The Plot Against the President Read online

  He later sold the farm and used the profits to invest in Alpha Omega, a maker of world-class wines in Napa Valley.

  In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed him California state director of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development section. He was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2002, promising to take on environmentalists who wanted to divert water into the ocean and choke the soil.

  Chance rules farm life. Contingency drives the luckless off the land and shapes the stalwart. Farmers are hard not by nature but to weather the nature that determines their fate. If it rains, your crops grow; if it rains too much, they rot; if it doesn’t rain, you starve. It is a career of black and white; things are, or they are not.

  Nunes says that sensibility shaped his understanding and actions during the last two years. The collusion narrative was nonsense, cover for something else that was going on. He read the terrain quickly.

  What he had to learn along the way was how to manage a team in the midst of a crisis like no one had seen before—a coup against a US president.

  Nunes assembled a number of distinct and complementary talents: former intelligence officials who knew how to find and identify evidence of corruption; lawyers deeply knowledgeable about esoteric congressional procedures; experts on the history of intelligence; a former DOJ national security prosecutor, Kash Patel, who knew the nature of the enemy—his former colleagues; his communications director, Jack Langer, who went on offense against the hostile press corps; and the late Damon Nelson, the HPSCI staff director, who kept the team together during its hardest times. They called their wide-ranging investigation of the myriad abuses and crimes committed by senior US officials “Objective Medusa.”

  For nearly two years, Nunes’s team pulled at the threads of the operation and found widespread corruption at the top levels of the federal government. They had to press forward carefully to hold the ground they’d won. The rogue law enforcement and intelligence officials, Clinton operatives, Obama aides, and the press were waiting for them to make a mistake.

  “Every time we took a shot,” says Nunes, “we had to hit them between the eyes.”

  The Objective Medusa team rarely missed.

  They discovered in October 2017 that the Steele Dossier had been funded by the Clinton campaign. A February 2018 report known as the “Nunes Memo” laid out how the dossier had been used as evidence to obtain the FISA.

  The Objective Medusa team discovered the role played by DOJ official Bruce Ohr and his wife, Nellie, in pushing the anti-Trump operation.

  Objective Medusa uncovered the role State Department officials played in the anti-Trump operation.

  Nunes’s team won release of the text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, that gave evidence of the extent and nature of the anti-Trump operation. They found that Strzok’s “insurance policy” text referred to something specific the FBI had done to obtain the spy warrant.

  Objective Medusa investigators pushed to find out how many spies the intelligence community had sent after the Trump campaign.

  They set up a congressional task force to widen the investigation into the corrupt FBI investigators who had tried to frame Trump.

  Finally, they asked the president to declassify federal law enforcement documents giving further evidence of Deep State corruption.

  In giving their full accounting of the abuses and crimes committed during the FBI’s investigation of Trump, Nunes and his team returned the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) to its origins: investigating the abuses and possible crimes committed by American spies.

  “The committee started in 1977,” says Nunes’s communications director, Jack Langer. “The House of Representatives passed a resolution to set up a committee monitoring the intelligence community in the wake of widespread abuses. The CIA, FBI, NSA, and others were spying on Americans.”

  In 1975, two congressional investigatory panels were tasked to look into allegations of intelligence community (IC) abuses: the Church Committee, led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, and the Pike Committee, chaired by Representative Otis Pike of New York. The two panels established permanent committees in both houses that would be responsible for constitutional oversight of the US intelligence community: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and HPSCI.

  “It was a pretty quiet committee before the 2016 elections,” says Langer. Much of HPSCI’s work involves authorizing spending for the intelligence community and providing it with necessary support and assistance. “The public wasn’t really following what we do, and if the press had questions for us, we usually couldn’t comment, since most of our work is classified.”

  Nunes and his Democratic counterpart on the committee, Adam Schiff, worked well together the last two years of the Obama administration. As late as 2016, the two said good things about each other on the House floor. That changed when Trump was elected and Schiff lost his bearings.

  Nunes’s March 2017 trip to tell the White House he’d seen evidence of spying on the Trump team was the opening move in a protracted struggle to bring the truth to light.

  I’ve asked Nunes several times if he ever thought of walking away and just leaving the whole thing alone for someone else to deal with. “No,” he says. “Never. Not once. I knew the more times they came after me, the more they hit me, I knew that I was right over the target.”

  Lots of people know they’re right, but not everyone is willing to pay the price for it.

  “What happens if you don’t do the right thing?” says Nunes. “I wasn’t raised that way. How do you look yourself in the mirror? How do you explain to yourself five, ten years down the road that you could have done something but you didn’t?”

  This book is an effort to present the known, as well as previously unreported, details in the anti-Trump operation. The basic outline of the story, however, is shockingly simple. Hillary Clinton’s campaign used political operatives and dirty cops to frame her opponent. When she lost, Obama officials employed the resources of the federal government to try to topple President Trump.

  What readers may find surprising in this account is the extent of the role of the press. The media weren’t simply partisan or lazy or complicit—they have been an integral component of both legs of the operation from the beginning until the present. All in all, it is a tragic story about criminality, corruption, and a conspiracy of lies at the highest levels of important US institutions that were designed to keep the public safe, such as the FBI, and free, such as the press. But there is another story running parallel to that account, and that is a story about a small handful of Americans, public servants, who stood up, assumed responsibility, and did the right thing at a crucial time.

  “If it weren’t for eight people,” Patel tells me over a beer one snowy evening in Washington, “no one would know what happened.”

  The Objective Medusa team was outgunned by a confederation with unlimited financial resources and far superior numbers: the national security bureaucracy, political operatives, and the majority of the press. Still, they brought the truth to light. This story credits them for their actions and courage and, I hope, may give some readers cause for optimism in what looks like a dark moment in our history and even inspire others.

  To tell that story, for nearly two years I spoke with Nunes, Patel, Langer, and other Objective Medusa investigators who could not speak on the record. What they accomplished together speaks for all of them: they uncovered the biggest political scandal in American history.

  Chapter 2

  ENEMIES OF THE STATE

  DEVIN NUNES and Kash Patel dispute the FBI’s claims that the Trump investigation began on July 31, 2016. “We actually think it began in late 2015, early 2016,” says Nunes.

  It’s winter 2019, and I’m sitting in a sushi restaurant in downtown Washington with the congressman and Kashyap “Kash” Patel, the former DOJ prosecutor who led much of the House Intelligence Committee’s
investigation of the FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia probe.

  An athletically built thirty-nine-year-old with a dark, close-cropped beard, Patel was born to Indian parents who had moved from Africa, Uganda, and Tanzania, to Jackson Heights, Queens, a New York City melting pot of Indian, Asian, Latin American, and African immigrants. After graduating from the University of Richmond, he went to law school in New York. He moved to Miami and became a public defender before taking a job in Washington.

  “I was a terrorism prosecutor at Main Justice,” says Patel, referring to DOJ headquarters. “It was a great place, a dream job, going after bad guys with great colleagues. Running those counterterrorism operations gave me a profound respect and love for the department and the FBI.”

  During his time at DOJ, Patel also served as a civilian in the military at Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). “I worked alongside our Tier 1 special forces community conducting global targeting operations,” he says. “It was one of the greatest honors of my career.”

  At Main Justice, he worked with many of the same people he would come to investigate as part of Nunes’s team. After spending nearly two years investigating the origins of the Russia collusion investigation, Patel agrees that the anti-Trump operation began in winter 2015–2016.

  “January 2016,” says Patel, “is when Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, and Bruce Ohr start speaking together about a bunch of things they’re up to.” Their business concerns were related to Russia and Trump.

  Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and founder of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, Steele, a former British intelligence officer, and Ohr, a senior Justice Department official, are central figures in the anti-Trump operation. They’d known each other for years, sometimes working together. Simpson met Steele in 2009, shortly after they separately started private research firms. Steele and Ohr met in 2007. Simpson and Ohr first met around 2010 at networking events. In the early winter of 2016, their career paths intersected again as they engaged in an email correspondence regarding a number of Russia-related business concerns.

  After ending his government career on the Russia desk in London, Steele picked up a number of Russia-related jobs in the British capital, home of a large Russian diaspora. He was hired, for instance, to lobby on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian government–linked aluminum magnate. Deripaska’s US visa had been withdrawn years before due to his alleged ties to organized crime. In January 2016, Steele notified Ohr that the situation seemed close to resolution and asked him to monitor developments. Ohr told him he’d “keep an eye on it.”

  That Steele, the author of the reports alleging Trump’s ties to the Kremlin, was himself lobbying a DOJ official on behalf of a Putin-allied oligarch was peculiar enough. The early 2016 manifestation of the anti-Trump plot’s central network of Steele, Ohr, and Simpson shows that the operation was seeded long before the FBI says it initiated the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.

  Indeed, Simpson had hired Ohr’s wife, Nellie, in October 2015 to compile research on Trump, his family, his aides, and their business ties to Russian and other former Eastern Bloc individuals and institutions.

  That was only part of the Ohrs’ role in the operation. Along with Steele, the husband-and-wife team was a conduit for information passed between Fusion GPS and the small FBI team that managed the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. The Crossfire Hurricane group consisted of a handful of FBI officials at Washington, DC, headquarters, most notably deputy director Andrew McCabe, deputy assistant director for counterintelligence Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, McCabe’s special counsel.

  The claim made by Justice Department and FBI officials that the investigation into four Trump team officials—Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Jr., and Michael Flynn—was opened by the end of July 2016 was purposefully misleading. US law enforcement authorities constructed a false chronology of the investigation in order to obscure their wrongdoing and rationalize withholding documents from Congress.

  “The FBI wanted to erect barriers to protect themselves,” says Patel. “So they say the investigation began on July 31. That’s wrong. It’s just the FBI saying that date is a big deal, so we’ll give you all the documents we have after that date and we don’t have anything before that date because there was no investigation. But it’s an arbitrary date, and it doesn’t mean that nothing happened before then.”

  Nunes and Patel explain that an investigation doesn’t just appear out of thin air; it needs a long runway. “There are levels of authorizations that you need in order to get a counterintelligence investigation off the ground,” says Patel. “We said there’s stuff before July 31, and FBI said ‘No, no, there’s nothing.’ And then we found a couple of things. Like Ohr and Simpson and Steele talking and texting in January 2016.”

  There’s more evidence suggesting that the Crossfire Hurricane team started looking into Trump officials by early 2016. In addition to the Steele-Simpson-Ohr correspondence, there’s Michael Flynn.

  Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was regarded as the top military intelligence officer of his generation. He revolutionized the nature of intelligence collection in battlefield settings by circumventing the intelligence bureaucracy. His work in Iraq helped defeat Al Qaeda during the 2007 surge.

  Flynn’s seminal 2010 article “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan” put the US intelligence community on notice. The essential problem, he argued, was the Beltway bureaucracy, through which information might circulate for days or weeks before it came back to the field.

  “Moving up through levels of hierarchy,” he wrote, “is normally a journey into greater degrees of cluelessness.”

  Flynn was speaking for the collector in the field, often a soldier, who needed actionable intelligence on the spot. Success in battle, and keeping Americans safe, required minimizing the role of the bureaucracy. He wanted to apply the lessons he had learned in combat settings across the intelligence community. Thus his proposed revolution threatened the budgets, jobs, and prestige of thousands of spies who constituted the intelligence bureaucracy.

  They noticed. By the time the three-star general was named head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 2012, the bureaucracy saw him as an enemy. He’d also alienated the Obama White House.

  Flynn repeatedly challenged Obama’s policies. In particular, he was skeptical of the administration’s key foreign policy initiative, the nuclear deal with Iran. The Islamic Republic had been directly responsible for killing thousands of Americans in Iraq and indirectly responsible for many more. The documents captured during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan showed evidence of Iran’s relationship with Al Qaeda. Flynn pushed for release of the bin Laden documents, and the White House was furious. Publishing them would complicate Obama’s ability to convince Congress of the wisdom in striking a nuclear deal with a terror state devoted to murdering Americans.

  “Flynn was in a knife fight with the White House,” says Derek Harvey, a retired army intelligence officer who works with Nunes and knows the former DIA head.

  Flynn announced his resignation from DIA in April 2014 and started a consulting firm that worked with foreign clients. He did media appearances and advised several GOP candidates for the 2016 nomination: Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, and Scott Walker, as well as Trump. He told reporters he’d moved into public life because he thought the country was at risk. He told friends he saw the Clintons and their corruption as a threat to the republic. He was willing to talk to anyone if it would help keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

  But it was Trump who fit Flynn best. The candidate who promised to drain “the Swamp” was the only real vehicle for Flynn’s campaign against the intelligence bureaucracy. Unless that bureaucracy was shorn of power, it would continue to risk the lives of more Americans, especially those in uniform.

  Trump in turn trusted the former spy chief. He had detailed knowledge of the Beltway establishment b
ecause he’d fought it—just as important, the Swamp saw Flynn, as it did Trump, as an enemy. But both underestimated the establishment’s will to power and the many weapons in its array.

  For the intelligence bureaucracy, the situation became increasingly urgent as 2015 was coming to a close and Flynn was drawing closer to a GOP front-runner who promised to upend the system.

  In December, Flynn’s Beltway adversaries saw an opportunity—an event and a photograph capturing a moment of it. The operatives targeting Flynn must have seen its potential value immediately. It was a picture of the former DIA chief sitting next to Vladimir Putin. The Russian president is in suit and tie and Flynn is in a tuxedo, evidence that he’s not working but celebrating with Putin. They’re seated at the table of honor at a Moscow banquet commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Russian government–owned news network, Russia Today, now RT.

  Flynn’s speakers’ bureau had arranged the trip and paid him to deliver a speech at the banquet. He had been given a defensive briefing by intelligence officials before he left and debriefed his former colleagues on his return. Flynn said that he had used the occasion to advise the Russians to bring their ally Iran into line, to stop wreaking havoc across the Middle East. But those details were erased in most subsequent press reports. To paint Flynn, and by extension Trump, as Russian assets, the former spy chief’s Beltway adversaries used techniques famously employed by Moscow’s spy services.

  Josef Stalin’s spies understood that photographs are useful instruments in pushing propaganda. A picture tells a story. Frame it correctly, and the caption writes itself. To change the story, Soviet propagandists changed the picture. Stalin, for instance, had his rivals erased from photographs. Former colleagues and friends became enemies of the state, vanished down the memory hole. Similarly, details of Flynn’s visit to Moscow for the RT banquet were “disappeared.” The true account was replaced with a false narrative. In this telling, Flynn wasn’t just sitting close to Putin, as the photograph showed, he was actually close to Putin—much more than anyone knew.