17

Russia

When it comes to Trump and the question of collusion with Russia, there is indeed a smoking gun. But it’s not the June 2016 meeting that Don Trump Jr., along with campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, held in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer.

The lawyer, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, duped Don into setting up the meeting by claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. In fact, the meeting was a bait and switch. It turned out the lawyer had no meaningful information to offer on Hillary. Rather, she wanted to interest the Trump team in a Moscow initiative to allow American families to adopt Russian children.

The meeting, which lasted twenty minutes, was the sort any political campaign or media outlet would have agreed to. Like investigative reporters, political operatives want to obtain tips, even if most of the time the proffered information turns out to be of no value. In this case, nothing came of the meeting. In contrast, Hillary Clinton’s campaign actually helped pay for a dossier of almost entirely false accusations about Trump, some of which a British former intelligence official obtained from Russian contacts.

According to journalistic standards that existed decades ago, the fact that such a meeting took place would not have even been a story. The reason it became public was that Kushner, in an amended filing, disclosed it as a contact he had had with a foreign national. The pretext for the meeting was a hoax, and nothing came of it. To suggest by running a story that there was something nefarious about it was unfair. But in today’s politically charged media world, the meeting became an immediate sensation as part of a narrative—pushed by the media and Democrats—suggesting that the Trump campaign illegally colluded with Russia.

On its face, the claim is bogus: Even if the campaign had colluded with Russia, that would not have been a violation of law, as former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who voted for Hillary Clinton, pointed out in TV interviews. Campaigns are free to obtain information and coordinate with any source, foreign or domestic, just as Hillary’s campaign did when funding the dossier on Trump. Moreover, after he became president, Trump demonstrated that he is no pawn of Russia: In response to its chemical attack, Trump sent missiles into Syria, an ally of Russia. Against Russian interests, he approved the largest U.S. commercial sale of lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine since 2014 to help Ukrainian forces fight a Russian-backed separatist movement in two eastern provinces.

Tongue in cheek, Jared told congressional interns that Trump’s campaign team was too disorganized to collude with Russia. He could well have been speaking about himself. Invariably, when Kushner filed a disclosure statement about contacts with foreigners, he had to subsequently amend the document because he had left something out. Instead of filling out the forms himself, he often gave the task to aides to carry out.

In congressional testimony, both the FBI and the CIA said that while Russia clearly meddled in the U.S. election by attempting to sow dissension and mistrust of both Trump and Hillary Clinton, they saw no sign of collusion. If that message did not make an impact on the public, it’s because the media largely ignored it.

The Washington Post ran a story reporting former CIA director John Brennan’s congressional testimony that the CIA had alerted the FBI to a troubling pattern of contacts between Russian officials and associates of the Trump campaign. Not until the third paragraph did readers learn that Brennan testified that he saw no proof of collusion.

Indeed, Brennan affirmatively said in his testimony that the contacts may have been benign. The Post did not report that comment, and the New York Times saved it for the seventh paragraph of its story on Brennan’s testimony. The Wall Street Journal buried Brennan’s statement that he didn’t know if these contacts by people tied to Trump’s campaign amounted to collusion in the thirteenth paragraph of its story.

Not to be outdone, the Washington Post did not report until the eighteenth paragraph of a story about campaign operative Carter Page’s possible contact with Russians that Trump aides and Page said that he had never actually met Trump and that Page left the campaign in August 2016. The story left out the fact that in a December 2016 letter, Trump attorney Don McGahn told Page to “immediately cease” claiming that he was a Trump adviser.

“You were merely one of the many people named to a foreign policy advisory committee in March of 2016—a committee that met one time,” McGahn said in the letter.

The Washington Post ran a story saying a close Trump aide—identified by some publications as Kushner—is a “person of interest” in the FBI’s Russia investigation. The story was bogus on its face because the FBI uses that term only in violent crime cases, never in counterintelligence cases.

Rather than acknowledge that there was no actual substance to the claims of collusion, papers like the Washington Post and New York Times ran elaborate charts with lines drawn between campaign aides and Russians. Democratic members of Congress got TV time by couching their remarks as questions and prefacing their accusations by saying, “If it’s true that…”

Nor did firing Jim Comey constitute obstruction of justice, as many TV analysts claimed, since Trump did not order that the investigation be stopped, he was not a target of an FBI investigation, and his action did not entail corruptly covering up, destroying evidence, or making false statements, as happened during Watergate.

It turns out that in all the thousands of stories about collusion, there was indeed a smoking gun—in reverse. It established definitively that there had been no collusion and that the entire effort by the media and Democrats to try to tie the Trump campaign to Russia was a fraud. That evidence was an August 14, 2017, Washington Post story citing campaign emails demonstrating conclusively that top campaign officials, including Chairman Paul Manafort, had no interest in obtaining any kind of cooperation from Russia.

The idea for obtaining help from Russia came from a onetime campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos. For six weeks of work, Papadopoulos had been paid $8,500 before he was let go from the campaign.

Three days after Trump named his campaign foreign policy team in March 2016, Papadopoulos offered to set up “a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump,” according to an email he sent to seven Trump campaign officials with the subject line “Meeting with Russian Leadership—Including Putin.” He said his Russian contacts welcomed the opportunity.

“The proposal sent a ripple of concern through campaign headquarters in Trump Tower,” the Washington Post story said. “Campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis wrote that he thought NATO allies should be consulted before any plans were made. Another Trump adviser, retired Navy Rear Admiral Charles Kubic, cited legal concerns, including a possible violation of U.S. sanctions against Russia and of the Logan Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from unauthorized negotiation with foreign governments.”

Indeed, “Among those to express concern about the effort was then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who rejected in May 2016 a proposal for Trump to do so,” the Post story said. Moreover, on March 24, Clovis, the campaign co-chairman who also served on the foreign policy team, reacted to one proposed Russia meeting by writing, “We thought we probably should not go forward with any meeting with the Russians until we have had occasion to sit with our NATO allies.”

In the same email chain, Kubic, the retired admiral, reminded others about legal restrictions on meetings with certain Russian officials, adding, “Just want to make sure that no one on the team outruns their headlights and embarrasses the campaign.”

Finally, Manafort responded to one email about an invitation from a Russian organization official to set up a meeting by saying in an email to his associate Richard Gates: “We need someone to communicate that DT [Donald Trump] is not doing these trips.”

Gates agreed with Manafort and told him he would make sure that no one in the campaign would respond. He would do that, he said, by instructing “the person responding to all mail of non-importance” that any communication about a Russian overture is to be ignored by everyone in the campaign.

There could be no clearer evidence that the Russia collusion story was a sham than the emails, which were among more than twenty thousand pages of documents the Trump campaign turned over to congressional committees. But rather than putting an end to the conspiracy theories, the story was largely ignored by the media, which continued to run stories about alleged Russian collusion as if the emails had never existed. Indeed, the Washington Post story that demonstrated conclusively that there was nothing to the Russia collaboration claims was headlined “Trump Campaign Emails Show Aide’s Repeated Efforts to Set Up Russia Meetings.”

The eventual indictment of Papadopoulos by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III charged him with lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russians. Since his efforts to obtain help from the Russians were not illegal—any more than the Clinton campaign’s collection of information from Russians—he was not charged in connection with anything having to do with that activity. But the indictment stated plainly that no meeting between the Trump campaign and the Russians arranged by Papadopoulos ever took place.

Nonetheless, when Papadopoulos was indicted for lying to the FBI, the media played up the nonstory that the low-level aide had wanted to set up meetings between the Trump campaign and the Russians, while largely ignoring the fact that the campaign wanted nothing to do with any Russians. Instead of enlightening the public, the press had turned into a propaganda tool.

As with Papadopoulos, Mueller indicted Michael Flynn, whom Trump had named to be his national security adviser during the transition, for lying to the FBI about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. Flynn agreed to plead guilty. According to the indictment, Flynn lied when he told FBI agents that he did not ask Kislyak in a December 29, 2016, telephone conversation to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions the United States imposed on Russia. He lied again when he told agents that he did not ask Kislyak in a December 22 phone call to defeat or delay a United Nations Security Council resolution.

Flynn’s indictment triggered endless speculation by the media that he was about to spill the beans about Trump or his White House aides. A scowling Carl Bernstein suggested on CNN that Flynn could be another John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel who played a major role in exposing the Watergate cover-up. But what if there were no beans to spill? And what was the crime in the first place? Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers were only too happy to join in the speculation, giving them air time. Never have so many words been uttered about so little.

Besides the indictments of Flynn and Papadopoulos, Mueller issued indictments of Manafort and his associate Richard Gates. The indictments focused on their personal business dealings long before Manafort had joined the Trump campaign. The tax and money laundering case against Manafort described a complicated scheme in which he lobbied for a pro-Russia party in Ukraine and its leader, Viktor F. Yanukovych, and allegedly hid proceeds in bank accounts in Cyprus, the Grenadines, and elsewhere. Prosecutors said he laundered more than $18 million and spent the money extravagantly.

Back in June 2006, when I asked Trump how he would operate if he were elected president, he said, “There would be fewer scandals in my administration because I don’t tolerate scandal.” Immediately upon seeing a wire service report about Manafort’s dealings in Ukraine and allegations of millions of dollars in cash payments and secret lobbying, Trump fired him as campaign manager. Similarly, seeing reports that Tom Price, the secretary of Health and Human Services, had racked up roughly a million dollars in flight costs on private and military aircraft since taking office, Trump let him go.

Having lied to Pence about his conversations with Kislyak, Flynn served in the White House for only twenty-four days. If Trump had left it at that, the matter would have faded from view. But obsessive as he is, Trump could not leave well enough alone. He knew he had not colluded with the Russians. How could the FBI not see that?

Trump’s security chief Keith Schiller had been bad-mouthing Comey, and Jared told Trump he should fire him. Ivanka supported the idea as well. Trump was already down on Comey for not indicting Hillary Clinton. What Trump did not understand was that without evidence of criminal intent, the existing laws would not support an indictment over Clinton’s handling of her classified emails.

Aside from the FBI agents and prosecutors who worked on the case, no one is in a better position to explain Comey’s decision not to prosecute the former secretary of state than John L. Martin. After leaving the FBI as a special agent, Martin became a Justice Department prosecutor. For twenty-five years he was in charge of prosecuting all the espionage laws, including Section 793(f) of the federal criminal code, the pertinent statute in the Clinton investigation. Among the seventy-six spies Martin prosecuted were John A. Walker Jr., Jonathan Pollard, and Aldrich Ames. All but one of the prosecutions resulted in convictions.

During those years, Martin tells me, he never used Section 793(f) alone because, while that law makes it a felony to handle material relating to the national defense with “gross negligence,” it is unlikely a jury would convict a defendant on that charge alone without a showing of criminal intent. Thus, in the case of former CIA director David Petraeus, besides charging him with a violation of Section 793(f), the Justice Department charged him with lying to the FBI, an indication of criminal intent. Petraeus agreed to a plea disposition.

Besides the absence of provable criminal intent, Comey had to consider the fact that some jurors could give Clinton a pass simply for being a presidential candidate. Did Comey want the FBI to be responsible for throwing the presidential election into chaos if, in the end, the prosecution resulted in a dismissal by the court, a hung jury, or an acquittal?

While Comey’s decision to make the call himself rather than leave it to Justice Department officials on whether to prosecute Clinton can legitimately be argued either way, “Comey did the right thing,” Martin says. “He put the facts out to let the people decide.”

It seemed to aides that Trump was looking at what to do about Comey from the day he won the election. Within the first few days of his presidency, he began contemplating whether he should keep him or fire him. Comey had been in the press continuously during the campaign in connection with the Clinton email investigation. But then he ultimately decided that he wasn’t going to charge her even though he laid out all the elements of the appropriate charges.

Trump groused that Comey was not doing enough to investigate leaks of classified information. But the FBI does not announce its leak investigations. The Bureau routinely pursues them whenever an intelligence agency reports a leak to the Justice Department and the FBI determines that it has a reasonable chance of tracking down the leaker. By November 2017, Sessions revealed in a congressional hearing that the FBI had twenty-seven ongoing leak investigations in progress. The number compared with an average of three investigations undertaken each year under Obama but mainly reflected the explosion of seriously damaging leaks after Trump became president.

Trump also did not like the fact that in congressional testimony in May 2017, Comey had misstated the number of Hillary’s classified emails that were on the laptop of her aide Huma Abedin. Comey said that Abedin forwarded “hundreds of thousands” of emails involving her boss to her husband’s computer. The FBI immediately sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee correcting the error. It said that about 49,000 emails potentially relevant to the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server had been found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. However, only a “small number” of these had been forwarded by Abedin. “Of those forwarded to Weiner, only two email chains contained classified information,” the FBI said.

Anyone who has been on TV knows how easy it is to misstate a fact. But that controversy reignited the president’s thoughts as to whether or not Comey should continue as FBI director. Trump began discussing internally whether Comey should be replaced.

At his Bedminster golf club, Trump discussed the matter with Jared and Ivanka. Both played to Trump’s sense of grievance, and both were for firing Comey. After spending the weekend at the golf club, Trump returned to the White House and made his decision that he was going to fire Comey. Back in the White House, Trump told Pence and several senior aides—Priebus, Bannon, and White House counsel Donald McGahn—that he was ready to move on Comey.

First, since Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, to whom Comey reported directly, were coming in for a meeting, McGahn said Trump should confer with them before firing Comey. As it turned out, both said Comey had erred in deciding on his own not to indict Hillary, something they had previously discussed between themselves. As a result, they told Trump, they had lost confidence in him as FBI director. Trump asked them to give him a memo to that effect. That sealed Comey’s fate. But Priebus cautioned Trump to wait and talk to Comey in person.

Even though Trump told aides he was intent on firing Comey, they believe that if Rosenstein had said he and Sessions supported Comey instead of saying that they had no confidence in him, Trump would have changed his mind and kept Comey on as FBI director. Instead, they helped trigger the firing.

Going on NBC, Trump told Lester Holt, “And, in fact, when I decided to just do it [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said ‘you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’ ”

While that statement sounds as if Trump, in his usual truncated fashion, was saying he fired Comey because the FBI director was pursuing the Russia investigation and he wanted to stop it, Trump made it clear to aides afterward that he meant the opposite—that he was aware that firing Comey could prolong the Russia investigation. His comments to Holt immediately following that statement confirm Trump’s claim.

In the interview, Holt asked Trump if he was “angry with Mr. Comey because of his Russia investigation.”

“I just want somebody that’s competent,” Trump responded. “I am a big fan of the FBI, I love the FBI.”

Trump said in the interview that he supported a full investigation into Russian interference in the election. He said he never tried to pressure Comey into dropping the FBI probe of the Trump campaign and insisted, “I want to find out if there was a problem in the election having to do with Russia.”

Trump added, “As far as I’m concerned, I want that thing to be absolutely done properly. Maybe I’ll expand that, you know, lengthen the time [of the Russia probe] because it should be over with, in my opinion, should have been over with a long time ago. ’Cause all it is, is an excuse, but I said to myself, I might even lengthen out the investigation, but I have to do the right thing for the American people.”

In other words, in confusing fashion, Trump was saying that rather than trying to end the FBI’s Russia investigation, he recognized that by firing Comey, he may have been prolonging it. The media largely ignored those statements. Nor, in all the endless stories about the Russia investigation, did the media point out that Trump never asked anyone to stop the investigation. It was a point that Comey, Rosenstein, and Sessions all confirmed.

In contrast, during the Watergate scandal, President Nixon actually took steps to try to suppress the FBI’s investigation of his role and his aides’ involvement in a cover-up of the White House’s orchestration of a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters. The most damaging tape of Nixon’s Oval Office conversations recorded Nixon telling his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to have the CIA concoct phony national security reasons to divert the FBI from pursuing crucial leads in the Watergate investigation. Nixon’s ploy resulted in a delay in the FBI’s investigation of only a week. Except when J. Edgar Hoover was director and engaged in massive abuses, including keeping blackmail files on presidents and members of Congress, the FBI has never bent to political pressure.

“By referring to ‘the Russia thing,’ Trump meant he did think about the Russia investigation and said, hey, I need to make this move, but actually by getting rid of Comey, this is going to make the Russia situation even longer and potentially more problematic,” an aide notes. “But I have to do it. I have to get rid of this guy. It was the opposite of what he’s been accused of.”

Comey, who at the time was visiting the Los Angeles field office, learned he was fired in an embarrassing manner—in public, from the television, in full view of his staff. As Comey was delivering a speech to FBI field office employees, he initially laughed as news that he had been fired flashed across the TV screens.

“How’d you guys do that?” Comey said to his staff.

The FBI director assumed he was being pranked by his underlings. He had to be told by his team that the headlines were no joke. He had been dismissed, effective immediately.

For those who lived through Watergate and remember how Nixon tried to stifle the FBI’s investigation of his role in a cover-up, Trump’s action, delivered to FBI headquarters by Trump’s security chief and Comey nemesis Keith Schiller, cast a pall on his presidency, raising legitimate questions about any later action he took in connection with the FBI or Justice Department.

To be sure, Trump had the right to fire any government executive. But the fact that Comey was overseeing an FBI investigation that could conceivably lead to charges against the president himself or his aides made it look as if the United States had become a banana republic.

“I said to Trump, you can fire Comey, but you can’t fire the FBI,” Bannon says. “The one thing the president’s head was not comprehending was that this is not a city of personalities. It’s a city of institutions. These institutions have long histories, and they have incredible institutional memories.”

Early on, Bannon advised Trump that if he were going to fire the FBI director, he should do it immediately upon taking office. But Trump took no immediate action, eventually inviting Comey to dinner and saying, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” according to Comey. Comey hedged his response.

Once Trump seemed set on firing Comey, Bannon stayed away from the Oval Office for two days. “I gave my best advice. I said my piece,” Bannon says. “ ‘You’re president of the United States, go for it.’ ”

Bannon notes that Jared was pushing Trump to fire him. “It was his idea, and he got it in his head,” Bannon says. “I got in Jared’s face about it.”

Since Comey had decided not to indict Hillary, Jared thought Democrats would love the idea of firing the FBI director. It didn’t work out that way. Democrats attacked Trump over firing Comey. While that was motivated in part by partisan politics, they had a legitimate point.

In Bannon’s view, “Jared represented a lethal combination of arrogance and incompetence that ends administrations.”

Exasperated with Jared and Ivanka, aides felt they simply had no idea of what they were doing and no understanding of the jobs and the responsibilities and the qualifications of a lot of those jobs. Their attitude seemed to be that if they could just get a bunch of these smart people to tell all these dumb people in government what to do, they’d fix it all. They had no understanding of the basic fundamentals of how government works, how a campaign works, how politics works. Most of all, they had no understanding of the political consequences of their actions.

Ivanka and Jared were pushing for Trump to fire Comey without understanding that it would be impossible to get a new nominee through the Senate, an aide says. “They didn’t understand the basics of why Scaramucci wasn’t qualified,” the aide noted. “And in the end, they would run away from the decision. They have no accountability for any of the decisions that they advocate for.”

Indeed, when the backlash over firing Comey began, Jared and Ivanka blamed Spicer and the communications team, as if they could somehow undo the damage Trump had done to himself. Pushing Trump to hire Scaramucci, they cited the bad press over Comey’s firing. Their track record was perfect: From pushing to fire Comey to proposing to hire Scaramucci, they were responsible for the worst decisions of Trump’s presidency. And during the campaign, Jared criticized then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski for not being a “team player” by not supporting campaign chairman Manafort, who later was charged with a range of criminal violations, according to Lewandowski’s and David Bossie’s book Let Trump Be Trump. Trump eventually removed Lewandowski as campaign manager because he was seen as too combative and bombastic.

Neither Jared nor Ivanka had had any experience in government. Unlike Trump, who also had no experience in government, they lacked the judgment necessary to maneuver in Washington. The fact that both Jared and Ivanka were thirty-six years old did not explain their naiveté. Neither Ivanka nor Jared had the savvy to understand why firing the FBI director or hiring Scaramucci would be an unmitigated disaster.

While Trump privately acknowledges that they are a problem, and tells them they should have remained in New York, he can’t bring himself to fire them. Trump almost never fires anyone himself, and as a devoted family man, he would have even more trouble firing his own daughter and her husband.