Chapter 13

OBJECTIVE MEDUSA ON OFFENSE

THERE WAS AN UPSIDE, says Nunes, to stepping away from leading HPSCI’s Russia investigation. “Knowing that there was no collusion, nothing on Trump, I could focus on the other things we’d started to find, like the unmaskings, FISA abuse, and other related matters.”

On March 8, Nunes had written the Justice Department asking for copies of any applications submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “We were doing due diligence for the Russia investigation,” he says, “and we wanted any documents we thought might exist regarding a counterintelligence investigation.”

There was a FISA warrant on Carter Page. Nunes was briefed on it in mid-March. That was thanks partly to the efforts of Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and his staff would come to play an important role in uncovering FBI and DOJ crimes and abuses. The work of Grassley and his staff reinforced the work of Nunes and his team.

The Senate Judiciary Committee had long been accustomed to looking at irregularities at the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Grassley made sure HPSCI saw the FISA warrant. Grassley knew how to pressure DOJ. “Senator Grassley made it clear that his committee wouldn’t confirm Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general unless he saw the FISA,” says Nunes. “Since we’d been asking for it, Grassley made sure we saw it as well.”

They saw that the FBI had used the Steele Dossier to obtain a warrant to spy on a US citizen. Not being able to say anything about it, while the media launched false allegations of collusion against the Trump administration daily, caused heartache for HPSCI Republicans. “All the members wanted to disclose it,” remembers Nunes. “We’re the ones with the sole jurisdiction for oversight of the intelligence community. So it was our responsibility, and Congress is counting on us when red flags pop up.”

But they couldn’t say anything, not to the US public, not even to fellow members of Congress. The FBI and DOJ had buried it, like so much of the anti-Trump operation, under the heading of classified intelligence.

Then an April 11, 2017, Washington Post story disclosed news of the FISA warrant on Page. The story, written by Ellen Nakashima, Devlin Barrett, and Adam Entous, was meant to further bolster the narrative that the Trump team had coordinated with Russia. The FBI had been so worried about signs of the Trump team’s friendliness toward Russia that it had used its most intrusive form of intelligence collection to monitor a US citizen.

But for the anti-Trump conspirators across the US government and in the press, it was just a means of building the momentum necessary to take down the president.

Just a few days later, Kashyap Patel joined Nunes’s team. HPSCI staff director Damon Nelson asked the chairman why he hadn’t gone through the normal hiring process. It was a decision Nunes had made on the spot. “I wanted him,” says Nunes, “and we needed him.”

Nelson named the new hire the lead investigator. Patel helped take back the initiative after the ethics complaint pushed Nunes off leading the Russia investigation.

At first Patel’s new colleagues didn’t know what to make of him. As a former prosecutor, he was always looking for the win. That didn’t comport well with the give-and-take that had previously governed HPSCI’s bipartisan ethos. The committee’s job was to pass legislation helping the intelligence community and provide constitutionally mandated oversight.

But now the committee was returning to its original purpose when it had been established in the wake of the scandals that had rocked the intelligence community in the 1970s: to investigate crimes and abuses of an out-of-control intelligence community violating the rights of US citizens.

As a New Yorker, Patel’s style sometimes clashed with those of the easygoing Californians, southerners, and midwesterners who made up the HPSCI staff. And his colleagues didn’t know what to make of what he was saying about the upper echelons in federal law enforcement.

“He was always going on about the top people at DOJ and FBI,” says a former Army Special Operations officer on Nunes’s team, “and at one point I turned to him and told him, ‘Give it a rest.’ But Kash was right.”

Nunes told his team he trusted Patel. “I wanted Kash to lead, and I wanted them to follow his lead,” he says. “I hired him to bust doors down and didn’t want them to get in his way.”

Another HPSCI staffer remembers being skeptical at first. “Kash proposed a heroic quest,” says Patel’s investigative partner, “Jim,” who asks that his real name not be used.

Together, their diverse temperaments, legal training, professional experience, and physical appearance were a study in contrasts, like something scripted for a police drama. Patel went in headfirst, while his investigative partner was more reserved, more cerebral.

“Kash had a grand vision for the investigation,” says Jim. “We said, ‘We’ll believe it when we see it.’”

Patel likes to mix it up in the corners. He’s a lifelong hockey fanatic. He coaches youth hockey in the Washington, DC, area and skates defense for the nationally renowned Dons, an amateur team named after the hockey commentator and fashion legend Don Cherry.

Patel grew up on Long Island cheering for his local franchise, the New York Islanders, and was born in Queens, like the forty-fifth president. He says he knew Trump was going to win the moment he came down the escalator. “One, he’s from New York and doesn’t like to lose. He plans everything. Two, no one dominates the media like that guy. So everyone calls me crazy for eighteen months, but I was right.”

We’re sitting in one of the few remaining Washington, DC, bars where smoking cigars is permitted. Patel hands me a Gurkha, made by a friend in Miami, Kaizad Hansotia, and lights it. He says he was expecting that there would be irregularities with the FBI’s Russia investigation. He knew the Crossfire Hurricane group: McCabe, Strzok, Page. “They’re really good agents and really good lawyers,” he says.

The problem, he says, was that there was no accountability in significant parts of Obama’s Justice Department, often even when dealing with high-profile cases. “We had great terrorism cases just sitting on the shelves at DOJ and no one would approve them, because the bureaucracy was so bad. I joked that if you want to move quickly through DOJ, keep screwing up. Everyone who’s implicated in your mistakes has an interest in covering it up, so they’ll promote you.”

There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the way the upper echelons worked. It was out of the ordinary, Patel thought, that Comey had never investigated the DNC’s servers after the alleged hack. “Instead, Comey just accepted CrowdStrike’s assessment,” he says. “Some random outside company that happened to be retained by Perkins Coie, the campaign’s lawyers. I never worked a case involving cyber where the FBI said, ‘Let’s not use our own people on this one.’ You’re supposed to do it yourself, you’re the FBI.”

For Patel, Comey’s exoneration of Clinton was a stark illustration of everything that was wrong at DOJ. “He hijacked the Clinton investigation,” he says. “That was not his call to make. You don’t go on TV and say, ‘I, the FBI director, am deciding what is a prosecutor’s decision.’ And by the way, all my colleagues in the national security division, all truly apolitical, every one of us would have taken the Clinton case to a grand jury.”

Patel had had enough. “I was at the doctor’s that day, and he asked why my blood pressure was running so high. I told him it was Comey’s speech. All that just added up over time, and I was thinking ‘I got to get out of here.’”

When Patel accepted the job with Nunes’s team in April 2017, he didn’t know much about Congress or the Intelligence Committee. “But I was prepared to know who I would be dealing with in DOJ when I came on. I told Devin that we will find that the people running the Russia investigation will have done inappropriate things. That was my experience, having worked with them and seeing it occur. No one believed me. Maybe from an outsider’s view looking in, I might have also called myself crazy for saying that. Because it’s supposed to be DOJ.”

Still, he told Nunes that if they really found something on Trump’s working with the Russians, they’d have to follow it no matter where it led. “I needed to have assurances of accountability,” he says.

Nunes and Nelson wanted to start interviewing people immediately. Patel put on the brakes. “I told them, ‘No, not right away we don’t. We do at some point, but witness interviews are window dressing. That’s Investigation 101. What we need are all the documents.’”

Patel explains that as a public defender he learned that documents are the key to taking on DOJ. “You have much fewer resources as a public defender. Witness testimony is great but if we can get the government’s own evidence to show X, Y, and Z, then you’ve got them.”

The first document was the Steele Dossier. “Did these people named in the dossier actually do the things they’re alleged to have done? I told Devin if they did, then the president’s kind of screwed.”

Patel read the dossier closely. “At first it looked laughable,” he says. “I mean, I grew up in New York. I don’t know Trump, but I grew up with the guy. Even for him I’m like ‘This is ludicrous.’ So I started by thinking that there were things in it that were either true or not—like did Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen go to Prague. If he didn’t, then that’s a problem proving the dossier is real.”

But the centerpiece of the dossier, says Patel, is Carter Page. “If Page really did what the dossier claims, then that’s bad. That’s what you get a FISA for: a US person who is believed to be acting as a foreign agent and commits a crime.”

Page first appears in the dossier in two memos from the mid-July period. Report 94, dated July 19, alleges that Page met secretly with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin during his trip to Moscow in early July. According to Steele, they discussed dropping sanctions in exchange for bilateral energy cooperation. Page has denied the allegations since they were first relayed to him in late July 2016.

What the FBI knew about Page, however, made him a more attractive target for a FISA warrant. In 2013, Russian operatives working out of the Russian UN Consulate in New York had tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit Page. The former navy officer had helped the FBI make its case against the spies, but he was in the system for a Russia-related espionage matter. The FBI twisted that information to mislead the secret court to obtain the warrant.

“The biggest tool for counterintelligence investigations is a FISA,” says Patel. “So once an investigation is opened, you pick the easiest target to get a FISA on, even if it’s not the actual person you want.”

Page was the point of entry to gain access to the communications of the Trump team. The dossier, synchronized with Fusion GPS’s media narrative around Page, was what the Crossfire Hurricane team used to jimmy the lock.

The July 19 Steele report alleging that Page had had a “secret meeting” with Sechin checked off an important box for the FISA application process. A warrant is granted to find out about the target’s clandestine activities on behalf of a foreign power. To obtain a FISA on a US citizen also requires showing probable cause that those clandestine activities involve or may involve a crime. There is no crime alleged in the July 19 memo. The substance of Page’s supposed meeting is not criminal. Removing sanctions on Russia in exchange for bilateral energy cooperation would be a matter of policy.

The criminal predicate for the FISA warrant was introduced subsequently, in a memo, Report 134, dated almost exactly three months later, October 18. Report 134 is a revision of the July 19 memo that was directed by someone who knew the requirements for obtaining a FISA. The October 18 version described the same meeting in early July and appears to be related by the same “intimate” of Sechin’s who had reported the meeting to Steele’s intermediary in July.

This time, however, Sechin’s “close associate” provided a different account. Instead of offering bilateral energy cooperation in exchange for convincing Trump to relieve sanctions, Sechin tells Page that he will profit personally. According to the memo, Page was offered “the brokerage of up to a 19% (privatised) stake in Rosneft in return.”

That’s bribery. The scheme would have made Page a wealthy man. The brokerage fee would have amounted to at least tens of millions of dollars as a percentage of a deal worth more than $10 billion.

Adam Schiff and media pundits claimed that Rosneft’s eventual sale of a 19 percent stake proved the veracity of the dossier. However, the 19 percent figure would have been easy to pull off the internet. By spring 2016, it was widely reported that Russia was looking to sell off between 19 and 19.5 percent of Rosneft. Nevertheless, the figure may have proved persuasive to the FISA court; a specific number is more persuasive than vague allegations of a bag of cash.

The Trump adviser, according to Steele, “expressed interest and confirmed that were Trump elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.” The memo tied Page’s potentially criminal actions to Trump himself. According to Steele’s source, Page was “speaking with the Republican candidate’s authority.”

The July 19 memo regarding Sechin and Page’s meeting is documented word for word, as if it had been cut and pasted from the dossier into the FISA application. The allegations are repeated in the three subsequent FISA application renewals. However, the revised October 18 memo alleging bribery is not apparent in any of the four applications.

Since it is the later memo, alleging a potential crime in connection with clandestine intelligence activities, that fulfills the requirements of a FISA warrant, it is likely that the information is under redaction. It is not hard to see why the FBI and DOJ would seek to conceal the fact that a falsified document dated October 18 was used to obtain a secret surveillance warrant three days later, October 21.

Patel says the money that Page was supposed to have collected from the deal with Sechin was another aspect of the dossier that could be found to be true or false. “It’s hundreds of millions of dollars,” he says. “You could find out if Page has that kind of money. We called him in and spoke with him. He obviously didn’t have that kind of money. It was clear the story in the dossier was nonsense.”

The purpose of HPSCI’s Russia collusion investigation was to find out if anyone in the Trump campaign had really made deals with the Russians. But if the supposed linchpin of the Trump-Russia collusion scheme was innocent, what was the evidence?

Patel’s next step was to collect all the investigative documents surrounding Crossfire Hurricane. “I knew I had to get the documents leading to the production of the FISA,” he says. “I wanted to know what the government knew, when they knew it, and if there were any material omissions in the FISA application.”

Once they secured the documents from the FBI, Patel and the Intelligence Committee moved to interviews to get people on the record. Did anyone have proof that the Trump team had colluded with Russia?

“I had to tell a lot of people that collusion isn’t a crime,” says Patel. “It sounds bad, but it doesn’t exist, it’s a legal fiction. But I was like, okay, we’ve got to use that because it’s in the media and everybody’s already using it.”

The important thing was to determine if there had been any criminal activity. Patel, along with HPSCI members Trey Gowdy, Tom Rooney, and Mike Conaway, and their staff came up with the “three Cs”: collude, conspire, coordinate.

“Conspiracy is a real crime,” says Jim. “Coordination isn’t a crime, but it was a way to explain in layman’s terms a predicate for conspiracy. So did anyone see any coordination between the Trump team and Russia?”

Nunes’s committee interviewed officials from the Obama administration, the law enforcement and intelligence communities, and the Trump campaign. It was the same line of questioning for all of them.

“We asked them the three Cs straight up,” says Patel.

He runs down a partial list:

“‘Do you, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, have evidence of the three Cs?’

“‘No, I don’t.’

“‘Do you, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates?’

“‘No.’

“‘Do you, Jim Comey?’

“‘No.’

“‘Do you, Andy McCabe?’

“‘No.’

“‘Do you, John Podesta?’

“‘No.’

“‘Do you, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS?’

“‘No.’”

A number of witnesses tried to sidestep Patel’s line of questioning.

“And I said, ‘Hang on. I’m not asking if you thought it happened or if you heard it happened,’” Patel says. “I said, ‘Do you have information that exactly addresses this issue? If you tell me it exists, we’ll go get the documents, we’ll go get the people, we’ll use subpoenas.’ We weren’t hired to clear Donald Trump. We were charged with figuring out what happened.”

The investigation, he says, was going to reveal whether there was collusion or not. “It’s a finite question. We weren’t trying to solve an unsolvable murder. Donald Trump got elected. We knew the Russians definitely did some squirrely stuff, hacked some things and whatnot. The issue was, was there evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign said anything to the Russians like ‘Trump wants to be president, you help him, he’ll help you down the road’? We asked every single person we interviewed, and not a single person answered affirmatively to that question.”

There was nothing.

“So if no one had any evidence,” says Patel, “including the principals that were running the investigation, then maybe it didn’t happen. It became evident that the answer was no across the board. I didn’t expect to find that clean of an answer. But we did.”

If there was no evidence of collusion, conspiracy, or coordination, what had happened? The FBI had opened an investigation on the Trump campaign and had obtained a surveillance warrant without any real evidence. Something was very wrong.

Patel had already warned Nunes and the staff that they were going to find irregularities in what the FBI and DOJ had done. “Once we discovered bad action by FBI and DOJ, our driving force became proving what they knew and when they knew it, especially when it came to the Carter Page FISA,” he says. “Misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a seriously grave offense for which there must be accountability. And we felt the evidence would speak for itself; the fight was obtaining it for the public to see.

“I said from the beginning that Jim Comey and Andy McCabe are not squared away guys,” he adds. “I knew that something was up.”

Not everyone saw it that way, says Patel’s investigative partner. “Many of these people coming from the IC, especially Comey, had gotten a lot of mileage out of being the source of disclosures to members and had given the appearance of candor. This is the guy who comes and tells us secret stuff,” says Jim. “The inclination was to trust him.”

But Patel had worked with Comey and the others. “You cannot put on paper the value of sitting in a room with people,” he says. “My job has always been to read people. I was a trial lawyer. I had to read juries. I was pretty good at being able to read people and find their biases. I said the same thing when I was running this investigation: ‘I know these guys, I know their biases. I’ve been in a room with them. They present well. But they have agendas. And they tailor their investigations to reflect those agendas, at least the high-profile ones.’”

The fundamental problem with the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was the Crossfire Hurricane group. Now it was time for the Nunes team to pivot; they were going to investigate the investigators.

“I told Devin that our investigation is going to be a thing,” says Patel. “I told him we needed a name. It’s going to be big.”

HPSCI was investigating Russia collusion, but now it was turning its attention to what law enforcement authorities might have done during the course of Crossfire Hurricane: unmasking, FISA abuses, and other related matters.

“There are so many parts to this,” Patel remembers telling Nunes. “There were so many snakes on one head. I told Devin, ‘We need to cut off the head, like Medusa.’ So that’s what I called it: ‘Objective Medusa.’ It was our thing.”