CHAPTER SIX

Collusion: Foreign Government, the Obama Administration, and the Clinton Campaign

‘The FBI has a very close relationship with its British counterparts.”

It was February 2018 and former CIA Director John Brennan was appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, fielding questions about the origin of the Obama administration’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Because of the U.S.–U.K. special relationship, he explained, “the FBI had visibility into a number of things that were going on involving some individuals who may have had some affiliation with the Trump campaign.”1 It was all about the Brits.

More accurate to say: It was all about Brennan,

No one did more to promote the Russia-gate narrative than Obama’s transnational-progressive, hyper-political, rabidly anti-Trump spy chief. Brennan got his start in White House work on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, becoming the CIA’s daily briefer to the president.² During the 2016 presidential campaign, he had ambitions of staying in the White House as the new Clinton administration’s spymaster.

It was Brennan who peddled the conspiracy theories of his like-minded European counterparts, fearful that Trump was bent on disrupting their cherished post-World War II order (in which the United States underwrites security for the EU’s social welfare state). Other officials struggled to establish Russia’s responsibility for the hacking of Democratic email accounts—a high probability, but one based on equivocal evidence rendered more vulnerable by the Obama Justice Department’s failure to investigate it thoroughly. Brennan, by contrast, charged ahead with all the “slam dunk” certitude of his old boss and mentor, George Tenet: not only had the Russian done it, they had done it because Putin wanted Trump to win, and that was because Putin and Trump were in cahoots. And it was Brennan who quite publicly and proudly credited himself with spurring what ultimately became the FBI’s Trump–Russia probe. We’ve seen that it can be risky to take Brennan at his word. On this one, though, the evidence supports him.

First, let’s clear away some underbrush.

As we’ve already detailed, there has been a great deal of misinformation about the origination of the investigation—and even about whether there was a single investigation, as opposed to multiple threads, weaved into a Russia-gate narrative. Much of this misinformation can be blamed on President Trump himself. He could have cleared things up early on by declassifying and publishing the explanatory paper trail. Thus far (as this book goes to press), he has refrained from doing so—though the president has now delegated to Attorney General Bill Barr the authority to declassify information to facilitate Barr’s investigation of the Trump–Russia investigation’s genesis. Equally significantly, the president has made explosive allegations that, while in the ballpark of reality, are rife with inaccuracies. This has given intelligence officials in the United States and elsewhere the opportunity to issue denials in huffs of indignation that belie their underlying narrowness.

Let’s take a notable example. As previously discussed, on March 4, 2017, the president tweeted that his predecessor had his “wires tapped” at Trump Tower. Subsequently, Fox News legal commentator Andrew Napolitano claimed that, according to his informed sources (who appear to include former CIA analyst Larry Johnson), President Obama had surveilled Trump not via American intelligence agencies but by pressing an allied intelligence service into action—specifically, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters.3 GCHQ is Albion’s analogue to the NSA, specializing in international signals intelligence and cryptology.

In addition to heated rebukes from Obama officials, allies and media mouthpieces, Trump’s allegation prompted pointed denials from current and former intelligence officials (Obama appointees all). James Comey, then the FBI’s Director, put it this way in March 2017 House Intelligence Committee testimony:

With respect to the president’s tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets and we have looked carefully inside the FBI. The Department of Justice has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same for the Department of Justice and all its components. The Department has no information that supports those tweets.4

Similarly, James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, told Meet the Press that, from the national-security apparatus he oversaw, “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against … the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.”⁵

Fox News (at which I am a contributor) briefly suspended “Judge Nap” and distanced itself from his reporting. GCHQ itself heatedly dismissed the explosive allegations, an extraordinary refutation from a secretive sphinx that habitually refuses to confirm, deny, or discuss its spy-ops. “Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president elect are nonsense,” the agency declaimed. Not content to leave it at “nonsense,” GCHQ added that the allegations were “utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”⁶

Now, let’s say you’re a normal, sober person, reasonably well-informed but with limited time and attention span for such matters. You hear vehement, sweeping disclaimers from outfits that usually tell you they can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the morning sun. Naturally, you come away thinking that the accusations about their activities—claims of political spying—must have been complete bunk.

Not so fast.

Let’s examine this with care. Stripped of the high-decibel bluster, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the intelligence officials merely asserted that Trump’s claim—that President Obama ordered his phones to be wiretapped—was literally wrong. But as the half-joke goes, Trump is more to be taken seriously than literally. Here, the literal denial was so thin as to be nearly meaningless. Technically, even a rogue president would never order that anyone’s phones be wiretapped; a court would issue such an order, based on representations by investigators and Justice Department lawyers. When their remarks are parsed carefully, we find that the intelligence officials did not deny that there was an investigation involving Trump and his campaign, nor even that activity at Trump Tower was scrutinized. Moreover, GCHQ’s fervid denial—we were not “wiretapping” the “then president elect”—is near gibberish. GCHQ doesn’t actually do much “wiretapping” (the physical placement of a listening device on a telephone circuit)—certainly not in the United States; the word is a vestige from a bygone technological era. And Trump did not claim in his tweets that he was president-elect at the time of Obama’s alleged “tapping”—he said it happened “just before the victory.” Plus, even if GCHQ never targeted Trump’s Manhattan offices for the interception of phone calls, that hardly means it had nothing to do with any intelligence-gathering operations touching on Trump and his campaign.

Put simply, when listening to disclaimers from government officials, their indignation level should never be confused with the scope of their denial.

‘Congratulations, you will be defending yourself’

It is important to understand that Donald Trump was (and remains) incredibly unpopular among Western European elites. He was the first American major party presidential candidate in three-quarters of a century to express skepticism about an unconditional U.S. commitment to the Continent’s security and significance. In that vein, he took aim at NATO, particularly the lavish bureaucratic infrastructure that has outlived the alliance’s original mission and, to Trump’s mind, its value.

“Congratulations, you will be defending yourself,” Trump warned the allies in a lengthy New York Times interview during the heat of the campaign. That would be the consequence, he vowed, if the United States “cannot be properly reimbursed” for the “tremendous cost” our taxpayers bear in having our armed forces protect NATO nations blessed with “massive wealth.” NATO members were not “paying their bills,” and if that did not change, he asserted, the alliance would have to be rethought.7 This was a constant theme of Trump’s campaign: It was time to disrupt the old order. Not necessarily trash it, but renegotiate it so that America was not taken advantage of, not on the hook to assure the security of countries that refused to pony up for their own defense. Why, he wondered, should Americans sacrifice to shield the Continent from Russian aggression while Germany, the biggest, richest NATO country, made gigantic energy deals with the Kremlin, indenturing Europe to the rogue power that, in its empirical Soviet era, was NATO’s raison d’être?8 Candidate Trump elaborated:

We’re paying disproportionately. It’s too much. And frankly it’s a different world than it was when we originally conceived of the idea.… [W]e’re taking care of, as an example, the Ukraine. I mean, the countries over there don’t seem to be so interested. We’re the ones taking the brunt of it. So I think we have to reconsider. Keep NATO, but maybe we have to pay a lot less toward the NATO itself.⁹

Trump’s oft-expressed agnosticism about NATO and America’s interventions around the world was coupled with blandishments toward Moscow (sweet nothings toward a despotic regime—the sort of thing progressives find seductive when uttered by an Obama or a Merkel). As I’ve said, Trump’s Russia rhetoric sometimes crossed the line from jarring to infuriating (e.g., the drawing of moral equivalence between American and Russian intelligence operations). I feel the same dyspepsia when the president today talks about his warm friendship with the homicidal maniac Kim Jong-un. But that’s Trump, and you have to take him as he is. I didn’t see Abe Lincoln on the other party’s ballot—the party that didn’t just talk about better relations with anti-American regimes, factions, and organizations but funded, empowered, and embraced them. In any event, it is hardly unusual for an American presidential candidate to depict himself as uniquely suited to pursue the holy grail of cooperative relations with Russia—a posture taken by Obama and most of his predecessors in modern American history. But this is politics, so the Clinton camp predictably framed Trump as a threat to the post-World War II internationalist order that progressives regard as their own creation. He was, in the telling of Democrats and their Euro-chorus, bent on destroying NATO and turning the White House into an annex of the Kremlin.

If anyone could be relied on to toe this political line, it was Brennan. Even allowing that Trump can often be abrasive in a manner beneath his office, it is shocking to find a former director of the CIA upbraiding an American president as “treasonous,” guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and “wholly in the pocket of Putin.” It is equally stunning to find this recently incumbent U.S. spy chief beginning a typical published remark with: “Just imagine if we had a President who did not live in constant fear of being exposed as a fraud”—and always in a tone that oozes If only I could tell you what I know.10

Mind you: this is how Brennan speaks publicly. How do you figure he conducted himself while kibitzing with like-minded European intelligence counterparts he trusted?

Foreign Interference in Our Elections Is … Apparently Not So Bad

In late 2015, after Trump entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination (i.e., months before anyone had ever heard of George Papadopoulos), GCHQ began taking note of suspicious “interactions” between Trump associates and “suspected Russian agents.” This information was passed along to the American intelligence community as part of the allies’ regular exchange of information. Other European spy services followed suit. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Poland were all contributors, as was Australia. In Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, Obama National Intelligence Director James Clapper later confirmed this “sensitive” stream of European intelligence, originally reported by The Guardian’s Luke Harding.¹¹ At least at the start, there was no targeted operation against Trump or his campaign; it is said to have been routine intelligence collection against Russia that was yielding “connections” of varying kinds. Again, there is nothing necessarily nefarious about “connections,” and U.S. politicians across the spectrum have had them with Russia for decades. But these were Trump connections, so they were presumed to be dark. No, GCHQ was not “tapping” Trump’s phone lines in Manhattan, but, Harding related, “both US and UK intelligence sources acknowledge that GCHQ played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation.”

Here, it is worth noting the dismal state of U.S. intelligence on Russia under Brennan’s watch. As Lee Smith catalogues, American spy agencies were caught off-guard by Putin’s annexation of Crimea and by the escalation of Russia’s military presence in Syria—which even included the transportation of weapons and personnel through the Bosporus, a strait controlled by our NATO “ally,” Islamist Turkey. Putin had taken Obama’s measure. Moscow realized the president so needed its “help” on the Iran deal, as well as on the growing ISIS and humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, that the American administration would consciously ignore any provocation. In an April 2016 CNN interview, Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), then Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, lamented that “the biggest intelligence failure we’ve had since 9/11 has been the inability to predict the leadership plans and intentions of the Putin regime in Russia.”12

That was long before there was a public Russia-gate narrative, even months prior to the publication of hacked DNC emails—which first took the Obama administration by surprise, then froze it into paralysis. With an information void about Russia, and with the Obama administration both hardwired to politicize intelligence and encouraging of our allies’ clear preference for the Democratic nominee, European suspicions about Trump resonated. It was the perfect storm: even if one suspends disbelief and credits the American intelligence community’s good faith, it seems clear that the paltry state of reliable information on Putin’s regime rendered the intelligence community unable competently to evaluate the outlandish allegations in the Steele dossier, or to protect itself against Moscow’s legendary expertise in peddling disinformation.

Carter Page

We’ll soon come to the dossier. Now, let’s focus on a man who would emerge as one of its main characters, Carter Page. He was first announced as a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser on March 21, 2016, but he had joined the campaign two months earlier.

Page is an Annapolis graduate and former naval intelligence officer who served five years in the Navy, working for a time in western Morocco as part of a U.N. peacekeeping mission. He had been a good student, qualifying as a Trident Scholar, which enabled him to spend his senior year as a researcher on the House Armed Services Committee. Throughout his career, Page has persisted in academic work in the fields of international affairs, commerce, and security, earning an MA in national security studies from Georgetown, an MBA from New York University, and a doctorate from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in 2011. He ran an international affairs program at Bard College, taught a course on energy and politics at NYU, and won a coveted fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Alas, Page’s post-Navy career as an investment banker has been less than stellar. He joined Merrill Lynch, working first in London and then for three years in Moscow. He seems to have exaggerated his role in the firm’s work. For example, when he eventually began his own investment firm after leaving Merrill in 2008, he reportedly told a U.S. State Department official in Turkmenistan that he had helped take Russia’s energy giant, Gazprom, from a run-of-the-mill state-run oil company to “super major status”—a claim he had apparently also made to Turkmenistan officials.13 In reality, Page had been a nondescript deputy office manager at Merrill, making little impression on the execs who actually handled the big accounts. “He wasn’t great, and he wasn’t terrible,” observed Page’s boss. “What can you say about a person who in no way [is] exceptional?” The private fund he started in 2008, Global Energy Capital LLC, was hoping to attract a billion dollars for investment in companies run by foreign regimes. The venture, however, has struggled since its inception. Page has continued to seek investment opportunities around the world, including in the Russian energy sector. That fact is said to have made the Obama administration suspicious—ironic, to put it mildly, given that the Obama administration encouraged energy commerce with Russia while laboring mightily to help create the Russian tech sector (see Chapter 1).¹⁴

Page was favorably disposed toward Donald Trump from the moment the mogul launched his presidential bid at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015. What heartened Page about Trump is exactly what rankled many conservative Republicans (like me): the candidate’s blandishments towards Vladimir Putin; his minimizing of Putin’s monstrousness; and his vows to prioritize improved relations with Moscow—if necessary, it seemed, at the expense of important American interests. Page has not been shy about his pro-Russia views, and has a history of pro-Kremlin statements. He has blamed the deteriorating state of Russo-American relations on “misguided and provocative actions” by the United States, which he has accused of “imped[ing] potential progress” through “often hypocritical ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.” Reasoning that aggressive responses only provoke more Russian belligerence, Page has opposed Western action (mainly sanctions) against Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and has criticized the Obama State Department’s purported fomenting of Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution that ousted the Kremlin-friendly government.15

These are noxious political positions. But they are political positions. In this country, Page is entitled to hold them. The Trump campaign was entitled to consider internalizing them, no matter how obtuse they may be—just as the Obama administration was entitled to posit that American national security was somehow served by lavishing billions of dollars in sanctions relief on Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, while obliging the United States to help the jihadist regime develop an industrial strength nuclear energy program—of course, for civilian purposes only, right?

Page decided to volunteer to work on the Trump campaign. He sought and got an entrée from New York Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox, who knew Page had supported fellow Annapolis grad John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid. Impressed by Page’s résumé, particularly his military and intelligence service, the state party chairman forwarded Page’s name to Trump’s team. In January 2016, Page joined the campaign after brief meetings with its then-manager, Corey Lewandowski, and with Sam Clovis, the former navy fighter pilot turned Iowa radio host and GOP activist, who was starting to formulate a foreign-policy shop for the candidate.¹⁶

Such a shop would not be easy to stock with experts. Trump’s provocative positions on NATO and trade, his solicitude toward Putin, and his tirades against the Iraq war and what he framed as President Bush’s ineptitude, had the Republican foreign policy clerisy shunning his candidacy.¹⁷

Trump’s run through the GOP primary field was already looking like Sherman’s march through Georgia. Yet his advisers sensed a vulnerability as journalists peppered the campaign with questions about who was advising the would-be commander-in-chief on foreign policy matters. Feeling the need to brandish some names, the campaign announced a handful of obscure ones—probably as much unknown to Trump as to most. They included Page, as well as young George Papadopoulos, whom we will come to in the next chapter.18

Suffice it to say that Page got the FBI’s attention.

Politics Is Not a Predicate for a Counterintelligence Probe

Here, we come to why counterintelligence work can be so complex and difficult, compared to criminal investigations. This is not to say the latter are without their challenges. But when properly predicated, criminal investigations commence only after there is solid evidence that a penal offense has occurred or is underway. By contrast, the objective of national security is to prevent bad things from happening, to thwart foreign powers who might harm American interests and who do not have the legal protections of American citizens. Frequently, then, counterintelligence will involve the monitoring of people, including Americans, who may not have committed crimes, on the theory that they are serving the interests of foreign actors who may threaten us. The government is not required to wait until foreign powers have taken hostile action before engaging in countermeasures—depending on the kind of hostile action at issue, that could mean waiting until it’s too late.

On the other hand (have you noticed that when we’re talking law, there’s always another hand?), political dissent is never—by itself—a legitimate basis for the government to surveil an American citizen. This principle can be easier to state than to apply. Seditious action or espionage against our country is often inextricably bound up with political dissent against our government’s policies. It is not possible to separate the two entirely: to prosecute a person for criminal acts, it is necessary to prove criminal intent. Mens rea is often established by what a person says. Our words usually reflect the operation of our minds. The terrorism cases I prosecuted in the 1990s are a classic example: the suspects made many anti-American statements that freespeech principles entitled them to express, but when their conduct crossed the line into criminality (e.g., seditious conspiracy19), I was able to use their statements as mens rea proof. Yes, the First Amendment protected them from being prosecuted for making their political statements, but it did not insulate those statements from use as evidence of intent and motive for the crimes charged against them. Put another way, if a mafia don charged with murder is heard on tape telling the hitman, “Whack him,” you are not apt to find his lawyer mounting a free-speech defense.

But notice the salient word: conduct. Whether we are talking about criminal prosecution or surveillance for purposes of counterintelligence probes involving foreign powers, there must be some purposeful action before the government is justified in investigating an American. The PATRIOT Act, for example, stresses that First Amendment protected activity—mere speech, or mere association—is never sufficient by itself to trigger surveillance.²⁰ FISA also instructs that to justify surveilling an American citizen, there must be probable cause that the person is knowingly engaged in clandestine activity on behalf of a foreign power. The statute elaborates that such activity involves intentional subterfuge, the commission of crimes at the direction of a foreign intelligence service, using false identities on behalf of a foreign power, or such heinous activities as sabotage and terrorism.²¹ Manifestly, speech that does not cross the threshold of incitement or unwitting action that happens to help a foreign power is not good enough.

When we consider those principles, it is easy to understand (a) why the FBI might have had some legitimate concerns about Carter Page (remember, having “legitimate concerns” is not the same as saying he had done something wrong), and (b) why having legitimate concerns is not the same as having an adequate predicate for an investigation—or, even more, as having an adequate predicate for the use of highly intrusive investigative techniques that the law reserves for cases involving concrete evidence of willful clandestine activity.

It is not for nothing that Russia hawks derisively regarded Page as Putin’s voice in Trump’s campaign, while the rest of the community of international-affairs thinkers ridiculed his selection as an adviser to a major presidential candidate. In assessing Donald Trump’s “baffling” array of foreign policy advisers, Politico noted that Page’s “discursive online blog postings about foreign policy invoke the likes of Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, and Rhonda Byrne’s self-help bestseller, The Secret.” To be sure, Page’s foreign policy views were naïve and strangely sympathetic to a hostile foreign power. That did not make him a spy. Was he the kind of thinker we would want whispering in a presidential nominee’s ear? Well, I certainly wouldn’t (and didn’t). That, however, is a separate question. And on that question, it’s not like the blame-America-first mindset—like its companion conceit that we should refrain from pursuing America’s interests in the world—is uncommon among Washington’s smart set, or among academics, such as Page, who are steeped in foreign relations studies and have spent lots of time abroad. (Why do I think that if Page, without changing any of his Russia views, had joined, say, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Center for Constitutional Rights, or the Bernie Sanders campaign, The New York Times would have been fine with him?)

What else was known about Page when he joined the Trump campaign? Well, apparently through no fault of his own—i.e., not by doing anything illegal, but by traveling to Russia, by interacting professionally with Russians, as well as by seeking business opportunities and participating in academic conferences that were Russia-related (you know, the things our bipartisan political establishment told us were totally cool for the last thirty years)—Page attracted the attention of all the wrong people. The Mueller report, for example, notes that in 2008, as Page’s start-up venture, Global Energy Capital, foundered, he recruited as a “senior advisor” Sergey Yatsenko, deputy chief financial officer of Gazprom (a Russian-regime-controlled global natural-gas conglomerate whose shares are publicly traded). At around the same time, he met a man named Alexander Bulatov, who worked at the Russian consulate in New York. Prosecutors say Page later learned that Bulatov was a Russian intelligence officer, but they don’t allege that Page actually did anything with Bulatov—the Mueller report makes pregnant mention of the fact that they knew each other and then … the matter is dropped.22

In January 2013, Page did stumble into an FBI investigation of Russian spies. At an international energy symposium in New York City, Page happened into a man he says he was led to believe was a Russian government official, attached to Moscow’s United Nations mission. Unbeknownst to Page (which is how this usually works) the man was actually a Russian spy named Victor Podobnyy. By Page’s own account, in the ensuing months, he and Podobnyy exchanged emails and met in person on occasion, with Page giving Podobnyy his outlook on energy industry prospects and some documents on the subject—including parts of a lecture Page had given, which was publicly available information.

Here it gets fuzzy. In the course of its investigation, the FBI monitored conversations between Podobnyy and another spy, Igor Sporyshev. In at least one, on April 8, 2013, they discussed Page. Podobnyy described him as “an idiot,” who was looking to “earn lots of money” in the Russian energy sector, perhaps with a Gazprom project. Podobnyy was trying to recruit Page as an asset—evidently, an unwitting one whom he would burn once Page had obtained whatever information he was looking for. (“I will feed him empty promises,” Podobnyy told Sporyshev. “This is intelligence method to cheat, how else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.”)

In June 2013, the FBI approached Page to ask about his conversations with Podobnyy. Page voluntarily cooperated with the agents, meeting with investigators several times. In fact, the Justice Department used Page’s information in its arrest complaint in the criminal case against Podobnyy, Sporyshev and another Russian spy, Evgeny Buryakov.23

Here, we must note, the Mueller report plays fast and loose with the facts to make Page look worse—presumably to justify the Obama administration’s eventual decision to monitor him as if he and the Trump campaign were a Kremlin front operation. A reader of Mueller’s report would conclude that Page, like everyone else, found out about the case against the Russian spies only in 2015, when Podobnyy was arrested. At that point, we’re told, Page read the public complaint, realized he was the person described in it as “Male-1” (about whom Podobnyy and Sporyshev spoke in April 2013) spoke, and was immediately moved to tell a Russian official at the U.N. that he “didn’t do anything” (under circumstances where no one was alleging otherwise). But that’s not all that happened. Mueller conveniently omits that Page cooperated with the FBI in the investigation and prosecution of the spies. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Agent Gregory Monaghan said under oath in the arrest complaint:

On or about June 13, 2013, Agent-2 and I interviewed Male-1. Male-1 stated that he first met VICTOR PODOBNYY, the defendant, in January 2013 at an energy symposium in New York City. During this initial meeting, PODOBNYY gave Male-1 PODOBNYY’s business card and two email addresses. Over the following months, Male-1 and PODOBNYY exchanged emails about the energy business and met in person on occasion, with Male-1 providing PODOBNYY with Male-1’s outlook on the current [sic] and future of the energy industry. Male-1 also provided documents to PODOBNYY about the energy business.[24]

Page’s interview by the FBI was not a one-off. Beginning in 2013, he was interviewed multiple times over the next three years about his interactions with Russians.²⁵

Of course, even if we and Page assume that this means the government regarded Page as a cooperating witness, at least by the time the spies were arrested, that would not necessarily mean the Bureau was completely convinced Page was on Team America. Let’s try to see things from the perspective of the FBI, which has the challenging responsibility of protecting our security without unduly intruding on our liberties. In 2008, Page met a Russian spy, which would reasonably have been regarded as significant, even if there was no known untoward interaction. Page was targeted for recruitment by Russian spies five year later. He provided information and documents to one of the spies. In that connection, investigating agents would probably not have known at first that (a) the information Page gave Podobnyy was public and harmless, and (b) Page thought he was dealing with a U.N. official, not a spy. The FBI may have quite reasonably worried that Page was feeding non-public business intelligence to clandestine Russian operatives. Until they could find out more, the Bureau may have regarded Page as a subject of the investigation.

But then they interviewed him and did enough follow up investigation to satisfy themselves that Page was harmless—perhaps even useful. Ultimately, it appears that he was regarded as a cooperating witness. That’s why the summary of his 2013 FBI interview is in the arrest complaint. Once a counterintelligence file has been opened, however, the Bureau has a habit of keeping it open. As I’ve stressed, counterintelligence is not prosecution-oriented; it is about information gathering—and while prosecutions end, you can never have enough information. The fact that the spies were prosecuted would not necessarily have meant the FBI was done with Carter Page for intelligence purposes—why else would agents have continued periodically interviewing him over the years?

That’s a long-winded way of saying that the FBI may very well have had an open case file on Page at the time he joined Trump’s campaign—i.e., the 2013 case may never have been closed, either because of bureaucratic inertia or because the matter was still considered active (perhaps because the Russian spy under indictment did not plead guilty until after Page joined the campaign).26

Once Page joined the Trump campaign, the Mueller report takes pains to recount, he championed the notion that Trump’s ingratiating posture toward Putin could have a “game changing effect” and bring an end to what Page regarded as “the new Cold War.”²⁷ With due respect to Page’s naval service, for those of us who remember what the actual Cold War was, to have regarded Russo-American tensions—provoked by Putin’s aggression—as a “new Cold War” was asinine. But it was asinine within the bounds of political debate. Page also made no secret of the fact that he believed the anti-Russia sanctions in place were counterproductive—a position he’d been publicly vocal about. Again, a foolish position. But being an idiot (here, Podobnyy seems perspicacious) is not being a foreign agent.

And yes, as Mueller illustrates, Page touted that his years of experience working in Russia and its regime-dominated energy sector gave him “high-level contacts” who might be able to facilitate a meeting between Putin and Trump. He was no doubt inflating his connections, but so what? I’d be fine if the government wants to designate Russia as an adversary with which commerce should be severely restricted. (I’d rather it were done by a congressional enactment rather than a presidential proclamation under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act28—but that’s a different story.) Last I checked, though, the government was encouraging commerce with Russia (other than with sanctioned individuals and entities). More to the point, why single out Page? In Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton had a foreign policy adviser who not only could (and did) arrange meetings with Putin, but could (and did) score a big payday for himself to boot. That did not make him a foreign agent. To imply that Page, who had comparatively zero influence, should nevertheless have been seen as a clandestine operative is thin camouflage for what is essentially a political position, namely, that a Clinton administration could be trusted to manage America’s relationship with our adversary in Moscow but a Trump administration could not. Political outcomes are for voters to decide, they are not the business of prosecutors and FBI agents.

Then there was Page’s trip to Moscow in July 2016. Because of the Steele dossier (which we will come to in due course), it is well known by now that Page gave a commencement speech at the New Economic School (NES). There was nothing secret about the speech. It was scheduled well in advance. Page not only made the campaign aware that he had been invited to speak; he strongly urged that Trump go in his stead. That seems presumptuous on Page’s part (the candidate standing in for the advisor), except when one remembers that the NES was the same venue at which Barack Obama spoke in his first year as president—a speech that bears rereading since much of it sounds downright Carter Pagesque.²⁹ In any event, Page’s superiors in the campaign gave him strict instructions that he was on his own, and was not to represent himself as appearing on behalf of the candidate.³⁰

As we shall come to in more detail, the most indecorous aspect of the report prepared by Robert Mueller’s staff of Democratic partisans is its constitutionally repugnant shifting of the burden of proof. If you are a Trump associate, the prosecutor won’t leave it at “we have insufficient evidence to charge a crime, so we remain mum,” as prosecutors are supposed to do. Mueller’s approach is to taint with innuendo—exactly what a prosecutor is not supposed to do. Not “we don’t have proof to charge a crime”; Mueller’s staff says, in effect, “We can’t exonerate you—there are unanswered questions here”—as if it were an American’s burden to prove his innocence rather than the prosecutor’s to establish wrongdoing.

That is Mueller’s approach to Page.

Page is in the collusion vortex because of Clinton campaign operative Christopher Steele’s allegation that he engaged in corrupt meetings during his Moscow trip with Putin crony Igor Sechin and Putin regime official Igor Divyekin. Page has convincingly denied these meetings. He has openly bragged for years about Russian officials he knows, but he has never claimed to know either Sechin or Divyekin. He says he does not know them, he denies meeting them, and he emphatically denies discussing a quid pro quo scheme, as alleged by Steele, in which Trump, if elected, would drop sanctions in exchange for money. The FBI has been investigating for nearly three years, and Mueller still has no proof that these things happened. Yet he won’t say that. Nor will he simply say nothing, which would be appropriate. Instead, here’s the end of his Page section:

The [Special Counsel’s] Office was unable to obtain additional evidence or testimony about who Page may have met or communicated with in Moscow; thus Page’s activities in Russia—as described in his emails with the [Trump] Campaign—were not fully explained.31

In other words, Page failed to prove his innocence of the unsupported allegations lodged by a foreign spy working for the opposition political campaign.

In the emails to the campaign Mueller alludes to, Page claimed that before his NES speech, Russian Deputy Prime Minister (and NES board member) Arkady Dvorkovich made remarks expressing strong support for Trump’s candidacy and hope that the two countries could “work together toward devising better solutions in response to the vast range of current international problems.” Page added that this sentiment was widely shared, “based on feedback from a diverse array of other sources close to the Presidential Administration.” From this jejune observation, we are evidently supposed to imagine that this “diverse array” may have included Sechin and Divyekin, who, after all, are “close to the Presidential Administration” of Putin. Therefore, the implication goes, it was up to Page to prove that he did not engage in corrupt schemes to sabotage his country, notwithstanding that the prosecutor has no proof that he did.

That is not the way American citizens are supposed to be treated by the United States government, regardless of whether the matter in question is a criminal or a counterintelligence case, and regardless of whether one thinks Carter Page and Donald Trump are fools. If you want to say there has been no shortage of Russian smoke around Carter Page over the years leading up to his time in the Trump campaign, that is obviously true. If you think that may have rated some preliminary investigative steps, such as interviewing him (as the FBI did in March 2016), that certainly makes sense. But surveillance warrants on the theory that he was a Russian agent engaged in clandestine action against our country—based on his daft belief in appeasement and the uncorroborated blather of a foreign spy who couldn’t get basic facts right?

That’s wrong, the prosecutor’s insinuations notwithstanding.

Triangulating Manafort: Obama, Clinton and Ukraine

It is in connection with Paul Manafort that we encounter some genuine collusion targeting the 2016 campaign: willful collaboration among foreign governments, the Obama administration, and the Clinton campaign.

Just a week after the campaign introduced Page as a Trump foreign policy adviser, it announced that Manafort had been brought on board, too. Although the nomination was nearly in Trump’s grasp, his campaign still feared that the more organized campaign of Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas), the only viable competitor left, would succeed in cadging delegates Trump had won in state primary elections.32 Manafort was recommended to Trump by their mutual friend Thomas Barrack. The consultant was an old political hand, experienced managing the rough-and-tumble of a convention fight. And there were added attractions: Manafort badly wanted the gig and was willing to work for free (at least “free” in terms of salary; as we previously mentioned, he had every intention of cashing in on the lofty role).³³

As we’ve detailed, Manafort had longstanding, lucrative political consulting (and other business) arrangements with Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs who had Kremlin ties. These arrangements had already been spun into a narrative of political corruption by Glenn Simpson in 2007 and 2008—when Simpson was a Wall Street Journal scribe, not yet the Fusion GPS impresario. (The Russia-gate tale is very much an off-the-shelf affair.)

Six years later came Ukrainian Euromaidan uprising of February 2014, which finally forced the flight to Moscow of Manafort’s client, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. With American attention intensifying as tensions boiled over in Kiev, Manafort reentered the FBI’s investigative cross-hairs, as did other American political consultants who did work that benefitted the Party of Regions. It is difficult to say, however, what forms these investigations took.

CNN, for example, has reported that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI launched an investigation of Manafort in 2014, and that the probe included some kind of surveillance authorization from the FISC, with this monitoring finally discontinued in early 2016 “for lack of evidence.”34 This report is difficult to square with representations by prosecutors, during Special Counsel Mueller’s 2018 prosecutions of Manafort, that the government was not in possession of any relevant intercepted communications by Manafort. Due process rules would have required prosecutors to disclose such communications to the defense—or at least to acknowledge their existence, then try to convince the court that they were irrelevant to the case and should not be disclosed.³⁵ It is possible that that there was some kind of FISA order that did not involve monitoring of Manafort’s communications. Or it could be that the FISC authorized the surveillance of a foreign associate of Manafort’s—most likely, Konstantin Kilimnik—and that Manafort was neither the direct target nor a participant in any intercepted communications.³⁶

At any rate, while it appears certain that Manafort’s failure to register as a foreign agent of Ukraine was scrutinized after Yanukovych fled, it is unclear whether court-authorized surveillance was among the investigative techniques the government used.

Yanukovych’s abdication delighted the Obama administration, which was quick to back the new administration of President Petro Poroshenko. The ensuing Obama–Clinton–Ukraine collaboration that followed has been laid bare by the dogged reporting of Peter Schweizer, Chuck Ross, Jeff Carlson, and John Solomon.37 Kiev became so dependent on Washington for desperately needed financial support that, by threatening to withhold funds, Vice President Joe Biden pressured Poroshenko into firing Viktor Shokin, one of his top prosecutors. Shokin just happened to be investigating a natural gas company called Burisma, which just happened to have placed Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, on its board of directors. While the Veep pushed the International Monetary Fund to grant Ukraine a $17.5 billion loan package, Burisma lavishly compensated Hunter’s law firm, to the tune of more than $3 million over an eighteen-month span. (A lot of money, but chump change compared to the Chinese government’s $1.5 billion infusion in a joint investment fund with Hunter Biden while Vice President Biden, administration point-man on China issue, turned a blind eye to Beijing’s aggression in the South China Sea.³⁸)

Under the circumstances, it may seem ironic that the Obama administration prodded Ukraine to establish a National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU)—but the IMF, like most progressive institutions, is duly impressed by such Orwellian titles. Naturally, the fledgling NABU developed a close-knit relationship with the FBI. In 2014, NABU alerted the Bureau to a ledger said to have belonged to Yanukovych, bête noire of the new Ukrainian government. The ledger purports to show $12.7 million in cash payments to Manafort. The FBI used the information to interview Manafort, but the authenticity of the ledger has not been established. Manafort dismisses it as fake (contending that the Party of Regions paid him by wire transfer, not cash), and Ukrainian officials have conceded that they cannot prove the payments reflected in the ledger were made. The Justice Department thus reportedly closed the case with no charges. (Perhaps not coincidental to the decision not to pursue the case: Manafort had brought influential Democrats into his Ukrainian work, such as former Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig and the consulting firm started by Obama and Clinton adviser John Podesta—a firm that is still run by Podesta’s brother.³⁹)

But then came 2016, and sudden renewed interest in the Manafort–Ukraine investigation. The interesting question is, why?

As we’ve seen, Yanukovych high-tailed it to Moscow, having ignored Manafort’s advice to chart Ukraine’s course toward the EU rather than Russia. Afterwards, the consultant busied himself by propping up a new Ukrainian political organization, the Opposition Bloc, to supplant the Party of Regions. That put Manafort on the radar screen of Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American and a DNC consultant who was all in for Hillary. Chalupa is said to have had an inkling that Manafort would become involved in the Trump campaign. Why she did is an interesting and thus far unanswered question. To be sure, if it was conjecture, it would have been sensible conjecture: a Ukrainian keeping tabs on Manafort would know he was a friend and former political consulting business partner of Roger Stone, who was himself vigorously supporting Trump’s bid (though no longer formally part of the campaign40). Manafort was itching to get back into the American political arena, and Trump’s steamrolling campaign would be a logical landing place; in fact, it was Manafort, not Trump, who made the first move in reaching out to Tom Barrack.

Chalupa also had good sources in Kiev who were focused on Manafort. These included Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian legislator opposed to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions and the Opposition Bloc, and Artem Sytnyk, NABU’s director. It was Sytnyk who took over and quietly closed the investigation of Burisma after Vice President Biden got Poroshenko to pink-slip the prosecutor. Leshchenko just happens to be a vassal of Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire who just happens to give millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. Wonder of wonders, Leshchenko took a public, strident anti-Trump position during the U.S. campaign—highly unusual for a foreign parliamentarian. “A Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy,” he told the Financial Times, so it was “important to show not only the corruption aspect” of the mogul, but also that Trump was “a pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world.” That, he added, was why most Ukrainian politicians were “on Hillary Clinton’s side.” (I’m sure she was thrilled about the enthusiasm in Kiev, but enthusiasm in Wisconsin might have been more helpful.)

During the same early 2016 weeks when Chalupa was tapping her Ukrainian sources and giving Democrats a heads-up about a potential Manafort–Trump alliance, NABU investigators and Ukrainian prosecutors journeyed to Washington. There, the Obama administration arranged for them to huddle with the FBI, the Justice Department, the State Department, and the White House’s National Security Council (agencies that coordinated frequently throughout the collusion caper). Andrii Telizhenko, a political officer at Ukraine’s embassy in Washington, later told John Solomon that the U.S. officials uniformly stressed “how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united.” The officials also indicated to their Ukrainian counterparts that they were keen to revive the investigation of payments by Yanukovych’s ousted Party of Regions government to American figures—i.e., the FBI’s Paul Manafort probe. I know this may be hard to believe, but the Obama officials seem to have been less interested in Greg Craig than in Manafort.

Nazar Kholodnitskiy, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told Solomon that soon after the January 2016 Washington meetings, he found that Ukrainian officials were effectively meddling in the American presidential election. Another top Ukrainian lawman, Kostiantyn Kulyk, recalled that after the Kiev contingent’s return home from the United States, there was lots of buzz about helping the Americans with the Party of Regions investigation.

Which brings us back to Serhiy Leshchenko, Ukraine’s unabashed Clinton backer. And whaddya know—besides serving the government in Kiev and providing scintillating geopolitical analysis, Leshchenko had a side job: he was a source for … wait for it … Fusion GPS—the Clinton campaign oppo arm that dreamed up the Steele dossier. Turns out it was Leshchenko (along with NABU chief Sytnyk) who leaked the unverified Yanukovych ledger to the media in May 2016, just after it was announced that Trump had made Manafort his campaign chairman. There is also a pending investigation into whether Leshchenko attempted to blackmail Manafort by sending text messages to the consultant and his daughter that threatened to give NABU, the FBI, and the media “bulletproof” evidence of Manafort’s financial dealings with Yanukovych.41

The ledger’s exposure, of course, is what led to Manafort’s ouster from the Trump campaign. The Ukrainian payments became an important strand of the Russia-gate narrative. The wealth that Manafort’s Ukrainian work generated formed the foundation of his prosecution by Special Counsel Mueller for tax, money laundering, and unregistered foreign-agent offenses.

Can anyone say Clinton Campaign Collusion with Ukraine? The Ukrainian courts can: In December 2018, one such tribunal ruled that Leshchenko and Sytnyk had violated Ukrainian law by leaking the ledger. The infraction, the court added, “led to interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016 and harmed the interests of Ukraine as a state.”

Meanwhile, CNN maintains that sometime in 2016, the FBI “restarted” the FISA surveillance that the network says had been discontinued early in the year.42 We will take a closer look in Chapter 8 at the claims, based on felonious intelligence leaks, that Manafort and other Trump campaign figures were subjected to FISA surveillance beginning in autumn 2016 and continuing into the start of the Trump presidency.

When Is ‘Early Spring’?

In Russia-gate, like most everything in Washington, what they don’t tell you—or especially, what they go out of their way to keep from you—is more meaningful than most information you get.

The House Intelligence Committee’s completed its report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign on March 22, 2018, but it took over a month for the report to be released to the public—festooned with blackouts insisted upon by the Justice Department, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies. Fortunately, the Committee’s then-Chairman, Devin Nunes, went ballistic over the excisions. Finally, some of them were quietly un-redacted. When they were, The Wall Street Journal’s eagle-eyed Kimberley Strassel was keeping watch. She noticed some overlooked passages on page 54.⁴³

As a result, we learned that, in what was described as the “late spring” of 2016, the FBI’s then-Director James Comey briefed the principals of the National Security Council on “the Page information.”

NSC principals are a presidential administration’s highest-ranking national-security officials. The Obama NSC was chaired by the president. Regular attendees included Vice President Biden, National Security Advisor Rice, and National Intelligence Director Clapper. The heads of such departments and agencies as the Justice Department (Attorney General Lynch) and the CIA (Director Brennan) could also be invited to attend NSC meetings if matters of concern to them were to be discussed.

We do not know which NSC principals attended the Comey briefing about Carter Page. But how curious that the House Intelligence Committee interviewed so many Obama-administration officials who were on, or knowledgeable about, the NSC, and who had government appointment calendars that are exactingly kept, and yet none of them provided a date for this meeting more precise than “late spring” 2016. Given how mulishly the intelligence community has stonewalled questions about when and why the Trump–Russia investigation(s) originated, the haziness about a date that could easily be determined is intriguing.

Further, exactly what “Page information” was at issue? The FBI did not begin receiving Steele dossier reports about Page until July 2016. What information was so significant in the “late spring” that Director Comey needed to brief top Obama national security officials about it? Did the FBI still have an open counterintelligence investigation on Page based on the 2013 case in which Page had cooperated with the FBI’s prosecution of Russian spies (one of whom described Page as “an idiot”)? Was the Page information somehow spruced up by intelligence coming over the transom from Europe? Did it seem more alarming because Page’s coming on board the Trump campaign was so rapidly followed by Manafort’s doing so? We don’t know. We just know Page and Manafort had the attention of the Obama administration’s top echelon.

At the insistence of the FBI and the Justice Department, another significant meeting was initially redacted on page 54 of the House report, purportedly out of concern for national security secrets. When it was unredacted at Nunes’s insistence, however, it became clear that national security had nothing to do with the excision. Sometime apparently before the “late spring” NSA briefing, Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, met with Attorney General Lynch “about Page.” Among the topics discussed was the possibility of providing the Trump campaign with a “defensive briefing.” This would be a meeting with a senior campaign official to put the campaign on notice of potential Russian efforts to compromise someone—presumably Page—within the campaign.

Isn’t that interesting? As we’ve noted, the FBI had interviewed Carter Page in March 2016.44 Was that interview a reaction to his joining the Trump campaign? Was it an effort to gauge whether Page was still a Russian recruitment target? Was it a substitute for giving the campaign a defensive briefing, or a preparatory step in anticipation of possibly giving such a briefing? We don’t know. Former Attorney General Lynch told the House Committee that a potential defensive briefing was discussed, but she could not—or, at least, did not—provide an explanation for why it never happened.

Here is what we can surmise.

It defies modern American norms for the incumbent government to investigate the opposition party’s presidential campaign, and to invoke the government’s extraordinary foreign counterintelligence powers in doing so. To be sure, no sensible person would argue that the government should refrain from investigating if, based on compelling evidence, the FBI suspects individuals—even campaign officials, even a party’s nominee—of acting as clandestine agents of a hostile foreign power. The question is, what should trigger such an investigation?

The Obama administration decided that the norm against exploiting government powers to investigate political opponents did not apply to the Trump campaign. The administration decided not to give the campaign a defensive briefing even though plenty of Trump campaign officials had impeccable national-security credentials. For example, by the spring of 2016, Trump surrogates included Rudy Giuliani (a former New York City mayor, U.S. Attorney, and top Reagan Justice Department official), Chris Christie (then the New Jersey governor and a former U.S. Attorney), and Senator Jeff Sessions (then the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and highly likely to land a top national security position if Trump won). If all the Obama administration had been trying to do was check out a few worrisome characters who had wheedled their way into the Trump campaign despite suspicious Russia ties, the FBI could easily have alerted one or more of these former government officials.

If it was not ready or willing to do that, the Obama administration could have reacted to the news that Page and Manafort had joined the Trump campaign by interviewing them—again. As we’ve noted, Page was clearly available for interview. Manafort had submitted to an interview in 2014 over his Ukrainian work, and would have been hard pressed to decline if the Justice Department (which oversees the Foreign Agent Registry) said it wanted to discuss the matter further.

Instead of treating the Trump campaign like a normal political organization, the Obama administration chose to treat it as a co-conspirator collaborating with Russia. Instead of offering a defensive briefing, Obama officials made the Trump campaign the subject of a counterintelligence investigation. From the “late spring” on, it appears that every report of Trump–Russia ties, no matter how unlikely and uncorroborated, was presumed to be probative of a traitorous arrangement. Facts about Trump were viewed in the worst possible light. The mogul was never given the Obama administration’s Hillary Clinton standard: the irrebuttable presumption of innocence, no matter how high the corruption evidence mounted.