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  On March 12, 2013, Clapper testified in an open congressional hearing. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, asked the intel chief who heads the sixteen intelligence-gathering operations of the federal government: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?”

  “No, sir,” Clapper replied. “Not wittingly.”

  It was a bald-faced lie.8

  A mere three months later, Edward Snowden leaked his treasure trove of classified National Security Administration (NSA) documents revealing that the agency had been vacuuming up data on domestic and international communications, exposing Clapper’s falsehood.

  Lying to Congress under oath is against the law and can get you up to five years in prison.

  Clapper later issued a bizarre defense, insisting that Wyden’s simple yes-or-no question was some mind-bogglingly complex query. In fact, he compared it to being asked a “When are you going to stop beating your wife?” kind of question—the kind of inquiry that implies something unproven is a fact. Then he said the query was “not answerable necessarily, by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful or least untruthful manner, by saying, ‘No.’”9

  It’s hard not to think about Clapper’s legacy, though, when you consider his dishonest record on intrusive spying and what he did to get the Steele dossier into the national press and to push Russiagate into the mainstream. Clapper advised FBI director James Comey to brief then president-elect Trump on the Steele dossier. On Friday, January 6, 2017, Comey met with Trump and his transition team at Trump Tower and shared some of the allegations. Four days later, on January 10, CNN, BuzzFeed, and other outlets revealed that the meeting had taken place and that the president had learned of the charges contained in the dossier—which instantly bestowed a sense of legitimacy on the now debunked and entirely unsubstantiated report. The very next day, January 11, Clapper issued a statement claiming he conveyed his own shock and outrage about the leaks to the incoming president, saying, “I expressed my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press.”

  Evidence suggests that Clapper may have been lying then, too. In April 2018, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a report on the run-up to Russiagate. “Clapper subsequently acknowledged discussing the ‘dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,’ and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic,” the report asserts10—a charge Clapper later denied in a TV interview.

  Months later, Clapper got a new job. Leaking to CNN seems to have been a profitable move; the network subsequently hired him as a contributor. He personally profited by helping promote the Russiagate hoax and by damaging Donald Trump.

  Meanwhile, he has also started off-loading any responsibility for the Russiagate investigation—passing it off on Barack Obama, as seen in an interview with Anderson Cooper:

  If it weren’t for President Obama, we might not have done the intelligence community assessment that we did that set off a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today, notably, special counsel Mueller’s investigation. President Obama is responsible for that, and it was he who tasked us to do that intelligence community assessment in the first place.11

  PAUL MANAFORT

  I’ve already made it clear that Manafort is a troubled actor in Russiagate. That said, given what happened to others in the campaign, deep state operatives would have targeted “suspects” to justify the bogus scandal—like George Papadopoulos, who made no secret about trying to arrange a meeting with Moscow on behalf of the campaign. But let’s face it: Manafort was the Achilles heel of the whole campaign.

  Given everything that’s come to light about him over the past three years, it’s easy to say that there were warning signs in Manafort’s previous work. That implies that the Trump campaign should have realized he was a liability. But that is an unduly harsh assessment. Remember, Trump was an outsider and Manafort, given his long lobbying résumé, must have painted himself as the ultimate insider. Not only that, but Manafort even had a model of his own to follow provided by Rick Davis, his old partner at Manafort Davis Inc., who had talked his way into becoming John McCain’s campaign chair in 2008.

  Manafort, it turns out, had numerous motives for joining Team Trump. As a longtime Republican consultant, he brought valuable experience, insight, and connections to the campaign. But he also had a ten-million-dollar debt to Oleg Deripaska that was hanging over his head, according to tax return records.12 That is a hefty, potentially compromising debt, especially if Deripaska’s reputation for engaging in mob-like solutions isn’t just a rumor. This link alone would have made him damaged goods. But as we’ve seen, he had a boatload of debt, tax, and legal issues on top of the violations Glenn Simpson had already written about.

  GLENN SIMPSON

  Here are the known facts about Glenn Simpson. As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, he wrote the previously mentioned 2007 article about Russian oligarchs influencing Washington that indicated he suspected Paul Manafort had violated FARA laws. He left the Wall Street Journal to start Fusion GPS. He was hired to conduct opposition research on Donald Trump. He hired Nellie Ohr, the wife of the fourth-highest-ranking DOJ official, Bruce Ohr, to conduct opposition research on Trump. On October 16, 2018, Simpson invoked the Fifth Amendment—the right not to incriminate himself—when he was called to testify before a joint committee of Congress. A number of political insiders have speculated that Simpson may have perjured himself with previous testimony claiming he didn’t meet Ohr until after the election.13 As Representative John Ratcliffe, Republican of Texas, told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo in October 2018:

  Simpson had previously testified under oath to the House Intelligence Committee that he never met with Bruce Ohr or discussed with Bruce Ohr the Steele dossier prior to the October FISA application in 2016 or the 2016 presidential election. That is in direct contradiction to what Bruce Ohr told me under oath last month.14

  Circumstantial evidence also suggests Simpson was neck-deep in the infamous Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016—despite his repeated denials. This meeting was initially portrayed as the smoking gun for the collusion charges between the Trump campaign and Russia. But overwhelming evidence suggests it was an entrapment scheme designed to gather negative political opposition research on the Trump campaign—not a juicy political dirt-swap.

  The meeting was set in motion when British music promoter Rob Goldstone emailed Donald Trump Jr., promising the Russian “crown prosecutor” had information that would “incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.” Goldstone’s client Emin Agalarov, the pop star son of Azerbaijani-Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov, also helped with the arrangements.

  When reports of Goldstone’s email—which looked damning—and the meeting surfaced in July 2017, the irresponsible, Trump-hating media had a field day.

  But that email come-on proved to be a bait-and-switch ploy. The meeting was attended by Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, Natalia Veselnitskaya (a lawyer for the Russian holding company Prevezon), lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, and two others. Veselnitskaya’s primary mission was to advocate for overturning the Magnitsky Act, a congressional act that resulted in, among other things, the seizure of $230 million of Prevezon funds.

  Veselnitskaya produced a memo that suggested the American firm Ziff Brothers Investments, which she claimed had helped Magnitsky Act advocate Bill Browder illegally buy up Gazprom shares, had “financed the Hillary Clinton campaign.” As bombshells go, this was a disappointment, as similar claims had surfaced previously.

  But here’s the fascinating catch: the strategist who worked with Veselnitskaya to dig up dirt on Browder was the same strategist who had set the Steele dossier in motion—Glenn Simpson.

  Members of what I call the Collusion Chorus like to point out that after the meeting leaked and the New York Times reported that Donald Trump Jr.
was “promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign,” the president actually dictated a statement to the press about the substance of the gathering. This presidential misstep was made under duress; Trump was reacting to unfounded and, as we will see, poisonous allegations and a cloud of “gotcha” media suspicion. But he later wisely faced down the fire with facts, tweeting, “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics—and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”

  Glenn Simpson also claimed not to know about the meeting—despite admitting he met with his client Veselnitskaya hours before she visited Trump Tower and the following day. This of course, defies credulity. But Simpson insisted before a Senate committee that his client had a meeting with the son of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, but somehow the meeting never came up.

  Yeah, right.

  Then there are the things about Simpson that I like to call the known unknowns. By this I mean, we don’t know the full extent of his involvement in various operations. For example, as I previously mentioned, Simpson’s wife’s Facebook post suggests he was responsible for many of the charges in the Steele dossier. He was Steele’s boss. Is it possible, then, that some of the sources in the Steele dossier were his sources? It seems likely. By hiring Steele, who had worked with the FBI previously on the FIFA soccer scandal, Simpson now had a second direct conduit to law enforcement—in addition to Ohr at the DOJ.

  You can’t overestimate the importance of being a known entity to the FBI. The FBI has a process for verifying information from new, unverified sources, but Steele had a documented record with the FBI, which rendered this process largely unnecessary. No hard evidence has surfaced outlining a formal Simpson plan to weaponize Steele’s reporting, but that, in effect, is precisely what happened.

  Making matters worse was the presence of Rinat Akhmetshin at the Trump Tower meeting. Akhmetshin is a shadowy figure known for lobbying and deep connections to Russian intelligence. But he has admitted to other critical connections, specifically to the Clinton team. How incredibly hypocritical for anti-Trump Clinton acolytes to attack Don Trump Jr. for accepting a meeting with a Russian who proudly professes to be friendly with members of the Clinton staff.

  This brings us to the Steele memos themselves.15 The very first memo is listed as number 080. We know that Steele was hired in June and that first memo was dated June 20. Had Steele written seventy-nine other memos prior to that in the space of a month? Or had the memo-numbering system been initiated by Simpson, who had been working on the Trump collusion and was, per his wife, the driving force behind the dossier? The second memo in the dossier is listed as 086. Again, does this mean there were other memos in between 080 and 086?

  These open issues cast further doubt on how Simpson and Steele worked and may suggest that Steele’s name and prior reputation with the FBI as an informant served to launder Simpson’s handiwork and sourcing. By incorporating intelligence he received from Simpson as his own research—a reality implied by Simpson’s wife—Steele may have wittingly or unwittingly served to sanitize and legitimize the fabrications of the “sources” providing the now debunked anti-Trump opposition research.

  Adding fuel to the idea that Simpson was behind some of Steele’s reporting is the matter of the dossier’s sources. The first source to be publicly identified was Sergei Millian, who was outed in a January 24, 2017, Wall Street Journal article. Millian was identified as the person referred to at various times as both Source D and Source E, according to a Journal informant described as “a person familiar with the matter.”16

  A Belarusian-born resident of Atlanta who speaks six languages and claims to have ties to Trump via lawyer Michael Cohen, Millian seems shadier than a giant oak tree in full summer bloom. George Papadopoulos reports that Millian once offered him $30,000 a month on behalf of an unnamed Russian millionaire—provided the former Trump advisor was part of the administration.17 In his book, Deep State Target, Papadopoulos also says Millian bragged about meeting John McCain during inauguration weekend, and that Millian didn’t utter a word of denial when a friend stated, “You know Sergei works for the FBI.”18

  Meanwhile, to really confuse things, Millian was photographed with Oleg Deripaska—the man who lent Manafort $10 million—in the summer of 2016.

  So Millian’s allegiances are murky, to say the least. And it seems just as likely that the U.S.-based fabricator would have crossed Simpson’s orbit—like he would have crossed Steele’s. Furthermore, some of the stories about hookers and blackmail while Trump was in Moscow that are attributed to Millian in the dossier seem more likely to have happened—or should I say slightly more plausible?—if they had come from sources with ties to Azerbaijani-Russian billionaire businessman Aras Agalarov—who hosted Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe contest—or his son, Emin. But I guess when you are laundering sensationally sleazy fiction, reliable sources are hard to find.

  It’s entirely possible, given what we know, that Millian was just another plug-and-play piece of Simpson’s game, a kind of human quote machine who existed to help Simpson and Steele fabricate sensational fictions—hookers, pee tapes, conspiracies—about Trump, Putin, and Russian intelligence.

  While we’re on the subject, it’s tempting to ask what rules were in place—besides ethics, fair play, and professional decency—to stop Simpson from “piping,” as journalists say, his own quotes to Steele and passing them off as sourced.

  Simpson has talked about firewalls between his various clients and jobs. But this is a guy who traffics in dirt and damage. He foisted unverified, unproven allegations to the highest reaches of law enforcement. His standards basically amount to, “Trust me.”

  “I call it journalism for rent,” Simpson said while speaking at the 2016 Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival and Symposium, where he described Fusion GPS’s work on a panel titled “Investigations with an Agenda.”19

  That’s a pretty sleazy description. It almost makes an honorable profession sound like the world’s oldest profession. Simpson’s motive was Simpson. He was in the business of generating research reports and strategy. For a guy who was critical of Manafort’s lobbying and influencing efforts, Simpson wasn’t any holy man. His work to undo the Magnitsky Act was in service to the same corrupt and brutal Russian oligarchy that, according to his own DNC research, was a close cousin to the same regime attacking America and supposedly working with the Trump campaign. So it’s clear he would work on any issue—even ones that seem to oppose each other. We know he got $1 million from the DNC. We don’t know what the Russians paid him for the Magnitsky work. But whatever he got, it looks like dirty money to me.

  CHRISTOPHER STEELE

  There is no question that the report that bears Christopher Steele’s name was central to igniting the Russiagate investigation. Key FBI figures like Andrew McCabe and James Comey have said so, and the dossier dishes heavily on Trump advisor Carter Page, providing the FBI with ammunition to plug into its FISA application on Page and, by extension, the campaign.

  What was Steele’s motive? The narrative is that he pushed his reporting to agency contacts because he was so alarmed by the material he was gathering. In an interview with the Senate Judicial Committee, Glenn Simpson said Steele was worried that Trump was being blackmailed by Russia and wondered if “this represented a national security threat.”

  Added Simpson: “He said he thought we were obligated to tell someone in government, in our government, about this information.”

  Steele has remained largely silent about his work and his methods. Simpson has said another London-based Russia researcher, Edward Baumgartner, worked on the dossier as a subcontractor and reportedly did much of the legwork. But Steele was the front man for the dossier, and he first brought it to the attention of the FBI in July 2016.

  Steele is the f
ormer head of the MI6 Russia desk, but more than three years after he wrote his initial dossier memos about the hookers, the sleazy video tapes, Michael Cohen’s trip to pay off hackers in Prague, and Carter Page and Paul Manafort’s working together to ferry secrets to the Trump campaign from Russians, those memos have been entirely debunked. In fact, they seem based on nothing but lies and fantasies.

  Steele had been officially out of the spy game for years when he started working on the dossier. Were his contacts stale? Did he have any Russian contacts at all? Or, as he seems to have told Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec in October 2016—ten days before the FBI swore to the first FISA warrant in front of the court—were Steele’s sources the Russian intelligence higher-up, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, and Putin’s ideological architect, Vladislav Surkov? Yes, that same Surkov who was once Putin’s right-hand man and who publicly proclaimed his penchant for Russian disinformation and interfering in American’s brains. What was Steele’s budget to pay for information? Were sources telling him what he wanted to hear in return for an easy payday? Were they engaging Steele and Simpson in a sophisticated Russian disinformation campaign designed to sow discord? Who, exactly, were his sources? Who were Baumgartner’s?

  Whomever the informants were, they were wrong, either intentionally in the case of a disinformation campaign, or unintentionally for various other reasons, including sheer incompetence. And by forwarding their outrageous fictions along, Steele was effectively doing Glenn Simpson’s dirty work—laundering bogus reports with his own good-soldier reputation for Trump-hating mainstream consumption. He put his supposedly sterling reputation on the line for $75,000 with shoddy research that detonated the biggest counterintelligence investigation in history. He should have asked Simpson for a raise, given the negative publicity he generated.

  Of course, it goes without saying that what he really deserves is to never work again on intelligence matters. He may go to his grave swearing he believes that the garbage he wrote was plausible. But spreading that unverified drivel against Trump and America is potentially criminal and unquestionably unethical and immoral.