Dirty Rubles

by Greg Olear

  In short, by 2016, Donald Trump’s real estate concerns, which had already gone belly-up six times, were being underwritten by the Russian mob…when Trump was running for president. What are the chances that a recidivist failure like The Donald would not screw up a seventh time, and be even more in hock to Mogilevich & Co.?

  The Brainy Don was holding it over the Not-So-Brainy Don.

  Trump’s mob ties were not exactly a state secret when he began his run for president, especially in New York. Plenty of journalists had reported on it, most notably Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice. Trump’s Russian ties were also painfully obvious to any enterprising reporter who chose to look.

  Why did the media not take Trump’s connections to the criminal underworld seriously?

  * * *

  1 This is why a meeting about “adoptions” was really about sanctions.

  2 Technically, Vory v Zakone has a more specific meaning, but I’m using it here as a synonym for the Russian mob entire.

  3 For more on the Putin/Russian OC relationship, read Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia, which discusses Putin’s involvement with the diversion of municipal funds, illegal arms shipments, the food shortage scandal of 1991, gambling, and money laundering for the Cali drug cartel.

  4 Among other things, Snowden’s “Great Escape” establishes, early on, collusion between Julian Assange of Wikileaks and Vladimir Putin of Russia.

  5 This idea was suggested to be by Alison Greene in her Twitter thread on the Baku fire.

  VII.

  TRICK OR TREAT:

  The Fourth Estate Craps the Bed

  ON 31 OCTOBER 2016, the New York Times published a news story that would prove to be the most consequential in recent memory. “Investigating Donald Trump,” the headline proclaimed, “FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” This was the paper of record announcing, in no uncertain terms, that the Trump/Russia story was bunk.

  The authors, Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers, began by explaining what the FBI had been up to:

  For much of the summer, the F.B.I pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead—which they ultimately came to doubt—about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.

  The next paragraph slammed the door closed on all of this:

  Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into the Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.

  The third conflated Trump/Russia with the Hillary Clinton email brouhaha:

  The F.B.I.’s inquiries into Russia’s possible role continue, as does the investigation into the emails involving Mrs. Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, on a computer she shared with her estranged husband, Anthony D. Weiner.

  While the piece itself was more balanced than the headline suggested, most readers walked away from the story—just nine days before the election!—convinced of three things:

  The FBI was a monolithic organization;

  The entire FBI had concluded that Trump/Russia was all smoke and no fire;

  Clinton’s alleged use of a private email server for classified communications was an equivalent, or perhaps worse, offense than Trump’s alleged collusion with an enemy power to swing the election.

  In actuality, none of those three takeaways was accurate.

  It was the “Trumplandia” New York field office of the FBI, and not the Bureau’s elite counterintelligence division, that found no link. On the contrary, almost everything the larger FBI was investigating turned out to have legs. Using a private server to disseminate classified emails, as Clinton did, while unwise, was more or less routine for past Secretaries of State—and even if illegal, is a jaywalking ticket next to the multiple homicide of Kremlin coordination. As Glenn Simpson, the founder of GPS Fusion, derisively remarked in his Congressional testimony about the 31 October article, “it was a real Halloween special.”

  The Times piece had immeasurable influence in the months that followed. Most members of the mainstream media consigned Trump/Russia to the “conspiracy theory” oubliette, along with Sandy Hook Trutherism, vapor trails, and fake moon-landing pronouncements. With few exceptions, the story was only followed by a handful of intrepid journalists working at smaller publications: David Corn of Mother Jones, Franklin Foer at Slate, Natasha Bertrand at Business Insider, John Schindler at the Observer. Other media outlets took an extremely conservative position on their coverage of Trump/Russia, giving Trump—whose ties to the mob, as previously noted, were well known—an undeserved benefit of the doubt.

  Even at the time, the media’s aversion to the story seemed odd. That Russia was attempting to tamper with the election was not exactly controversial. The 17 agencies comprising the US Intelligence Community agreed that this was the case. Hillary Clinton alluded to it in one of the debates. Trump himself went on national TV and asked the Russians for help finding Clinton’s “missing” emails; later, his camp would claim this was a joke…but was it? In the last days of 2016, why was the New York Times, which had failed so spectacularly on Halloween, not atoning for its grievous mistake by investigating what it missed in October?

  Jeet Heer of The New Republic explained the Fourth Estate’s collective reticence in this tweet of 14 February 2017: “Part of the reason I (and others, I think) resisted the Russia theory is that it seemed too stupid to be real. But sometimes life is stupid.”

  That may be, but there were other considerations. The bottom line, for example. Revenue for media had been in decline before Trump. Eight years of No Drama Obama was bad for business. Donald Trump, the brash, kids-say-the-darnedest-things buffoon, was ratings gold, he was clickbait incarnate. Why not broadcast his rallies live on CNN? It’s not like he had any chance of actually winning. Better make hay while the Trump shines. The subscription rate at New York Times rose tenfold in 2016. CBS CEO Les Moonves famously remarked that round-the-clock coverage of Trump “may not be good for America, but it’s damned good for CBS.”

  Because of the dereliction of journalistic duty by the mainstream media, anyone who wanted the truth about Trump/Russia had to actively seek it out. Twitter quickly emerged as the best and most up-to-the-minute source of information…but one had to know where to look. A few select accounts were must-follows: investigative reporters like Corn, Foer, Bertrand, and Schindler; former Clinton White House volunteer Claude Taylor; futurist Eric Garland, whose brilliant “Game Theory” thread of 11 December 2016 launched him into prominence; Seth Abramson, an adjunct professor and former defense attorney who was a veritable Javert in his pursuit of Trump/Russia; various anonymous but seemingly well-sourced accounts with names like Counterchekist and Tea Pain and Lincoln’s Bible and Alias Vaughn; and, especially, the provocative romance novelist-turned-British Member of Parliament-turned investigative journalist Louise Mensch.

  On Election Day, Mensch, writing for a tiny and now-defunct online news site called Heat Street, dropped an exclusive report claiming that the FBI had been granted a FISA warrant in October 2016 to investigate the Trump campaign “in connection with the investigation of suspected activity between the [Trump Tower] server and two banks, SVB Bank and Alfa Bank,” and, further, that this warrant covered “any ‘U.S. person’” connected to the investigation, including Donald Trump and three other individuals. FISA stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.1 If a FISA warrant had been obtained, this meant that the Bureau had enough evidence of possible espionage or other serious criminal activity to convince a federal judge to sign the warrant. It meant, at a minimum, that the FBI was investigating Trump/Russia.


  The media’s concern about Mensch’s “exclusive”…was that it was exclusive, and for months. While Foer and others had written about the two servers being in contact, not a single other news outlet had been able to confirm her FISA scoop. This meant one of two things: either she had sources so well-placed that no one else could rival them…or she’d been fed false information and the report was bullshit.

  In the winter of 2017, alas, all signs pointed to the latter.

  Mensch had an unfortunate reputation as a “conspiracy queen,” her story directly contradicted the Halloween New York Times article, and, most ominously, none of the major media players had managed to confirm her FISA scoop. Indeed, when Mensch wrote an op-ed in advance of the 20 March 2017 Comey hearing for the same New York Times on 17 March, her credibility was attacked on Twitter by Susan Hennessey, editor of Lawfare and a Brookings Fellow, who concluded: “Either a previously unknown person has reliable sources no one else knows. Or someone heard rumors and published what other’s wouldn’t.” Hennessey echoed the thinking of mainstream editors everywhere when she tweeted: “If [a] major claim is made, it needs secondary confirmation within a few days. And if the best in the biz have been working their sources for months with nothing and unable to confirm, [the story is] presumptively unreliable.” The press had been unable to determine whether the rumored FBI investigation of Trump/Russia was even actually a thing. When asked about it, FBI Director James Comey always gave the so-called “Glomar” response: “I can neither confirm nor deny.”2

  Unable to say for sure if the Trump/Russia investigation existed, let alone confirm Louise Mensch’s FISA scoop, good journalists steered clear of the story. Bad journalists, however, took delight in “debunking” it. Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, who’d built his career railing against the totalitarian state, nevertheless adopted Kremlin talking points in his lazy condemnations of Trump/Russia, muddying the waters for those of us on the left. On 17 March 2017, three days before the Comey hearing, Greenwald denounced the whole Trump/Russia affair: “Many Democrats have reached the classic stage of deranged conspiracists where evidence that disproves the theory is viewed as further proof of its existence, and those pointing to it are instantly deemed suspect.” He concluded that “given the way these Russia conspiracies have drowned out other critical issues being virtually ignored under the Trump presidency”—this assertion was flat-out false, at least in the mainstream press, which had hardly Woodward-and-Bernstein’d the Trump/Russia story—“it’s vital that everything be done now to make clear what is based in evidence and what is based in partisan delusions. And most of what the Democratic base has been fed for the last six months by their unhinged stable of media, online, and party leaders has decisively fallen into the latter category.” This followed a previous piece in which he denounced Mensch and anyone else writing independently about Trump/Russia (like me!) as a “charlatan.”

  On the right, meanwhile, there was Breitbart and InfoWars and Fox News—especially Sean Hannity, who broadcast his show without bothering to inform his audience that he was a client of Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, and also a de facto policy adviser of Trump himself. Hannity insisted, and continues to insist as of this writing, that there’s nothing to the allegations, that Trump is innocent—the victim of a Deep State conspiracy.

  So it’s no exaggeration to say that, as the sun rose on 20 March 2017, the day of Comey’s appearance before Congress, the future of Trump/Russia hung in the balance. On the “there’s something there” side, you had Louise Mensch and a handful of intrepid journalists at small publications; on the “nothingburger” side, pretty much everyone else. Swayed by Mensch’s logic after reading her “Mr. Putin, Let’s Play Chess” piece in January, I held with the former, and had written extensively about Russia for weeks. But my journalistic bona fides were not exactly pristine. I confess to being worried the night before the hearing that Comey would continue to “Glomar” the FBI investigation3—or, worse, announce that it was kaput and no charges would be filed. Everything that Mensch had written made perfect sense...what if she was wrong?

  Thus, when Comey stated, in his opening remarks, that “the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts,” and, moreover, that “[a]s with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed,” Team Louise was vindicated—bigly.

  More than that, Comey’s statement served as an indictment of most of the pusillanimous mainstream media, which had been so wary of the Trump/Russia story. Now, at long last, they got to work. In the weeks that followed, there was a new mainstream media-driven revelation almost every day: the Paul Manafort/Ukraine $10 million money laundering bombshell; the Devin Nunes imbroglio; Mike Flynn’s shady relationship with Turkey and his astonishing offer of immunity; and the opening of the Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, in which expert Clint Watts of George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security testified that, “Part of the reason active measures have worked in this US election is because the commander-in-chief has used Russian active measures at time [sic] against his opponents.”

  This was all great journalism…but it was too little, too late.

  The Fourth Estate had crapped the bed.

  WHILE THIS WAS HAPPENING, Christopher Steele was desperately trying to get his intelligence reports in the hands of the right people at the FBI.

  Once a Moscow-based senior intelligence officer for MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA, Steele left the agency to found his own company, Orbis Business Intelligence, in 2009. In 2016, Steele was hired by Fusion GPS, an American firm founded by former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson, to investigate Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.

  Trump’s defenders insist that Steele was paid by Hillary Clinton, and that he was a Democratic Party operative actively seeking to dig up dirt on Trump. This is complete bullshit. Fusion GPS was initially hired by a Republican attorney seeking opposition research on Trump; after Trump won the nomination, a Democratic group decided to continue to fund the effort. Steele himself reported directly to Simpson and was not told, and did not ask, for whom he was ultimately working. In effect, Steele was an independent contractor, and a blind one at that.

  Steele’s findings were so damning, in his view, that they had to be shared with American law enforcement. Senator John McCain was one of the first to be contacted. The FBI, too, was notified, and Steele met with a Bureau agent in Rome in July 2016 to deliver the series of intelligence reports that are collectively known as “the dossier.” To reiterate: Steele was a longtime British spy in Russia, the sort of character who turns up in James Bond novels (Mensch described him as “M”). He enjoyed a sterling reputation in the intelligence community, with whom he’d collaborated countless times. He was uncannily, if not uniquely, qualified to assess the danger of what he found.

  But the FBI, for whatever reason, did not share Steele’s concern. As the weeks wore on, Steele, desperate to expose Vladimir Putin’s dirty dealings, showed his reports to members of the press, notably David Corn at Mother Jones. (Bigger outlets were contacted, too…but turned Steele down). In time, Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith decided to publish the entire dossier—a controversial decision that would have several ramifications. First, “citizen journalists” were able to directly analyze and review the remarkable document. Second, Russians in key positions started getting arrested or turned up dead. Third, the mainstream press glommed on to a single salacious detail, on the first few pages of the dossier, involving Trump beholding Russian prostitutes urinating on a bed at the Moscow Ritz during the Miss Universe pageant in November of 2013. The phrase “pee-pee tape” entered the popula
r lexicon. Steele wrote in the dossier that this was a rumor, something he heard people discussing, and that he could not vouch for its veracity. But Trump and his supporters, with a big assist from the sensationalist press, used this lurid detail as a cudgel to try and discredit the entire dossier. Steele, a consummate professional—and a British citizen trying to help his American allies withal—was portrayed as a wingnut. Some of the more crazed Trumpists in Congress demanded he be indicted! History will remember Christopher Steele as a hero of Trump/Russia, and these Trump loyalists as collaborators.

  One of the many lies perpetuated by Trump’s apologists is that the Steele dossier, which they erroneously claim was paid for by Hillary Clinton, was the impetus for the FBI’s investigation into Trump/Russia. This is patently false. Trump’s foreign policy adviser Carter Page and his former business partner Felix Sater had been known to the Bureau for years for their questionable dealings with Russia.4 The investigation itself began in June 2016, when the Bureau received word from Australian intelligence that another of Trump’s foreign policy advisers, George Papadopoulos, had been in clandestine contact with agents of Vladimir Putin beginning on 14 March 2016. Later, Papadopoulos had drunkenly boasted of this encounter to an Australian diplomat, who notified his intelligence services, which in turn alerted the FBI. The FISA warrant had been obtained well before Comey was even aware of Steele’s report, which existence he seemed to ignore until relatively late in the game.