In the months following Trump’s victory, members of the Obama White House made hundreds of unmasking demands, allowing them to read word-for-word the conversations the incoming presidential team was having with outsiders. Most of these unmaskings requests were boilerplate and did not list specific reasons for why the officials needed the information. The team received dozens of other summaries that technically “masked” Trump team members but also made obvious who they were. Many of the reports contained political information about the transition team’s meetings and policy plans—nothing to do with Russia. All this was a clear abuse of the unmasking rules.
At least one of the unmaskings came at the hands of former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice. This was odd, as Ms. Rice’s job was policy advice—she was not engaged in counterintelligence investigations. She later insisted she has not done the unmasking for “any political purposes.” Both former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and DNI Clapper also admitted to personally reviewing classified documents in which Trump, his associates, or members of Congress had been unmasked, and both admitted to sharing the details with other members of the Obama government. Yet the bulk of the unmaskings came via an official with absolutely zero cause to make them: former United Nations ambassador Samantha Power. Power was a diplomat with no intelligence-related function in government; nothing about her job required unmasking, as she herself seemed to later acknowledge. Power on paper made as many as 260 unmasking requests, but she told Congress that she wasn’t technically responsible for many of them; someone had done them in her name. We still don’t know who.
We also don’t know how much of this was part of a corrupt practice known as “reverse surveillance.” It’s (supposed to be) hard to get the FISA court to give permission to surveil a U.S. citizen. But political actors long ago figured a workaround. They first take educated guesses about who their target U.S. citizen might be talking to outside the country. They then create a pretext to listen in on that foreigner. Voilà, they have the conversations of the U.S. citizen. The sheer number of Obama unmaskings suggests that at least some of these tapped conversations were reverse engineered. In short, both the FBI and the Obama team were desperately monitoring the Trump transition for anything that might belatedly derail a Trump presidency.
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At the same time, the FBI and the Obama White House rushed to get out ahead of the storyline. They needed to further flame the “Trump-Russia” collusion theory and release damning accusations, the better to justify their election-year actions. This campaign culminated in a one-two punch on the day of January 6, 2017.
Brennan had pushed the intelligence community to embrace his Putin-aiding-Trump-specifically theme, but hadn’t got traction during the election season. Now the administration went all in. By December, according to the Washington Post, Obama had ordered “a comprehensive review by U.S. intelligence agencies into Russian interference in U.S. elections.” The principals scrambled to use this as the vehicle to launch Brennan’s views publicly, as an official intelligence product, released on January 6. The Post story noted that this new report “was based largely on the work done by the task force Brennan had established and made public what the CIA had concluded in August, that ‘Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.’”
But it was the administration’s other big move on January 6 that truly launched the Trump-Russia narrative into the stratosphere. The day before, January 5, Comey and Acting Attorney General Sally Yates met with Obama, Biden, and Rice. The discussion was about how much to tell the president-elect about its Russia investigation. The correct answer, of course, should have been “everything.” The FBI has to this day insisted its investigation was only into specific individuals in the campaign—not into the campaign itself or Trump. As the incoming president, Trump had a vital stake in, and right to know, any of the FBI’s concerns about his team—in particular any issues with incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
The audacious decision was made to instead mislead Trump—the man the public had just elected president, the man who would in mere weeks be Comey’s boss. On that January 6, Comey, Brennan, Clapper, and National Security Agency head Mike Rogers provided President-Elect Trump a “briefing.” The intelligence chiefs told Trump only about their concerns about Russian interference—not that the FBI was specifically looking into whether the campaign had “colluded.” Comey then also gave Trump a deliberately deceptive description of the dossier. He told the president-elect only about the dossier’s allegations that Trump cavorted with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, on the supposed grounds that Trump needed to “know” such a salacious allegation existed. He did not tell the president-elect about the dossier’s claims that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia, nor did he tell the president that this packet of opposition research was a central plank of an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign. Comey’s decision to provide such an incomplete briefing to an incoming president—to deliberately withhold crucial information from Trump and his team—was scandalous. FBI directors are not chosen by the public; they remain subordinate to elected officials. Comey’s move to hide his Bureau’s work from the incoming commander in chief is an abuse of power potentially unrivaled in recent political times.
All the more so given that the briefing seemed primarily a means for Comey to get the dossier out to the public. Comey was well aware the media was in possession of the dossier. But even the low-standard Beltway press corps had been reluctant to publish its crazed allegations. It needed an excuse. As liberal commentator Matt Taibbi noted in his book Hate Inc., Mr. Comey’s dossier briefing was the classic Washington “trick.” It served as the “pretext” to get the details out, a “news hook” to allow the press to publish the dossier. Indeed, within hours of Comey’s “private” briefing, the press was buzzing with reports that the FBI director had informed the president of sensitive allegations made against him. And not long after, BuzzFeed had decided the public deserved to know what those allegations were.
Between its intelligence assessment and the publication of the dossier, the Obama team had effectively set the narrative: Putin had wanted Trump to win, and the Trump campaign may have accepted Putin’s help. The Russia-collusion narrative was off to the races. But Comey had taken one last incredibly important action—deliberate, and again, unconscionable—that helped guarantee it would continue. Congressional Republicans had also demanded Comey provide them a briefing on the dossier. According to Devin Nunes, Comey at that briefing repeated his claim that Republicans had paid for the dossier. “If they had informed us Hillary Clinton and the Democrats paid for that dossier, I can guarantee you that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would have laughed and walked out of that meeting,” Nunes told me. He’s right. They’d have walked, they’d have blown the whistle, and the entire Trump-Russia charade would have ended before it began. Instead, Comey and his FBI kept quiet about the dossier’s origins—and laid their next traps.
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The first to get snared was retired U.S. Army Lt. General Michael Flynn. Flynn had served his country honorably for more than thirty years as a paratrooper and in military intelligence. Obama in April 2012 nominated him as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, where his sweeping plans to change the way that body worked instantly earned him enemies throughout the Obama administration and defense structure. Flynn was ultimately forced out of the DIA in 2014, notably in part because of the meddling of one Stefan Halper—the same FBI-CIA asset who helped inform on the Trump campaign. Halper had organized one of their intelligence seminars in Cambridge in 2014, and Flynn was invited to speak. A colleague of Halper’s reported back to the U.S. government that Halper had thought Flynn was too cozy with a Russian woman who was also in attendance.
Flynn, a registered Democrat, remained a respected military figure in Republican circles and was consulted by GOP presidential candidates ranging from
Scott Walker to Ted Cruz. He ultimately joined the Trump campaign as an adviser in February 2016. Obama partisans were furious when he gave a cutting speech at the August Republican convention, accusing his former bosses of craven foreign policy. He also slammed Clinton, noting that if he (a former intelligence official) had done “a tenth” of what she’d done mishandling classified information, he’d “be in jail.” Flynn clearly incensed Team Obama, to the extent that Obama personally trashed Flynn to President-Elect Trump when the two met a few days after the election. Obama, according to Politico, warned Trump not to hire Flynn, accusing him of being “problematic” and having “crazy ideas.” Yet Obama certainly never suggested Flynn was a Russian asset, and the Obama administration had never taken any steps to revoke Flynn’s high-level security clearance.
We don’t know how early Flynn became a Comey suspect, but senior government leaders were clearly listening in on his conversations not long after Trump’s November 2016 appointment of him as national security advisor. It’s also unclear if the FBI directly tapped him with a FISA warrant, or if he was being picked up as part of intelligence monitoring of foreign nationals that he was speaking to—or both. But the administration became aware of a December 29, 2016, conversation Flynn had with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. It happened on the same day that the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. The incoming Trump administration was concerned the sanctions would harm their incoming relationship with Russia, and Flynn in the call requested that the Russians not escalate. By January 2, the Obama White House knew of this conversation, and by January 12, “a senior U.S. government official” had leaked the fact of the Flynn call to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. Ignatius also used his column to lay the groundwork for the ludicrous claim that Flynn had broken…the Logan Act of 1799.
The Logan Act is an ancient law that criminalizes negotiation by unauthorized persons with foreign governments that are in dispute with the United States. Only two defendants have ever been charged under the Logan Act—the more recent one in 1852—and neither was convicted. It is absolutely normal for members of a presidential transition team to talk to their foreign counterparts, and on all manner of subjects.
Yet the Obama administration seized on the Logan Act as a pretext to escalate its investigation of the Trump team and to further fan the Russia-collusion flames. Indeed, it was on Logan Act grounds that Comey’s FBI set about entrapping Flynn. On January 24, mere days after he was sworn in, Flynn got a call from Deputy FBI Director Andy McCabe, ostensibly to talk about an FBI training session. But then McCabe slipped in that he felt the FBI needed to have a few agents talk to Flynn about his Russia communications.
It says something appalling about Comey’s FBI and its tactics that the only purpose of this meeting was to put Flynn in legal jeopardy. The FBI did not need to ask Flynn about the nature of his Russian communications. It already had all the transcripts. It knew exactly what he had said. Moreover, McCabe urged Flynn to meet without a lawyer. “I explained that I thought the quickest way to get this done was to have a conversation between [Flynn] and the agents only. I further stated that if LTG Flynn wished to include anyone else in the meeting, like the White House Counsel for instance, that I would need to involve the Department of Justice. [Flynn] stated that this would not be necessary and agreed to meet with the agents without any additional participants.” This setup was Comey’s idea. Comey would brag to MSNBC in 2018 that it was “something I probably wouldn’t have done or wouldn’t have gotten away with in a more organized administration.” He said: “In the George W. Bush Administration or the Obama Administration, if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House counsel, there would be discussions and approval about who would be there. And I thought, it’s early enough, let’s just send a couple guys over.”
McCabe meanwhile recounted that he and FBI officials also decided that they would deliberately “not warn Flynn that it was a crime to lie during an FBI interview because they wanted Flynn to be relaxed.” And rather than flag the transcript for Flynn and ask him for an explanation, the agents (one of whom was Peter Strzok) decided before the meeting that if Flynn did not confirm what he had said in the conversation, “they would not confront him or talk him through it.”
Flynn for his part had no reason to be alarmed; the FBI’s Russia probe was still secret, and Flynn had done absolutely nothing wrong in speaking to the Russian ambassador. Indeed the agents reported back that he’d been helpful. They’d shown up within hours of McCabe’s call and found Flynn had been “relaxed and jocular” and “clearly saw the FBI agents as allies.” When asked whether he’d asked the Russians not to escalate the situation, Flynn responded: “Not really. I don’t remember. It wasn’t ‘Don’t do anything.’”
This is hardly a definitive “no.” And there’s good reason to believe Flynn didn’t remember. As a former intelligence official, Flynn would have known the U.S. government was listening to Kislyak and likely heard his conversation—he’d have no reason to lie. In the months leading up to the inauguration, he’d also had hundreds of calls with foreign leaders on hundreds of subjects. In the wake of the Ignatius column, Flynn had similarly told Trump officials he hadn’t discussed sanctions. Most important, the FBI agents themselves did not think Flynn was lying. The FBI summary reported that “both had the impression at the time that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying.”
But none of this was good enough for then–acting AG Sally Yates, who soon after the FBI interview demanded an emergency meeting with White House Counsel Don McGahn. Yates laid out her wild Logan Act theory. She also claimed that Flynn had lied to the vice president and the FBI, and that the Russians knew it, which meant Flynn had been “compromised” and was vulnerable to blackmail.
Several weeks on, Obama partisans remained frustrated that they hadn’t taken out their man—so they went to the press. In a coordinated attack, both the Washington Post and the New York Times on February 9 reported exact pieces of Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak in December. The Washington Post spewed the Logan Act line, claiming the conversation was “inappropriate and potentially illegal.” Nunes, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, would later call the leak the most destructive to national security he’d seen in his time in Washington—given its exposure of technical methods. The leaking of classified information—which the Kislyak-Flynn conversation most certainly counts as—is a felony punishable with up to ten years in federal prison. The Post’s version of the story bragged that it had been sourced by no less than nine separate officials. And it worked. Within a week, the White House had fired Flynn for lying to the vice president.
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The Flynn leak story is important because it highlights yet another way the Resistance wreaked lasting damage on the country—in particular on institutions of national security and our relationships with crucial foreign allies. As former NSA head Mike Rogers once explained, leaks “reveal the sources and methods we employ to provide intelligence to American policymakers and warfighters and generate advantage for our nation while protecting its citizens.” Intelligence professionals get particularly alarmed by the mishandling of information about U.S. citizens, because it rightly undermines trust in the government and puts at risk the surveillance tools the professionals need to keep track of legitimate bad guys. Foreign partners also grow reluctant to share information with any country that can’t be counted on to keep secrets. All this is why no less than Jim Comey once testified that “leaks of classified information are serious, serious federal crimes for a reason.”
Yet the Trump haters were so intent on bringing down the early Trump administration that they put into place an official new structure that guaranteed the ensuing volley of leaks. As the New York Times reported in March 2017, Obama “White House officials scrambled” in their last days to “spread information
” about “possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians—across the government,” so as to “leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.” At intelligence agencies, the story reported, “there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government—and, in some cases, among European allies.”
Only days before Trump’s inauguration, Obama also signed an executive order that allowed the National Security Agency to share raw intercepts and data with the sixteen other agencies in the intelligence community. The new order vastly increased the number of intelligence analysts who had access to this raw NSA surveillance. NSA analysts once filtered out irrelevant information and minimized the names of American citizens. Under the Obama rules, it was out there for the taking.
The leaks that accompanied the first part of the Trump administration were so numerous and damaging that Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson felt compelled to study it. His team examined media leaks between January 20, 2017, and May 25, 2017—Trump’s first 126 days in office. The report found the Trump administration had “faced 125 leaked stories—one leak a day—containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama.” The leaking was seven times faster than that in Obama’s first 126 days. Nearly 80 percent of the leaks focused on the Russia probe, and many revealed “closely-held information such as intelligence community intercepts, FBI interviews and intelligence, grand jury subpoenas, and even the workings of a secret surveillance court.”
Resistance (At All Costs) Page 8