The Plot Against the President Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Lee Smith

  Jacket design by Timothy Shaner

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group.

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  First Edition: October 2019

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-1-5460-8502-7 (hardcover), 978-1-5460-8501-0 (ebook)

  E3-20190918-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART ONE: THE OPERATION

  1. “OBJECTIVE MEDUSA”

  2. ENEMIES OF THE STATE

  3. FRAMING TRUMP: THE RUSSIA JOB

  4. THE PROTODOSSIERS

  5. THE FUSION RUSSIANS

  6. THE AVATAR

  7. THE INSURANCE POLICY

  8. OBAMA’S DOSSIER

  9. THE PRESS BREAKS

  10. BLOOD IN THE WATER

  11. BECOMING DEEP THROAT

  12. THE VALLEY OF DEATH

  PART TWO: INVESTIGATING THE INVESTIGATORS

  13. OBJECTIVE MEDUSA ON OFFENSE

  14. THE PAPER COUP

  15. DIRTY COPS

  16. THE DEEP STATE DIGS IN

  17. THE DECOY

  18. THE NUNES MEMO

  19. THE CAVALRY ARRIVES

  20. THE FORGERS

  21. THE HARVEST

  22. THE POSSESSED

  23. A RECKONING

  24. CONVICTIONS

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Notes

  To my wife Catherine

  And to all the families put through this trial by ordeal

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  PART ONE

  THE OPERATION

  Chapter 1

  “OBJECTIVE MEDUSA”

  “WELCOME,” said Congressman Devin Nunes, “to the last gasp of the Russian collusion conspiracy theory.”

  It was July 24, 2019, the first time he’d come face to face with Special Counsel Robert Mueller III. And now their meeting was taking place in public, on Capitol Hill, in front of millions of people watching at home on television. At least half the audience had their hopes pinned on Mueller. The former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been appointed in May 2017 to continue the Bureau’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He represented what had once been the best chance of changing the outcome of the election by bringing down Trump.

  What had stopped him was Nunes. The former chairman and now ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee had been studying the Russia-Trump collusion investigation for nearly two and a half years. Nunes had discovered, and produced evidence, that the FBI and Department of Justice had abused the resources of the federal government to spy on Donald J. Trump, his campaign, his transition team, and his presidency.

  Nunes knew that the FBI had no collusion case against Trump. The FBI had no evidence, except for political dirt paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

  With Nunes closing off avenues, Mueller had to adjust. He turned it into an obstruction investigation, which had lasted nearly two years until Attorney General William Barr had shut that down, too. Like Nunes, Barr understood that Mueller was running an operation, not an investigation.

  On March 22, 2019, Mueller produced his final report. After spending more than $30 million and employing dozens of attorneys and FBI agents, the special counsel found no evidence that Trump or his associates had colluded with Russia. Nonetheless, Mueller’s devotees found hope in the report insinuating that the president might have obstructed justice. Democrats summoned him to testify before Congress in an effort to bring the report to life, a television reenactment that might with luck lead to Trump’s impeachment. After a long career in public service, the seventy-four-year-old Mueller’s last act was as a political mannequin.

  He surely wasn’t there to answer real questions about the investigation, the questions that Nunes had been asking since March 2017: When did the investigation start? Based on what evidence? Under whose authority? What other US agencies or departments were involved? Which US governmental personnel had a hand in the operation? How high did it go? How many spies were sent against Trump’s presidential campaign?

  Mueller brushed any probing questions aside. They weren’t, as he said repeatedly, “in his purview.” The special counsel stumbled over even friendly questions. He claimed ignorance of important investigative details. He appeared not to know much of what was in the report that carried his name.

  Nunes read from a prepared statement:

  In March 2017, Democrats on this committee said they had “more than circumstantial evidence” of collusion, but they couldn’t reveal it yet. Mr. Mueller was soon appointed, and they said he would find the collusion.

  Then when no collusion was found in Mr. Mueller’s indictments, the Democrats said we’d find it in his final report.

  Then when there was no collusion in the report, we were told Attorney General Barr was hiding it.

  Then when it was clear Barr wasn’t hiding anything, we were told it will be revealed through a hearing with Mr. Mueller himself.

  And now that Mr. Mueller is here, they are claiming that the collusion has actually been in his report all along, hidden in plain sight.

  Mueller started impassively at Nunes as the congressman concluded his speech. “It’s time for the curtain to close on the Russia hoax,” said Nunes. “The conspiracy theory is dead.”

  Nunes spoke the truth for those with ears to hear it. It was the American voter who chose Trump, not Putin. The efforts to undermine Trump’s candidacy, destroy his presidency, and criminalize political differences were also attacks on American institutions and the American public. No one had risked more to tell the truth than Nunes. His strange odyssey had started precisely two years before Mueller filed his final report.

  On March 22, 2017, Nunes was on his way to the White House to tell Trump about what he’d seen. The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) looked alarmed. What concerned him that afternoon wasn’t a hostile action taken by foreign adversaries, terrorists, or the intelligence services of a rogue nation-state; rather, it was something that American spies had done to Americans. Nunes had seen evidence of a plot against the president.

  Earlier in the month, the recently inaugurated Trump had written on Twitter that his predecessor had spied on him: “Just found out that Obama had my wires tapped in Trump Tower just before the victory.”

  Trump’s statements regularly touched off a firestorm. His opponents found cau
se to denounce his every utterance even as the same words rallied his supporters. But this was different. He’d accused the president of the United States of spying on a political campaign, his. It was unthinkable. Yet sources had shown Nunes that Barack Obama administration officials had asked for the identities of Trump transition team members to be unredacted from intelligence reports.

  Typically, the identities—names, titles, and so on—of US citizens are redacted, i.e., “masked,” to protect their privacy rights. Unmasking is not illegal, and there are legitimate reasons to ask for the identity of an American to be unmasked. But Nunes had seen evidence of an extensive campaign of unmaskings, for no apparent purpose except to spy on the Trump team.

  Nunes, wearing a blue pin-striped suit, approached a group of several dozen reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen assembled at the bottom of a staircase in the Capitol Hill Visitor Center. He stood at a narrow lectern with a dozen microphones to accommodate all the media. The event was carried live on several networks. He unfolded a prepared statement and began.

  While I said there was not a physical wiretap of Trump Tower, I was concerned that other surveillance activities were used against President Trump and his associates. First, I recently confirmed on numerous occasions, the US intelligence community incidentally collected information about US citizens in the Trump transition. Details about US persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting. I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition team members were unmasked. Fourth and finally, I want to be clear, none of the surveillance was related to Russia or the investigation of Russian activities, or of the Trump team.

  The Obama administration had unmasked the identities of Trump associates. The wide dissemination of information identifying them had increased the likelihood that it would be leaked to the media.

  Nunes had touched on the essence of what would eventually be understood as the political operation to destroy Trump. It began in the winter of 2015–2016. It consisted of two components, intertwined.

  One involved senior Obama officials from the US law enforcement and intelligence communities as well as the diplomatic corps. They had used electronic surveillance and confidential human sources to spy on and entrap the Trump team. They had leaked classified information to the press to portray Trump and his circle as compromised by hidden ties to the Russian government. That was a political espionage campaign, often conducted clandestinely.

  The other component was the media campaign. The press had published leaks of classified intelligence as well as political dirt provided by Clinton operatives to build an echo chamber smearing Trump as a Russian agent.

  The operation had had two separate legs: it was designed, first, to undermine his campaign; after Trump won, the operation continued, but now its goal was to bring down the president.

  Nunes continued:

  The House Intelligence Committee will thoroughly investigate surveillance and its subsequent dissemination to determine… who was aware of it? Why was it not disclosed to Congress? Who requested the additional unmasking? Whether anyone directed the intelligence community to focus on Trump associates. And whether any laws and regulations and procedures were violated.

  When Nunes left Capitol Hill for the White House that afternoon, everything changed. He’d just begun to scratch the surface of a scandal that would split the country. The media attacks on him started immediately.

  “Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth?” asked MSNBC analyst Elise Jordan. “A former dairy farmer who House Intel staffers refer to as ‘Secret Agent Man,’ because he has no idea what’s going on.”

  Roll Call’s David Hawkings dismissed him as a rube: “The match between his backstory and his prominence seems wholly incongruous, and helps underscore the perception that Nunes is cavalierly playing at a very high-stakes game while in way over his head.”

  The “resistance” eventually targeted his family as well, with political operatives paid millions of dollars to destroy him. Nunes was no longer just a public figure, the representative from California’s Twenty-second Congressional District. He’d become, as Theodore Roosevelt put it, “a man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”

  Crawdaddy’s is a large restaurant with a big horseshoe-shaped bar and live music at the end of Main Street in Visalia, California. Two years after Nunes’s journey began, I’m there with him and a group of his friends—Ray Appleton, a radio talk show host, and the Kapetan brothers—listening to the house band.

  The lead singer, in a dark bob haircut, go-go boots, and a miniskirt, is belting out covers. The band’s led by another of the congressman’s buddies, the restaurant’s owner, Keith Korsgaden, on guitar. They’re good, say Nunes’s friends, all musicians.

  During a pause in the music, a man with a graying beard in a black turtleneck walks up to the stage, has a quick word with the band, then turns to the audience. “This next one,” he says into the mike, pointing at Nunes, “is for you.” Nunes looks up from his plate and freezes. Was this another protestor, part of the camp that regularly denounces him at protests staged outside his local offices?

  Keith rips into the first few licks of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and the singer tips his driving cap toward Nunes. “I was born,” he sings, “in a crossfire hurricane.”

  A surprised smile passes across Nunes’s face, and he nods back. The crowd erupts in cheers.

  “Crossfire Hurricane” is the name that the FBI gave to the investigation it opened on the Trump campaign. The probe was named not after the Stones’ 1968 classic but rather the 1986 Penny Marshall film Jumpin’ Jack Flash.

  In the late-Cold-War-era comedy, a quirky bank officer played by Whoopi Goldberg comes to the aid of Jonathan Pryce, who plays a British spy being chased by the KGB.

  The FBI’s code name alludes to the former British spy whose allegedly Russian-sourced reports documented the Trump team’s supposed ties to the Kremlin, ex–MI6 agent Christopher Steele.

  Hired by Clinton campaign operatives to smear Trump, Steele is credited with authoring a thirty-five-page collection of memos, the “Steele Dossier,” that the FBI used to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump and his associates. Informants were also sent to spy on and entrap the Trump team.

  The dirty tricks operation turned into an attempted coup after Trump’s election. Since he was elected without the consensus of the ruling party representing the coastal elite, Barack Obama’s intelligence chiefs, including CIA director John Brennan, FBI director James Comey, and FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, as well as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, believed that his election was illegitimate. It was permissible, they believed, to remove him from office.

  They’d justify it by continuing the FBI’s investigation and expanding on the Clinton campaign’s dirty tricks operation contending that Trump was controlled by a foreign power, Russia.

  Brennan initiated the coup with an official report produced by his handpicked team of analysts. Their January 2017 intelligence community assessment claimed that Russian president Vladimir Putin himself had interfered with the election to help Trump win.

  Comey’s March 2017 congressional testimony set up the president for a series of traps intended to bring obstruction charges leading to Trump’s ouster. After Comey’s dismissal in May 2017, Mueller was named special counsel and inherited control of the FBI’s investigation and therefore the coup. His job was to fulfill Comey’s mission and continue the investigation until he could trap the president in an obstruction of justice charge.

  The crowd at Crawdaddy’s understood that for two years, Nunes had been the only thing standing in the way of the coup called “Crossfire Hurricane.”

  It’s early spring in Tulare, California, Nunes’s hometown. The snowcapped peaks of the Sierra Nevada will so
on melt and fill the Central Valley with the water that makes it the world’s most fertile agricultural region. “It’s the breadbasket of the solar system,” Nunes says, smiling.

  We’re driving by what used to be the Tagus Ranch, the 7,000-acre fruit farm that was the destination for thousands of migrants who fled the midwestern dust bowl for California in the 1930s. Much of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was set around Tulare. Nunes’s ancestors preceded the Oklahomans by decades, but even today some of his family members speak with that same drawl.

  The Nunes family is originally from the Azores, an autonomous region of Portugal consisting of a chain of islands 850 miles west of the Iberian Peninsula. “It’s a beautiful place but also a tough place to live,” says Nunes. “You never starve, but you never have a lot either.”

  In the late nineteenth century, his ancestors left their small farms in the Azores for small farms in the San Joaquin Valley and helped settle the land. “The Azoreans are tough people,” says Nunes. “They have to be—living in the middle of the Atlantic, they’re isolated and know they have to count on themselves.”

  The Nunes family was poor but always made it through, even through the depression. “My ninety-nine-year-old grandmother will tell you they had everything they needed,” says Nunes. “They had a small farm, and they were growing what they needed, and they survived.”

  Nunes was born in Tulare on October 1, 1973, and grew up on the family farm. He attended Tulare Union High School, earned an associate degree at College of the Sequoias, then his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture at Cal Poly, San Louis Obispo, about a two-hour drive southwest from Tulare.

  The congressman has the self-deprecating humor of a Jimmy Stewart character. Tall at six feet, one inch, a family man, and slow to anger, Nunes is relentless in pursuit. “I raised cattle as a teenager,” he says. “My father broke away from the family farm and started his own business—he was a sharecropper. My mother kept the books. He encouraged us to get out on my own, so my brother, Anthony, and I started a harvesting business. I bought my own farm and tended row crops while I was still working on the family’s farm.”