Exonerated Page 4
ANDREW MCCABE
James Comey named Andrew McCabe deputy director of the FBI in late January 2016. When President Trump fired Comey, asserting his unassailable legal right to appoint the head of the agency, McCabe became the acting director. One of the first things he did was to initiate an investigation into the president on possible charges of obstruction of justice.
He also moved to solidify the Russiagate witch hunt so that it couldn’t be closed—despite the shaky evidence behind it. “I wanted to make sure that our case was on solid ground and if somebody came in behind me and closed it and tried to walk away from it, they would not be able to do that without creating a record of why they made that decision,” McCabe said.20
These moves make perfect sense if you consider that McCabe was loyal to the man who appointed him. But why was McCabe promoted in the first place?
A well-placed FBI source has told me that McCabe was widely known in the agency for his gift of gab, not for his investigative skills in the field as an agent. His reputation wasn’t for nabbing bank robbers and hardened criminals. It was for nabbing headlines. He was known as a good “briefer.” He was good in front of the camera and for presenting other agents’ work to the press and the public.
There’s nothing wrong with being a great PR guy—the FBI needs great PR guys now more than ever. (Ironically, hours before McCabe was set to retire, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired him, claiming McCabe had made an “unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor.” McCabe has denied any wrongdoing and called his termination politically motivated.) But my source cites this as evidence that McCabe is politically savvy. That doesn’t mean he wants to get into politics, but he knows how to make things happen—for himself and others. If he only applied the same savvy to actual shoe-leather-type investigative work, then there would be no need to write this book right now.
McCabe’s wife, Jill, however, did want to get into politics. In 2015, Jill, a pediatric emergency physician, decided to run for Virginia’s state Senate as a Democrat. And she had the blessing of the state’s most powerful politician: Terry McAuliffe, who reportedly funneled more than $650,000 to her campaign fund. While that is a tremendous amount of money for a state Senate campaign, the link to McAuliffe is what is essential here.
There are few people in politics with tighter connections to Bill and Hillary Clinton than Terry McAuliffe. He was the Clintons’ fundraiser in chief, the man who gathered contributions for the Clintons’ campaigns, the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, and the Clinton’s mega-flush foundation. He also reportedly secured the loan for the Clintons’ Chappaqua, New York, house—personally!
So let’s connect the dots. McCabe’s wife, Jill, gets big money from Terry McAuliffe, who is one of Hillary Clinton’s best pals, and McCabe formalizes an obstruction-of-justice investigation against the president of the United States, who beat Hillary Clinton.
Anybody see a problem here?
Optics are important, and they cut both ways. The optics, or appearances, surrounding the Trump campaign disturbed many D.C. insiders. Here was a rookie candidate saying some positive things about a new relationship with Russia. He hired a guy with legal issues and questionable ties that nobody flagged—including the same intelligence agencies that had previously identified Manafort’s partner during a stint working with the McCain campaign. But how are the optics surrounding McCabe not equally disturbing? Or more disturbing?
By running the counterintelligence investigation and investigating Trump for obstruction of justice, McCabe accomplished three things at once:
He repaid a favor to McAuliffe for supporting his wife.
He helped legitimize the entire Russiagate investigation.
He kept investigative pressure on Trump—not on the Clintons and their endless stream of scandals.
JAMES COMEY
Former FBI director James Comey has more motives for spinning Russiagate and keeping the heat on Trump than almost anyone else in the Collusion Chorus. Let’s start with the ancient history: it’s easy to forget that one month before the 2016 election, Comey was the most hated man in Washington by Clinton-loving liberals. On October 28, 2016, eleven days before the November 9 national election, Comey quietly informed congressional leaders that he was temporarily reopening the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email probe, a decision he made after learning that Clinton consigliere Huma Abedin’s convicted pervert husband, Anthony Weiner, had a laptop computer that might have Clinton emails on it. News of the reopened investigation leaked and impacted the election immediately. By resurrecting the mystery of the missing emails, Comey inadvertently put Clinton back in the hot seat and knocked the front-runner off her game.
This botched investigation made Comey public enemy #1 among East Coast power brokers, the media elite and, no doubt, the man who had given him his job: Barack Obama. Democrats were howling for his head! His only path to redemption, then, was Russiagate and undermining Trump. Otherwise, he would be known among the East Coast elite as the clown who handed the election to Trump.
But fortunately for him and unfortunately for the country, Comey’s agency underlings allowed a bailout plan to progress. FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok opened an investigation into collusion between Trump and the Russians. As we shall see, Strzok, a virulently anti-Trump investigator, did great damage to the probe. And under Comey’s watch, Strzok’s operation went off the rails, abandoning operational practices and legal requirements in order to push the probe forward.
At a March 20, 2017, hearing, Republican New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik nailed Comey for ignoring established protocol. After getting Comey to admit that the FBI typically informs congressional leaders about high-profile investigations every quarter, she asked why the agency waited more than six months to provide a briefing on the Russia–Trump investigation.
“It was a matter of such sensitivity that we wouldn’t include it in the quarterly briefings,” Comey said during the hearing.21
Remember, when Comey went and briefed the president-elect in Trump Tower, he called the charges “salacious and unverified”—words that suggest he doubted the veracity of the allegations.
For the FBI to proceed with a FISA warrant request to spy on American citizens, they must follow the Woods Procedures. These are FISA verification rules named after Michael Woods, a former member of the FBI’s general counsel.
In 2003, then FBI director Robert Mueller described the Woods Procedures in a letter to Senator Patrick Leahy. Among the many notable things Mueller revealed—including how previous FISA applications contained inaccuracies and failed to note relevant details, such as one FISA target’s being a former informant—is: “The Woods procedures are used to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in the declaration.”22
Mueller went on: “By signing and swearing to the declaration, the headquarters agent is attesting to the knowledge of what is contained in the declaration.”
The agent’s name is redacted in the FISA request to spy on Carter Page that was granted on October 21, 2016. But the heavily redacted FISA application clearly has James Comey’s signature on page sixty-eight, certifying that the execution of the document was “in accordance with the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, as amended.” By signing, Comey was stating that the application complied with the Woods Procedures. But it didn’t.
There are strong indications that not everything was on the up-and-up. We now know that convicted Russian spies had concluded that Page wasn’t spy material—they even called Page an “idiot.” And we know that Carter Page had assisted our intelligence community in the apprehension of Russian spies in the past.23 We know that Christopher Steele, the allegedly “reliable source” of the “verified” FISA information, couldn’t keep his own story straight when he told Kathleen Kavalec of the State Department that Michael Cohen had traveled to Prague to co
ordinate the collusion scheme—yet just eight days later, Steele wrote a dossier memo to the FBI saying that his sources were “unsure” of the location of the Cohen meeting. Kind of a big detail to “forget,” no? We know that Steele told Kavalec that he wanted his information out before Election Day, obviously indicating that his motives were political, not related to security. We also know, thanks to Kavalec’s notes, that Steele mentioned Trubnikov and Surkov, two Putin allies with expertise in Russian disinformation, while discussing sources.
This evidence would have completely undercut the request in front of the FISA court, but no one at the court was ever notified about it. It was likely never included in the original FISA or the three FISA warrant renewals, although some of the warrant24 remains redacted. At least one published report, however, says that this is exactly what happened. Citing “congressional sources who have seen the unredacted document,” Real Clear Investigations reports that “the FBI omitted from its application to spy on Carter Page the fact that Russian spies had dismissed the former Trump campaign adviser as unreliable.”25
One more huge point was apparently excluded from the FISA warrant: that Steele was being paid by the Hillary Clinton team and the DNC. Glenn Simpson’s bill may have been paid by Perkins Coie lawyers, but the Clinton campaign and the DNC were paying the law firm. The original FISA warrant fails to reveal that specific connection, and simply states, “Source #1 [Steele]…was approached by an identified U.S. person [Simpson], who indicated to Source #1 that a U.S. law firm had hired the identified U.S. person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s [Trump’s] ties to Russia.”26
Everybody got that? Steele was approached by Simpson, who told him a law firm wanted Trump-Russia dirt. Simple, right?
But the deeper reality has been ignored. Here’s the rest of the FBI’s not-so-full disclosure:
(The identified U.S. Person and Source #1 have a longstanding business relationship.) The identified U.S. person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. Person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. Person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.27
Shouldn’t a judge have been presented with the fact that the source had been indirectly paid by Hillary Clinton, the opponent of the man for whom FISA target Carter Page worked?
Additionally, I have one more reason to believe that Comey signed at least one FISA warrant in bad faith. A well-placed insider on Capitol Hill has assured me that an FBI agent interviewed one of Christopher Steele’s Russian subsources and wrote up a 302—the FBI designation for an interview summary—that indicated the informant was untrustworthy and not telling the truth. According to my insider, Comey had seen the 302 or been told about it by January 2017 at the latest.
If this is true—and I believe it is—then Comey would seem to have violated the strict Woods Procedures. These FISA protocols require the inclusion of any information that might change the court’s view of a warrant. Because it was not mentioned that an FBI agent had discovered that one of Steele’s subsources was lying, these procedures were clearly violated.
The first FISA renewal occurred in January 2017, so we don’t know if Comey had heard this damning evaluation before signing off on that document. But he did sign off on April’s FISA with nary a mention of this. Why would he do that? He needed to keep the warrant open to investigate and impinge on the Trump presidency, not to investigate “collusion,” which he assuredly knew at this point was a hoax.
To be clear, Comey and his team needed the FISA warrant because it allowed the agency to spy not only on Page, but on anyone Page was in contact with—like those working on the Trump campaign—through the “two-hop rule,” a constitutional abnormality that allows the recipients of a FISA warrant to encircle almost anyone in a target’s entire network. In this case, that meant nearly everyone in the Trump campaign.
So the FISA declarations were fundamentally flawed, inaccurate, and in some cases easily debunked (such as the allegation that Michael Cohen went to Prague, and the failure to connect Simpson and Steele’s tainted research to the DNC and the Clinton campaign). Yet Comey’s team continued skirting FBI norms and procedures and playing fast and loose, failing to identify the connection between Simpson and Candidate #1’s (Trump’s) rival—Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC!
Speaking of playing fast and loose and abusing power, on December 13, 2018, Comey appeared on MSNBC and fragged himself by dropping the bombshell that he had sent FBI agents to the White House to interview National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
Sleazy Comey admitted that the interview had been arranged directly with Flynn and not through the White House counsel’s office. The hardball move—a kind of investigative drive-by—was, according to Comey, “something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more…organized administration.”28
“Gotten away with?”
The director of the FBI, with the power to ruin someone’s life and reputation, admits he pulled a fast one on the Trump administration. By getting Flynn to agree to an interview without his lawyers, the national security advisor walked right into Legal Jeopardy 101. And who masterminded that? James “Gotcha” Comey.
With all this malfeasance and all these anti-Trump maneuvers emanating from his office, Comey needed to keep the pressure on the president and off of himself. This is a guiding principle of many of the conflicted members of the Collusion Chorus. Their own records are so slimy and tainted that they resort to the oldest warfare strategy known to man: the best defense is a good offense.
ROD ROSENSTEIN
From almost the moment the Senate confirmed him as the deputy attorney general of the DOJ on April 25, 2017, Rod Rosenstein has been a flashpoint in Russiagate, the unlikely pivot man around which the plans to take down the president have kept swirling.
Rosenstein wrote the memo that the White House used to justify the May 9, 2017, firing of James Comey. “I wrote it. I believe it. I stand by it,” he later told Congress.29 But he wasn’t happy about it, according to Andrew McCabe, who described Rosenstein as “glassy-eyed.”
“He said it wasn’t his idea. The president had ordered him to write the memo justifying the firing,” McCabe writes in his book, The Threat. He also says Rosenstein feared he was being used by the Trump administration as a scapegoat for Comey’s firing.30
As if that weren’t enough excitement for his first weeks on the job, Rosenstein was also courting Robert Mueller to be Russiagate’s special counsel. At around the same time, Mueller’s name had reportedly landed on a list of possible candidates to replace Comey as FBI director, and the former G-man was called into the Oval Office to meet the president and Jeff Sessions.
The official story is that this was a job interview. But I smell a rat. I believe it was a job interview for the gig Rosenstein was offering.
Think about it: Mueller was Rosenstein’s old boss. They worked together when Rosenstein was an intern in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston where Mueller was the interim U.S. attorney. Then they worked together when Mueller headed the criminal division of the DOJ. They are associates. And being dragged into the “fire Comey” memo, Rosenstein was likely horrified by the outsider in the White House. Can’t you see it? He wanted his classic Washington, allegedly straight-arrow FBI buddy—Mueller—to witness the upheaval himself. Trump is all passion and gut instincts. Mueller is a cold, calculating, conservative Washington insider. Rosenstein knew that Mueller would think Trump was trouble for their cabal. He knew Mueller would view the job as saving America and sign on.
And that is exactly what happened.
Mueller never told the president or Jeff Sessions, who was also on hand, that he was considering another gig. The very next day, conveniently, Rosenstein announced that Mueller was the new special counsel.
This was a slap in the president’s face. Rosenstein didn’t just suddenly wake up that morning and say, “Hey, Bob, I just decided to make you the special investigator!” They had to have been planning it for a while.
It’s likely that Mueller wanted to meet the president. Otherwise, the professional thing to do would have been to delay that Oval Office meeting. But talking to Trump was probably a deal-clincher. After viewing his polar opposite inhabiting the White House, Mueller probably said, “Sign me up!”
But the real controversy for Rosenstein is that he signed off on the last renewal of the original Russiagate FISA warrant. (FISA warrants expire after ninety days. If you want an extension to spy on suspected foreign agents, a new application must be submitted for each renewal.)
Here’s the catch: when the FISA warrant was first renewed and signed by Comey in January 2017, it must have been pretty clear that those juicy details provided by the merchants of dishonesty, Simpson and Steele, were actually garbage. The FBI interviewed one of Steele’s “sources” and determined that the source was illegitimate. Steele seems to have admitted to Kavalec that he used Russian disinformation specialists as sources, and Steele couldn’t remember his own story with regard to Cohen’s infamous Prague trip. Sergei Millian had been exposed as a charlatan who promoted his nonexistent ties to Trump. Michael Cohen denied he had ever been to Prague and offered his passport as evidence. (Note: News source McClatchy reported on December 27, 2018, that evidence had been shared with Mueller indicating that Cohen’s cell phone was detected in Prague. This has not been reported anywhere else. It sure would be nice if Simpson and Steele revealed their “sources” who fed them bad information.) The supposed kompromat (compromising information) never materialized. And Simpson and Steele’s connections to the DNC and Clinton were uncovered.