Resistance (At All Costs)

by Kimberley Strassel

  It would make sense only in retrospect, and that timing is an important part of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Remember, it would take Republicans nearly another year to discover that Clinton and the DNC were behind the dossier. In the first few months after the 2016 election, they weren’t even aware the FBI was probing the Trump campaign. But Democrats knew. People in the Obama administration knew. People in the Clinton orbit knew. And certainly, as a result, Democratic members of Congress knew. Those congressional Democrats had engineered Sessions’s recusal, to help protect the FBI’s secrets. Now they needed to sideline any elected Republicans who might be in a position to find information.

  At the top of their lists were the GOP heads of both the Senate and the House Intelligence Committees. And North Carolina Senator Richard Burr proved an easy mark. As soon as the haters had in early January established the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, they trained their fire on Burr, depicting him as a lackey of the incoming president. A New York Times story in February 2017 quoted Senate Democrats who argued any Burr inquiry would only be about a desire to “protect President Trump.” Missouri’s Claire McCaskill demanded a special committee to “investigate this matter in a thorough, public and responsible way.” The Resistance claimed Burr was incapable of conducting a fair probe and had potentially even been co-opted by the White House to run interference.

  Republicans were always correct in demanding they retain control over these investigations; it was the only appropriate venue to really dig into the scandal. Even early on, it was clear that both the Justice Department and the FBI were too conflicted to do a probe of their own actions. The FBI had engaged in some unusual behavior and was possibly the source of some of the criminal leaks. And the Sessions recusal meant no one from the outside would be taking a fresh look at the department. As Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley would later ask, with regard to the leaks: “So how can the Justice Department guarantee the integrity of the investigations without designating an agency, other than the FBI, to gather the facts and eliminate senior FBI officials as suspects?” Congress was the best thing going for accountability. Burr ultimately kept his investigation, though at the price of a promise to do the bidding of his committee Democrats—a mistake that would enable the left to further capitalize on its Trump-Russia narrative.

  The real target was Nunes, who Democrats understood from the start would not be easily cowed. The Californian had been particularly troubled by the January and February leaks about Flynn; he suspected an inappropriate unmasking. But then he got tips from sources saying that Flynn was only the start; the Obama administration had been unmasking like mad. The sources provided him with information about specific documents that would prove it. Viewing those documents, however, required Nunes to go to a secure reading room on the White House grounds where the documents were stored. Nunes was as transparent as possible about this trip. On March 22, immediately after his examination, he called a press conference to publicly explain what he’d found: The Obama administration had unmasked Trump officials, and the information it collected had been widely dispersed across government, despite having “little or no intelligence value.” Much of it, said Nunes, wasn’t even related to Russia. Nunes then briefed the White House on his discovery.

  But the haters jumped to claim that Nunes’s trip had been orchestrated by Trump’s inner circle, and that he was too partisan to lead a House probe. Democrats slammed him for not telling them about his findings first. They accused him of carrying water for the president, of undermining the committee’s investigation, and of hiding details. The press gave full airing to these false claims, ignoring the fact that the Nunes discovery was unrelated to the “collusion” question that his committee was investigating. Nunes had obtained dozens of documents showing the prior administration had misused collection tools to unmask and surveil an incoming administration. Individuals from that administration had also leaked that information to the press, a serious crime. These were damning details in their own right, and House Intelligence Committee Democrats should have been appalled—given all their prior worries about the government violating civil liberties. Their decision to instead uniformly pile on Nunes shows the degree to which politics was driving their actions from the start.

  Cue the coordinated effort to destroy Nunes. Almost immediately after his press conference, Democrats also began claiming that Nunes had broken the law. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden stated that because Nunes in his press conference had in passing mentioned FISA warrants, he had revealed “classified information.” This was a crazy notion—Nunes didn’t reveal anything about the warrants, and the press had already been rampantly speculating about FISA actions against the Trump campaign. It’s also hardly a crime to say the word “FISA.” But progressive groups allied with House Democrats immediately filed a volley of ethics complaints. The Republicans on the House Committee on Ethics caved in early April and announced the committee would formally initiate an investigation of Nunes for the “unauthorized disclosures of classified information.” Nunes was forced to step aside from the panel’s official probe into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. Democrats, the media, and liberal Resistance groups had engineered false charges against a sitting congressman, smeared him for telling the truth, and removed him from a piece of the investigation—all to keep the truth from coming out. This was unprecedented, even in rough Washington.

  Congressional ethics committees receive politically motivated complaints all the time, though they almost never act on them. That’s because the members of those committees—right and left—have traditionally understood the danger of entertaining partisan petitions. Members have a self-interest in staying above the fray. Using the committee to pursue one party’s members on purely political grounds opens the rival party’s members to similar risks. So it says something that Democrats were willing to throw this understanding aside in their enthusiasm to get Nunes. The California Republican would later find out that four of the five committee Democrats had called for his removal from the Russia probe even before the ethics investigation into him was launched—a huge conflict for those who voted yes. And not only did they push for the probe, they then dragged it out as long as possible. Nunes immediately agreed to provide all the information the committee asked, and Republicans realized early there were no grounds to the Nunes accusation. But Democrats refused to close the examination, demanding more and more. It would take until December for the committee to clear Nunes, admitting there was never anything there. In the process, these Democrats violated all the traditional rules of one of few congressional bodies that—even in our partisan times—had retained a modicum of mutual respect and decorum.

  * * *

  Nunes didn’t give up “all” of his investigation—which would prove crucial. Several of his Republican colleagues—Texas’s Mike Conaway, South Carolina’s Trey Gowdy, and Florida’s Tom Rooney—took over the Russian-interference part. But Nunes, as House Intelligence Chairman, with oversight of the nation’s surveillance laws, remained in control of a vital piece. He continued a narrowly focused probe into whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation had abused the FISA process.

  That meant Nunes was able to ride herd on Fusion and Steele, the producers of the dossier that the FBI had used to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page. Since the dossier’s public release in January, Republicans in the House and Senate had started to learn more concerning facts about that document and its authors. Former officials initially tried to put some distance between themselves and the corrupt dossier. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, in the spring made a point of saying his people had never been able to “corroborate” the dossier’s “sourcing.”

  Yet by early April 2016, the press had reported that the FBI had obtained a warrant on Page, and it was no leap to assume that application might have included information from the dossier. Republicans began to dig in, and Democrats again abused their positions to try to protect the tricksters.

&n
bsp; An example of this scurrilous behavior came in July 2017, when Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley said he wanted to have both Trump Jr. and Manafort come and testify about the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting with that Russian lawyer, Veselnitskaya, in June 2016. Grassley had up to this point worked closely with his Democratic counterpart, Dianne Feinstein; the duo were known in D.C. for their ability to get along. And Democrats wanted nothing more than to put Trump Jr. and Manafort under the klieg lights. They insisted the hearing take place in public, for the world to hear. Grassley was up for it.

  Then, suddenly, they backed off. They no longer wanted public testimony. Why? Because Grassley had demanded that Fusion GPS head Simpson also testify, and clearly some Democrats were terrified that the oppo-researcher would be asked under oath who had paid him to compile his dossier. They were willing to give up everything—including their Manafort Moment—just to protect Simpson.

  Grassley meanwhile also wanted American-born businessman William Browder to testify. The Russian government in 2005 blacklisted Browder from the country, accusing him of engaging in financial corruption. Browder hired a Russian accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, who proved it was the opposite: The Russian government had engaged in rampant corruption and attempted to cover up the crimes. Magnitsky was arrested, beaten, and tortured; he later died in a Russian jail. The United States would ultimately pass the Magnitsky Act, signed by Obama, which punished via sanction those responsible for Magnitsky’s death.

  Veselnitskaya represented a Russian company accused by the U.S. government of money laundering, as part of the corruption uncovered by Magnitsky. Fusion had been hired by a U.S. law firm assisting Veselnitskaya to do a hit job on Browder, to undermine his claims. Grassley wanted Browder to explain the treatment meted out to him by the Fusion crowd—the slurs, the harassment, the ugly press stories. Democrats were so alarmed that their precious Simpson—owner of the dossier—might be called to account that they invoked a parliamentary maneuver just to temporarily keep Browder off the witness stand. Feinstein was so eager to protect Simpson that she was willing to destroy her long-standing relationship with Grassley and refused to sign his letter demanding that Simpson tell the committee who paid for the dossier

  Still, Republicans were getting an inkling of the dirty dossier trick. On July 28, 2017, the WSJ was the first to suggest that Hillary and the DNC were behind the document, based on solid information I’d received from sources. In a column titled “Who Paid for the Trump Dossier,” I wrote: “Here’s a thought: What if it was the Democratic National Committee or Hillary Clinton’s campaign? What if that money flowed from a political entity on the left, to a private law firm, to Fusion, to a British spook, and then to Russian sources?” The left ridiculed that claim for months, but it was, in fact, exactly what happened. For so long, we’d heard the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had been colluding with Russians. It was backward. From the start, it was the Hillary campaign playing footsie with the Russians. Move aside the middlemen of Fusion and Steele and you ended up with this: The Democrats were paying dollars to collect Russian-provided accusations against Trump.

  It would nonetheless take more than two months to establish that truth. As Nunes began to circle, Simpson retained Josh Levy as a lawyer. Levy wasn’t just any attorney—he was a highly political, Democratic advocate. He formerly worked in Congress, as no less than counsel to Chuck Schumer—which says something about Fusion’s ties. Nunes ultimately issued subpoenas for Fusion’s bank records, which the company aggressively fought. Levy in October wrote a seventeen-page letter accusing Nunes of misdeeds and declaring his subpoenas invalid. He also refused to make Simpson available for testimony on the grounds that Fusion had a (hilarious) right to silence under the First Amendment.

  The committee hauled Simpson in anyway, in what became a circus of a private hearing. The Fusion team ultimately invoked the Fifth Amendment on everything—from its relationship to Steele, to the history of its work, to the role of the dossier. (Never mind the Fifth Amendment only protects you from providing self-incriminating evidence.) More revealing was the offensive behavior on the Democratic side. No Democratic members even bothered to come to the hearing. Instead, Democratic staffers took it upon themselves to shield Simpson from tough questions. At one point, staffers for ranking member Adam Schiff interrupted Republican Tom Rooney and accused him of badgering the witness and of acting inappropriately. This is not done; staffers do not interrupt congressmen. And they certainly don’t accuse elected members of Congress of engaging in misbehavior or act as defense attorneys for witnesses. But the staffers did here. Again, it was an unprecedented moment and a crossing of lines. Why fight so hard to keep Simpson’s secrets? Democrats clearly knew that the answers would be ugly.

  Fusion would ultimately file a federal lawsuit to attempt to block the committee’s subpoena of its bank records. But it never had a leg to stand on, and it ultimately folded. The committee’s findings, in late October 2016, proved that Clinton and the DNC had paid for the dossier, via the law firm cutout of Perkins Coie. At least some journalists expressed outrage, claiming they had asked this question and been lied to. NYT reporter Kenneth Vogel tweeted: “When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer [Marc Elias] pushed back vigorously, claiming ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Senior NYT White House correspondent Maggie Haberman added: “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.” We will probably never know just how hard anyone in the mainstream media pressed for this story, if at all. But if Haberman is correct that the lawyers hid it for a year, the question is why that same mainstream media still treats him as a legitimate source. Which it does.

  DNC officials immediately distanced themselves from the news. The former DNC chair, Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was in control at the time of the dossier commissioning, claimed to know nothing about it. So did her successor, Tom Perez. And a Perkins Coie spokesperson told the Washington Post that Elias “drew from funds he was authorized to spend without oversight from campaign officials.” But lawyers told me they’d never heard of a law firm authorizing payments without the approval of the client. And notably the spokesperson did not outright deny that Elias told people in the DNC and Clinton sphere about the work.

  Which meant a lot of people in Washington knew. Fusion delivered its product to its paymasters. It also filtered it through the State Department, the Justice Department, and the FBI. Comey in the spring of 2016 had briefed the Obama administration on his Trump-Russia concerns, and Brennan had briefed Senate minority leader Harry Reid. Just how many top Democrats knew about the dossier, pushed the FBI to act on it, and then worked to cover it up and sideline Republicans who started investigating? That we may never know. But this was the purest case in modern times of political actors co-opting the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies for political purpose, an unspeakable affront to free elections and liberty.

  * * *

  Fusion’s obstruction was one thing; the Department of Justice’s was another. From the moment Republicans understood that the FBI was investigating the Trump orbit, they began demanding information. And from that moment, the FBI and the DOJ resisted.

  Consider the conflict of interest here, and the problem it presents for effective government oversight of U.S. spying agencies. The FBI—and/or U.S. intelligence agencies—engages in behavior that is inappropriate and at odds with the laws Congress has passed. It knows this and does not want Congress to find out. It has, in fact, specifically conjured up a “counterintelligence investigation” to further shroud its probe in secrecy. When Congress demands information about the investigation, it pleads “sources and methods” and “classified information” and the “integrity of investigations” as excuses to stonewall requests. These are the very privileges Congress has granted intelligence agencies, now being used to keep Congress from rooting out bad behavior.

  The Justice Department’s refusal to comply with House
and Senate requests was more disturbing than even that. Congress has what’s known as the “Gang of Eight,” a group of senior leaders of the legislature who are routinely briefed on classified intelligence by the executive branch. They include the leaders of each of the two parties in the Senate and the House, and the chairs and ranking members of those bodies’ intelligence committees. The Gang of Eight has always been made privy to the United States’ most sensitive intelligence operations, including for instance, George W. Bush’s enhanced interrogation program.

  In a WSJ op-ed published in May 2018, a 33-year veteran of the FBI described his own experience working with Congress. Thomas J. Baker served as a special agent and legal attaché. As he wrote: “Former Directors William Webster (1978-87) and Louis Freeh (1993-2001) insisted that the FBI respond promptly to any congressional request. In those days a congressional committee didn’t need a subpoena to get information from the FBI.” He explained: “My colleagues and I shared the general sense that responding to congressional requests was the right thing to do. The bureau’s leaders often reminded us of Congress’s legitimate oversight role. This was particularly true of the so-called Gang of Eight, which was created by statute to ensure the existence of a secure vehicle through which congressional leaders could be briefed on the most sensitive counterintelligence or terrorism investigations.” Baker went on to say that the Bureau’s refusal to supply information in the Russia case was nothing less than “shocking.” He was appalled that Comey had not briefed Congress on the Trump-Russia affair, and that the FBI was refusing other requests. “The Gang of Eight exists for precisely this purpose,” he wrote. “Not using it is inexplicable.” Baker’s piece put in context the FBI’s behavior; its refusal to provide Congress information was a disturbing first, another result of the Resistance.