Exonerated Read online

  Also by Dan Bongino

  Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump

  A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

  Exonerated:

  The Failed Takedown of President Donald Trump by the Swamp

  © 2019 by Dan Bongino

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-64293-341-3

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-342-0

  Cover design by Cody Corcoran

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  Post Hill Press

  New York • Nashville

  posthillpress.com

  Published in the United States of America

  A heartfelt thank-you to all of the citizen journalists who filled in the massive holes left behind by the alleged journalists who failed to cover the most significant political spying scandal of our time. You did the job our broken media failed to do.

  Special thanks to 279.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1: The Plug-and-Play Plan

  CHAPTER 2: The Cast: Conflicts ‘R’ Us

  CHAPTER 3: Plan A: Ad-Libbing Adversaries

  CHAPTER 4: Plan B: The Road Map for Trashing the Trump Campaign

  CHAPTER 5: The Run-Up

  CHAPTER 6: Plan C: Operation Save the FBI From Itself

  CHAPTER 7: The Mueller Distortion

  CHAPTER 8: The Deep State Sails to Ukraine

  CHAPTER 9: Fixing the Future

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  At its beginning, Russiagate was a plug-and-play operation.

  Then it picked up steam and spun out of control as investigators searched in vain for connections that never existed. But at the start, it relied on a template for manufacturing a national scandal. The template wasn’t a formal diagram; it was more conceptual—a plan based on two newspaper articles that had been hiding in plain sight. Taken together, however, these stories provided a dangerous playbook for an attempt to take down Donald Trump.

  All this lethal political formula needed to be activated was the right mix, the perfect plug-and-play components to detonate conspiracy charges: take a toxic, compromised political operative and tie him to a nationally known figure running for president, then connect the candidate to a few nasty rumors from murky sources, and presto! You’ve just created the pretext for a devastating scandal—complete with an explosion of muck for the media to rake over the front-running candidate while also providing the ammunition to fuel partisan politicians’ demands for an investigation.

  This book exposes that template and the people who used it to ignite the deep state attack on Donald Trump. It reverse-engineers the entire sordid, disgraceful operation that was meant, initially, to discredit the Trump campaign and stop him from becoming president.

  Prepare to be outraged. Explosive revelations are going to come at a fast and furious pace. Exonerated exposes the following:

  How a profiteering ex-journalist stumbled on the connections of one shady lobbyist—a now convicted tax evader who is serving seven-and-a-half years in the United States Penitentiary, Canaan, near Scranton, Pennsylvania—to cast a shadow over an entire election campaign.

  How the ex-scribe armed with a contract to conduct opposition research to find damning information about Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign hired a Russia expert—who just happened to be married to a senior Justice Department official—and then later lobbied her spouse to open an investigation on the front-running candidate, Donald Trump.

  How the template mastermind then hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who was viewed favorably by the FBI, and fed him information, turning him into some out-of-control quote machine. Steele eventually helped launder these sleazy “findings” into semiofficial-sounding allegations.

  How those allegations—in the form of the infamous “Steele dossier”—were fed to politicians and journalists, and how Steele double-dipped, joining the FBI payroll and feeding similar reports to the FBI to legitimize these fictions and to force an official probe.

  How some of the top law enforcement and intelligence agents in the nation—men and women shocked by the rise of a maverick candidate and horrified by the idea that Hillary Clinton might lose the election to a swamp outsider—worked to create an aura of conspiracy around Donald Trump and his campaign and then to cripple his presidency.

  How, after being spoon-fed dubious allegations by the former journalist, senior FBI leaders skirted official investigation protocols to initiate investigations—which then served to legitimize the flimsy and often completely bogus evidence.

  How the FBI leaders, using these bogus allegations and a previous investigation of a low-profile Trump advisor, then went to America’s secret, rubber-stamp warrant factory to obtain permission to scrutinize this “evidence” and the entire Trump campaign.

  How those warrants were then used to investigate—a polite term for “spy on”—American citizens tied to Trump and the campaign.

  How, in the paranoid rush to find damning evidence that never existed in the first place, these lawmen also investigated family and friends of the campaign workers.

  How these lawmen played extreme hardball with Trump team members, and how, after uncovering wrongdoings that had nothing to do with Russiagate, they tried to leverage potential criminal charges in an effort to substantiate collusion allegations—and repeatedly failed.

  I have discussed many aspects of these mind-numbing deep state maneuvers on my podcasts. But the scope is so enormous that it takes a book to lay out the details in sequence—and sometimes in parallel—to document the cause-and-effect chaos that ensued.

  “Conspiracy” and “collusion” are words that get thrown around a lot. From the earliest days of Russiagate, the two “C-words” have been everywhere. The FBI, the media, and deep state actors love those terms when they are related to Trump, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and the election. But one crippling fact remains: there has been no hard evidence of actual wrongdoing regarding the Trump campaign in connection with Russia, and after three solid years of warrants, wiretaps, threatening interviews, sensational arrests, countless leaks, and millions of dollars spent, special counsel Robert Mueller’s supposed dream team of investigators has found no evidence of a nefarious collusion plot.

  It turns out that, if anything, those highly charged C-words—“conspiracy” and “collusion”—should be applied to the investigators and the investigation itself. And we will get to that.

  But let me be clear: I don’t think there was a single figure orchestrating all of the events that I document here. Every player had a part to play, and the motivations of the all the players vary, but there was no grand puppet master. There was no Godfather. And there was no secret society, either. There were plenty of bad actors, no doubt—deep state figures with extensive ties to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—but keeping secrets wasn’t their strong suit. The spinning of Russiagate was reactive, situational, and adversarial—no question. And for some of the bad actors, it was cynical, too. That goes double for the man behind the plug-and-play template. His plan, the plug-and-play ploy to discredit Trump, succeeded in hoodwinking top lawmen—although as we will see, some of those high-ranking law-and-order men had reasons to want to be deceived.

  But this was no formal cabal. It was more, as I said, reactive—like an investigatory domino theory. In a series of colossal screw-ups that recall the Keystone Kops more than the Avengers, lawmen got conned and then had to join the con or risk being expose
d and humiliated. In the end, faced with a lack of evidence and huge political expectations generated by leaks and an almost pathological hatred of Trump, the investigators were forced to cover their collective asses and generate more warrants and more arrests without ever getting close to proving a collusion conspiracy—because there never was one.

  This resulted in a sequence of three seat-of-the-pants strategies that I call Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C. These were investigative tactics to spy on and probe Donald Trump and his campaign. When Plan A blew up, lawmen needed another course of action to cover for the faulty logic and flimsy evidence that launched the probe in the first place.

  Usually, investigations spur cover-ups. But in this case, the opposite seems to have happened. Plans A, B, and C were cover-ups that served to legitimize the investigation!

  Look, unwinding the plot to entrap Donald Trump is complicated—especially with my talking in general terms. The central players have more connections than the New York subway system. And there were all kinds of double-talk and suspect allegiances. So unpacking it all means tying everything together and moving back and forth in time. But stick with it and all will become clear. Warning: the truth may leave you aghast and horrified. I speak from experience. I’ve been sorting through the muck for three years and I’m still in shock.

  I want to start with the template itself, the plug-and-play model that made Russiagate snowball. Then I want to introduce the cast of characters—or should I say perpetrators?—and their vested interests in the investigation and with one another. Then it will be time to unspool Plans A, B, and C and explain how they imploded.

  America has suffered a national scandal. But it is not the one the nation was initially sold. The facts I unfurl reveal shocking truths. Put them together and you have a picture of a much different debacle, one that has destabilized our government and ripped apart our nation.

  And it’s really a tragedy. We are all suffering. This country has real problems to solve—the economy, health care, the opioid crisis, and much more. A bogus, politicized crisis is the last thing anyone needs.

  America needs to manufacture jobs, not scandals. I hope exposing this plug-and-play template will prevent political hits in the future. Of course, it may do just the opposite, given all the political opportunists out there. But I have to share what I know. The story of Exonerated needs to be told.

  Here it goes.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Plug-and-Play Plan

  On April 17, 2007, the Wall Street Journal ran an article with the headline “How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington.” On the surface, the piece was based on the oldest story in Washington, D.C.—that money buys influence and favors.

  I know. You’re thinking, “Stop the presses!”

  But back in 2007, the most significant news angle of the piece was whom, exactly, appeared to be bought and who the buyers were.

  One bombshell charge involving one household name drove the story: “For a $560,000 fee, Bob Dole, the former Senate majority leader and 1996 Republican presidential nominee, helped a Russian billionaire accused by rivals of bribery obtain a visa to visit the U.S. in 2005, among other things.”1

  As scandals go, you could file the revelations of this story under Typical Washington Cesspool Behavior. There was nothing, from Dole’s point of view, illegal about it. It was part and parcel of what his law firm, along with so many others, did: open doors for clients. True, Dole’s pulling favors for a billionaire Russian with reputed ties to the criminal underworld looked pretty sleazy. But otherwise, it was just another story about money and influence running amok in the capital. Sadly, this is old news.

  For the purposes of Russiagate and the future tarnishing of Donald Trump’s campaign, however, this article was filled with names of far more interest than Bob Dole’s.

  The billionaire that Dole and his law firm went to bat for was Oleg Deripaska, one of the world’s richest men and reportedly one of Vladimir Putin’s closest oligarch pals. Words and phrases like “illegal wiretapping,” “extortion,” and “racketeering” also follow his name with alarming frequency. Concerns about Deripaska’s ties to criminal elements and antidemocratic regimes are generally thought to have caused his ongoing visa difficulties with the State Department.2

  The article’s more shocking revelation, though, was the implication that Dole and Deripaska were put in contact by Dole’s old campaign advisor, a guy who also had made millions working for a veritable who’s who of despotic leaders, including the infamous former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

  A guy named, as you probably guessed, Paul Manafort.

  We’ll get to why Manafort’s presence in the article is so important—and why he was such a liability to Donald Trump. But first, let’s finish with the other notable name in the Journal story. It’s arguably the most shocking name of all, and it’s right there below the headline: Glenn Simpson, who cowrote the story with his wife, Mary Jacoby.3

  More than any other figure in Donald Trump’s orbit, Paul Manafort deserved to set off alarm bells when it came to Russia. But more than any other figure in the entire Russiagate charade, Glenn Simpson is the one who actually pulled the alarms.

  Simpson knew just how explosive Manafort’s presence in the campaign was, in part because of this article.

  As many readers may know, Simpson no longer works as an investigative reporter for the Journal. Instead, he runs Fusion GPS, the strategic intelligence firm hired in late 2015 by the Washington Free Beacon to conduct opposition research on Donald Trump. The Beacon, a conservative media outlet, claims it also paid for research on other Republican candidates.4 In late 2015, Simpson approached Nellie Ohr, a Russia specialist who is married to Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, one of the highest-ranking officials in the Department of Justice (DOJ). Simpson hired Nellie, eventually paying her $44,000, and he would later lobby Bruce5—acts that would subsequently derail the DOJ bigwig’s career.

  But then, in the spring of 2016, Simpson got lucky.

  Extremely lucky.

  The big misstep of the Trump campaign—probably the one appointment those involved would like to take back—occurred.

  On March 29, 2016, Paul Manafort was named campaign convention manager. At the time, Fusion GPS’s work on anti-Trump research for the Beacon had come to an end. But with Manafort now part of the Trump team, a whole new river of muck presented itself to Simpson. And when six weeks later, on April 16, 2016, Manafort became Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Simpson must have pulled the article out of his back pocket and danced a jig. If anyone wanted opposition research, he had the golden ticket—the golden template—right in front of him, in the article he had written precisely nine years and one day earlier.

  That same spring, Simpson and Fusion GPS were able to reportedly wrangle more than $1 million from Perkins Coie, the law firm representing the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, to continue his anti-Trump research.6

  And part of that research, no doubt, involved one specific sentence in that old, yellowing article. It was a sentence that, incredibly, suggested that Manafort had committed a crime—one that would haunt not only Manafort but at least two other members of the Trump team: “Mr. Manafort, who isn’t registered as a consultant to the Ukrainian leader, didn’t respond to requests for comment.”7

  With that one sentence, Simpson and Jacoby quietly set up Manafort and anyone he would work with in the future. They were blowing a whistle for federal investigators, suggesting in black and white that Paul Manafort had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a law requiring agents and lobbyists representing the interests of foreign powers in a “political or quasi-political capacity” to register with the Department of Justice.

  So opposition researcher Glenn Simpson—the man hired to provide actionable intelligence to cripple Donald Trump’s campaign—had figured out years earlier that
Manafort might be vulnerable to criminal charges. Now he could plug that fact into his case against Trump.

  Flush with money from the DNC and Clinton, Simpson hired Christopher Steele, the former head of MI6’s Russia desk, to compile intelligence briefings on possible Russian influencing operations regarding the 2016 presidential election. This was Simpson’s key hire. He paid Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, $168,000.8 In return, he got the former intelligence operative who had also worked for and with the FBI. He was a known, respected entity who could feed “information” to intelligence and investigative channels and who could pass on the information that Simpson amassed.

  Or, perhaps, created.

  That information is now known as the “Steele dossier.” It contains an avalanche of misinformation and lies about Donald Trump, his associates, and alleged Russian influencing. But when it was leaked—first to liberal Mother Jones editor David Corn and later to BuzzFeed, which published the entire thing, as well as a number of political and intelligence figures—it drove the outcry of C-word allegations and helped spur Russiagate investigations.

  Simpson’s wife, Mary Jacoby, was so proud of her husband that she later outed him as masterminding these fantasy filings—wanting to make sure that he got credit for the work instead of Steele. “It’s come to my attention that some people still don’t realize what Glenn’s role was in exposing Putin’s control of Donald Trump,” Jacoby wrote in a June 24, 2017, Facebook post, according to online magazine Tablet. “Let’s be clear. Glenn conducted the investigation. Glenn hired Chris Steele. Chris Steele worked for Glenn.”9

  This is one of the most damning quotes in the entire Russiagate affair and we will return to it soon, when we discuss the dossier in greater detail. But for now, just keep it in the back of your mind as evidence of Simpson’s scandal-fabricating activity.

  Let’s go back to Simpson’s 2007 Wall Street Journal article for a brief moment—and its importance in engulfing the Trump campaign in a cyclone of dubious charges.