But it’s unlikely that Republican loyalists will be in a position to punish the next Democratic White House in retaliation for what Obama officials and Clinton operatives did to Trump and his team.

  “These bureaucracies are basically all run by Democrats,” says Nunes.

  “They’re institutionalists,” says Jim.

  And the institutions they serve and protect are appendages of a larger organism. Trump calls it the Swamp, but it’s more like a living thing. Evidence is that it rose to defend itself when Michael Flynn threatened to starve it. The Crossfire Hurricane group was part of a whole, the particular instrument used against Trump.

  “They had the whole system wired,” says Nunes of the small FBI group at the center of the coup. “That’s why they wanted this to be a counterintelligence investigation—because there’s no checks and balances to it. They all knew what they had to do to get this rolling.”

  “Deep State” is another way to describe what classical philosophers meant by the word “regime.” It refers not only to a form of government but also to the values and virtues that form of government prizes and the leading persons who embody them. Thus, many of the leading persons of the United States’ political bureaucracy had starring roles in the coup.

  There was CIA director John Brennan, a Beltway careerist who used his agency’s authority to credential a conspiracy theory.

  And James Comey, the former prosecutor who kicked off the series of obstruction traps set to bring down the president.

  His predecessor at the FBI, Robert Mueller, managed the coup until he was stopped.

  But no one represented this establishment, its arrogance and corruption, more perfectly than Hillary Clinton. That’s why her loss made the regime even fiercer. If she didn’t get what she believed she was entitled to, all of their privileges and prerogatives were vulnerable.

  Clinton was the operation’s center of gravity. Not only was it first conducted on her behalf, but her fears gave it form: fear that she wouldn’t get into the White House, fear that the dirt on her would go public.

  Had Clinton won, the operation would have been buried and no one would ever have known what had happened. But there were additional factors that had to fall into place for the plot against Trump to be uncovered. The Objective Medusa team had to be there.

  Nunes, a California farm kid who didn’t know better than to speak his mind and tell the truth, had to be head of the House Intelligence Committee. And there had to be that staff—Nelson and Langer and Jim and the rest—and Nunes had to know how to keep them inspired to manage the kind of crisis that no one had ever seen before. And that team needed Patel, a fast-talking outer-borough New Yorker who knew where to find things and liked kicking in doors.

  Take away any of those factors, and the United States would have been one step closer to becoming a third-world, one-party security state.

  “There was no one coming in behind us,” says Patel.

  And next time there may not be anyone taking the lead. The struggle for America will outlast what eight people accomplished in helping to put down a coup. Even now, some of their victory is still buried under the same classifications used to obscure the abuses and crimes committed during the plot against Trump.

  Yet the Objective Medusa team finished the job it had set out to do. “We just can’t show it yet,” Patel says. “But we cut off the head.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANKS TO the publications and staff where some of this material first appeared in different form:

  Alana Newhouse, David Samuels, Liel Leibovitz, Matthew Fishbane, and Jacob Siegel at Tablet; David DesRosiers, Tom Kuntz, Peder Zane, and Liz Sheld at Real Clear Investigations; Sean Davis, Ben Domenech, and Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist; James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal; Chris Buskirk, Julie Kelly, and Ben Boychuk at American Greatness. Thanks to Chris Blackburn, Chris Farrell, Svetlana Lokhova, and Mark Wauck for their generous insight. Thanks to my agent Keith Urbahn and his colleagues at Javelin. Thanks to my editor Kate Hartson and her staff at Center Street, especially Sean McGowan. Thanks to Allen Roth and Steven Schneier for their great support and encouragement. Thanks to Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Congressmen Mike Conaway, Chris Stewart, Mike Turner, Brad Wenstrup, former congressman Tom Rooney, and their staff who shared their time and insights with me. Thanks to Congressman Mark Meadows and his staff, especially Mary Doocy and Ben Williamson. Thanks to Patrick Davis and Jason Foster. Thanks to friends and colleagues, especially Tony Badran and Mike Doran. Thanks to Mrs. Elizabeth Nunes, and Evelyn, Julia, and Margaret for their patience and generosity. Thanks to Congressman Nunes’ staff. Thanks to Jack Langer and Kash Patel, and the entire Objective Medusa team. Thanks most of all to Devin Nunes. Thanks for fighting.

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  NOTES

  Following are sources not identified in the text.

  1: Welcome: “Devin Nunes Opening Statement for Mueller Hearing,” July 24, 2019.

  2: Mueller brushed: Transcript of Robert S. Mueller III’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, July 24, 2019.

  3: After spending: Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, p. 13.

  4: prepared statement: “Representative Nunes on Russian Election Interference.” March 22, 2017. C-Span.

  5: Their business concerns: “Emails show 2016 links among Steele, Ohr, Simpson—with Russian oligarch in background,” Byron York, Washington Examiner, August 08, 2018. York’s carefully reported and well-sourced columns made him one of the most important of the handful of journalists covering the anti-Trump operation.

  6: Ohr’s wife: US House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Joint with the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Interview of Nellie Ohr, October 19, 2018, p. 8

  7: Halper… campaign war-room: “Reagan aides describe operation to gather inside data on Carter,” by Leslie H. Gelb, New York Times, July 7, 1983. “John McCain and the October Surprise,” by Steve Kornacki, New York Observer, October 9, 2008.

  8: Halper… drew income: “Trump-supporting Pentagon analyst stripped of security clearance after Stefan Halper complaints,” by Rowan Scarborough, Washington Times. August 15, 2018. “FBI spy Stefan Halper’s $240,000 Pentagon study disavowed by high-profile experts,” by Rowan Scarborough, Washington Times. October 1, 2018. Letter from Office of Inspector General, Department of Defense to Sen. Charles Grassley regarding “DoD ONA contracts with Professor Stefan Halper,” July 2, 2019. Scarborough’s articles, particularly on Halper’s interactions with Office of Net Assessment, were among the most significant reports highlighting central issues in the anti-Trump operation.

  9: February 26, 2016 Reuters: A January 2, 2019 John Solomon article in The Hill—“Exculpatory Russia evidence about Mike Flynn that US intel kept secret”—showed conclusively that Flynn had notified his former agency before his trip, receiving a defensive briefing beforehand and providing one to former colleagues on his return. However, information about Flynn’s trip was in the public record before his exit from the White House—“Trump Embraces Ex-Top Obama Intel Official,” by Shane Harris, Daily Beast, March 9, 2016; “Top Trump adviser defends payment for Russian speaking engagement,” Michael Isikoff, Yahoo! News, July 18, 2016; “Trump adviser Michael T. Flynn on his dinner with Putin and why Russia Today is just like CNN,” Dana Priest, Washington Post, August 15, 2016. Nonetheless, the press routinely ignored Flynn’s published remarks in order to prosecute a campaign against the retired general.

  10: He wrote an op-ed:
“The bear out there,” by Devin Nunes, Washington Times, August 29, 2014.

  11: July 2009 trip to Moscow: “Text: Obama’s Speech at the New Economic School,” New York Times, July 7, 2009.

  12: we could be doing economically to Russia: “80 times Trump talked about Putin,” by Andrew Kaczynski, Chris Massie, and Nathan McDermott, CNN, March 2017.

  13: Fred Ryan: Audio recording of Donald Trump’s meeting with Washington Post editorial board, March 21, 2016.

  14: Papadopoulos hit the press: “Say sorry to Trump or risk special relationship, Cameron told,” by Francis Elliott, Times of London, May 4, 2016.

  15: Robert Baer: “Unpacking the Other Clinton-Linked Russia Dossier,” by Lee Smith, Real Clear Investigations, April 26, 2018.

  16: Simpson was already familiar: “How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington,” by Glenn Simpson and Mary Jacoby, Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2007. “McCain Consultant Is Tied To Work for Ukraine Party,” by Mary Jacoby and Glenn Simpson, Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2008

  17: The biggest intelligence failure: “Intel chair: Russian moves biggest intel failure since 9/11,” CNN, April 11, 2016.

  18: Hillary for America: According to the Clinton campaign’s law firm, Fusion GPS approached the campaign in early March 2016 and was hired in April. Letter from Matthew Gehringer, General Counsel, Perkins Coie LLP, to William W. Taylor, Zuckerman Spaeder LLP, October 24, 2017.

  19: Founded in 2010: US Senate, Judiciary Committee, Interview of Glenn Simpson, August 22, 2017, p. 25.

  20: smear Romney: “The President’s Hit List,” Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2012.

  21: several separate dossiers: A spreadsheet, “WhosWho19Sept2016.xlsx,” produced by Nellie Ohr cites numerous reports (from November 2015 to September 2016), suggesting that Fusion GPS compiled voluminous Trump-Russia and updated it frequently. Many of the dozens names on the spreadsheet appear in the May 20 and three other protodossiers. “Bruce Ohr Gave His Wife’s Fusion GPS Research To The FBI. Here Are The Documents,” by Chuck Ross, Daily Caller, August 14, 2019.