By John Solomon, opinion contributor | The Hill
Back in the mafia’s heyday, FBI and IRS agents had a set of surveillance rules.
“Alfonse
Capone,” AP file photo
If one mobster showed up in town, pay notice. If two
arrived, be suspicious. If three or four were in the same vicinity, something
was going down.
And if five or more headed to the same neck of the woods,
a meeting of consiglieri or La Cosa Nostra’s council was likely happening. (This,
because there were always five families in New York and some adjunct families
elsewhere that made up the council’s leadership.)
There also was another rule of thumb: Mobsters would
always have the same calling card, or excuse, to be in town. Attending a
funeral (the mid-1980s mob meeting in Chicago) or a vacation in the sticks (the
infamous 1957 gathering in upstate New York) were some of the more memorable
ones.
Early in my reporting that unraveled the origins of the
Trump-Russia collusion probe, tying it to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and possible Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuses,
I started to see patterns just as in the old mob meetings: FBI or
intelligence-connected figures kept showing up in Trump Town USA during the
2016 campaign with a common calling card.
The question now is, who sent them and why?
Interviews with more than 50 witnesses in the Trump case
and reviews of hundreds of pages of court filings confirm the following:
- At
least six people with long-established ties to the FBI or to U.S. and
Western intelligence made entrees to key figures in the Trump business
organization or his presidential campaign between March and October 2016;
- Campaign
figures were contacted by at least two Russian figures whose justification
for being in the United States were rare law enforcement parole visas
controlled by the U.S. Justice Department;
- Intelligence
or diplomatic figures connected to two of America’s closest allies, Britain
and Australia, gathered intelligence or instigated contacts with Trump
campaign figures during that same period;
- Some
of the conversations and contacts that were monitored occurred on foreign
soil and resulted in the creation of transcripts;
- Nearly
all of the contacts involved the same overture — a discussion about
possible political dirt or stolen emails harmful to Hillary Clinton, or
unsolicited business in London or Moscow;
- Several
of the contacts occurred before the FBI formally launched a legally
authorized probe into the Trump campaign and possible collusion on July
31, 2016.
The recipients of these overtures are all household
names, thanks to the infamy of the now very public probe — Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr.,
Michael Cohen, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos,
Michael Flynn, Sam Clovis and Roger
Stone, to name a few.
Some of the instigators of the contacts have been
acknowledged in public: Professor Stefan Halper, Russian businessman Hank Greenberg, former
MI6 agent Christopher Steele and former FBI informer Felix Sater, who
is “Individual 2” identified in the Cohen plea deal this week.
Others I identified through interviews, but U.S.
officials have asked me to keep them private to avoid compromising their
identities or nexus to intelligence and law enforcement work.
The chances that so many would converge into
then-candidate Donald Trump’s circle, in such a short period around an
election, are about as rare as winning the Mega Millions lottery. In other words, most
were not coincidences. A few, maybe, but not all.
And that leaves the biggest question: Who dispatched
or controlled each emissary?
At least two important bodies in Congress — the House
Intelligence and Senate Judiciary committees — demanded to be secretly briefed
on payments to “undercovers.” They’ve been pretty tight-lipped since, except
to express concerns that the public would be alarmed by what was divulged.
From those members of Congress, we can deduce that some
of the contacts that occurred in 2016 were related to the political opposition,
anti-Trump research funded by the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign and
driven by Steele and his Fusion GPS employer. That work became known as the Steele dossier.
Others of the contacts appear to have been instigated by
Western allies, such as an Australian diplomat’s barroom conversation in May 2016 with
Papadopoulos.
And the rest are likely to have come from the FBI itself,
which clearly dispatched informers, agents and other operatives to gather
evidence to bulk up the uncorroborated Steele dossier, so agents could get a
FISA warrant in October 2016 to spy on Page, the Trump campaign adviser.
For a long time, most members of Congress have defended
the FBI’s use of informants in the Trump probe. But there’s been a recent
change in the tone of some early defenders.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) recently
told me he believes there may have been abuses of the FISA process. House
Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob
Goodlatte (R-Va.) made similar comments, suggesting the FBI may have withheld
exculpatory evidence it had gathered from its informers.
And House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) went
further than anyone else just last week, suggesting the effort to gather
evidence beyond the Steele dossier might be the most problematic of all because
it was designed to be a political “insurance policy” against Trump winning the
presidency.
The evidence-gathering for the “insurance policy” was
“not only phony but, I think, as concerning as, if not more concerning than,
the original information used in the Christopher Steele dossier,” Nunes
disclosed on Sean Hannity’s Fox News TV show last week.
If this were a mob case, agents would not stop until they
knew why each character appeared and who sent them. President Trump can help
answer many, if not all, unanswered questions by declassifying the documents as
he promised months ago. Congressional leaders and the Justice Department can
impose accountability based on what is disclosed.
The American people deserve to know how much of the
Trump-Russia probe was the result of agent provocateurs and political
muckrakers and FISA cheaters, and how much was legitimate law enforcement
work.
John Solomon is an award-winning
investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI
intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse
of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of
political corruption. He is The Hill’s executive vice president for video.
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The Mueller investigation has come up empty on Russia -- You won’t believe what's coming next
The pattern and purpose of Mueller’s investigation and the endgame is becoming clear, and yes, it’s clearly get the president at all costs.
The team
Mueller hired really foretold the story — Andrew Weissmann as the
stop-at-nothing pit bull and a group of Democratic-leaning lawyers, including
some who have represented the Clintons, had the obstruction of justice charge
ready to go on day one.
Trump’s first team of lawyers with their “don’t worry and
cooperate” strategy set the president back, and let the whole thing spiral out
of control.
The investigation, I believe, has come up
truly empty on its central charge related to the president — collusion with the
Russian government.
They are now trying to find someone, anyone
who had any contact with Julian Assange with the aim of calling that
collusion-lite.
But mostly what Mueller’s team is doing is bludgeoning
witnesses on unrelated charges to piece together a case against the president.
They are shaping that case through the indictments -- and threats of
indictments -- that are being used to get guilty pleas to make the president
seem like an obstructor or co-conspirator.
They are literally creating the
crimes.
Let’s review what Mueller and his team are doing:
Michael Flynn —
They discovered unreported lobbying by Trump's former National Security Adviser
and leveraged that to get him to plead guilty to lying to the FBI. Why? So that
they can claim Trump’s comment to James Comey about letting him go was
obstruction of justice. Yet no other prosecutor would ever have brought this
charge.
Michael Cohen —
They got Trump’s former lawyer on all sorts of financial crimes related to his
businesses and loans. But he pled guilty to campaign finance violations for
payments that in the past would have been ruled on as personal expenses. Now
they’ve also gotten him to cop to lying about when he killed the perfectly
legal Russia tower project, only it appears that Trump’s lawyers ducked that
perjury trap in the written questions.
George Papadopoulos—
The former member of Trump’s foreign policy advisory panel was forced to
plead to lying about the timing of his contacts. The goal was to legitimize the
start of the investigation around him when all he did was pass on a surmise
or a tip he received. Was the time and expense worth a 14-day sentence? Of
course not. They had all the records they needed to figure out who he contacted
when.
Jerome Corsi –
The best-selling author was threatened with pleading to lying about his
contacts with his friend and former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone. There
was nothing illegal about his comments or actions, and he is a journalist,
though obviously, the general rules of journalism don’t apply to
conservatives like him.
Roger Stone -- The former Trump
campaign adviser sent out a tweet suggesting Hillary Clinton’s campaign
chairman John Podesta was next, and an email to Corsi asking him to get the
rest of the emails. He was obviously trying to find out what was going on with
these emails, and that’s not illegal in any way.
Paul Manafort –
The former Trump presidential campaign chairman’s old tax and reporting
cases going far back were dusted off to get him under the thumb of the
prosecutor. It was revealed that he continued a joint defense agreement
with the president and suddenly the prosecutor is saying he lied about his
business dealings. It’s all about vengeance on him for failing to give
them what they want and to make Trump look bad.
Sure, there are some anonymous Russians who will never be
tried to add on top of this record.
But it’s clear now Mueller is no longer
looking for crimes in the presidential race of 2016.
He is simply creating a
narrative to delegitimize the president and to string together his words to
Comey with the Flynn indictment, Cohen with Stormy Daniels payment, Roger Stone
and Jerome Corsi with ties to Julian Assange, and now Cohen with underplaying
Russia connections.
And let’s not forget the Trump Tower meeting with the
attorney who was also conveniently working with Fusion GPS.
There’s no doubt that the outline of Mueller’s report was
written a long time ago and is being filled in. For those who thought Mueller
would deliver a balanced and thoughtful report, these latest actions suggest
that instead, we are seeing an all-out attack on the president and the
presidency the likes of which we have never seen.
Get ready for the fight of the century coming soon and
it will be about everything except collusion with the Russian government.
Mark Penn is managing director of the
Stagwell Group. He was chief strategist on Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential
campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, and Mrs. Clinton’s 2008
presidential campaign.
