Chapter 12

THE VALLEY OF DEATH

AFTER TRUMP tweeted that his predecessor had spied on him, Nunes said that there was no indication Trump had been wiretapped. There was ample evidence, however, that the national security apparatus was being used against the president and his senior aides.

Trump’s January conversations with world leaders had been leaked to the media. His conversation with the president of Mexico had been leaked to Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker, Joshua Partlow, and Nick Miroff. The president’s call with the Australian prime minister had been leaked to the Post’s Greg Miller and Philip Rucker.

An intercept of the national security advisor’s communications with the Russian ambassador had been leaked to the Post’s team of Miller, Entous, and Nakashima; nine US officials had been directed to confirm it.

An intercept showing that attorney general Jeff Sessions had met with the same diplomat had also been leaked to the Post’s Miller, Entous, and Nakashima.

Clearly, there was a political operation under way designed to sabotage the Trump administration.

“Alarm bells should have been going off all over,” says Nunes. “The FBI should’ve been breaking down doors to find out what was going on. ‘Hey, we’re here to protect you and the country, Mr. President.’ Instead,” says Nunes, “there was nothing.”

But the members of the intelligence community who weren’t part of the anti-Trump operation were panicked. The plotters were putting sensitive programs at risk. Whistle-blowers reached out to the HPSCI chair.

“The sources,” Nunes says, “told me that Obama officials had been going crazy unmasking people on the Trump transition team.”

Nunes will not disclose anything about his sources and cannot say much about the nature of what he uncovered, as it touches on intelligence community sources and methods. But he outlines how he revealed the unmasking of Trump officials and brought it to light. “I slowly put together what happened. But it was difficult. I couldn’t just say to the new administration, ‘Give me everything that was unmasked,’ because I didn’t know what I was looking for. I wouldn’t have known where to find the records without the sources.”

On March 21, Nunes went to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjoining the White House, where the bulk of White House staffers have their offices. “I got my hands on the documents I was looking for and the next morning briefed Speaker Ryan on it,” he recalls. “I told him, ‘I’m going to go brief the Republican members on the committee and the president. I’m going to be very transparent with the press so that they know what’s going on.’ So I called a press briefing before I went to the White House to give them what details I could of what I had seen.”

As Nunes’s staff gathered to discuss the next move, there was concern that the chairman was moving too quickly. “We didn’t want him going out there alone on this,” says a Nunes aide who asked not to be named. “We wanted another set of eyes on it so he could get some support from the rest of the committee and Republicans.”

Damon Nelson, HPSCI’s staff director, was particularly wary. He’d known Nunes since high school. “I met him when I was a freshman and he was a sophomore and we had classes right next to each other,” says Nunes. “He had long hair and cut class and played pool. Then he seemed to drop from sight. And then, in 2002, I was interviewing for my first legislative director and here’s this guy with the same name—Damon Nelson, who graduated from high school, joined the air force, where he met his wife and served in the first Gulf War, and went on to get a bunch of degrees.”

It was an amazing transformation, says Nunes. And he came to value Nelson’s advice as much as anyone’s. But the chairman also knew he had to act quickly. “The window of opportunity to expose what they’d done was closing,” he says. “Once they found out I was onto them, they were going to shut down everything. There were still plenty of Obama holdovers in that building, and they were watching me when I came in that day. I had to move quickly.”

The staff eventually came to see that their skepticism was misplaced. “He has great political instincts,” says the aide. “He’s almost always right about that kind of stuff. And besides, after all the debate, we all recognized that he was the one who was elected.”

And they knew it was their job to follow him into the valley of death, into which he was surely heading by taking on the intelligence community, political operatives, and the press.

At his March 22 press conference in the Capitol, Nunes stressed that none of the surveillance of Trump team members “was related to Russia or the investigation of Russian activities or of the Trump team.” That is, what he’d seen had nothing to do with any investigation of the Trump transition team. “It was never about Russia,” he says. “It was simply Obama people unmasking Trump transition people for no legitimate reason.”

HPSCI found that huge numbers of unmaskings of Americans had been done by certain Obama officials in 2016, including hundreds by Samantha Power, who wouldn’t have seemed to need such constant access to highly sensitive intelligence to conduct her duties as US ambassador to the United Nations. Testifying before HPSCI, former national security advisor Susan Rice acknowledged having unmasked Trump transition officials when they had met in December 2016 at the Trump Tower with the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. Her testimony was leaked to CNN reporter Manu Raju, revealing the names of the Trump officials she’d unmasked: Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, and Steve Bannon.

Rice justified the unmasking by saying that she had been frustrated that the Emiratis had not followed protocol for visiting officials and had failed to notify the White House of their stay. But if her aim was to rebuke foreign dignitaries, why unmask the identities of US officials—which were then leaked to the press?

It seems that part of her purpose in unmasking transition officials was to gather intelligence on a future meeting between Trump associates and UAE officials.

A few weeks after the meeting between the Trump officials and the Emirati royal, prominent Trump supporter Erik Prince, the founder of the private security firm Blackwater USA and brother of incoming education secretary Betsy DeVos, met with Emirati officials in the Seychelles. There Prince was introduced to a Russian banker.

Prince denied allegations made in an April 3, 2017, Washington Post article that he had been there to establish a back channel with Moscow. Adam Entous had the lead byline with Greg Miller, Kevin Sieff, and Karen DeYoung on another Post article seemingly sourced to a classified intercept.

Prince said he had been shown “specific evidence” by sources from the intelligence community that his name was unmasked and given to the paper. “Unless the Washington Post has somehow miraculously recruited the bartender of a hotel in the Seychelles,” said Prince, “the only way that’s happening is through SIGINT [signals intelligence].”

That was the essence of the political campaign targeting the Trump White House: Obama officials leaked classified intelligence to political operatives with bylines to sabotage Trump.

Because Nunes had uncovered the operation, he had to be crushed. “Finding the unmasking was really deadly to them,” he says. “And it should be, and they should all be investigated, and people should be thrown in jail for it. People should be in jail for a long time for what they did to Flynn and others.”

And just as they’d pushed Flynn from the White House and forced Sessions to recuse himself, they were going after Nunes. “Right after that March 22 appearance,” he says, “they turned their entire apparatus, from super PACs to the press, on me, dumping oppo research and fake news about me everywhere. They did it because they knew they were caught—they were unmasking Trump transition people and leaking it to the press. I broke up their party. They knew they were screwed, so they tried to get rid of me.”

Jack Langer’s office is down the hall from Nunes’s in Longworth. The communications director spent many of his early years in Japan, where his father was a computer executive. After his family returned home to Philadelphia, he went to the University of Colorado Boulder, and once he’d finished college, he moved to Prague. “I learned Czech and forgot it,” he says. “I have a talent for forgetting languages—I forgot the Japanese I used to know, too.”

He worked as a reporter and ad salesman for a few English-language publications in the Czech Republic before he came back to the United States to get his PhD at Duke. He wrote his dissertation on imperial Russian history. “I can’t believe Team Collusion missed that one,” he jokes.

Nunes offered him the communications director’s job after he’d edited the congressman’s book, Restoring the Republic: A Clear, Concise, and Colorful Blueprint for America’s Future. “It was a great experience,” says Langer, a slender man with a thick, booming voice. “We’d be working on the book late at night and drinking a good bottle of wine from Devin’s winery.”

Langer remembers when his relationship with the media was good. “Before the Russia stuff, we really had no problems with anybody in the press,” he says.

That changed after the March 22 press briefing. An early example of the press’s new posture surfaced in a March 24 Daily Beast story by Tim Mak. That kicked off the “Midnight Run” narrative. It was a fictionalized account of how Nunes had learned of the unmasking. According to Mak’s sources, Nunes “received a communication on his phone,” jumped out of an Uber he was sharing with staffers, switched cars, and went somewhere at night to review the documents.

“The story was sourced to three Intelligence Committee officials and one other official closely tied to the Intelligence Committee,” Langer remembers. “So the author is basically acknowledging ‘These are Intelligence Committee Democrats who gave me this story.’”

Langer says that four or five different publications called him to confirm details of the “Midnight Run.” “Obviously the story was being shopped around,” he says. He remembers a call from a Washington Post reporter. “The writer told me, ‘I have this story from three of your own committee’s staffers.’ I still remember the tone of voice. It was stunned, as if to say, ‘I’ve got this from three people on your own committee. How can you deny it?’ When in fact it’s three Committee Democrats saying this and the reporter can’t imagine that a hostile source may have a reason to invent a story to discredit Devin.”

After Nunes unmasked the unmasking, numerous stories were contrived to embarrass the HPSCI chairman. The purpose was to intimidate him and keep him from digging further into the anti-Trump operation.

“I didn’t understand what was going on with the press,” says Langer. “I was still naive enough that I didn’t understand the point of this story or why it was being put out. But then Adam Schiff comes out and labels this ‘the Midnight Run,’ and then the Democrats and the press start ridiculing Devin and pointing to this as proof he’s this weird conspiratorial guy who does wacky things like jump in and out of cars in the middle of the night.”

Nunes went on CNN a couple of days later and told Wolf Blitzer the story was false. “He didn’t jump in and out of any cars, he didn’t go anywhere at night, and he wasn’t sneaking around,” says Langer. “He stopped and casually chatted with various people he ran into on his way to the Eisenhower building, which has the secure facility where the documents were. But all the denials had absolutely zero effect. To this day, the media reports the ‘Midnight Run’ story as a fact. It’s too perfect of a caricature of Devin for them to let go.”

Another story that sticks out in Langer’s mind is a New York Times piece trying to identify Nunes’s sources for the unmasking. “These publications could have sent their journalists out to discover whether or not it was true that Obama people were unmasking Trump people,” he says, “but instead they all tried to hunt down the whistle-blower.”

Langer hadn’t immediately agreed with the congressman’s suggestion to stop talking to the mainstream press. But as the investigations wore on and the media became increasingly hostile, he came to see it differently. “Talking to reporters had become useless,” he says. “They had the story they wanted to tell, which was whatever story the Democrats and the intelligence leakers were feeding them. Coming to us for comment was just a formality, and what we said didn’t matter anymore. They were no longer reporters, they were narrative pushers.”

Langer began embedding critiques of the press’s performance in his comments to the media. For instance, when CNN requested comment for one 2018 story involving the congressman, Langer fired back, “It’s unsurprising to see the left-wing media spin Chairman Nunes’s routine observations as some nefarious plot, since these same media outlets spent the last year and a half touting a nonexistent Russia collusion conspiracy.”

Langer decided he needed a new communications strategy. “Number one, to hell with these guys,” he says. “And number two, we have to push back.”

Nunes had seen evidence of a real scandal: Obama officials had unmasked Trump associates and leaked their identities to the press. The leaks were criminal, abuses of power that violated the privacy rights of US citizens. Further, using national security surveillance programs to push a political operation risked provoking a popular backlash demanding an end to programs keeping Americans safe from terrorism. The leakers had put Americans into danger.

The Democrats played to block by getting Nunes put under investigation. That amplified calls for the HPSCI chairman to hand over the reins of the Russia probe.

The campaign against him was financed by left-wing money. Three progressive activist groups, MoveOn, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Democracy 21, filed complaints with the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) accusing Nunes of having leaked classified information during the March 22 press briefing.

“Anyone can file a complaint with the OCE against any member of Congress,” says Langer. “Some groups use that as a weapon. Others use it to puff themselves up by filing some frivolous complaint against congressmen they don’t like so they can issue a press release. The OCE gets tons of complaints, and the vast majority of them probably never get a second look. There’s no way they can handle all of these, but the House Ethics Committee picked up the complaint from OCE and decided to investigate it.”

The investigation was politicized from the outset, he explains. “Before they announced they would take this complaint, four of the five Democrats on the Ethics Committee had publicly denounced Devin for his unmasking revelations. Some accused him of leaking classified information; others said he needed to be removed as chairman. That’s clearly prejudgment, and those members should have recused themselves from the investigation. But that’s not what happened.”

On April 6, Nunes decided to step aside from leading the Russia investigation. “I had to,” he recalls. “I was in the valley of death, and there was no other way out. They’d start sticking cameras in the faces of Republicans all over the Hill, demanding that I be forced out of the chairmanship.”

Also, Nunes had seen evidence of a separate issue that would determine the course of HPSCI’s work: the FBI had used the Steele Dossier to obtain the spy warrant on Carter Page. If he kept fighting the Russia investigation, he’d cut himself off from what he already understood was the real issue. He asked other Republican committee members to take over the investigation: Mike Conaway, Trey Gowdy, and Tom Rooney. “I thought it would be over soon,” he says. “I was thinking that people were reasonable and there was no evidence of any wrongdoing, so this would be cleared up in two weeks, by the time the Easter break ended.”

Conaway, on the other hand, remembers thinking that it was going to take some time. “I’ve served as chairman of the Ethics Committee, so I knew those things take forever,” he tells me.

The eight-term congressman from Texas had been a military policeman in the army. Nonetheless, it was impossible to keep Adam Schiff in line. Conaway remembers his first meeting with HPSCI’s top Democrat after he’d taken over the investigation. “I looked for Adam Schiff the next day and found him in the cloakroom,” he says. “I said, ‘Hey, Adam, I’ve been asked to take over the Russia investigation,’ and he said, ‘Great, let’s work good together.’ I said, ‘Now, Adam, I am not going to go on TV, and I’ve asked my guys to not go on TV. Would you do the same? Would you and your guys get off TV and let’s conduct this investigation the way it ought to be done, behind the scenes?’ He looks at me incredulously and said, ‘Well, I have to ask permission from Nancy Pelosi to do that.’”

Conaway was stunned. “It never occurred to me to ask Paul Ryan anything like that. I was relatively successful with myself. I was not on TV at all. I was totally unsuccessful with convincing Adam and his team to get off TV.”

Schiff instead became the television face of the committee. He was a regular on CNN, forecasting nearly nightly that evidence of Trump-Russia collusion was just over the horizon.

Radio host John Batchelor came to refer to Schiff as “Pathfinder”—an advance scout illuminating the routes by which Trump might be impeached for collusion.

The nickname caught on with the Nunes team: “Pathfinder has found another path to collusion” became a regular quip among committee staffers every time Schiff stretched a new lie across the same worn bow.

The Left hung on every word that crossed Schiff’s lips as he staged his campaign through the same media he fed with leaks and disinformation. Schiff was among those other figures—former Obama aides, Clinton operatives, corrupt law enforcement and intelligence officials, and the press—who poisoned the American public sphere with the collusion hoax.

There was so much going on during that March and early April period, says Langer, that he wasn’t able to see how much had changed and how quickly. “It was just such rapid fire that I didn’t really have time to take a step back and think about it,” he says. “But after Devin stepped aside from leading the Russia investigation, I could look at it with some perspective. Then I put it all together in the same way Devin already had: they were using Russia to take down Trump.”

Langer says that April period was a low point for the committee. Nonetheless, finding that the FBI had used the Steele Dossier to obtain the FISA warrant pointed HPSCI in a new direction.

“I couldn’t have dreamed they’d be that dirty,” says Nunes. “As soon as we saw they’d abused the FISA process, we opened up the investigation right away because the FISA issues bled into other matters, like how they started the whole investigation. It was all a setup.”

It was then he realized he’d come across the biggest political scandal in US history. “They used the intelligence services and surveillance programs against American citizens,” he says. “They spied on a presidential campaign and put it under a counterintelligence investigation so they could close it off and no one else would see what they were doing. They leaked classified intelligence again and again to prosecute a campaign against a sitting president. Ninety percent of the press was with them, and the attorney general was out of the picture.”

That meant it was up to Nunes and his team to expose the hoax, get out the truth, and uphold the rule of law. Any offense they devised would involve going against the top levels of the DOJ and FBI, congressional opponents, the media, and the more than half of the country that had swallowed the collusion narrative.

Strangely, Nunes’s team liked their odds. Help was on the way. At the end of March, the HPSCI chair met with a former public defender and onetime DOJ prosecutor and offered him a job. With Kashyap “Kash” Patel on board, the momentum would shift. Objective Medusa was about to begin.