Adam Schiff is the 21st century equivalent of Senator Joseph McCarthy yelling about the non-existent evidence he has of 205 card-carrying communists in the State Department. Though, as I write this, an alternative way to think about it is Robert Mueller as the addled McCarthy-like frontman for an unethical, ambitious, and partisan lawyer, with Andrew Weissman as the modern version of Roy Cohn.
It's all part of the greatest political scandal of my lifetime and I look forward to the results of the Durham/Barr probe.
And please, will somebody finally tell me who Josef Mifsud was working for???
I'll use this post to reflect on some important background to the collusion allegations and investigation and over the next couple of weeks continue with the series of posts focused on specific aspects of the transcripts.
Reading the transcripts was like wading through Rachel Maddow's Greatest Hits. Here are the various conspiracy theories covered by the committee (those I've written about or intend to write about are in boldface):
George Papadopolous, Josef Mifsud, and the alleged damaging information on Hillary
Carter Page as key link in collusion
Trump Tower Meeting
Trump Tower Moscow
Miss Universe Moscow and the "salacious allegations" (Fake news, but relevant because Russians.)
Russian Financiers of Trump Org (except there weren't any, but relevant because Russians)
Russian Condo Buyers (after Trump Tower was built, which contains condos separate from the office space, some of the original condo purchasers resold their unit to Russian buyers. The Trump Organization was not involved but somehow this was relevant because Russians.)
Russian Buying Florida Mansion (Trump bought a Florida mansion and sold it a few years later to a Russian and made tens of millions. Relevant because Russians.)
Deutsche Bank (so stupid even the D's on the committee gave up on this one.)
Alfa Bank (Russian owned bank with its servers allegedly connected directly with Trump Org. Fake news, but relevant because Russians)
Ukraine Plank on GOP Platform
Paul Manafort. (Supposed co-mastermind behind it all. Not. Targeted by Ukrainians working with Hillary Campaign in 2016).
Michael Flynn & The Ruskies
Peter Smith (An eccentric 80 year old GOP supporter who had been trying to find Hillary hacked emails via the Dark Web and who had contact with Michael Flynn. In 2017, Smith committed suicide after speaking to a reporter from the Wall St Journal which subsequently published an article on his quest.)
The Hacks (DNC, DCCC, John Podesta)
Wikileaks (Bumbling clowns Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi try to get info from Assange but fail).
Michael Cohen in Prague. (And, according to Steele Dossier, co-mastermind with Manafort of collusion. I was surprised and impressed with Cohen's testimony - precise, knows the real estate world, impassioned rebuttal of the Steele Dossier, and refused to be pushed around by Schiff and Swalwell.)
Cambridge Analytica. (Bad because it used data from Facebook, unlike the Obama people in 2012 who were good because they used data from Facebook.)
The 53 interviews cover 5,571 pages and are of 49 individuals (Corey Lewandowski, Steve Bannon, John Podesta, and David Kramer were interviewed twice). The interviews began in June 2017 and extended into March 2018 with 39 of the 53 in the period from late September to mid-January (and 17 between Dec 4 and 22). Two witnesses, both with FusionGPS, took the 5th so gave no testimony: Peter Fritsch and Thomas Catan.
Witnesses included 6 of the 8 participants in the Trump Tower meeting of June 2016, Keith Schiller, head of security for the Trump Organization and Trump's personal bodyguard, and Rhona Graff, Trump's administrative assistant since 1987, along with 13 others who worked on the Trump campaign, including three of the four campaign senior advisors or managers (Roger Stone, Corey Lewandowski, Steve Bannon) along with Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr.
Eleven of the transcripts contain redactions so, at times, it is difficult to understand the context of the unredacted materials. For instance in two of the interviews there is reference to intelligence received by FBI Director Comey in the summer of 2016 that led him to decide to make the decision on the Clinton email investigation himself, but the details are redacted. The heaviest redacted transcripts were of Susan Rice, Loretta Lynch, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and an unidentified FBI Special Agent. Interviews with fewer redactions were of Samantha Power, Mary McCord (DOJ), John Carlin (DOJ), Evelyn Farkas (DoD), Dan Coats, and Matthew Tait (formerly of UK Intelligence).
Regarding the unidentified FBI Special Agent. This individual was the original contact for Christopher Steele regarding the dossier (he'd previously met Steele, who was a paid FBI source, in 2009). He was responsible for getting Steele in touch with the appropriate offices within the FBI. Other than passing Steele on, he had no involvement in verification of the dossier contents, nor in the FISA warrant application. The agent heard back from FBI HQ in late September that "information in the Steele dossier corroborated an investigation they had opened previously . . ." (p.36) (1) He had no knowledge of the connection with the Clinton Campaign, was appalled to find out Steele had been briefing reporters, and expressed his strong support for terminating him. Came across as professional and credible.
Some of the transcripts were fascinating, some boring, and a few quite funny and entertaining, particularly Corey Lewandowski, Rob Goldstone (the music promoter who set up the Trump Tower meeting) and Felix Sater, the real estate promoter working with Michael Cohen on the Trump Tower Moscow project.
The committee conducted more than 53 interviews. It previously released its November 14, 2017 interview with Glenn Simpson of FusionGPS which is a conspiracy theory fantasy. There are also references to additional interviews which the committee did not vote to release. In addition, other Congressional committees were conducting interviews around the same time, notably of James Comey by the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, 2017 and of George Papadopolous by the House Judiciary Committee on October 25, 2018.
The title of this post, "Different Worlds" is a twofold reference. First to the different political world in which the interviews took place, 2017 is very different from 2020. Second, the different worlds of real estate promoter BS and that of political operative BS. They are both BS worlds but so different in their orientation it contributed to the Democratic belief that Trump was a creature from another planet and to the bafflement of the Democrats on the committee as they tried to understand the very unconventional Trump campaign and the financial world of Trumpdom (to be covered in Part 2).
The Political Landscape in 2017
When the Intelligence Committee began its interviews in June 2017 things looked very different than they did in 2019 and 2020. The Committee was focused on four issues:
Russia's actions with respect to the 2016 election cycleThough the Republicans controlled the House, the Intelligence Committee was without the services of its chairman, Devin Nunes (R-CA) until the end of the year. In a clever maneuver, Democrats filed an ethics complaint against Nunes in March 2017, claiming he had leaked classified information in order to help Donald Trump, meaning the first Republican on the committee to smell something was seriously wrong was neutralized. Nunes was not cleared until the end of 2017, so GOP leadership on the committee fell upon Mike Conaway (R-TX) who, along with Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Tom Rooney (R-FL) were the most active Republican questioners. Gowdy and Rooney left Congress in 2018, while Conaway is not running for reelection this year. Of the other active questioners, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) retired in 2018 and Peter King (R-NY) retiring this year, leaving Chris Stewart (R-Utah) and Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) as the only GOP questioners who will be left in January 2021. In contrast, only one of the seven active Democrats during the interviews will have left.
With whom, if anyone, in the United States did they work with?
The US government response during that period
The role of masking, unmasking in the dissemination of classified information
Though today most Republicans in Congress are solidly, though some reluctantly, behind President Trump; that was not true in 2017. The change came about for three reasons:
1. With the Mueller Report, the IG Report and a flood of other documentation, the extent of the conspiracy against Trump is now evident, the recklessness of agency bureaucrats, the complicity of the media, along with 3+ years of unprecedented obstruction by Democrats in Congress.But in 2017, Trump's relations with Congress were frayed, his behavior erratic and one never knew where he stood on his own proposals. Whatever they said publicly, a significant percentage were unhappy he was President.
2. The Kavanaugh hearings made it clear that all Republicans will be attacked just like Trump, no one is immune.
3. The power of Trump with the GOP electorate making Senators and Representatives worried about getting on his wrong side.
And on Russia, the President's own behavior made them fear there might be something to the collusion allegations. The President had commented favorably on Putin, but more than that had put America on the same relative moral plane as Russia. He had, in his view, merely joked about Hillary's emails but it didn't seem so funny when hacked Democratic emails started showing up in the midst of the campaign (2). Dark stories about Russian connections were floating around about Carter Page, George Papadopolous, and Paul Manafort and then came the Michael Flynn stories and his resignation. January saw the publication of the Steele Dossier, about which no one knew the origins. In May came the firing of Comey, and then the capper, when the President could not stay on script and contradicted the reasons for the firing in his interview with Lester Holt and then gloated to the Russian Ambassador about the firing. It looked terrible. And then, three weeks after the committee's first interview (Dan Coats), came news about the Trump Tower meeting which occurred in June 2016. And let's face it, how many of us are confident that if Trump had actually been presented with a quid pro quo arrangement with Putin that he would have refused?
The truth about the Steele Dossier, that the Clinton campaign paid for it and that there was a direct link between that campaign and Russian intelligence sources, did not begin to emerge until late October 2017 and even then the Democrats managed to muddy the water for a while longer, falsely claiming FusionGPS was just continuing opposition research work it had been doing for a Republican donor (3).
I don't think all the GOP members of the committee knew where the investigation was going to end up when it started and the existence of the Mueller investigation further concerned and constrained them.
While there were interviews focused on the unmaskings and the Obama administration response they were not particularly revealing, except as to the extent of the unmaskings. As to the response, or lack of it, the line by the Democratic interviewees is that the Obama administration worried that if it made a big deal of Russian interference during the campaign it might backfire and be seen as a political intervention. Left unsaid was that they feared the intervention might hurt Hillary and there was no need to take that risk since they all expected Hillary to easily win.
That left the Democrats free to play a lot of offense, though many of the Republican members were able to effectively help witnesses. The leading Democrat questioners were Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell. Schiff was a very skillful questioner. In contrast, Swalwell acted like he was always on the verge of asking the one question that would unravel the entire conspiracy and evidenced a very high opinion of his own abilities. I think Schiff realized fairly quickly the Democrats were drilling a dry hole in the search for a conspiracy but understood the political advantage of continuing the charade. Swalwell was dumb enough he may really have been a true believer.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) So, with the twisted reasoning we've seen elsewhere in this investigation, the FBI used a dossier that it was never able to corroborate, in order to corroborate the accuracy of the investigation it had previously opened.
(2) In her testimony, Hope Hicks, Trump’s communications director spoke to that specific incident:
“I did make him aware that there were some that were taking this sort of facetious comment to be literal and that we needed to make sure people understood that it was intended to mock those that were suggesting he could possibly be involved with the hack.”She said Trump, “expressed sort of disbelief that anybody could possibly take it seriously”. (p.60)
(3) On December 12, 2017 the committee interviewed Michael Goldfarb, publisher of the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication funded by Paul Singer who backed Marco Rubio for the GOP nomination. Goldfarb hired FusionGPS to do research on the financial history of the Trump organization (he hired other firms to do oppo research on Hillary).
In April 2016, once Trump seemed assured of the GOP nomination, Goldfarb had FusionGPS end its research and it was at this point Glenn Simpson of Fusion approached the Clinton campaign offering to continue the research. Steele was not hired until June.
Goldfarb was furious, not just about the dossier when he learned about it, saying "I thought it was bullshit" (p.36), but upon finding out that Fusion was working with a Russian oligarch to overturn the Magnitsky Act, while Goldfarb had worked closely with Michael Browder, the main proponent of the Act.
No comments:
Post a Comment