The Cost, page 4
Attorney General William Barr states: “It’s been stunning that all we have gotten from the mainstream media is sort of bovine silence in the face of the complete collapse of the so-called Russiagate scandal, which they did all they could to sensationalize and drive.
“And it’s like not even a ‘whoops,’ ” he continued. “They are just on to the next false scandal.”
Barr adds that it “has been surprising to me that people aren’t concerned about civil liberties and the integrity of our governmental process.”5
What follows is the story of the historic corruption and abuse of federal power, enabled and encouraged by news organizations that abandoned journalistic principle in the pursuit of ideological ends.
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In 2016, supporters of Hillary Clinton began circulating a bogus dossier of smears alleging that Trump had been compromised by the Russian government. The creation of the dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee during a presidential election year. They used a law firm called Perkins Coie, which hired a company called Fusion GPS to build the dossier against their opponent. The author of the dossier, former British spy Christopher Steele, was staunchly opposed to Trump. Steele’s information came from a “Primary Sub-source” who by 2017 had told FBI agents that some of the most sensational claims were simply made in “jest.”6
This effort to brand Clinton’s opponent a traitor didn’t prevent her defeat in the 2016 presidential race. But it helped inspire Trump’s adversaries in Washington to turn the national security machinery of the federal government against American citizens participating in politics. To employ the surveillance tools usually reserved for terrorists and other foreign enemies against an associate of Donald J. Trump, U.S. government officials committed a series of frauds upon a federal court and the American people.
It would take until December 2019—almost three full years into Trump’s presidential term—for the Justice Department’s inspector general to lay out Steele’s connections to Russian oligarchs. This information had been sitting in the FBI’s own files but was ignored in the quest to make a collusion case against Trump. Not until April 2020 did the public learn that even before Trump took office the FBI began receiving intelligence reports saying not only that key dossier claims were false but that they had been invented by the Russian government.7 After years of political warfare fueled by accusations against Trump, the U.S. election meddler with Russia ties turned out to be Hillary Clinton.
This doesn’t mean that anyone should “lock her up.” It may be immoral but it’s not illegal to share self-serving unverified rumors with the FBI and urge an investigation to determine if your political rival is conspiring with a foreign government. The greatest fault lies with those in government who accepted this reckless partisan scheme and used it to assault the U.S. political system and individual liberty. It’s time for a reckoning to ensure this never happens again.
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Director James Comey’s Federal Bureau of Investigation said that it officially began targeting Trump campaign associates in July 2016 with the opening of a case called “Crossfire Hurricane.” We say “officially” because it is unlikely that that was the true start of the investigation, as we’ll discuss later. What’s not in dispute is that, almost thirty-two months later, special counsel Robert Mueller reported to the Justice Department that he’d found no evidence of anyone in the Trump campaign colluding with Russians.
The absence of evidence wasn’t for lack of trying by the special counsel. Mueller took over the Russia investigation in May 2017 after Comey’s firing sparked calls for an independent inquiry. Mueller stacked his team with activist Democrats, including generous donors to Obama and Clinton campaigns and staff who had been promoting the collusion narrative long before they went to work for Mueller. In May 2020 an embarrassed Biden for President campaign would cancel a fundraiser featuring top Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann. But it was too late to hide the fact that Trump had been investigated by ideological opponents.
What’s also now clear is that, months before Mueller was hired in 2017 and before Trump was even inaugurated, FBI officials already knew they had no collusion case. Richard Grenell, as acting director of national intelligence in 2020, declassified voluminous witness testimony proving the government never had any collusion evidence. Says Grenell: “The Russian investigation had all sorts of red flags from the beginning and when you look at the transcripts, when you look at the declassified footnotes from some of the investigations, it’s clear that there were multiple people from multiple agencies that were raising red flags. However… those red flags and those voices were pushed aside, classified, and never shown to the public. And so very few people knew the truth…”8
Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz, who was appointed to his post by President Barack Obama, has been documenting the numerous problems with Steele and his dossier, including the many reasons not to believe it. Democrats weren’t Steele’s only clients.
“Steele had multiple contacts with representatives of Russian oligarchs with connections to Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) and senior Kremlin officials,” reports the inspector general.9
“Steele’s frequent contacts with Russian oligarchs in 2015 had raised concerns in the FBI Transnational Organized Crime Intelligence Unit,” adds the IG’s report, but this information wasn’t even shared with members of the FBI team using Steele’s reporting to investigate the Trump campaign.10
The December 2019 inspector general’s report described questions related to a particular unnamed ally of Russian ruler Vladimir Putin: “We asked Steele about whether he had a relationship with Russian Oligarch 1. Steele stated that he did not have a relationship and indicated that he had met Russian Oligarch 1 one time. He explained that he worked for Russian Oligarch l’s attorney on litigation matters that involved Russian Oligarch 1 but that he could not provide ‘specifics’ about them for confidentiality reasons.”11 So, according to Steele, he did not have a relationship with someone who was funding his work?
As for his infamous dossier, Steele wasn’t actually doing much work at all. “Steele himself was not the originating source of any of the factual information in his reporting,” says the inspector general’s report.12 Steele had farmed out the task of reporting to somebody else and Steele never told the FBI who it was.13
To summarize, an anti-Trump former foreign spy whose clients included representatives of a Russian oligarch and the Hillary Clinton campaign provided the critical evidence in the collusion investigation from a source he did not disclose.
Believe it or not, this was enough—along with the suppression of exculpatory evidence—to get a wiretap on an associate of the Trump campaign named Carter Page. Some Trump opponents have spent years pretending that Steele’s dossier was just one part of a huge mosaic of solid evidence justifying the surveillance and the overall investigation.
But the Obama-appointed inspector general found that without Steele’s claims there would have been no Justice Department request for a wiretap under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: “We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016, played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.”14
The inspector general’s report notes that before the use of the Steele dossier, the FBI general counsel’s office and the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence had rejected the idea of seeking a wiretap on Page in August of 2016. There wasn’t enough information to support a probable cause finding that Page was an agent of a foreign power.15 And there wasn’t enough information to support a probable cause finding against anyone else associated with Trump, which was why the FBI focused on Page.
Not that the use of Steele’s dossier was the only abuse of Carter Page. The government successfully applied for a warrant to spy on him in the fall of 2016 and then persuaded the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to grant a series of renewals. According to the Office of the Inspector General, “We identified significant inaccuracies and omissions in each of the four applications—7 in the first FISA application and a total of 17 by the final renewal application.”16
The FBI had stacked the deck against Page. The IG reports: “As a result of the 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions we identified, relevant information was not shared with, and consequently not considered by, important Department decision makers and the court, and the FISA applications made it appear as though the evidence supporting probable cause was stronger than was actually the case. We also found basic, fundamental, and serious errors during the completion of the FBI’s factual accuracy reviews, known as the Woods Procedures, which are designed to ensure that FISA applications contain a full and accurate presentation of the facts.”17
More than a year before the Obama-appointed inspector general made this report, then U.S. representative John Ratcliffe said the same thing on the Fox News program Sunday Morning Futures. To obtain the warrant to surveil Carter Page, the FBI had only shown the court evidence that bolstered its case, without disclosing facts that called it into question.18 By then much of the press corps had already decided to buy the narrative from Trump opponents, regardless of the burgeoning evidence of FBI abuses.
Speaking of these abuses, they went far beyond omitting evidence favorable to Carter Page. Not satisfied with hiding the facts, at least one FBI attorney altered exculpatory evidence and made it appear incriminating. Among advisers to the Trump campaign, Page was attractive as a target to the FBI because he did business in Russia and he’d met with some shady characters there. These facts could go a long way toward persuading a judge that Page was a Russian agent—as long as the judge never learned the truth: Page had been working with the CIA. Helping a U.S. intelligence agency collect information on the Russians should have earned Page the thanks of a grateful nation. Spying on Putin’s Russia is dangerous work. But the FBI not only never told the court he was assisting the good guys; the bureau falsely presented some of his helpful activities as evidence he was helping the bad guys.
The same falsehood was leaked to the press. “I kept getting these calls from reporters throughout the summer of 2016 asking about these totally false allegations which Fusion G.P.S. and their consultants were doing for the DNC,” he says. Were Democrats trying to muddy him up to justify the investigation? “Exactly. Well, really, to muddy then-candidate Trump up,” Page concludes.19
Some FBI officials no doubt noticed that instead of lawyering up and staying silent, Page was publicly insisting that the claims against him were false. Before the last renewal for wiretap authority in 2017, after Page had disclosed his actual role in the press, the FBI worked even harder to mislead. An FBI lawyer had received an email from another government agency confirming that Page had indeed served as a source for U.S. intelligence. Inspector General Horowitz reports that the FBI lawyer then “altered the email that the other U.S. government agency had sent” so that it appeared to state that Page had not been a source. The inspector general adds that the FBI lawyer then forwarded the doctored email to a supervisor. Shortly thereafter, a supervisor “served as the affiant on the final renewal application, which was again silent on Page’s prior relationship with the other U.S. government agency.”20
The FBI lawyer who altered the record is named Kevin Clinesmith. He’s among a number of anti-Trump staff who later joined the Mueller investigation and then left after the exposure of a series of texts demonstrating extreme bias against Donald Trump and his supporters. After the Trump victory in the 2016 election, Clinesmith had texted a colleague, “viva la resistance.”21
The falsifying of evidence against Page was among the reasons Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued a public order on December 17, 2019, demanding that the FBI report on what it was doing to ensure accurate applications that include all material facts.22
That description certainly didn’t apply to the FBI’s applications to wiretap Page. Officials never told the court that Clinton and the Democrats paid for the dossier and never fully disclosed Steele’s Russian connections. The FBI also falsely suggested that Steele had not been the source of a Yahoo! News report about Page, so the story appeared to corroborate Steele’s claims.23
From the fall of 2016 until the early summer of 2017, the FBI requested and received a series of surveillance authorizations on Page without telling the court that the thin, misleading evidence it had presented was becoming even less believable.
Steele never told the FBI who had actually collected the information for his dossier. But the FBI did manage to find this person by January 2017 and in the course of conversations over several months learned that the information was garbage. In the language of intelligence, this person was the “Primary Sub-source” who had drawn on a “network of sources”—which may have sounded authoritative, but when the FBI found this person, the source said it wasn’t so much a network of sources “but rather friends with whom he/she has conversations about current events and government relations,” according to a footnote from the inspector general’s report, which was finally declassified in April of 2020.24
Even if one were inclined to believe this anonymous person passing on comments from anonymous friends, it turned out that the whole anonymous crew was being misquoted. In January of 2017, according to the inspector general’s office, “the Primary Sub-source told the FBI that he/she had not seen Steele’s reports until they became public that month” and indicated that “Steele misstated or exaggerated the Primary Sub-source’s statements in multiple sections of the reporting.” For example, one story described as “confirmed” by Steele was, in the words of the source, “rumor and speculation.”25
During a March 2017 interview, “the Primary Sub-source said he/she made it clear to Steele that he/she had no proof to support the statements from his/her sub-sources and that ‘it was just talk.’ ” An FBI agent reported that the Primary Sub-source said the information came from “word of mouth and hearsay,” conversations “with friends over beers” and that comments about Trump’s alleged sexual activities, were made in “jest.”26 Looking back now in 2020, current Attorney General William Barr observes that “the dossier pretty much collapsed at that point—and yet they continued to use it as a basis for pursuing this counterintelligence investigation.”27
The Steele information wasn’t credible, but it wasn’t necessarily the result of fun and games in 2016. U.S. intelligence later reported that Russian intelligence services were aware of Steele’s effort to compile his dossier material as early as July 2016.28 The FBI was warned as early as January 2017 that Russian intelligence appeared to be feeding false information to Steele.
A recently declassified footnote from the IG report states:
A January 12, 2017, report relayed information from [REDACTED] outlining an inaccuracy in a limited subset of Steele’s reporting.… The [REDACTED] stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations. A second report from the same [REDACTED] five days later stated that a person named in the limited subset of Steele’s reporting had denied representations in the reporting and the [REDACTED] assessed that the person’s denials were truthful. A [U.S. Intelligence Community] report dated February 27, 2017, contained information about an individual with reported connections to Trump and Russia who claimed that the public reporting about the details of Trump’s sexual activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were false, and that they were the product of [Russian Intelligence Services] “infiltrat[ing] a source into the network” of a [REDACTED] who compiled a dossier of information on Trump’s activities.29
Essentially the collusion case had collapsed by early 2017, its core evidence exposed as discredited barroom humor or worse. Yet the FBI leadership continued to seek wiretap renewals without telling FISA judges the truth—and continued to feed reporters an empty conspiracy tale.
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Despite the collapse of the case as Trump was taking office, former Obama administration officials and Trump adversaries in Congress would spend years misleading the public with televised allegations and dark conspiracy theories even as many of them were admitting privately under oath that they hadn’t seen any collusion evidence. A parade of former senior intelligence and law enforcement officials from the Obama administration took turns condemning Trump on CNN and MSNBC. But when the cameras were turned off, their stories changed.
Current director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe was in Congress at the time trying to get to the bottom of the collusion con. In September 2018 he would appear on Fox Business Network to review the history: “More than seventy witnesses appeared before the House Intelligence Committee. All of them were asked the same question, ‘What evidence do you have of Russian collusion with Donald Trump, or the Trump campaign? What evidence do you have of conspiracy? What evidence do you have of coordination?’… And they all said, ‘We don’t have any.’ ”30
Yet, until the 2020 release of interview transcripts confirmed this fact, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, led by Representative Adam Schiff of California, spent years pretending they were uncovering damning evidence about the president.
If the collusion case was dead by January of 2017, the business of printing dubious collusion stories was alive and well. In fact, 2017 was the year that reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post published a series of stories that would receive their industry’s most coveted award, the Pulitzer Prize.
