URANIUM ONE, SPYGATE, AND IMPEACHMENT
What They Portend
for the Future
Robert Mueller had been at the witness table several long hours when Congressman Will Hurd finally chimed in. Now in his midseventies, Mueller, the Justice Department special counsel who oversaw the Trump-Russia probe was not quite the same crisp-speaking Marine whom Americans had come to know as their FBI director during the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks through his retirement in 2013.1
But his experience still loomed as an asset, especially when it came to the art of refusing to bite on politically loaded questions. He had just finished a five-minute, rapid-fire round of questions from Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) that clearly had frustrated the Democrat’s effort to pin him down on questions about former Trump fixer Michael Cohen.2
Mueller’s answers were classic dodges. “I can’t adopt your characterization,” he answered Castro at one moment. The next, he added: “I can’t speak to that.” A few seconds later he threw in “I’m not certain I could go that far,” and finished with, “I defer to you on that….I can’t get into details….I can’t speak to that.” Castro yielded back his time, unsatisfied by his effort to get Mueller to bite on his preferred story line.3
Hurd, a Republican from Texas, was up next. A former CIA officer, he shared a common intelligence community experience with the former FBI director. But the odds that he would fare better than Castro in extracting new information from Mueller seemed equally long.4
Over the first few hours of the nationally televised hearing, the prosecutor had tenaciously stuck to the text of his four-hundred-plus page report, which had concluded a few months earlier that the Trump campaign had not demonstrably colluded with Vladimir Putin to hijack the 2016 election.5
Hurd was a few seconds into his Q and A when he sprang a question that uncharacteristically got Mueller to stray outside the confines of his report.
Hurd knew that Mueller had not addressed in his final report anything about the widely reported rumor that Trump’s campaign may have used a computer server inside the Alfa Bank of Russia to secretly communicate with Team Putin during the 2016 election.6
It was an odd omission given how much attention that allegation had been given in the court of public opinion over three years, contributing to the relentless media narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.
The tale appeared to start in the summer of 2016 with a computer blogger who went by the name “Tea Leaves” and an Indiana University computer sciences professor (and Hillary Clinton supporter) named L. Jean Camp. The data they published supposedly demonstrated mysterious computer pings between the Trump Tower in New York and Alfa Bank in Moscow.7
By early fall, FBI General Counsel James Baker had brought similar allegations into the bureau’s counterintelligence team, courtesy of a data dump he got from a lawyer who represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC).8 (No political motive there!)
About the same time, Christopher Steele, the former MI6 operative working as a Hillary Clinton opposition researcher for Fusion GPS, walked the Alfa Bank allegation into a senior State Department official, Kathleen Kavalec. She immediately forwarded it to the FBI (though she also cast doubt on its veracity).9
Glenn Simpson, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who ran Fusion GPS, did his best to sell the same rumor to senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr during an early December contact. Ohr shipped it to the FBI as well.10
And numerous media outlets—Slate, CNN, The New York Times, and The New Yorker among them—peddled the allegation over two years.11
While the FBI had tried its best to shut down the Alfa Bank rumor for months—its agents had debunked it early on as nothing more than routine computer pings, most likely from marketing spam—Mueller’s team had been silent on the issue. So, Hurd took a crack at getting an answer.12
“On October 31st, 2016, Slate published a report suggesting that a server at Trump Tower was secretly communicating with Russia’s Alfa Bank, and then I quote, ‘akin to what criminal syndicates do.’ Do you know if that story is true?” the congressman asked.
“Do not. Do not,” Mueller answered rather hurriedly.
Hurd was not satisfied, convinced that Mueller’s team must have examined such a high-profile claim.
“You do not?” he replied in a surprised tone.
“…know if it’s true,” Mueller answered.
“So you did not investigate these allegations that are suggestive of potential Trump/Russia…” Hurd began to ask before Mueller cut him off.
“Because I believe it not true doesn’t mean it would not be investigated,” the silver-haired prosecutor snapped back. “It may well have been investigated. Although my belief at this point, it’s not true.”
Hurd had created one of the few newsworthy moments in the hearing, extracting from Mueller a tidbit of information that fell outside the findings specified in his report.13
Two words. Not true.
Those words summarized not only Mueller’s assessment of the Alfa Bank allegation. They might as well have been the title for a bad Broadway musical celebrating the decade-long fiasco that began with the 2009 Russia reset and ended with Trump’s impeachment in 2019.
Time and again, government, political, and media elites made declarations to the American public that turned out to be false.
The Obama-Clinton team declared that their “reset” (an appeasement strategy that gave away America’s nuclear business to Moscow) would make Russia a close friend. Obama said that the strategy succeeded.14
Not true.
Hillary Clinton and Ambassador Michael McFaul declared Skolkovo the solution to creating a peaceful spy-free technology partnership with Russia.15
Not true.
Steele declared in his infamous dossier that his sources had told him that there was a “well-developed conspiracy” between Trump and Putin to hijack the 2016 election.16
Not true. And even his primary intelligence source disowned much of what had been attributed to him in the dossier.17
James Comey and Rod Rosenstein, two creatures of the permanent Justice Department (DOJ) bureaucracy, declared that the information submitted to secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in October 2016 went through a rigorous process to ensure that it had been verified.18
Not only was this claim not true, the DOJ inspector general identified fifty-one claims that the FBI and DOJ made in the warrant applications that were demonstrably false, misleading, or unsubstantiated.19 Comey would later admit his defense of the FISA warrant was misguided. “I was wrong,” he told Fox News’ Chris Wallace.
The FBI declared that there was good reason to believe that Trump advisor Carter Page was influenced by the Russians.
Not true. Page was actually a CIA asset providing intel on Russia matters, and an FBI lawyer had to alter a document to hide this fact from the FISA judges.20
Joe Biden declared that there was nothing untoward with his son Hunter taking a job with a Ukrainian natural gas company (Burisma Holdings) that had a reputation for corruption while the vice president oversaw U.S. policy in that country.21
Not true. A State Department official testified that he and his colleagues saw the appearance of a conflict of interest and even tried to block some federal business from going to Burisma on Hunter Biden’s watch because of corruption concerns.22
House Democrats in their impeachment proceedings declared that there was evidence that Trump withheld foreign aid in a July 2019 call with Ukraine’s president as pressure for an investigation of the Bidens.23
Not true. Ukrainian prosecutors had already opened the investigation months earlier, and there was no mention of foreign aid being tied to a Biden investigation in the call.24
Politics has always involved degrees of lying, exaggeration, and mistruths. As comics like to joke, “show me a good politician and I’ll show you a good liar.” But the ten-year period that began with the Obama presidency in 2009 was a far more consequential Decade of Deceit.
Some of that deceit came from a new mastery by foreign adversaries of the ancient spy craft of disinformation. As Russia showed with its intervention in the 2016 American election, the 2010s opened a new era of social media manipulation, information insecurity, and manufactured news that could be hijacked to foment social and political unrest. The United States is a prime target for all those foreign adversaries that resent the success of our economy and the freedoms afforded by our democracy.25
U.S. military and intelligence chiefs are right to raise the alarm about this trend, and American high-tech companies are justified in seeking new fortifications to this advanced form of warfare.
But the more consequential deceit of the last decade came from institutions—the FBI, the Justice Department, the State Department, and the mainstream media—where truth had once been mandatory for the bedrock trust the American public placed in them.26
For the first time, we saw in the 2010s a systematic effort by players in these institutions to knowingly and willfully promote falsehoods to achieve bureaucratic and political outcomes or, possibly, to foment division in America.27
This institutional dishonesty had proliferated faster than North Korean missile tests, Iranian enrichment sites, or mating bunnies. And the advent of social media and “Big Tech” companies added digital warfare to the arsenal. False stories could be propagated at the speed of light on the information highway, and dissenting voices were stifled through digital censorship unseen in any prior era.
At the same time, nonprofit institutions funded by a new generation of American billionaires like George Soros could wage information and disinformation campaigns to achieve ideological outcomes sought by their benefactors. And the American public would accept the incoming data because of the good-sounding name of the group, the reputation of its billionaire founder, or the hipness of its social media appeals.28
Just as alarming, a financially weakened and less-experienced journalism profession began to aid and abet disinformation in ways that would make Walter Cronkite turn in his grave.
Can you remember a time when an FBI lawyer was caught doctoring an official government document to deceive a court? It happened during the Trump-Russia collusion case.29
The boldness of this new generation of federal bureaucrats to impose their own will cannot be overstated. Not when you consider the crafty dishonesty employed by the FBI in sustaining the myth of the Steele dossier.
It turns out that the FBI interviewed Steele’s primary source in early January 2017—just a few months into the Trump-Russia investigation. The source disowned much of the intelligence attributed to him in the Steele dossier and admitted that the claim of Trump being compromised by a Russian prostitute was a “rumor and speculation,” not fact.30
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December 2019 report lays bare just how definitively the source knocked down the Steele dossier, which at the time provided much of the justification for the FBI’s FISA warrant targeting the Trump campaign.
The January 2017 interview “raised doubts about the reliability of Steele’s descriptions of information in his election reports. During the FBI’s January interview, at which Case Agent 1, the supervisory intel analyst, and representatives of NSD were present, the [source] told the FBI that he/she had not seen Steele’s reports until they became public that month, and…made statements indicating that Steele misstated or exaggerated the [source’s] statements in multiple sections of the reporting.”31
In earlier generations, such a reversal of an informer’s evidence essential to a court proceeding would have led to an immediate alert to the judges, the end of the wiretapping and surveillance, and the likely shutdown of the entire investigation. But not inside this FBI, run by James Comey and Andrew McCabe.
Instead of shutting shown its FISA operation, the bureau renewed the surveillance warrant three more times to cover the next nine months. This made it look to the court as though Steele’s source had actually substantiated the dossier, when in fact the source had disowned it.32
As Horowitz observes, “We found no evidence that the Crossfire Hurricane team ever considered whether any of the inconsistencies warranted reconsideration of the FBI’s previous assessment of the reliability of the Steele election reports.”33
This was not any old whopper. It had far-reaching consequences. The FBI was allowed to spy, without justification, on Page and the Trump apparatus for nearly a year, and the entire country was allowed to suffer through the Trump-Russia scandal for two more years even though it had been mostly contrived. Meanwhile, Trump’s nascent presidency was handicapped out of the gate by a manufactured scandal driven by epic falsehoods.34
Such institutional dishonesty was exposed across the political landscape by the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, from the New York Times false story in February 2017 that U.S. intelligence had corroborated collusion between senior members of the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, to Adam Schiff’s repeated assertions after FBI briefings that evidence had been collected of a Russia-Trump conspiracy. Neither (among so many other false bombshells) was true.35
Not even Putin, in his wildest dreams, could imagine how some computer server hacks and $150,000 spent on social ads in 2016 would be amplified by a bogus scandal propagated and sustained for three years by America’s own institutions.36
At the dawn of a new decade, there is one overarching lesson that America must digest from the progression of the failed Russia reset to the Uranium One scandal to allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, and, eventually, impeachment.
We are entering a new era of information warfare, and foreign adversaries are not the only perpetrators. American institutions, long trusted to give us the truth neutrally, are now active participants in misinformation, deceit, or shading of the facts. The consequences are far reaching, and the solutions are not easily devised.
There is reason to suspect that the political divide that has separated left and right in America in recent years may be worsened by this trend. What cost will this new era of institutionalized disinformation impose on American democracy, unity, and sovereignty?
This is but one lesson of the fallout from the last decade.
Vladimir Putin began the 2010s with his KGB skills and a nuclear arsenal but little else to leverage for regional or global advantage. He had a weak economy, technological gaps, and little influence or capital outside Eastern Europe.
Now, thanks to the giveaways of the failed Obama-Clinton reset, Putin begins the next decade with gas and uranium monopolies that prop up his economy and make both Europe and the United States more dependent on his resources. His strategy to weaponize Russia’s energy sector as a geopolitical game changer has been all but accomplished.
Thanks to the bungled Skolkovo experiment, his country has access to far more Western technology with half the need for espionage, as evidenced by the Russian president’s prized new hypersonic missiles that travel at twenty-seven times the speed of sound.37
His military has been rebuilt and is flexing its muscle in far more places than a decade ago, including Syria and Ukraine. And he faces an America torn from within by a series of political scandals—some funded by Democrats or furthered falsely by U.S. bureaucrats and the news media—that have tarnished both U.S. democracy and its most trusted institutions.
Irrefutably, Putin is more firmly in control of Russia’s destiny at the dawn of the 2020s because of America’s many failures to combat his asymmetric aggression in the preceding decade. Putin is not invincible, though, as the Trump sanctions and the limited economic options for Moscow still expose. But vigorous American leadership will be required to execute a far more coherent and strategic Russian policy than the one that Obama began with in 2009.
Finally, the American experience with Iran, Syria, North Korea, and the Russian reset have created a poignant body of evidence that a U.S. foreign policy that relies heavily on appeasement and blind trust in adversaries and “frenemies” only weakens the United States.
This is an instinctual lesson that Trump embraced early as he crafted his America First agenda that appealed to a large plurality of Americans. And it is a bitter pill that some liberal security revisionists are now beginning to swallow when it comes to looking back at the Obama reset with Moscow.
In March 2018, the reliably liberal Brookings Institution sought to provoke such a debate on the left by republishing an article from a month earlier entitled “Don’t Rehabilitate Obama on Russia.” The article warned readers “not [to] slip into collective amnesia over the Obama administration’s weak and underwhelming response to Russian aggression.”38
Throughout his presidency, Obama consistently underestimated the challenge posed by Putin’s regime. His foreign policy was firmly grounded in the premise that Russia was not a national security threat to the United States. In 2012, Obama disparaged candidate Mitt Romney for exaggerating the Russian threat—“The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Obama quipped.39
This breezy attitude prevailed even as Russia annexed Crimea, invaded eastern Ukraine, intervened in Syria, and hacked the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Obama’s response during these critical moments was cautious at best and feckless at worst.
Even the imposition of sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by so much propitiation and restraint elsewhere that it did not deter Russia from subsequent aggression, including the risky 2016 influence operation in the United States. Obama, confident that history was on America’s side, for the duration of his time in office underestimated the damaging impact Russia could achieve through asymmetric means.
What is so remarkable about the sustained Democratic effort to destroy and/or end Trump’s presidency is that inherent in its many manufactured attacks are clear projections of the party’s own foreign policy missteps when it governed during the Obama era.
For instance, the impeachment articles accuse Trump of withholding U.S. foreign aid to force a decision in Ukraine. Yet Vice President Joe Biden did just that in 2016 when, by his own admission, he ordered Ukraine’s president to fire the country’s chief prosecutor or lose $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. And the Clinton-funded Steele dossier accused Trump of conspiring with Russia to the detriment of America, something that the Uranium One, nuclear fuel, and Skolkovo giveaways actually achieved.40
Meanwhile, even as Trump has been accused of being Putin’s puppet, he has been far firmer and more aggressive in his dealings with Putin than Obama ever was. Trump’s sanctions on Russia are far tougher than Obama’s, and the forty-fifth president did something that his predecessor had not: he gave Ukraine lethal aid to resist future Russian aggression. Yet none of this is acknowledged by the media, since it would fatally compromise the Russian collusion narrative.41
If Trump survives and wins a second term, he should be armed with a mandate to create his own Trump Doctrine. Such a foreign policy could eradicate the failings of both George W. Bush’s endless wars and Barack Obama’s appeasement at all costs. As such, it could return America to an era of peace through strength that typified the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. During his first term, Trump has flashed some pillars of such a potential doctrine.
One tenet is that if America draws a red line, it must act when crossed. Obama waffled on such foreign policy delimiters, often turning them into dotted lines that emboldened bad actors. Trump has declared that his red lines will remain red, as he demonstrated when he executed Iran’s top general with a drone strike in January 2020 after Tehran refused to stop perpetrating attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq.42
A second pillar is that America will never stop seeking the return of its hostages but at the same time will not pay cash for such returns. Trump’s commitment and success with hostage negotiations involving North Korea, Iran, and the Taliban have been born in part by a clear policy. The enemy knows what to expect going in, and coming out.
Trump’s clarion call for other nations to step up and fund or man security operations across the globe is another potential tent pole for his foreign policy doctrine. Trump is not an isolationist as some have claimed, but he also does not believe in endless wars or that America must always be the global cop. And just because America can do something militarily now, or has done something in the past, does not mean that it should necessarily be done in the future. Military action as a potent but last resort is Trump’s comfort zone.43
Similarly, the forty-fifth American president understands that all deals are not the same. Some do not have to be consummated, officiated, or credited to American leadership. They can be fostered in secret and even executed by allies. As America’s self-proclaimed “dealmaker in chief,” Trump grasped early in his presidency that sometimes a too visible American role can be detrimental to negotiations.44
America can lead, even when it is quiet or invisible. And the regional dealmaking that Trump quietly fostered in the Middle East starting in 2019 may have far more long-term consequences for America than the Hail Mary throws for a global Middle East deal that always proved elusive.
Whether it is Trump or a new president, the most important challenge of 2021 is to create a coherent long-term strategy that defines the American interest, globally and regionally. For most of the twentieth century, nearly every president’s foreign policy began with a definition of the American interest.
The values and objectives in the American interest definition guided not only the U.S. security and diplomacy bureaucracies, but also the expectations of both allies and foes abroad. But in recent years, particularly under Barack Obama, foreign policy decisions became more fungible and episodic, detached from the larger values, interests, or objectives defined by the American interest.45
Obama’s lack of a consistent foreign policy doctrine led to the unnecessary destabilization of Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi had been providing U.S. counterterrorism assistance. It also led to a complete misread of the Arab Spring uprising and the missed opportunity to ride the 2009 Green Movement in Iran to a regime change that would oust the ruling mullahs. Finally, the excessive giveaways of the Russia reset cannot be traced to clear American interests. They benefited Putin far more than the domestic interest.46
The geopolitical continuum that began with Obama’s bungled Russian reset and ended with Trump’s impeachment cannot be repeated in the next decade. The challenges abroad and at home are too vexing, and the costs of failure too great.
The America of the 2020s must eschew the mistakes of the past decade and chart a new course that strengthens America abroad and unites it at home. The only question is whether America’s current leaders can embrace and execute the mission.