It was Tuesday, August 28, 2018, three days before my seventy-second birthday, when the doorbell rang at our home in a wooded area of northern New Jersey at approximately 3:30 PM.
My wife, Monica, and I were in my study discussing family financing. Since 2016, I had lost several lucrative consulting jobs I had in Washington, D.C. InfoWars, where I had been working as Washington Bureau Chief since shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Since the election of Donald Trump as president, the hard left has targeted InfoWars as the spearhead to attack economically. The goal was to force InfoWars and all reporters associated with Alex Jones off the internet. The intent was to punish economically and silence all conservative and libertarian critics of the hard left’s increasingly aggressive socialist goals. Not stopping at imposing political censorship through social media giants including Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, the hard left also threatened corporate clients who hired as consultants so-called “conspiracy theorists” such as me.
In the ensuing two years since the 2016 surprise election of President Trump, the hard left has intensified into a violent “resist and obstruct” movement designed ultimately to use the criminal investigation of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel office as a means of criminalizing politics. The ultimate goal of the hard left is to first impeach, then imprison Donald Trump through utterly false charges the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton.
When I asked over the intercom who was at the front door, the answer came back, “The FBI.”
That was a frightening moment for both me and Monica. Truthfully, finding the FBI at the front door was not entirely unexpected. The press had been reporting for weeks that the Mueller investigation was systematically questioning all associates of well-known political activist Roger Stone. Clearly, I had to be on the list.
In February 2016, I met Roger Stone for the first time, but within a few weeks, I began playing a double-role of being both a reporter and a political operative.
I reported on Stone’s political activities to advise Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. My job at that time was to work as a full-time reporter for World Net Daily, WND.com. I held this job since 2004 when Joseph Farah, founder and CEO of WND.com, asked me to join him. In that year, I had co-authored with John O’Neill my first number one run-away bestseller. The book entitled Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry became known as the “Swift Boat book.”
With Unfit for Command, we coined “Swift Boating” as a new term in politics. The hard left, of course, used the term derogatively, suggesting a “Swift Boat” attack involved destroying a political candidate by lies and smears. That book that is widely credited with derailing John Kerry’s 2004 presidential aspirations, and I will stand by the truth of every word.
At the same time, I had crossed over from the reporter’s role to work behind the scenes as a political operative, working secretly with Roger Stone to engineer events that would affect the news cycle favorably for the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election. Joseph Farah had long established the policy at WND.com that as reporters we were encouraged not to mask our political leanings. Instead, reporters at WND were also encouraged to publish opinion pieces as commentary.
When the doorbell rang, I could see my wife was shaken by the news that the FBI was at the doorstep. “Here we go again,” Monica said. She had long been afraid my writing on the political right would land me in prison. Her fears and mine intensified as Deep State moved to convert the federal government into an Orwellian surveillance state where people could be punished or executed for their political views. I began to have this worry when the IRS began a series of costly audits of my tax returns in 2004—a move I believe the Deep State took to retaliate against me for my role in co-authoring Unfit for Command and assisting with the Swift Boat movement against John Kerry.
In 1991, I married Monica, some ten years my junior, three months after first meeting her in New Jersey. Before meeting Monica, I had resolved never again to be married. I fell in love with Monica the first time I saw her. I have often joked that the reason I asked Monica to marry me some three months after I met here was that I knew I had to marry this woman before she had time to learn too much about me. My whole life story has had so many unexpected twists and turns that I doubt anyone, including myself, will ever fully comprehend it.
Monica was born in La Plata, Argentina to parents born in Italy. She is a beautiful woman with flowing blond hair and a sharp temper. One of her great strengths is that as quickly as she can flare in anger, she can forgive. But from the beginning, I knew marrying Monica was the wrong woman to choose if I had any aspirations to be unfaithful to her. That was one transgression she would never forgive.
Prior to living in New Jersey, I had spent some 15 years living in the western United States, first moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1976, where I had a position as a research professor at the University of New Mexico, first in the Political Science Department and subsequently in the Department of Public Administration. In Denver, Colorado, I changed careers after deciding I could never truly succeed in an academic environment that was beginning to be dominated by leftists.
In Denver, I began my career in bank marketing. I subsequently moved to Portland, Oregon, where I helped a fledgling company, Marketing One, develop into a national company that sold a billion dollars a year in annuities through banks, plus another billion dollars in mutual funds. In 1990, I had been living in White Plains, New York, where I was working for yet another bank marketing company. This one was called Independent Financial Marketing Group, a company whose founder hailed from South Africa. In 1990, I came to Morris Plains, New Jersey, where I was recruited by a national bank marketing firm headquartered on Route 10 off Interstate 287. My job there was to develop a securities mutual fund sales program to accompany the annuity marketing the firm had been implementing for years. That’s where I met Monica.
When I married Monica, she was aware of my political interests—I had received a Ph.D. from the Political Science Department at Harvard in 1972, when I was twenty-five years old. She knew me when we first got married as a financial services expert who worked with banks in the United States as well as overseas to implement bank marketing programs through which the banks sold insurance and securities products to their retail customers—activities that since the Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act had been largely forbidden for commercial banks to do.
The truth is that I had been involved in presidential politics since I was a child. Throughout my childhood, my father worked in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, where he was employed by the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, first as the Assistant Editor of the union’s newspaper, the Trainmen News, then as the union’s first Director of Public Relations. On January 1, 1969, my father’s crowning career achievement was realized when the United Transportation Union (UTU) was born. With the personal assistance of President Lyndon Johnson and the advice of Edward Bernays, commonly considered the father of public relations, my father managed to engineer the creation of the UTU by combining what were then known as the five railroad operating unions. Since the early 1950s, my father played a role in Democratic Party politics, representing the union.
As a child, I was a truant from kindergarten who refused to attend elementary school. I preferred to stay home to watch the televised organized crime hearings chaired by the slow-talking Democratic Senator from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver after the creation of the United States Special Committee to Investigate Crime. I distinctly remember watching on television with my father the 1952 Republican National Convention in Chicago that nominated popular war-hero Dwight D. Eisenhower of Kansas for president, followed by the Democratic National Convention also held in Chicago that year. In 1952, the Democrats nominated for president Illinois Governor Adlai E. Stevenson.
I spent considerable time with my father in Washington, watching such historic events as the McClellan Committee. In 1957, the McClellan Committee’s investigation of organized crime moving into the Teamsters Union helped launch Jack Kennedy’s presidential career. I learned politics spending hours in the Senate gallery in the hours when my father had business dealings with the government on behalf of the union.
In 2004, when John Kerry began emerging as the likely Democratic Party presidential candidate, I decided it was time for me to re-enter the political arena. I went up to the attic of our home and brought down a box of old papers, explaining to Monica that I was going to do my best to block Kerry from the White House.
“Who are you to do this?” Monica asked incredulously.
That led to a long discussion where I had to disclose to Monica that as an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, I had worked with the CWRU Civil Violence Research Center. Subsequently, as a graduate student at Harvard, I did contract work for the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis University—a nationally renowned research institute headed by the renown psychiatrist John Spiegel of the Spiegel catalogue family fame. Always in these jobs I was working under a government contract in work that first brought me into contact with various law enforcement and intelligence agencies, including the FBI and the CIA.
In the early 1970s, I worked in a Lemberg Center project under contract with the then Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a federal agency that was established under the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. The LEAA at that time was part of the U.S. Department of Justice. One of my assignments was to work undercover with the FBI to penetrate the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), a vocal organization of anti-war activists whose public figurehead at the time was none other than John Kerry.
In the course of that assignment, we established that Kerry, while he was yet in the Naval Reserves, had met in Paris as a representative of the VVAW with the beautiful, politically sophisticated Madame Nguyễn Thị Bình, who at that time was the chief negotiator to the Paris peace talks for the Viet Cong. Informing Naval Intelligence of the discovery, undercover U.S. intel operatives photographed Kerry in Paris wearing his Navy uniform going to meetings with Madame Binh. This violation of the military code, and possibly of U.S. law, resulted in John Kerry getting a “less than honorable” discharge from the Navy—a disgrace that later blocked Kerry from being accepted at the Harvard Law School.
Over the years, including while reporting for WND.com, I have had continued experience working with the FBI to report on various aspects of criminal activity. In recent years, at the invitation of the FBI, I was the sole reporter allowed to attend in El Salvador a DOJ-sponsored conference on criminal Hispanic gangs. That conference highlighted the FBI’s work internationally with countries in Mexico as well as Central and South America where the violent El Salvadorian-based gang MS-13 is a menace.
In our twenty-seven year marriage, Monica and I had managed through many very difficult times. I had come to learn that with Monica, I had a marriage partner I could rely upon to be a mature-thinking pillar of strength through what was certain to be one of the greatest tests we were forced to face together. In the years after 2004, the IRS had also showed up at our doorstep, demanding to interrogate me about my tax filings. Monica’s analysis in difficult times, including now, often has included advice that I did not want to hear. But I have also come to realize that Monica’s perspective is so important that I had to listen. Today, with the Mueller Special Counsel criminal investigation, we were going to have to navigate through what now was developing to be the most difficult challenge of our marriage.
Once the FBI announced their presence at the front door, our next move would be to contact our attorney. Anything I said to the FBI from that moment on would be reported, with the risk that it is a federal felony to lie to the FBI. With the possibility I could go to federal prison for anything I said to the FBI from that moment on, I resolved not to talk with the agents at the door, but to thank them politely and send them away, letting them know my attorney would speak promptly with the Department of Justice official to whom they were reporting.
The first problem was that our four-month old German Shepard had responded to the doorbell with predictable loud and angry barking. Lobo, a Spanish name that means “wolf,” was acting as if he could just savor taking several bites out of the hides of the two FBI agents who had just rang the doorbell.
As Monica subdued Lobo and got him into the basement, I opened the door to greet the two FBI agents. Both were young and very professional, neatly groomed and sharply dressed in coats and ties.
The two agents introduced themselves, showing me their identification. Agents Smith and Agent Jones (both obvious pseudonyms designed to protect the identity of two FBI agents at the door) then presented me with a two-page subpoena to appear ten days later, on Friday, September 7, 2018, in Washington, D.C., to testify before the Mueller grand jury.
Monica, who joined me at the front door, scanned with me the two-page subpoena.
The agents, who were clearly anxious to be invited inside to begin questioning me, were blocked when I said quietly, “I will immediately contact my attorney and he will be in touch with you right away.” The agents backed off and explained that the contact person in Washington who had issued the subpoena was Aaron Zelinsky.
Zelinsky was a forty-two year-old professional prosecutor before joining Mueller’s Special Counselor team who had worked in the office of the U.S. Attorney in the District of Maryland as an Assistant U.S. Attorney under current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who was then overseeing for the Department of Justice the U.S. Attorneys in the District of Maryland.1 Zelinsky graduated from Hopkins, a preparatory school located in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2002, having served as president of the student council. He went on to receive a Bachelor of Art in Economics from Yale College in 2006 and a Doctor of Jurisprudence (JD, DOJ) from Yale Law School in 2010.
I knew Zelinsky had a distinguished career in the Department of Justice in Richmond, Virginia, where he had earned an award for excellence in the prosecution of organized crime. In 2012, Zelinsky served as a legal advisor in the Obama State Department. Following that, Zelinsky clerked for Judge Thomas Griffith, a George W. Bush appointee on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2013, Zelinsky clerked for now-retired justices John Paul Stevens and Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. His resumé even included a stint serving for three months in 2012 as an adjunct professor at the Peking University School of Transitional Law in Shenzhen, China, followed by serving as a visiting assistant professor of law at the University of Maryland’s law school in Baltimore.
Put simply, I recognized Zelinsky as an experienced, hard-working, brilliant up-and-coming DOJ career prosecutor who was a force that we had to take very seriously. As I determined from the moment the FBI announced their presence, I was determined to be questioned by the FBI at the door. I fully appreciated lying to the FBI was a federal criminal felony, and I knew how easily the well-trained FBI field personnel armed with a subpoena could develop a perjury trap by questioning inexperienced people. Those frightened by a subpoena are often tempted to explain their way out of a difficult situation by attempting to justify their behavior to the FBI field agents delivering the subpoena. This is almost always a costly mistake.
I had no intention of talking to the FBI without the advice and presence of my attorney, David Gray. But, my problem was that 2016 was two years past and I knew my memory was less than perfect, more than capable of playing tricks on me.
I immediately assumed FBI Agents Smith and Jones were operating under a special assignment to Mueller’s special counselor team in Washington. My guess was these two agents had travelled from Washington specifically to deliver the subpoena to me at my New Jersey home. My guess was that they would report back to Zelinsky and that I would see them again, in the FBI interrogation room in Washington.
Agents Smith and Jones acted very professionally and politely, a trademark of FBI agents in the field. In return, I aimed to be equally calm, polite, and professional in my responses to them at the front door.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” I assured the FBI agents. “Please let Mr. Zelinsky know that my attorney will be in touch with him as soon as I have a chance to confer with my attorney.”
Agents Smith and Jones accepted that response, we thanked each other, and they departed quietly.
Much later, I learned Agents Smith and Jones had been frightened at Lobo’s barking. “That sounded like one big dog,” Agent Smith later told us, driving my attorney, David Grey, and me from the Mayflower Hotel in Washington to the federal courthouse in southeast D.C., to appear before the Mueller grand jury.
Listening to the dog at the door, Agents Smith and Jones went instantly on alert, ready to pull their service side-arm weapons in self-defense. From experience, FBI agents delivering subpoenas know that the angry barks of a large dog can quickly turn into a vicious and life-threatening dog attack once the door is open. Few Americans realize how many dogs the FBI is forced to shoot and kill in similar door-knocks to protect themselves from angry dogs doing their job.
Once the FBI agents departed, I turned to Monica and said, “Let’s call David Grey.”
We both knew that I had just entered a national FBI criminal investigation being conducted at the highest and most visible political level in our nation’s history.
I suspected immediately the target of the investigation for which I was being summoned was Roger Stone and that my testimony was required to help Mueller’s prosecutors build their criminal case to convict Roger Stone of a criminal felony and to squeeze him to turn state’s evidence against Donald Trump.
Still, that day I knew the outcome could easily be that I would be imprisoned as a felon even if Mueller had subpoenaed me to be a witness, not as a target, if I had a lapse of memory or made a misstep in testimony before Mueller’s Special Counsel and the FBI.
Even with the advice of David Gray, I was not sure I could avoid a perjury trap even though I fully intended to tell the truth. From what I knew of the manner, FBI investigators and Department of Justice prosecutors were capable of playing the perjury trap game, I felt scared. In the pit of my stomach, this was a game that was set up, so I could lose, even if I felt certain I was telling the truth.