Exonerated Read online

  Simpson’s story suggests that Manafort, among other things, may have committed a FARA violation. True, FARA crimes are rarely, if ever, enforced in lobbyist-loving Washington. But evidence of criminal behavior is exactly what investigators needed to open a probe. With Manafort’s proximity to Trump—and Manafort’s well-documented connections to Putin’s pal Viktor Yanukovych, the scandal-ridden, corrupt former president of Ukraine who bolted to Russia after being overthrown—Simpson had almost everything he needed to start a firestorm.

  I say “almost” because there was one other old story that shaped the template by tying Manafort to another prominent political leader who (like Dole) had run for president: John McCain. When it comes to providing further instructions for how to weaponize the Trump campaign against itself, this article was even more powerful.

  The article, “Aide Helped Controversial Russian Meet McCain,” by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and John Solomon, appeared in the Friday, January 25, 2008, issue of the Washington Post. It focuses on the disturbing connections between McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign manager, Rick Davis, and Oleg Deripaska. Davis, of course, was part of Davis Manafort Inc., which the paper describes as “a lobbying firm that was being paid to provide political advice to pro-Russian and oligarch-funded candidates in Ukraine.”10

  The presence of Davis, who attended and evidently facilitated two meetings between McCain and Deripaska in 2006, caused a good deal of friction within the McCain campaign team, the article reveals. Some aides believed that Davis’s firm’s work overseas conflicted with the senator’s record as a pro-democracy champion and an advocate of reducing the influence of lobbyists in Washington. Because of this, “the aides questioned whether Davis should be given an important title in the campaign because that would make him more vulnerable to criticism,” sources told the reporters.11

  Campaign aides weren’t the only ones worried about Davis’s presence or McCain’s potentially problematic ties to Davis-Manafort. John Weaver, one of McCain’s top advisors in the 2008 campaign, says U.S. intelligence raised concerns to McCain’s staff about the Davis-Manafort work. (It might have been helpful if those same agents had tipped off Trump to Manafort’s problematic past, but interestingly, that courtesy call never happened.)

  According to Sara A. Carter, writing in the now defunct news site Circa, a U.S. counterintelligence source confirmed the concern about a possible McCain influencing operation. “Before there was Trump, there were concerns about some of the same people being around McCain about ten years ago, and we alerted his team to those concerns and they appeared to take some defensive action.”12

  Manafort remains offstage for most of the Washington Post article—although it reports that Deripaska thanked him in a letter for helping arrange the meeting with McCain in Davos, Switzerland—but it’s clear that his proximity to Davis and Deripaska tainted him tangentially.

  So here we come back to the plug-and-play scandal operation. Anti-Trump operatives saw a clear opportunity: if they substituted the names Trump and Manafort for McCain and Davis, they could recycle the previous scandal that had plagued McCain in 2008. Because of Manafort’s dirty past, they could taint the Trump campaign with the same bad optics, the same public relations nightmares, the same potential conflicts of interest and, most damning of all, the same concerns about Russian influencing. In fact, Manafort’s Russian connections would be even more inflammatory when tied to Trump because the candidate had made statements on the stump about wanting to work more closely with Russia and had given speeches listing some of the interests that Moscow and D.C. shared. In the toxic shadow of Manafort, those comments became more troubling. Trump’s campaign manager was connected to some of the most repressive and sinister Russian figures. He took their money. These facts don’t actually prove that Trump did anything wrong (he didn’t), but they provided opposition operatives everything they needed to scream collusion and push for an investigation.

  So the main components for a plug-and-play plan were now, finally, in place, ready to be activated to detonate a scandal of epic proportions.

  But Simpson wasn’t the only one in town with his eye on Manafort. A longtime consultant for the Democratic National Committee named Alexandra Chalupa had been waiting for him to appear, too.

  “I felt there was a Russia connection,” Chalupa told Politico. “And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to be involved in this election.” For Chalupa, whose Democratic bona fides also include working at the White House’s Office of Public Liaison for the Clinton administration, Manafort was “Putin’s political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections.”13

  Chalupa shifted into overdrive once Manafort joined Trump. A week after Manafort officially signed on to Team Trump, she met with a legislative assistant in the office of Representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio, as well as cochairs of the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus, and pushed for a congressional investigation. An email Chalupa sent to the DNC communications director14 at the beginning of May that was subsequently hacked and eventually published by WikiLeaks reveals that she claimed to have been working “for the past few weeks” with Yahoo! News star reporter Michael Isikoff.15 That would appear to tie her to Isikoff’s April 26, 2016, story, “Trump’s campaign chief is questioned about ties to Russian billionaire,” which reveals that Manafort had been questioned by officials from the Cayman Islands “in connection with a $26.2 million investment by a billionaire Russian oligarch who was his partner in an ill-fated telecommunications development in Ukraine.”16

  Chalupa left the DNC—which had paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records—after the Democratic convention in late July to focus full-time on her research on Manafort, Trump, and Russia.

  She was not alone. Simpson and Steele were assembling the dossier, of course. And the Never Trumpers were gaining momentum. They had real motivation now. Trump had officially become the Republican nominee on June 16. That meant he was the only one standing in the way of Hillary Clinton in her mission to take control of the White House. The deep state was on high alert. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin must have been exceedingly pleased. A declassified national security assessment determined that Putin had “ordered an influence campaign” targeting the U.S. election.17

  Putin, angered by U.S. sanctions and his nation’s own diminished stature, ordered all three Russia intelligence agencies—the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)—to wreak havoc. While Putin had plenty of reasons to hate Hillary Clinton, and while cyberagents working for Russian intelligence were clearly targeting the DNC—eventually hacking, stealing, and releasing a trove of emails on WikiLeaks—the idea that Russia has any allegiance to the Republican party is ludicrous. Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party’s figurehead, destroyed the Soviet Union with covert operations in the 1980s that wrecked its economy. Putin, serving as a KGB big shot, witnessed the national humiliation of his beloved Mother Russia at the hands of the U.S. So rest assured that all he has ever wanted to do is sow discord in the United States and destabilize our nation. He knew he couldn’t actually afford to go to war against us, so this was the next best thing: foment distrust and conspiracy theories and destroy America from within.

  If anyone has any doubts about this, one of Putin’s closest advisors, Vladislav Surkov, actually spelled out Moscow’s savage goals in an article published in February 2019, saying, “Foreign politicians talk about Russia’s interference in elections and referendums around the world. In fact, the matter is even more serious: Russia interferes in your brains, we change your conscience, and there is nothing you can do about it.”18

  Putin, in other words, wanted us to eat ourselves alive.

  Unfortunately, a veritable army of Washington insiders was making it easy for him.

  1Glenn R. Simpson and Mary Jacoby, “How Lobbyists Help Ex-
Soviets Woo Washington,” The Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2007, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB117674837248471543.

  2Ibid.

  3Ibid.

  4Matthew Continetti and Michael Goldfarb, “Fusion GPS and the Washington Free Beacon: A Note to Our Readers,” Washington Free Beacon, October 27, 2017, https://freebeacon.com/uncategorized/fusion-gps-washington-free-beacon/.

  5Executive Session Committee on the Judiciary, and the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, “Interview of: Bruce Ohr,” August 28, 2018, https://dougcollins.house.gov/sites/dougcollins.house.gov/files/Ohr%20Interview%20Transcript%208.28.18.pdf.

  6Jack Gillum and Shawn Boburg, “‘Journalism for Rent’: Inside the Secretive Firm Behind the Trump Dossier,” The Washington Post, December 11, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/journalism-for-rent-inside-the-secretive-firm-behind-the-trump-dossier/2017/12/11/8d5428d4-bd89-11e7-af84-d3e2ee4b2af1_story.html?utm_term=.fb32ce0fdda4.

  7Simpson and Jacoby, “How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington.”

  8Mark Hosenball, “Ex-British Spy Paid $168,000 for Trump Dossier, U.S. Firm Discloses,” Reuters, November 1, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-dossier/ex-british-spy-paid-168000-for-trump-dossier-u-s-firm-discloses-idUSKBN1D15XH.

  9Lee Smith, “Did President Obama Read The ‘Steele Dossier’ in the White House Last August?” Tablet, December 20, 2017, https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/251897/obama-steele-dossier-russiagate.

  10Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and John Solomon, “Aide Helped Controversial Russian Meet McCain,” The Washington Post, January 25, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/24/AR2008012403383_pf.html.

  11Ibid.

  12Sara A. Carter, “Here’s the Russian Influence Controversy that John McCain Doesn’t Want You to Know About,” Circa, June 6, 2017.

  13Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern, “Ukrainian Efforts to Sabotage Trump Backfire,” Politico, January 11, 2017, https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446.

  14Ibid.

  15Ibid.

  16Michael Isikoff, “Trump’s Campaign Chief is Questioned About Ties to Russian Billionaire,” Yahoo! News, April 26, 2016, https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-campaign-chief-ducks-questions-about-214020365.html.

  17Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” January 6, 2017, https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf.

  18Cristina Maza, “Vladimir Putin’s Adviser Tells Americans: ‘Russia Interferes In Your Brains, We Change Your Conscience,’” Newsweek, February 12, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/russia-president-vladimir-putin-election-americans-1327793.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Cast: Conflicts ‘R’ Us

  It’s time to unwind how we went from a Glenn Simpson article in the Wall Street Journal to a multimillion-dollar special counsel probe that divided the nation, partially paralyzed the Trump administration, and accomplished little more than to make dozens of lawyers richer than they were two years prior. So let’s focus on the key players who drove this colossal fiasco. Many of them are former colleagues. Some have tight relationships with opposition leaders like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Some have ugly legal skeletons in their closet. And some are career lawmen who bought into shrewd opposition research that was calculated to look much more damaging than it was.

  Getting spun in public on the biggest story in decades is not fun. Getting fed bogus evidence and then biting it is humiliating and embarrassing. It can make you look bad. Actually, when you get played in public and wind up powering a gargantuan probe that draws Watergate comparisons—an investigation fabricated to cast doubt on the legitimacy of a presidential election—that isn’t just bad; it’s catastrophic.

  Seriously, it doesn’t just ruin your search results online. It can kill your entire career.

  This is what seems to have driven many of the principal characters here. They bought a sham story and then had to engage in face-saving maneuvers later after the stunning upset that was the electoral victory of Donald Trump. Forced to adjust on the fly—when blockbuster allegations began to disintegrate—these ace investigators and attorneys widened the scope of the probe—a kind of legal plug-and-play, if you will—to increase the chance of finding wrongdoing somewhere.

  The result? Russiagate has turned up zero collusion-related charges alleged in Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele’s dossier. Again, there have been no collusion charges in any way, shape, or form. Any arrests and indictments from the special counsel investigation—of former Trump administration National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, former campaign official Paul Manafort, and former campaign advisor George Papadopoulos—have nothing to do with the president or the Trump campaign. Say what you want about them, but they didn’t collude with Russians.

  Looking at this cast of characters and defining their motives—why they’ve done what they’ve done and their self-serving special interests in the investigation—is critical to understanding how Russiagate spiraled out of control despite the fact that nobody on the campaign colluded with the Russians, which was the stated reason for the special counsel investigation.

  JOHN BRENNAN

  The poster boy for Never Trumpers, CIA director John Brennan has been a cheerleader for Russiagate from the beginning. A twenty-five-year intelligence community veteran, he is widely regarded as an overly ambitious political climber and a swamp creature who backed Hillary Clinton and was anxious to serve as her CIA chief, as he had for Barack Obama.

  His unhinged venom toward Donald Trump reached a fever pitch with an acidic tweet after the president’s Helsinki press conference. Trump’s performance “rises & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors,’” Brennan ranted. “It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”1

  Normally, charges like that coming from America’s former spymaster would be devastating. If anyone was in a position to know about damning proof of collusion and collaboration, it would be the former CIA chief, right?

  But the Mueller report now stands as proof that it was Brennan, not Trump, who was off his rocker. But why?

  The reason lies in the genesis of Russiagate. When Trump, the ultimate outsider candidate, began mentioning Russia in his stump speeches and said a few positive things about our former Cold War enemy, it shocked the establishment. A presidential candidate was seeking a better relationship with Russia? It was inconceivable to the know-it-all foreign policy pundits who resented any contrarian views from outside of their elitist bubbles. Establishment cold warriors in D.C. would have none of it. But there was nothing these naysayers could do, really. This is America, where freedom of speech is a fundamental right, and you can’t just wiretap an American citizen for openly considering working with a foreign country.

  But if you run the CIA, you have powerful international connections who can. Which is to say, while American intelligence can’t spy on its own citizens in most cases, its foreign colleagues—with their less restrictive surveillance laws—can.

  That’s what spies do. They spy. As Lee Smith reports in Tablet, certain circles in Washington had been awash in rumors that “Britain’s intelligence service, the Government Communications Headquarters, was intercepting the emails and phone calls of Trump officials.”2

  Brennan’s overseas intelligence connections began relaying back information about “figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents” as early as 2015, according to the Guardian.3 And BBC reports that Brennan was told in April 2016 about an alleged tape recording that mentioned Kremlin cash “going into the US presidential campaign.”4

  In Augu
st 2016, Brennan told then Senate majority leader Harry Reid that Russians were interfering in our election on Trump’s behalf, relaying the same information originating from Steele and Simpson. Brennan’s brief pushed Reid to write a letter to then FBI director James Comey citing “evidence of a direct connection” between the Trump campaign, and he urged an investigation.5

  Eventually, the pressure worked. This intel, along with the Steele dossier, was used to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Donald Trump and Trump campaign figures.

  So Brennan was invested in seeing this intelligence—much of which he seems to have processed into his tweets—proven out. He was instrumental in getting the Russiagate probe off the ground. And he wanted to be proven right.

  It’s also worth noting that under Brennan, the CIA did conduct spy operations on selected Americans and was never penalized for repeated violations.6 He experienced almost no political fallout, which is to say that Brennan himself knows something about high crimes and misdemeanors—or at least getting away with them.

  JAMES CLAPPER

  James Clapper, director of national intelligence from 2010 to 2017, was a spymaster who was heavily invested in ensuring Donald Trump’s defeat and also had plenty of skin in the game. Since leaving his job, Clapper has consistently painted Trump as a possible Russian asset, and he was instrumental in helping legitimize Simpson and Steele’s information and dossier.7 He also had a very good reason for doing so: Clapper had plenty to lose in the event of an ideological regime change. He is a known liar with regard to intrusive U.S. government surveillance.