On Friday, October 27, the rumors started flying.
Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation delivered a set of sealed indictments to the court. Reporters from every major and minor media outlet around the world started scurrying to figure out who Mueller had ensnared, on what charges, and just how close to the president they might be.
The speculation pointed primarily to Roger Stone. Some speculated that the indictments were against Paul too. That scared me—not only because of the proximity factor and how anything that happened to him might affect my own reputation but mostly just thinking about what it might mean for Paul and his family. I was certain Manafort and Stone hadn’t committed any act of collusion. Other names were floating around too, including Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, whom I didn’t know well but who had been directly involved in Trump’s business dealings, including a plan the media had unearthed to build a Trump hotel in Moscow, which of course raised more suspicions.
But nobody thought the investigations were ultimately targeting me.
Including me.
I was busy attending my younger brother’s wedding. It was an exceptional fall day in Charlottesville, Virginia, and we were surrounded by family and friends. My phone was turned off.
My brother and his bride had graciously asked all of our children to participate in the wedding too, and they were thrilled to be a part of it. The ceremony was outdoors, overlooking the sweeping Virginia mountains around us, and the reception was an elegant sit-down dinner, followed by dancing and the sounds of laughter and happiness.
At the end of the night, I checked my phone and was greeted with a barrage of texts from reporters wanting to know if Paul was one of the people indicted. All I could tell them was, “You know more than me.”
The general consensus was, “I guess we’ll find out Monday morning.”
I wouldn’t have to wait that long.
On Sunday morning, as we were unpacking from our trip, my phone rang. It was my lawyer. He asked if I was alone, so I stepped into my home office to take the call.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Rick,” he said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, and there is no easy way to do it. I just received a call from Greg Andres. You are a target in the investigation, and you’re going to be indicted tomorrow.”
I was shocked.
I tend to be someone who takes news calmly. Even bad news. It is a trait that has helped me navigate working with others more effectively. So I sat down in my office chair and listened as my attorney explained the process I would have to go through in order to turn myself in to the FBI.
Looking back on it, I think my calmness that morning was in part because I couldn’t have possibly understood what the ramifications of this indictment would be. There was no way I could have imagined what this was going to do to my life and to my family. Plus, I was innocent. This was crazy. I hadn’t been a part of any of the things that the press or investigators or anyone else had insinuated the “Trump team” did. No one I knew during my time on the Trump campaign had “colluded” with Russia to try and sway the election in any way. We didn’t need to. Trump did plenty to sway the press, the voters, and everything else in that campaign all on his own. Which is why I truly could not understand why the investigation had targeted me, and why they were “indicting” me.
“What are they accusing me of?” I asked.
“I don’t know. The indictments are sealed. Hopefully, you can get a look at the charges before you’re in front of the judge,” he said. “But there’s something else….”
My lawyer went on to tell me that he couldn’t appear with me in court the next day.
He was dropping me as a client.
“Why?” I asked.
He said there was a dispute over payments between his firm and Tom Barrack. In my work for Tom, I knew that the law firm had been grossly running up its fees and that Barrack wasn’t having it. Tom had been withholding funds while disputing the charges, but the timing of this news felt suspect to me.
“What am I supposed to do with no attorney?” I asked.
“They’ll assign a public defender to you. It won’t matter much at this stage, but you will need to find new counsel,” he said. “They’ve offered to let you self-surrender, which means there won’t be a public spectacle. It’ll all be handled quietly. They want you to come into D.C. tonight, stay at a hotel, and the FBI will pick you up and bring you in for processing first thing in the morning. You have to surrender your passport as well. They’ll send someone over today to get it.”
“To my house?”
I could hear the sound of my children laughing in the living room. I was paralyzed.
“Yes. Someone from the local FBI field office will call you to set that up. Just turn it over. Don’t say anything. I’ll meet you later at the hotel tonight to go over what to expect in the morning. You’ll be fine. Again, I’m sorry, Rick.”
“Right. I understand. Okay, thanks,” I said.
I hung up the phone, completely numb.
Two hours later, an agent from the FBI’s field office in Richmond came to my house. Thankfully, he called me ahead of time and arranged for me to walk outside to meet him near the street, so our kids wouldn’t be impacted. I didn’t want to have to explain who he was, or what he was doing at the house on a Sunday.
He was polite. He acted as if he knew less about what was going than I did. I got the sense that he’d never been asked to pick up someone’s passport on a Sunday like this, but he took it from me and said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Gates. Can I ask you to sign this form?” The only thing the form did was confirm that I had handed over my passport to the custody of the FBI, so I signed it. It didn’t say anything about what the charges were, or why the surrendering of my passport was required—although I later learned that confiscating my passport was over the fear that I would flee the country.
Naively we thought this would all blow over quickly.
After an early dinner, I told the kids I had to go into D.C. for a morning meeting, which was not unusual on a Sunday night. I would sometimes drive in the night before in order to avoid the brutal I-95 commute. I checked into a hotel where I met my outgoing attorney, and he told me what to expect in the morning. And then I stayed up for most of the night running through everything I had ever done or said, and everything anyone else I had worked with on the campaign had ever done or said since I’d first been introduced to Trump in March of 2016. I was absolutely certain that no one I knew had colluded with any Russian to help sway the election. No way. Which made me question: Was this whole Special Counsel investigation a move to try and thwart the election results? Was this a political reaction to Trump breaking all the norms of the political system, and beating them so badly at their own game?
In the morning, two FBI agents took me to the Washington Field Office for processing. They did what my lawyer had promised: they took me in through an underground garage, so my family wouldn’t ever have to see a public spectacle.
It was in the field office where I saw Paul for the first time in several months. We passed one another in an office lobby while paperwork was being completed. Then we were separated into two separate rooms waiting to be moved over to the D.C. Federal District Courthouse, less than two blocks away.
The FBI agents then drove us in two separate vehicles to the courthouse, but once we arrived, we were positioned in the same area behind the magistrate’s chambers. This was the first time we were left alone together.
“This is absurd,” I said. “Why are we here? There’s no Russia collusion!”
Paul looked pained and in shock to see me. “I know,” he said. “I don’t understand why you’re here. I am really shocked. There’s no reason you should be here. We’re going to get through this. Don’t worry, everything will be fine.”
The only thing I knew with absolute certainty was that I was not guilty. So I stood tall as they walked me in the courtroom. I felt it was important to hold my head high, to let it be known through my body language that I hadn’t colluded with any Russians.
On the inside, not knowing what I didn’t know, having still not seen the actual indictment, not knowing what I was walking into—I was scared.
The outdated carpet on the floor, the worn wooden benches, and the fluorescent lighting of that run-down old courtroom hit me like a blinding light as we walked in. I’ll never forget the smell of that place, and the buzz in the air, as I looked around the gallery and saw it was packed. There wasn’t even any standing room left.
I had never seen the inside of a courtroom from this perspective before. I noticed sketch artists alternately staring at me and then looking down at their sketch pads, frantically scribbling, then looking over at Paul, and frantically scribbling some more.
The two of us were tied together in this, no matter what happened from here.
As the clerks and stenographer took their seats and a bailiff stood up and swung the door to the judge’s chambers open, my heart raced.
“All rise….”
The magistrate judge, Deborah Robinson, a woman with more than thirty years on the bench, came in, and she started speaking agonizingly slow.
She began reading the indictments, one syllable at a time, and slowly but surely the truth of why I’d been targeted became clear: not one single charge in either of the indictments against us had anything to do with “Russia collusion.”
Instead, it was a dizzying array of charges, on everything from taxes to FARA registration issues, and none of which had anything to do with President Trump, his team, or anything that occurred during the 2016 campaign.
I could not wrap my head around what she was saying. None of the charges against me were true, and I did not believe any of the charges against Paul were true, either. But the indictments had me tied to Paul’s charges in a “conspiracy.”
And that’s when I started seething.
“This is political persecution,” I thought.
I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to believe that our political system was this corrupt on so many levels. Paul and I had seen plenty of corrupt politicians in other countries. But here? At this high a level? It was unthinkable. The multiple counts in these indictments were about financial matters: Paul’s taxes, foreign accounts, and an issue with “FARA registration,” which, as I later learned, carried no criminal sentencing guidelines and was usually treated by the Department of Justice as a clerical error, not a federal crime. There was nothing about Russia. Which could only mean one thing: all of this was politically motived. There was no other reason that an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election would dig up these unrelated charges against any two people, except for the fact that we happened to be people who worked for Trump.
When the judge asked me to enter my plea, I said with absolute certainty, in a clear, strong, and defiant voice, “Not guilty.”
The word “conspiracy” immediately struck me. “Conspiracy” meant that more than one person was involved. The charges linked the two of us in “conspiring” to do these things they alleged we had done. And one of the charges—failure to properly register our political consulting work in Ukraine under the FARA Act (the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938), which was designed primarily to make sure foreigners openly registered their intentions as agents in dealings with the U.S. government—came with the demoralizing wording of charges of “conspiracy against the United States.”
In no way were we ever working “against” the United States of America. In fact, we were asked in 2014 to voluntarily support an FBI investigation looking into the ways in which the Ukraine government worked and to help the FBI understand what had happened during and after the Western-backed coup of the Ukrainian government, which was controlled by the political party we represented. We were tasked with helping an FBI investigation. And we did. Gladly. We weren’t under investigation then. If we were, then why had we heard nothing from the FBI or Department of Justice between 2014 and when this Special Counsel was appointed in 2017?
An experienced lawyer told me a little later on, “I don’t worry about indictments that carry thirty or forty charges. That’s just for show. It’s to scare you. It is the indictment that has only one or two charges that scare me most because I know they really have something.”
Even before I heard that advice, it occurred to me in that courtroom that the Special Counsel wasn’t after us. They did this in order to try and force us to take plea deals, to cooperate in their investigation, and to give up information on their real target, President Trump.
They were trying to get to him by using us as pawns to get there, to incentivize us to turn on him and tell the Special Counsel what they wanted to hear.
The irony is that there was nothing to tell.
If they had simply asked me to come in and give them everything I knew, I would have done it voluntarily. Instead, I was now being targeted.
My court-appointed attorney, David Bos, who turned out to be one of the sharpest attorneys I’d ever met, and Paul’s attorney both asked for bail in order to keep us out of prison while we waited for the next steps. There was utter confusion about this because courts in D.C. don’t do bail. They don’t have systems in place to even deal with bail.
Paul and I were released on our own recognizance the day of our arraignment, but we were both placed on house arrest. Although I was in D.C., our neighborhood back in Richmond had been swarmed by satellite trucks and newspaper reporters, staking out the house. My wife had to face that and try to shield the kids from that on her own. I was in despair thinking about them having to deal with the emotional trauma.
Two days after the arraignment, when we were back in front of a new judge, again facing these charges that had nothing to do with Trump-Russia collusion, the judge set my bail at $5 million. Secured. Which meant we needed to put up $5 million in collateral to cover the bail and be removed from house arrest.
Paul’s bail was set at $10 million.
To put that into perspective, Phil Spector, the Hollywood record producer who was accused of murder, was released on bail for $1 million. Harvey Weinstein, one of the wealthiest and now most reviled alleged sex offenders to come out of Hollywood, a man whose behavior was so offensive that it helped inspire the #MeToo movement, was released on $1 million bail as well.
I didn’t have $5 million in assets. I didn’t have anything close to that. And my alleged crimes didn’t come close to the level of crime that would ever warrant that kind of secured bail in any other circumstance.
My wife and I had to put our house up as collateral, and ask our parents to put their houses up, and we still didn’t come close. We had to do this as the media started spinning wild tales about the business dealings Paul and I were a part of. The narratives were false and absurd. They seemed uninterested in reporting or checking the facts. We added our savings and kids’ college funds up to try to secure the bail, and it still wasn’t enough.
We had friends offer collateral, and even then it wasn’t enough. This went on for an excruciating amount of time, and it became clear to me that it was a legal tactic meant to add pressure. The Special Counsel would agree with us to an asset we put forth, and then would oppose it in front of the judge—demanding real estate assessments, and time-consuming and costly legal documents. The judge eventually relented two months later in January and agreed to our bail package, even though I never came up with a fully secured $5 million.
On top of all this, the judge then required my wife to surrender her passport. I am not even sure that was legal. Initially, we could not figure out why this occurred but later discovered the reasoning was to prevent the possibility that my wife would flee the country with our children, and increase my level of flight risk. This seemed insane and just surreal to us. It was so out of the ordinary that the probation office in Richmond asked me what on earth they were supposed to do with her passport once we turned it over! They had never seen this before.
I hadn’t done anything that the Special Counsel had been called to investigate. Yet my family was now in danger of being ripped apart. My whole life was in jeopardy. And to top it all off, on that second day in court, the judge placed a gag order on both Paul and me. Which meant I wouldn’t be allowed to talk to anyone, let alone the press, about anything related to the investigation. Which further meant I had no way to defend my reputation in public or to tell the American people what exactly was happening.
Instead, as the chaos continued to unfold all around me and I saw so clearly where our country was headed if this Russia investigation continued, they deliberately silenced me. In one fell swoop, all because of the fractures and division caused by the singular election of Donald Trump, the United States government and the United States federal court system stopped my life in its tracks and forced me into a crucible. I was now a statistic in an increasingly broken political and judicial system.
They stole my voice.
I wouldn’t get it back—I wouldn’t get any of it back—until more than two years later.
Here are the facts that we know now—more than three years after my indictment.
The FBI’s investigation into Russia collusion was launched by an agent named Peter Strzok, based on thirdhand information delivered to the FBI following a meeting that George Papadopoulos held with the deputy ambassador from Australia in 2016. The two met in London. They were drinking. And in that meeting, George made comments saying that a third party had told him that “Moscow” had “embarrassing information” on Hillary Clinton. The deputy ambassador told his FBI counterpart in Australia what Papadopoulos said, and that agent then relayed the information back to D.C.
The FBI requires proof in order to start an investigation. There are standards and thresholds for launching any investigation, let alone an investigation of political candidates. Strzok didn’t have any such proof. In fact, in July 2020 the Senate Judiciary Committee released internal notes written by Strzok which stated, “We have not seen evidence of any officials associated with the Trump team in contact with [intelligence officers]. We are unaware of ANY Trump advisors engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.” But he launched the investigation anyway, under the code name “Crossfire Hurricane.”
Strzok was a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton, and vocally anti-Trump. He shared these feelings with a woman named Lisa Page, with whom he was romantically involved, via text messages. Page also worked for the FBI as an attorney and adviser to Deputy Director McCabe, a significant and senior role.
It all spun out of control from there.
Once the FBI opened a process to obtain more information, they were provided with a copy of the now-infamous “Steele dossier,” a report documenting Donald Trump’s dealings in Moscow, much of which has since been shown to be fabricated, and none of it proven true. The fabricated information in the Steele dossier—which was funded in part as “opposition research” by Fusion GPS, an organization connected to the Clinton campaign—was then used to obtain warrants to start surveillance on Carter Page, one of Trump’s foreign policy advisors. (Carter was hired before Paul and I were on the team, around the same time Papadopoulos joined the team. I never met him.) The FBI falsely portrayed Page as a possible Russian spy in its warrant filings to the Department of Justice, when in fact, agents within the FBI, having already been informed by the CIA, knew that Page was working for the CIA in Moscow as an American asset. Also, we now know through testimony from the Clinton campaign’s law firm member, Marc Elias, that invoices for Fusion’s work were passed directly to Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook. The same Robby Mook who derided the Trump campaign in late July 2016 based on his accusation that Russia was, without question, helping to elect Trump.
As the investigation continued, the DNC began submitting information to the FBI through a Department of Justice official named Bruce Ohr. (Ohr’s wife, Nellie, happened to be working for Fusion GPS at the time.) That information included material on Paul Manafort’s political, business, and financial dealings in Ukraine, as well as information about certain loans to Trump and others from Deutsche Bank, with possible links to Russian oligarchs and Vladimir Putin.
If the DNC had given that information directly to the FBI, it would have been considered biased or tainted, but because Bruce Ohr handed it off inside the FBI, it was deemed credible.
That information gave the FBI enough backing to continue the investigation, creating and building all sorts of unconnected dots that seemed to point back to some nefarious connection between Trump and Russia.
One of the “leads” that the FBI’s Washington Field Office pursued was on General Mike Flynn, who was brought aboard as Trump’s national security advisor after serving as a surrogate for Trump on the campaign trail. The office investigated Flynn for five months and determined that Flynn was not acting improperly with the Russians. They filed a memo closing the case back on January 4, 2017.
In May of 2020, the transcripts were finally released from the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian election interference, and those transcripts revealed that out of fifty-three witnesses interviewed, not one provided any evidence of collusion between Russia and Trump or his campaign. And many of those witnesses were high-level Democrats who served under Obama.
Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, had access to all of that information when he gave Robert Mueller and his office of the Special Counsel the power to upend so many lives in pursuit of evidence for this alleged crime, for which the FBI had zero proof to begin with. On June 3, 2020, Rosenstein sat in front of a congressional committee and readily admitted that he had regrets about some of the decisions he made at the launch of the investigation. He admitted that some of the supporting documents against Carter Page (who was later ensnared for supposedly lying to investigators) were tampered with, falsified, or unverified by people within the Justice Department, and therefore those surveillance warrants should not have been issued.
At the hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham asked if Rosenstein would agree there was ultimately “no there there” when it came to the idea that “the [Trump] campaign was colluding with the Russians in August 2017.”
Rosenstein responded, “I agree with that general statement.”
“As we now know,” Rosenstein said, “the eventual conclusions were that Russians committed crimes seeking to influence the election and Americans did not conspire with them.”
But before his testimony, in a statement released to the press, Rosenstein said, “Even the best law enforcement officers make mistakes, and some engage in willful misconduct.”
While he did not name names of who might have committed “willful misconduct,” I expect those names will eventually come out and may include names I’ve already mentioned here, since the Department of Justice has been conducting a thorough investigation of this entire debacle at the same time I’ve been working on this book.
In the spring of 2020, the Department of Justice dropped its case against General Mike Flynn. It was an unexpected move by the DOJ, and a step rarely taken. Flynn, whose son had been threatened with indictment if he didn’t cooperate with investigators, was ensnared by the Special Counsel in what amounted to a perjury trap. He pled guilty to lying to the government—just as I did. But the Justice Department in 2020 found that the “lie” he told was not connected to a criminal act, and therefore his “guilty” plea was invalid. They threw the case out.
Catching Flynn in a “lie” when he had committed no act of collusion with the Russians, which was the intended scope of the Special Counsel investigation, is what happened to everyone charged in the Mueller investigation. Everyone was hit with a “perjury” charge. It was a scheme. A tactic designed to ensure that when any one of us involved in this investigation was able to speak, we would all be viewed with less credibility. (I’ll share details that support these statements in the next two chapters.)
None of this is to say that all FBI agents are corrupt, or the whole Department of Justice is corrupt, or the entirety of the Democratic National Committee is corrupt. What’s remarkable is that it all just came down to a few powerful people in key positions. And not a single one of those people is still working in government today. They all left, were fired, retired, or resigned. Strzok and Lisa Page, McCabe and Comey, James Baker (the general counsel of the FBI, who was another key player), Bruce Ohr—they’re all gone.
I expect there will be additional indictments from the investigation on all of this, and I have reason to believe that those indictments will be handed down before the election in November. Maybe they’ll already have been handed down by the time this book is released.
I welcome them. We should all welcome them. Because what we know now, objectively, is that there was more collusion within the confines of our government to go after President Trump on these charges than there ever was any collusion between Trump or his campaign and Russia.
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a phrase that I wrote down very early in this process. He said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” I repeatedly recited this to myself over the last three years and took it to heart.
This quote is more profound today than it was when I found it.
The fact that Trump himself was the target of the investigation is not a conspiracy theory. We know he was a target because the Mueller Report states it. Trump brought suspicion upon himself because of the sometimes foolish and careless statements he made in public.
But from a prosecutorial point of view, the investigation itself and all of the charges unrelated to Russia collusion that were brought against me, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and others, were nothing more than a legal pyramid scheme, one in which prosecutors went after their primary target by targeting the people below the target.
They went after me in order to get to Paul.
They went after Paul in order to get to Trump.
They never found Russia collusion at any step along the way.
Through separate silos, one by one, they climbed through Flynn to try to get to Trump. They climbed through Roger to try to get to Trump. They tried to get to Trump on the business side too, by attempting to climb through Michael Cohen.
They never reached the top of the pyramid.
They never found what they were looking for—because it wasn’t there.
After receiving the report from the FBI in August 2017 that concluded neither Trump nor anyone in his campaign colluded with the Russians to alter the election, the investigation should have been closed.
It wasn’t. And the consequences are profound and disturbing: three years of deepening mistrust in our government, further divisiveness in our country, a presidential administration kept on the defensive, and humiliation on the part of the Democrats.
The investigation ultimately emboldened Trump.
It gave Trump even more power to continue to fight, to push back, to create and exploit more chaos in an already unstable political environment, to upend the norms and protocols in Washington, and to solidify his support not only with his large base but with more and more Republicans inside the Beltway.