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I don't think that the Russians colluded with Team Trump to help them win the election; they colluded for the purpose of damaging Hillary Clinton and weakening her Presidency. Hardly anyone thought that Trump would actually win. By all indications, most of Trump's family didn't want him to win and he was preparing to start TRUMP TV with Roger Ailes (who was forced out of Fox News in July 2016).
From Michael Wolff's new book:
Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his business deals and real
estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he if he
wasn't going to win?
What's more, Trump refused to spend any time considering, however hypothetically,
transition matters, saying it was "bad luck"but really meaning it was a waste of time.
Nor would he even remotely contemplate the issue of his holdings and conflicts.
He wasn't going to win! Or losing was winning.
Trump would be the most famous man in the worlda martyr to crooked Hillary
Clinton.
His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would have transformed themselves from
relatively obscure rich kids into international celebrities and brand ambassadors.
Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the Tea Party movement.
Kellyanne Conway would be a cable news star.
Reince Priebus and Katie Walsh would get their Republican Party back.
Melania Trump could return to inconspicuously lunching.
That was the trouble-free outcome they awaited on November 8, 2016. Losing would
work out for everybody.
Shortly after eight o'clock that evening, when the unexpected trendTrump might
actually winseemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he called
him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania, to whom Donald Trump had made his
solemn guarantee, was in tearsand not of joy.
There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon's not unamused
observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a quite
horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: suddenly, Donald Trump
became a man who believed that he deserved to be and was wholly capable of being the
president of the United States.
Putin was not looking forward to HRC being President, and the best he thought he could hope for was to keep her win a narrow one (like her husband's in 1992) and have a distracted administration spending its time fighting off GOP investigations and right-wing media coverage. At least she might leave Russia alone and stop expanding NATO. It wasn't hard to meddle in certain key swing states, likely with the guidance of some of Trump's people:
"The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has requested that a data analytics company called Cambridge Analytica turn over internal documents as part of its investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Cambridge Analytica specializes in what's called "psychographic" profiling, meaning they use data collected online to create personality profiles for voters. They then take that information and target individuals with specifically tailored content"
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/...ynn-russia
Now some of you are thinking, "but the deep state, Robert Mueller..." Yeah, I know Robert Mueller's role at the FBI on 9/11 and the anthrax letters investigation as well as anyone. The point is that the national security state of the US is striking back at a man who is a) fundamentally unfit for the Presidency b) a dangerous person to have controlling nuclear weapons c) a proven security risk (his inability to handle classified information carefully) and d) a man who can be blackmailed because of his 30 years of involvement with the Russians:
http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-russia-timeline/
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017...-timeline/
https://www.politico.com/interactives/20...tion-ties/
https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/d...ime-bosses
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017...-dossiers/
https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/t...-syndicate
http://www.citypaper.com/news/mobtownbea...story.html
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"A new report shows that for 10 years, a Trump property in Panama City collected millions of dollars from the Russian mafia and Colombian drug cartels. An investigation from Global Witness, an international NGO that probes corruption and money laundering, reveals how the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower turned a blind eye to crime lords looking for a safe haven to stash their blood money…The property, which the lead broker Alexandre Ventura Nogueira describes as "Ivanka Trump's baby," listed units for three times the going rate in Panama City, thanks to the Trump name. Nogueira worked closely with the Trump family; he claims he attended at least 10 meetings with Ivanka Trump, who challenged him to sell 100 units in the building. "The agreement was, I had a week to sell 100 units," Nogueira told Reuters. "I said, I'm going to do better, I'm going to sell without telling (the buyers) the price.'" Nogueira later fled Panama after he was arrested for unrelated charges of real estate fraud. From his European asylum, he told NBC that at least half of his Trump Ocean Club customers were Russians, including some with "questionable backgrounds." Only later did he learn of their ties to Russian organized crime circles."
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/spe...mp-panama/
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politi...anama-city
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Deutsche Bank was fined by the Obama DOJ for misleading investors:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/deutsche-...age-backed
You know who still hasn't fined them for Russian money laundering? Trump's DOJ:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/15/politics/j...index.html
You know who was investigating Deutsche Bank in NY? US Attorney Preet Bharara, who was fired by Trump for unknown reasons.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/man...conveyance
"Trump's relationship with Deutsche Bank stretches back some two decades and the roughly $300 million he owed to the bank represented nearly half of his outstanding debt, according to a July 2016 analysis by Bloomberg. That figure includes a $170-million loan Trump took out to finish a hotel in Washington. He also has two mortgages against his Trump National Doral Miami resort and a loan against his tower in Chicago."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/...by-mueller
" Deutsche Bank has been fined more than $630m (£506m) for failing to prevent $10bn of Russian money laundering and exposing the UK financial system to the risk of financial crime. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority imposed its largest ever fine £163m for potential money laundering offences on Germany's biggest bank, which it said had missed several opportunities to clamp down on the activities of its Russian operations as a result of weak systems to detect financial crime between 2012 and 2015."
[URL="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/31/deutsche-bank-fined-630m-over-russia-money-laundering-claims"]
https://www.theguardian.com/business/201...ing-claims[/URL]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/...-attorneys
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-doj...ank-2017-7
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According to court filings, Paul Manafort had three passports, fake identities and multiple phones and email accounts and was associating with Russian oligarchs… the indictment details how he used a company called Lucicle Consultants Limited to wire millions of dollars into the United States. The Cyprus-based Lucicle Consultants Limited, in turn, reportedly received millions of dollars from a businessman and Ukrainian parliamentarian named Ivan Fursin, who is closely linked to one of Russia's most notorious criminals: Semion Mogilevich. Mogilevich is frequently described as " the most dangerous mobster in the world. Currently believed to be safe in Moscow, he is, according to the FBI, responsible for weapons trafficking, contract killings, and international prostitution. In 2009, he made the bureau's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list."
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-r...-traveling
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mueller-re...ized-crime
"A newly unsealed docket in the criminal case against Paul Manafort and his longtime business associate Rick Gates says both men had received "millions of dollars" from Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs that would allow them "to live comfortably abroad" and therefore make them a flight risk… Manafort also has significant business ties to the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who signed a $10 million annual contract with Manafort in 2006 for a lobbying project in the US that Manafort said would "greatly benefit the Putin Government," The Associated Press reported in March… In a July 2016 email, Manafort asked his longtime employee Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian-Ukrainian dual citizen, to offer Deripaska "private briefings" about the campaign. Though the filing doesn't name Kilimnik, it says that "Manafort, Gates, and a Russian national who is a longstanding employee of Davis Manafort Partners, Inc. and DMP International LLC (collectively DMI) served as the beneficial owners and signatories" on the many offshore accounts they had opened."
http://www.businessinsider.com/prosecuto...hs-2017-10
Manafort has known Trump for 30 years. He bought an apartment in Trump Tower in 2006.
http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-paul-...story.html
https://ny.curbed.com/2016/10/25/1340503...dents-list
....where a bunch of Russian mobsters lived:
"For two years ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money-laundering network that operated out of unit 63A in Trump Tower in New York. The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment of more than 30 people, including one of the world's most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. Known as the "Little Taiwanese," he was the only target to slip away, and he remains a fugitive from American justice. Seven months after the April 2013 indictment and after Interpol issued a red notice for Tokhtakhounov, he appeared near Donald Trump in the VIP section of the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Trump had sold the Russian rights for Miss Universe to a billionaire Russian shopping mall developer."
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story-fbi-wiret...d=46266198
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The Plot Against America
Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort's pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/paul-manafort-american-hustler/550925/
I. The Wisdom of Friends
[FONT=&]The clinic permitted Paul Manafort[/FONT] one 10-minute call each day. And each day, he would use it to ring his wife from Arizona, his voice often soaked in tears. "Apparently he sobs daily," his daughter Andrea, then 29, texted a friend. During the spring of 2015, Manafort's life had tipped into a deep trough. A few months earlier, he had intimated to his other daughter, Jessica, that suicide was a possibility. He would "be gone forever," she texted Andrea.
To hear more feature stories,
His work, the source of the status he cherished, had taken a devastating turn. For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He'd been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he'd developed a highly personal relationship. Manafort would swim naked with his boss outside his banya, play tennis with him at his palace ("Of course, I let him win," Manafort made it known), and generally serve as an arbiter of power in a vast country. One of his deputies, Rick Gates, once boasted to a group of Washington lobbyists, "You have to understand, we've been working in Ukraine a long time, and Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure … In every ministry, he has a guy." Only a small handful of Americansoil executives, Cold War spymasterscould claim to have ever amassed such influence in a foreign regime. The power had helped fill Manafort's bank accounts; according to his recent indictment, he had tens of millions of dollars stashed in havens like Cyprus and the Grenadines.
[URL="http://www.theatlantic.com/subscribe/coverstory/"]
[/URL]Manafort had profited from the sort of excesses that make a country ripe for revolution. And in the early months of 2014, protesters gathered on the Maidan, Kiev's Independence Square, and swept his patron from power. Fearing for his life, Yanukovych sought protective shelter in Russia. Manafort avoided any harm by keeping a careful distance from the enflamed city. But in his Kiev office, he'd left behind a safe filled with papers that he would not have wanted to fall into public view or the wrong hands.
Money, which had always flowed freely to Manafort and which he'd spent more freely still, soon became a problem. After the revolution, Manafort cadged some business from former minions of the ousted president, the ones who hadn't needed to run for their lives. But he complained about unpaid bills and, at age 66, scoured the world (Hungary, Uganda, Kenya) for fresh clients, hustling without any apparent luck. Andrea noted her father's "tight cash flow state," texting Jessica, "He is suddenly extremely cheap." His change in spending habits was dampening her wedding plans. For her "wedding weekend kick off" party, he suggested scaling back the menu to hot dogs and eliminated a line item for ice.
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He seemed unwilling, or perhaps unable, to access his offshore accounts; an FBI investigation scrutinizing his work in Ukraine had begun not long after Yanukovych's fall. Meanwhile, a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska had been after Manafort to explain what had happened to an $18.9 million investment in a Ukrainian company that Manafort had claimed to have made on his behalf.
Manafort had been dodging Deripaska. The Russian oligarch wanted to know what had become of his money.Manafort had known Deripaska for years, so he surely understood the oligarch's history. Deripaska had won his fortune by prevailing in the so-called aluminum wars of the 1990s, a corpse-filled struggle, one of the most violent of all the competitions for dominance in a post-Soviet industry. In 2006, the U.S. State Department had revoked Deripaska's visa, reportedly out of concern over his ties to organized crime (which he has denied). Despite Deripaska's reputation, or perhaps because of it, Manafort had been dodging the oligarch's attempts to contact him. As Deripaska's lawyers informed a court in 2014 while attempting to claw back their client's money, "It appears that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have simply disappeared."
Nine months after the Ukrainian revolution, Manafort's family life also went into crisis. The nature of his home life can be observed in detail because Andrea's text messages were obtained last year by a "hacktivist collective"most likely Ukrainians furious with Manafort's meddling in their countrywhich posted the purloined material on the dark web. The texts extend over four years (201216) and 6 million words. Manafort has previously confirmed that his daughter's phone was hacked and acknowledged the authenticity of some texts quoted by Politico and The New York Times. Manafort and Andrea both declined to comment on this article. Jessica could not be reached for comment.
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Collectively, the texts show a sometimes fraught series of relationships, by turns loving and manipulative. Manafort was generous with his family financiallyhe'd invested millions in Jessica's film projects, and millions more in her now-ex-husband's real-estate ventures. But when he called home in tears or threatened suicide in the spring of 2015, he was pleading for his marriage. The previous November, as the cache of texts shows, his daughters had caught him in an affair with a woman more than 30 years his junior. It was an expensive relationship. According to the text messages, Manafort had rented his mistress a $9,000-a-month apartment in Manhattan and a house in the Hamptons, not far from his own. He had handed her an American Express card, which she'd used to good effect. "I only go to luxury restaurants," she once declared on a friend's fledgling podcast, speaking expansively about her photo posts on social media: caviar, lobster, haute cuisine.
The affair had been an unexpected revelation. Manafort had nursed his wife after a horseback-riding accident had nearly killed her in 1997. "I always marveled at how patient and devoted he was with her during that time," an old friend of Manafort's told me. But after the exposure of his infidelity, his wife had begun to confess simmering marital issues to her daughters. Manafort had committed to couples therapy but, the texts reveal, that hadn't prevented him from continuing his affair. Because he clumsily obscured his infidelityand because his mistress posted about their travels on Instagramhis family caught him again, six months later. He entered the clinic in Arizona soon after, according to Andrea's texts. "My dad," she wrote, "is in the middle of a massive emotional breakdown."
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By the early months of 2016, Manafort was back in greater Washington, his main residence and the place where he'd begun his career as a political consultant and lobbyist. But his attempts at rehabilitationof his family life, his career, his sense of self-worthcontinued. He began to make a different set of calls. As he watched the U.S. presidential campaign take an unlikely turn, he saw an opportunity, and he badly wanted in. He wrote Donald Trump a crisp memo listing all the reasons he would be an ideal campaign consigliereand then implored mutual friends to tout his skills to the ascendant candidate.
Shortly before the announcement of his job inside Trump's campaign, Manafort touched base with former colleagues to let them know of his professional return. He exuded his characteristic confidence, but they surprised him with doubts and worries. Throughout his long career, Manafort had advised powerful menU.S. senators and foreign supreme commanders, imposing generals and presidents-for-life. He'd learned how to soothe them, how to bend their intransigent wills with his calmly delivered, diligently researched arguments. But Manafort simply couldn't accept the wisdom of his friends, advice that he surely would have dispensed to anyone with a history like his ownthe imperative to shy away from unnecessary attention.
His friends, like all Republican political operatives of a certain age, could recite the legend of Paul Manafort, which they did with fascination, envy, and occasional disdain. When Manafort had arrived in Washington in the 1970s, the place reveled in its shabby glories, most notably a self-satisfied sense of high duty. Wealth came in the form of Georgetown mansions, with their antique imperfections and worn rugs projecting power so certain of itself, it needn't shout. But that old boarding-school establishment wasn't Manafort's style. As he made a name for himself, he began to dress differently than the Brooks Brothers crowd on K Street, more European, with funky, colorful blazers and collarless shirts. If he entertained the notion, say, of moving his backyard swimming pool a few feet, nothing stopped him from the expense. Colleagues, amused by his sartorial quirks and his cosmopolitan lifestyle, referred to him as "the Count of Monte Cristo."
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His acts of rebellion were not merely aesthetic. Manafort rewrote the rules of his adopted city. In the early '80s, he created a consulting firm that ignored the conventions that had previously governed lobbying. When it came to taking on new clients, he was uninhibited by moral limits. In 2016, his friends might not have known the specifics of his Cyprus accounts, all the alleged off-the-books payments to him captured in Cyrillic ledgers in Kiev. But they knew enough to believe that he could never sustain the exposure that comes with running a presidential campaign in the age of opposition research and aggressive media. "The risks couldn't have been more obvious," one friend who attempted to dissuade him from the job told me. But in his frayed state, these warnings failed to register.
When Paul Manafort officially joined the Trump campaign, on March 28, 2016, he represented a danger not only to himself but to the political organization he would ultimately run. A lifetime of foreign adventures didn't just contain scandalous stories, it evinced the character of a man who would very likely commandeer the campaign to serve his own interests, with little concern for the collective consequences.
Over the decades, Manafort had cut a trail of foreign money and influence into Washington, then built that trail into a superhighway. When it comes to serving the interests of the world's autocrats, he's been a great innovator. His indictment in October after investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges money laundering, false statements, and other acts of personal corruption. (He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.) But Manafort's role in Mueller's broader narrative remains carefully guarded, and unknown to the public. And his personal corruption is less significant, ultimately, than his lifetime role as a corrupter of the American system. That he would be accused of helping a foreign power subvert American democracy is a fitting coda to his life's story.
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II. The Young Man and His Machine
[FONT=&]in the spring of 1977,[/FONT] a 28-year-old Paul Manafort sat at a folding table in a hotel suite in Memphis. Photos from that time show him with a Tom Selleck mustache and meaningful sideburns. He was surrounded by phones that he'd specially installed for the weekend. The desk held his copious binders, which he called "whip books." Eight hundred delegates had gathered to elect a new leader of the Young Republicans organization, and Manafort, a budding kingmaker, had compiled a dossier on each one. Those whip books provided the basis for deal making. To wheedle and cajole delegates, it helped to have an idea of what job they wanted in return for their support.
Control over the Young Republicansa political and social network for professionals ages 18 to 40was a genuine prize in those days. Presidential hopefuls sought to harness the group. This was still the era of brokered presidential conventions, and Young Republicans could descend in numbers sufficient to dominate the state meetings that selected delegates. In 1964, the group's efforts had arguably secured Barry Goldwater the GOP nomination; by the '70s every Republican aspirant understood its potency. The attention paid by party elders yielded opportunities for Young Republican leaders. Patronage flowed in their direction. To seize the organization was to come into possession of a baby Tammany.
In Memphis, Manafort was working on behalf of his friend Roger Stone, now best known as a pioneer in opposition research and a promiscuous purveyor of conspiracy theories. He managed Stone's candidacy for chairman of the group. Stone, then 24, reveled in the fact that he'd received his political education during Richard Nixon's reelection campaign in 1972; he even admitted to playing dirty tricks to benefit his idol. Stone and Manafort had met through College Republicans. They shared a home state, an affection for finely tailored power suits, and a deeper love of power itself. Together, they campaigned with gleeful ruthlessness.
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Even at this early stage in his career, Manafort had acquired a remarkable skill for managing a gathering of great size. He knew how to command an army of loyalists, who took his orders via walkie-talkie. And he knew how to put on a show. In Memphis that year, he rented a Mississippi River paddleboat for a booze cruise and dispatched his whips to work over wavering delegates within its floating confines. To the Young Republican elite, the faction Manafort controlled carried a name that conveyed his expectation of unfailing loyalty: the Team. And in the face of the Team's prowess, Stone's rival eventually quit the race, mid-convention. "It's all been scripted in the back room," he complained.
Manafort had been bred for politics. While he was in high school, his father, Paul Manafort Sr., became the mayor of New Britain, Connecticut, and Manafort Jr. gravitated toward the actionjoining a mock city council, campaigning for the gubernatorial candidate Thomas Meskill as part of his Kiddie Corps. For college and law school, he chose Georgetown University, a taxi ride from the big time.
In the '70s, the big time was embodied by James A. Baker III, the shrewdest Republican insider of his generation. During the epic Republican National Convention of 1976, Manafort holed up with Baker in a trailer outside the Kemper Arena, in Kansas City, Missouri. They attempted to protect Gerald Ford's renomination bid in the face of Ronald Reagan's energetic challenge; Manafort wrangled delegates on Baker's behalf. From Baker, he learned the art of ostentatious humility, how to use the knife to butter up and then stab in the back. "He was studying at the feet of the master," Jeff Bell, a Reagan campaign aide, remembers.
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By the late '70s, Manafort and Stone could foresee Ronald Reagan's ascendance, and both intended to become players in his 1980 campaign. For Manafort, this was an audacious volte-face. By flipping his allegiance from the former Ford faction, he provoked suspicion among conservatives, who viewed him as a rank opportunist. There was little denying that the Young Republicans made an ideal vehicle for his ambitions.
Paul Manafort (left), Roger Stone (center), and Lee Atwater (right) in 1985. Their efforts helped transform how Washington works. (Harry Naltchayan / The Washington Post / Getty)These ambitions left a trail of damage, including an Alabama lawyer named Neal Acker. During the Memphis convention, Acker had served as a loyal foot soldier on the Team, organizing the southern delegates on Stone's behalf. In return, Manafort and Stone had promised to throw the Team behind Acker's campaign to replace Stone as the head of the Young Republicans two years later, in 1979. Manafort would manage the campaign himself.
But as the moment of Acker's coronation approached, Manafort suddenly conditioned his plan. If Acker wanted the job, he had to swear loyalty to Reagan. When Acker ultimately balkedhe wanted to stay neutralManafort turned on him with fury, "an unprecedented 11th-hour move," the Associated Press reported. In the week leading up to the 1979 Young Republicans convention, Manafort and Stone set out to destroy Acker's candidacy. At Manafort's urging, the delegates who were pledged to Acker boltedand Manafort took over his opponent's campaign. In a bravura projection of power that no one in the Reagan campaign could miss, Manafort swung the vote sharply against Acker, 465 to 180. "It was one of the great fuck jobs," a Manafort whip told me recently.
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Not long after that, Stone and Manafort won the crucial positions in the Reagan operation that they'd coveted. Stone directed the campaign in the Northeast, Manafort in the South. The campaign had its share of infighting; both men survived factional schisms and purges. "They were known as the Young Republican whizzes," Jeff Bell told me. Their performance positioned them for inner-sanctum jobs in the Reagan administration, but they had even grander plans.
III. The Firm

[FONT=&]during the years that followed world war ii,[/FONT] Washington's most effective lobbyists transcended the transactional nature of their profession. Men such as Abe Fortas, Clark Clifford, Bryce Harlow, and Thomas Corcoran were known not as grubby mercenaries but as elegant avatars of a permanent establishment, lauded as "wise men." Lobbying hardly carried a stigma, because there was so little of it. When the legendary lawyer Tommy Boggs registered himself as a lobbyist, in 1967, his name was only 64th on the active list. Businesses simply didn't consider lobbying a necessity. Three leading political scientists had studied the profession in 1963 and concluded: "When we look at the typical lobby, we find its opportunities to maneuver are sharply limited, its staff mediocre, and its typical problem not the influencing of Congressional votes but finding the clients and contributors to enable it to survive at all."
On the cusp of the Reagan era, Republican lobbyists were particularly enfeebled. Generations of Democratic majorities in Congress had been terrible for business. The scant tribe of Republican lobbyists working the cloakrooms included alumni of the Nixon and Ford administrations; operating under the shame-inducing cloud of Watergate, they were disinclined toward either ambition or aggression.
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This was the world that brash novices like Manafort and Stone quickly came to dominate. The Reagan administration represented a break with the old Republican establishment. After the long expansion of the regulatory state, business finally had a political partner eager to dismantle itwhich generated unprecedented demand for lobbyists. Manafort could convincingly claim to know the new administration better than anyone. During its transition to power, he had run the Office of Personnel Management, which meant that he'd stacked the incoming government with his people. Along with Stone and Charlie Black, another veteran of the Young Republican wars, he set up a firm, Black, Manafort and Stone, which soon compiled an imposing client list: Bethlehem Steel, the Tobacco Institute, Johnson & Johnson, Trans World Airlines.
Whereas other firms had operated in specialized nicheslobbying, consulting, public relationsBlack, Manafort and Stone bundled all those services under one roof, a deceptively simple move that would eventually help transform Washington. Time magazine deemed the operation "the ultimate supermarket of influence peddling." Fred Wertheimer, a good-government advocate, described this expansive approach as "institutionalized conflict of interest."
The linkage of lobbying to political consultingthe creation of what's now known as a double-breasted operationwas the real breakthrough. Manafort's was the first lobbying firm to also house political consultants. (Legally, the two practices were divided into different companies, but they shared the same founding partners and the same office space.) One venture would run campaigns; the other would turn around and lobby the politicians whom their colleagues had helped elect. The consulting side hired the hard-edged operative Lee Atwater, notorious for pioneering race-baiting tactics on behalf of Strom Thurmond. "We're getting into servicing what we sell," Atwater told his friends. Just as imagined, the firm's political clients (Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, Arlen Specter) became reliable warhorses when the firm needed them to promote the agendas of its corporate clients. With this evolution of the profession, the effectiveness and influence of lobbying grew in tandem.
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In 1984, the firm reached across the aisle. It made a partner of Peter Kelly, a former finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who had earned the loyalty of lawmakers by raising millions for their campaigns. Some members of the firm worked for Democratic Senate candidates in Louisiana, Vermont, and Florida, even as operatives down the hall worked for their Republican foes. "People said, It's un-American,' " Kelly told me. " They can't lose. They have both sides.' I kept saying, How is it un-American to win?' " This sense of invincibility permeated the lobbying operation too. When Congress passed tax-reform legislation in 1986, the firm managed to get one special rule inserted that saved Chrysler-Mitsubishi $58 million; it wrangled another clause that reaped Johnson & Johnson $38 million in savings. Newsweek pronounced the firm "the hottest shop in town."
Manafort's lobbying firm exuded the decadent spirit of the '80s. "Excess Is Best" was the theme of one annual gathering.Demand for its services rose to such heights that the firm engineered a virtual lock on the 1988 Republican primary. Atwater became the chief strategist for George H. W. Bush; Black worked with Bob Dole; Stone advised Jack Kemp. A congressional staffer joked to Time, "Why have primaries for the nomination? Why not have the candidates go over to Black, Manafort and Stone and argue it out?" Manafort cultivated this perception. In response to a questionnaire in The Washington Times, he declared Machiavelli the person he would most like to meet.
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Despite his young age, Manafort projected the sort of confidence that inspires others to have confidence, a demeanor often likened to that of a news anchor. "He is authoritative, and you never see a chink in the armor," one of his longtime deputies, Philip Griffin, told me. Manafort wrote well, especially in proposals to prospective clients, and excelled at thinking strategically. Name-dropping never substituted for concrete steps that would bolster a client. "If politics has done anything, it's taught us to treat everything as a campaign," he once declared. He toiled for clients with unflagging intensity. His wife once quipped, according to the text messages, that Andrea was conceived between conference calls. He "hung up the phone, looked at his watch, and said, Okay, we have 20 minutes until the next one,' " Andrea wrote to her then-fiancé.
The firm exuded the decadent spirit of the 1980s. Each year, it hosted a golf outing called Boodles, after the gin brand. "It would have to move almost every year, because we weren't invited back," John Donaldson, an old friend of Manafort's who worked at the firm, says. "A couple of women in the firm complained that they weren't ever invited. I told them they didn't want to be." As the head of the firm's "social committee," Manafort would supply a theme for the annual gatherings. His masterwork was a three-year progression: "Excess," followed by "Exceed Excess," capped by "Excess Is Best."
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Partners at the firm let it be known to The Washington Post that they each intended to take home at least $450,000 in 1986 (a little more than $1 million today). "All of a sudden they came into a lot of money, and I don't think any of them were used to earning the money that we were earning," Kelly said. Senior partners were given luxury cars and a membership to the country club of their choosing. Manafort would fly the Concorde to Europe and back as if it were the Acela to New York. "I must confess," Atwater swooned to The Washington Post, "after four years on a government payroll, I'm delighted with my new life style."
Manafort with the Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole at the 1996 GOP convention, which Manafort managed (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times / Getty)The firm hired kids straight out of college"wheel men" in the office vernacularto drive the partners around town. When Roger Stone's old hero, Richard Nixon, came to Washington, the wheel men would shuttle him about.
Many of these young associates would eventually climb the firm's ladder, and were often dispatched to manage campaigns on the firm's behalf. Climbing the ladder, however, in most cases required passing what came to be known as Manafort's "loyalty tests"challenging tasks that strayed outside the boundaries of standard professional commitment and demonstrated the control that Manafort expected to exert over the associates' lives. At the last minute, he might ask a staffer to entertain his visiting law-school buddies, never mind that the staffer had never met them before. For one Saint Patrick's Day party, he gave two junior staffers 24 hours to track down a plausible impersonator of Billy Barty, the 3-foot-9-inch actor who made movies with Mickey Rooney and Chevy Chasewhich they did. "This was in the days before the internet," one of them told me. "Can you imagine how hard that was?"
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IV. Man of the World
[FONT=&]by the 1990s,[/FONT] the double-digit list of registered lobbyists that Tommy Boggs had joined back in 1967 had swelled to more than 10,000. Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly had greatly abetted that transformation, and stood to profit from the rising flood of corporate money into the capital. But by then, domestic politics had begun to feel a little small, a bit too unexotic, for Paul Manafort, whom Charlie Black described to me as a self-styled "adventurer."
Manafort had long befriended ambitious young diplomats at the trailhead to power, including Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, then the Saudi ambassador to Washington. When Bandar attended the 1984 Republican National Convention, Manafort dedicated a small group of advance men to smooth his way. Manafort arranged for Bandar to arrive at the presidential entrance, then had him whisked to seats in the vice-presidential box.
Foreign lobbying had certainly existed before the '80s, but it was limited in scale and operated under a penumbra of suspicion. Just before World War II, Congress had passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, largely in response to the campaigns orchestrated by Ivy Lee, an American publicist hired by the German Dye Trust to soften the image of the Third Reich. Congress hadn't outlawed influence peddling on behalf of foreign interests, but the practice sat on the far fringes of K Street.
Paul Manafort helped change that. The Reagan administration had remade the contours of the Cold War, stepping up the fight against communism worldwide by funding and training guerrilla armies and right-wing military forces, such as the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghan mujahideen. This strategy of military outsourcingthe Reagan Doctrineaimed to overload the Soviet Union with confrontations that it couldn't sustain.
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All of the money Congress began spending on anti-communist proxies represented a vast opportunity. Iron-fisted dictators and scruffy commandants around the world hoped for a share of the largesse. To get it, they needed help refining their image, so that Congress wouldn't look too hard at their less-than-liberal tendencies. Other lobbyists sought out authoritarian clients, but none did so with the focused intensity of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. The firm would arrange for image-buffing interviews on American news programs; it would enlist allies in Congress to unleash money. Back home, it would help regimes acquire the whiff of democratic legitimacy that would bolster their standing in Washington.
The firm won clients because it adeptly marketed its ties to the Reagan administration, and then the George H. W. Bush administration after that. In one proposal, reported in The New York Times in 1988, the firm advertised its "personal relationships" with officials and promised to "upgrade" back channels "in the economic and foreign policy spheres." No doubt it helped to have a friend in James Baker, especially after he became the secretary of state under Bush. "Baker would send the firm clients," Kelly remembered. "He wanted us to help lead these guys in a better direction."
But moral improvement never really figured into Manafort's calculus. "Generally speaking, I would focus on how to bring the client in sync with western European or American values," Kelly told me. "Paul took the opposite approach." (Kelly and Manafort have not spoken in recent years; the former supported Hillary Clinton in the last presidential campaign.) In her memoir, Riva Levinson, a managing director at the firm from 1985 to 1995, wrote that when she protested to her boss that she needed to believe in what she was doing, Manafort told her that it would "be my downfall in this business." The firm's client base grew to include dictatorial governments in Nigeria, Kenya, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, among others. Manafort's firm was a primary subject of scorn in a 1992 report issued by the Center for Public Integrity called "The Torturers' Lobby."
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The firm's international business accelerated when the Philippines became a client, in 1985. President Ferdinand Marcos desperately needed a patina of legitimacy: The 1983 assassination of the chief opposition leader, Benigno Aquino Jr., had imperiled U.S. congressional support for his regime. Marcos hired Manafort to lift his image; his wife, Imelda, personally delivered an initial payment of $60,000 to the firm while on a trip to the States. When Marcos called a snap election to prove his democratic bona fides in 1986, Manafort told Time, "What we've tried to do is make it more of a Chicago-style election and not Mexico's." The quip was honest, if unintentionally so. In the American political lexicon, Chicago-style elections were generally synonymous with mass voter fraud. The late pollster Warren Mitofsky traveled to the Philippines with CBS News to set up and conduct an exit poll for the election. When he returned, he told the political scientist Sam Popkin the story of how a representative of Manafort's firm had asked him, "What sort of margin might make a Marcos victory legitimate?" The implication was clear, Popkin told me: "How do we rig this thing and still satisfy the Americans?"
The firm's most successful right-wing makeover was of the Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, a Maoist turned anti-communist insurgent, whose army committed atrocities against children and conscripted women into sexual slavery. During the general's 1986 trip to New York and Washington, Manafort and his associates created what one magazine called "Savimbi Chic." Dressed in a Nehru suit, Savimbi was driven around in a stretch limousine and housed in the Waldorf-Astoria and the Grand Hotel, projecting an image of refinement. The firm had assiduously prepared him for the mission, sending him monthly reports on the political climate in Washington. According to The Washington Post, "He was meticulously coached on everything from how to answer his critics to how to compliment his patrons." Savimbi emerged from his tour as a much-championed "freedom fighter." When the neoconservative icon Jeane Kirkpatrick introduced Savimbi at the American Enterprise Institute, she declared that he was a "linguist, philosopher, poet, politician, warrior … one of the few authentic heroes of our time."
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This was a racketSavimbi paid the firm $600,000 in 1985 alonethat Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly did its best to keep alive; the firm's own business was tied to Savimbi's continued rebellion against Angola's leftist regime. As the country stood on the brink of peace talks in the late '80s, after nearly 15 years of bloody civil war, the firm helped secure fresh batches of arms for its client, emboldening Savimbi to push forward with his military campaign. Former Senator Bill Bradley wrote in his memoir, "When Gorbachev pulled the plug on Soviet aid to the Angolan government, we had absolutely no reason to persist in aiding Savimbi. But by then he had hired an effective Washington lobbying firm." The war continued for more than a decade, killing hundreds of thousands of Angolans.
V. The Family Business
[FONT=&]"paul's not especially ideological,"[/FONT] his former partner Charlie Black told me recently. Many of Manafort's colleagues at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly professed to believe in the conservative catechism. Words like freedom and libertyflowed through their everyday musings. But Manafort seldom spoke of first principles or political ideals. He descends from a different kind of political lineage, and in his formative experience one can see the makings of his worldview.
Back in the '60s, Manafort's hometown, New Britain, Connecticut, was known as Hardware City. It housed the factory that turned out Stanley tools and was a tangle of ethnic enclavesPoles, Italians, Irish, Ukrainians. Nancy Johnson, who served New Britain in Congress, told me that when she arrived in the city during those years, she couldn't believe how little it interacted with the outside world. "It was a small city and very ingrown. When my kids were in high school, the number of their classmates who hadn't been to Hartford was stunning." Hartford, the state capital, is a 15-minute drive from New Britain.
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In 1919, not long after the Manaforts emigrated from Naples, the family founded a demolition company, New Britain House Wrecking, which eventually became Manafort Brothers, a force in local construction. When Manafort's father, Paul Sr., ran for mayor in 1965, he was a lonely Republican attempting to seize a blue bastion. But he had the schmoozing gene, as well as an unmistakable fierceness. Paul Carver, a former New Britain City Council member and a protégé of the old man, told me, "It was like going to the bar with your grandfather. He would stick his hand out and buy a round of drinks. He knew almost everybody in town." Paul Jr., known as P.J. to his friends, idolized his dad, plunging himself into the campaign, whose success he would decades later describe as "magic." Over the years, he would remain a devoted son. All the partners in his firm came to know his father, running into him at parties that P.J. hosted in his Mount Vernon, Virginia, home. "He was dedicated to him," Nancy Johnson told me.
The elder Manafort's outsize capacity for charm made him the sort of figure whose blemishes tend to be wiped from public memory. But in 1981, he was charged with perjury for testimony that he had provided in a municipal corruption investigation. New Britain police had been accused of casting a blind eye toward illegal gambling in the cityand of tampering with evidence to protect Joseph "Pippi" Guerriero, a member of the DeCavalcante crime family.
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Several investigations into the tampering drilled through New Britain's rotten government. The most devastating report came from Palmer McGee, a Hartford lawyer hired by New Britain to sort through its muck. In his findings, he pointed a finger straight at Manafort Sr., calling him the person "most at fault." According to the testimony of a whistle-blower, Manafort had flatly announced that he wanted to hire someone "flexible" to manage his personnel office, a place that would "not [be] 100 percent by the rules." The whistle-blower also testified that he had delivered an envelope to Manafort's home containing the answers to the exam that aspiring police officers had to passand that Manafort had given it to two candidates via a relative. Manafort never denied receiving the envelope but insisted that he'd merely asked for "boning-up materials."
A statute of limitations precluded prosecutors from filing charges against Manafort for the alleged crime of test-fixingand ultimately he was never convicted of perjury. But his arrest caused the Hartford Courant to compile a list of dealings that reflected badly on him: "Throughout his more than twenty years in public life, he has been the focus of controversy, and several accusations of wrongdoing." The litany includes a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development accusing him of steering contracts to Manafort Brothers, whose stock he still owned while mayor. When investors from Florida built a jai alai arena in Bridgeportusing the Teamsters' pension fund to finance the projectManafort had "improperly" finagled its environmental permit. His family business had then inflated the fees for its work on the arena so that cash could be kicked back to the Teamsters. (The business admitted to inflating its fees, but a grand jury declined to issue an indictment.) Even before this scandal broke, a former mayor of New Britain blasted Manafort for behavior that "violates the very essence of morality."
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Conventional wisdom suggests that the temptations of Washington, D.C., corrupt all the idealists, naïfs, and ingenues who settle there. But what if that formulation gets the causation backwards? What if it took an outsider to debase the capital and create the so-called swamp? When Paul Manafort Jr. broke the rules, when he operated outside of a moral code, he was really following the example he knew best. As he later said of his work with his father in an interview with a local Connecticut paper, "Some of the skills that I learned there I still use today … That's where I cut my teeth."
VI. Al Assir
[FONT=&]by the late 1980s,[/FONT] Manafort had a new friend from abroad, whom he mentioned to his partners more than any other, an arms dealer from Lebanon named Abdul Rahman Al Assir. "His name kept popping up," Peter Kelly remembered. While Al Assir never rated much attention in the American press, he had a familial connection who did. He was, for a time, the brother-in-law of the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, the middleman used in the arms-for-hostages scheme that became the Iran-Contra scandal. In the early '80s, Khashoggi was worth $4 billion; his biography, published in 1986, was titled The Richest Man in the World. At the height of his wealth, Khashoggi spent $250,000 a day to maintain his lifestylewhich reportedly included a dozen houses, 1,000 suits, a $70 million yacht, and a customized airplane, which has been described as a "flying Las Vegas discotheque."
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[size=12]Al Assir was the Khashoggi empire's representative in Spain and a broker of big weapons sales to African armies. He'd ensconced himself among the rich and famous, the set that skied in Gstaad, Switzerland, and summered in the south of France. The London-based Arabic-language magazine Sourakia wrote, "The miracle of Al Assir is that he will have lunch with Don Juan Carlos [the king of Spain], dinner with Hassan II [the king of Morocco], and breakfast the next day with Felipe González [the prime minister of Spain]."
Manafort suggested to his partners that Al Assir might help connect the firm to clients around the world. He wanted to increase the firm's global reach. Manafort's exploration of the outermost moral frontiers of the influence business had already exposed him to kleptocrats, thugs, and other dubious characters. But none of these relationships imprinted themselves more deeply than his friendship and entrepreneurial partnership with Al Assir. By the '90s, the two had begun to put together big deals. One of the more noteworthy was an arms sale they helped broker between France and Pakistan, lubricated by bribes and kickbacks involving high-level officials in both countries, that eventually led to murder allegations.
The arms dealer Al Assir introduced Manafort to an aristocratic world that exceeded anything he had ever known.It all arguably began with a 1993 dinner hosted by Manafort in his Virginia home and attended by Pakistan's prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto had just returned to power after three years in the opposition, and Manafort badly wanted her business. She knew of him as a skilled manipulator of public opinion, and throughout the meal, Manafort displayed his most strategic, most charming self. One former Pakistani official who attended the dinner told me that Bhutto came away determined to make use of his services. She suggested that Manafort work with the Pakistani intelligence service. Spooks in Islamabad had observed the international rush to hire Washington lobbyists, and they had been clamoring for one of their own.
At about that same time, Pakistan was looking to upgrade its submarine fleet, and European arms contractors raced to hawk their wares. In the end, France's state-owned manufacturer won the contractand Al Assir was added as an intermediary at the last minute. An ensuing scandal that is still unfolding, some 20 years later, would entangle both Al Assir and Manafort. It entailed alleged kickbacks into the 1995 presidential campaign of Édouard Balladur, apparently arranged by the French defense minister. Al Assir seems to have been a key conduit of the kickbacks. Years later, in 2002, a car bomb went off in Karachi, killing 11 French naval engineers in transit to the shipyard where the submarines were being assembled, along with three Pakistanis. One theory, fervently supported by some of the engineers' families, holds that the bombing was orchestrated by Pakistani officials who were disgruntled that the bribes promised to them as part of the deal had never arrived.
Manafort was not a central figure in this scandal, and was never charged with any wrongdoing. But as the former Pakistani official told me, "He was an introducerand he received a fee for his part." Documents show that Manafort earned at least $272,000 as a consultant to the Balladur campaign, although, as Manafort later conceded to French investigators, it was Al Assir who actually paid him. (Balladur has denied any wrongdoing and doesn't recall Manafort working for him. Al Assir could not be reached for comment on this story.)
Manafort and Al Assir were more than business partners. "They were very brotherly," one mutual acquaintance of theirs told me. Manafort took Al Assir as his guest to George H. W. Bush's inauguration, in 1989. When Al Assir and his second wife had a child, Manafort became the godfather. Their families vacationed together near Cannes. Al Assir introduced Manafort to an aristocratic world that exceeded anything he had ever known. "There's money, and there's really big money," a friend of Manafort's told me. "Paul became aware of the difference between making $300,000 and $5 million. He discovered the south of France. Al Assir would show him how to live that life."
Colleagues at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly noticed changes that accompanied the flowering of the friendship. Manafort's sartorial style began to pay homage to Al Assir, with flourishes of the European dandy. Suddenly he started wearing unconventional shirts and suede loafers without socks. In the firm's early years, Manafort had been a fixture of the office, a general presiding over his headquarters. But now he frequently flew off to France or Spain, collaborating with Al Assir on projects that remained a mystery to his subordinates, and even to his partners. "Paul went off on different foreign things that none of us knew about," Peter Kelly told me.
Manafort's lifestyle came to feature opulent touches that stood out amid the relative fustiness of Washington. When Andrea expressed an interest in horseback riding, Manafort bought a farm near Palm Beach, then stocked it with specially bred horses imported from Ireland, which required a full-time staff to tend. John Donaldson, Manafort's friend, recalls, "He was competing with the Al Assirs of the worldand he wanted to live in that lifestyle."
Manafort's Hamptons estate includes a putting green and a basketball court. He believed only "suckers stay out of debt," a former colleague says. (Google Maps)There were always suspicions among Manafort's colleagues in the firm that he was making money for himself without regard for his partners. Al Assir's occasional appearance in the international press lent these suspicions weight. One deal brokered by Al Assir helped crash a private bank in Lisbon. In 2002, he and Manafort persuaded the bank to invest 57 million euros in a Puerto Rican biometrics company. According to reporting by the Portuguese newspaper Observador, Manafort was the lead American investor in the company; his involvement helped justify the bank's investment, despite evidence of the company's faulty products and lax accounting. Al Assir is alleged to have extracted bloated commissions from the deal and to have pocketed some of the bank's loans. Manafort reportedly made $1.5 million selling his shares of the biometrics firm before the company eventually came tumbling down.
Stories about Manafort's slipperiness have acquired mythic status. In the summer of 2016, Politico's Kenneth Vogel, now with The New York Times, wrote a rigorous exegesis of a long-standing rumor: Manafort was said to have walked away with $10 million in cash from Ferdinand Marcos, money he promised he would deliver to Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign (which itself would have been illegal). Vogel relied in part on the 1996 memoir of Ed Rollins, a Republican consultant and Reagan's reelection-campaign director. In the book, Rollins recounted a dinner-party conversation with a member of the Filipino congress who claimed to have personally given a suitcase of cash to a "well-known Washington power lobbyist" involved in the Marcos campaign. Rollins would neither confirm nor deny that the lobbyist was Manafort, though his description doesn't leave much uncertainty, and he conceded in an email that "it's a pretty good guess." Rollins admits in his book to being "stunned" by what he heard"not in a state of total disbelief, though, because I knew the lobbyist well and I had no doubt the money was now in some offshore bank." This irked Rollins greatly: "I ran the [Reagan] campaign for $75,000 a year, and this guy got $10 million in cash."
Manafort has always denied Rollins's insinuation"old stuff that never had any legs," he told Vogel. And as a practical matter, it's hard to imagine that anyone could stuff $10 million in a suitcase. Still, Vogel found a raft of circumstantial evidence that suggested the plausibility of the tale. When I asked Manafort's former colleagues about the apocrypha, they couldn't confirm the story. But some didn't struggle to imagine it might be true, either. Even though John Donaldson doubts the veracity of the tale, he told me that it persists because it reflects Manafort's ethics. "I know how Paul would view it. Paul would sit there and say, These guys can't get access to Reagan. I can get them access to Reagan. They want to give $10 million to Reagan. Reagan can't take $10 million. I'll take the $10 million. They think they'll be getting their influence. Everybody's happy.' "
Another alumnus of Manafort's firm answered my questions about the Marcos money with an anecdote. After the election of George H. W. Bush, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly agreed to help organize the inauguration festivities. The firm commissioned a company from Rhode Island to sell memorabilia on the parade routeT-shirts, buttons, and the like. After crews had taken down the reviewing stand and swept up the debris, the alumnus recalled, a vendor showed up in the office with a bag full of cash. To the disbelief of his colleague, Manafort had arranged to take his own cut. "It was a Paul tax," the former employee told me. "I guess he needed a new deck. But this was classic: Somebody else does the work, and he walks away with the bag of cash."
Having spent so much time in the company of oligarchs, Manafort decided to become one himself.Colleagues suspected the worst about Manafort because they had observed his growing mania for accumulating property, how he'd bought second, third, and fourth homes. "He would buy a house without ever seeing it," one former colleague told me. His Hamptons estate came with a putting green, a basketball court, a pool, and gardens. "He believed that suckers stay out of debt," the colleague told me. His unrestrained spending and pile of debt required a perpetual search for bigger paydays and riskier ventures.
In 1991, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly was purchased by the mega public-affairs firm Burson-Marsteller, the second-largest agency in the world. It was a moment of consolidation in the industry, where the biggest players came to understand how much money could be made from the model that Manafort had created. But nearly as soon as Burson acquired the firm, Tom Bell, the head of its Washington office, began to notice the ways in which Manafort hadn't played by the rules. He'd been operating as a freelancer, working on projects that never went to the bottom line. In 1995, Manafort left Burson. Taking a handful of colleagues with him, he started a new firmDavis, Manafort and Freedmanand a new chapter, one that would see him enter the sphere of the Kremlin.
VII. The Master of Kiev
[FONT=&]during the 1980s and '90s,[/FONT] an arms dealer had stood at the pinnacle of global wealth. In the new century, post-Soviet oligarchs climbed closer to that position. Manafort's ambitions trailed that shift. His new firm found its way to a fresh set of titans, with the help of an heir to an ancient fortune.
In 2003, Rick Davis, a partner in Manafort's new firm, was invited to the office of a hedge fund in Midtown Manhattan. The summons didn't reveal the name of the man requesting his presence. When Davis arrived, he found himself pumping the hand of the Honorable Nathaniel Philip Victor James Rothschild, the British-born financier known as Nat. Throughout his young career, Nat had fascinated the London press with his love interests, his residences, and his shrewd investments. For his 40th birthday, he threw himself a legendary party in the Balkan state of Montenegro, which reportedly cost well over $1 milliona three-day festival of hedonism, with palm trees imported from Uruguay.
Russian oligarchs were drawn to Rothschild, whose name connoted powerand he to them. "He likes this wild world," Anders Ã…slund, a friend of Rothschild's, told me. Rothschild invested heavily in post-communist economies and became a primary adviser (and a friend) to the young Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.
Rothschild and Deripaska fed off each other's grand ambitions. Like a pair of old imperialists, they imagined new, sympathetic governments across eastern Europe that would accommodate and protect their investments. Their project required the type of expertise that Manafort had spent years accumulating. In 2004, Rothschild hired Manafort's new firm to resurrect the influence of an exiled Georgian politician, a former KGB operative and friend of Deripaska's then living in Moscow. This made for a heavy lift because the operative had recently been accused in court as a central plotter in a conspiracy to assassinate the country's president, Eduard Shevardnadze. (He denied involvement.) The rehabilitation scheme never fully developed, but a few years later, Rick Davis triumphantly managed a referendum campaign that resulted in the independence of Montenegroan effort that Deripaska funded with the hope of capturing the country's aluminum industry.
Deripaska's interests were not only financial. He was always looking to curry favor with the Russian state. An August 2007 email sent by Lauren Goodrich, an analyst for the global intelligence firm Stratfor, and subsequently posted on WikiLeaks, described Deripaska boasting to her about how he had set himself up "to be indispensable to Putin and the Kremlin." This made good business sense, since he had witnessed the Kremlin expropriate the vast empires of oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky who'd dared to challenge Putin. In fact, the Kremlin came to consider Deripaska an essential proxy. When the United States denied Deripaska a visa, the Russians handed him a diplomatic passport, which permitted him to make his way to Washington and New York.
Manafort understood how highly Deripaska valued his symbiotic relationship with the Kremlin. According to the Associated Press, he pitched a contract in 2005, proposing that Deripaska finance an effort to "influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet Republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin's government." (Deripaska says he never took Manafort up on this proposal.)
The Kremlin's grip on its old Soviet sphere was especially precarious in the early aughts. President George W. Bush's democratic agenda espoused an almost messianic sense of how the United States could unleash a new age of freedom. The grandiloquent American rhetoric posed an existential threat to entrenched rulers of the region who were friendly to Russia, and who had become rich by plundering state resources. Suddenly, the threat of democratic revolution no longer felt theoretical.
The risks of popular uprising were very much on Rothschild's and Deripaska's minds during the last months of 2004, when they handed Manafort a specific task. Ukraine had descended into political crisis, one that jeopardized business interests they'd already developed in the country (Rothschild had various private-equity investments; Deripaska had an aluminum smelter). They sent Manafort to Kiev to understand how they might minimize the dangers.
Of all Paul Manafort's foreign adventures, Ukraine most sustained his attention, ultimately to the exclusion of his other business. The country's politics are hardly as simple as commonly portrayed; corruption extends its tentacles into all the major parties. Still, the narrative of Manafort's time in Ukraine isn't terribly complicated. He worked on behalf of a clique of former gangsters from the country's east, oligarchs who felt linguistic and cultural affinity to Russia, and who wanted political control of the entire nation. When Manafort arrived, the candidate of this clique, Viktor Yanukovych, was facing allegations that he had tried to rig the 2004 presidential election with fraud and intimidation, and possibly by poisoning his opponent with dioxin. He lost the election anyway, despite having imported a slew of consultants from Moscow. After that humiliating defeat, Yanukovych and the oligarchs who'd supported him were desperate for a new guru.
Ferdinand Marcos (left), Viktor Yanukovych (center), and Jonas Savimbi (right) are among the many strongmen whom Manafort has advised and assisted. (AP; Dmitry Azarov / Kommersant Photo; Selwyn Tait / Getty)By the time Manafort first entertained the possibility of working with Yanukovych, the defeated candidate had just returned to Kiev following a brief self-imposed exile at a Czech resort. They met at an old movie palace that had been converted into the headquarters for his political organization, the Party of Regions. When Manafort entered the grandiose building, the place was a mausoleum and Yanukovych a pariah. "People avoided him," Philip Griffin said. "He was radioactive."
Manafort groomed Yanukovych to resemble, well, himself. Ã…slund, who had advised the Ukrainian government on economic policy, told me, "Yanukovych and Manafort are almost exactly the same size. So they are big, tall men. He got Yanukovych to wear the same suits as he did and to comb the hair backwards as he does." Yanukovych had been wooden in public and in private, but "Manafort taught him how to smile and how to do small talk." And he did it all quietly, "from a back seat. He did it very elegantly."
He also directed Yanukovych's party to harp on a single theme each weeksay, the sorry condition of pensioners. These were not the most-sophisticated techniques, but they had never been deployed in Ukraine. Yanukovych was proud of his American turn. After he hired Manafort, he invited U.S. Ambassador John Herbst to his office, placed a binder containing Manafort's strategy in front of him, and announced, "I'm going with Washington."
Manafort often justified his work in Ukraine by arguing that he hoped to guide the country toward Europe and the West. But his polling data suggested that Yanukovych should accentuate cultural divisions in the country, playing to the sense of victimization felt by Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. And sure enough, his clients railed against nato expansion. When a U.S. diplomat discovered a rabidly anti-American speech on the Party of Regions' website, Manafort told him, "But it isn't on the English version."
Yanukovych's party succeeded in the parliamentary elections beyond all expectations, and the oligarchs who'd funded it came to regard Manafort with immense respect. As a result, Manafort began spending longer spans of time in Ukraine. One of his greatest gifts as a businessman was his audacity, and his Ukrainian benefactors had amassed enormous fortunes. The outrageous amounts that Manafort billed, sums far greater than any he had previously received, seemed perfectly normal. An associate of Manafort's described the system this way: "Paul would ask for a big sum," Yanukovych would approve it, and then his chief of staff "would go to the other oligarchs and ask them to kick in. Hey, you need to pay a million.' They would complain, but Yanukovych asked, so they would give."
When Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010, he gave Manafort "walk in" privileges, allowing him to stroll into the inner sanctum of the presidential offices at any time. Yanukovych could be bullheaded, and as his presidency progressed, he increasingly cut himself off from advisers. Manafort, however, knew how to change Yanukovych's mind, using polling and political arguments to make his case. Oleg Voloshyn, a former spokesman in the foreign-affairs ministry, told me that his own boss, the foreign minister, eventually turned to Manafort to carry messages and make arguments regarding foreign-policy priorities on his behalf. "Yanukovych would listen to him," Voloshyn told me, "when our arguments were ignored."
VIII. A Reversal of Fortune
[FONT=&]before everything exploded in ukraine,[/FONT] Manafort saw the country as his golden land, the greatest of his opportunities. But his role as adviser, as powerful as it was, never quite matched his own buccaneering sense of self. After spending so much time in the company of Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, he set out to become an oligarch himself. Ri
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Over the next few days, a wealth of evidence emerged to suggest that Trump and Sanders were playing fast and loose with the truth. But we now have the documents to prove that decisively. Their disclosure was not a leak but an authorized action by the FBI, which released to us under the Freedom of Information Act more than 100 pages of leadership communications to staff dealing with the firing. This material tells a dramatic story about the FBI's reaction to the Comey firingbut it is neither a story of gratitude to the president nor a story of an organization in turmoil relieved by a much-needed leadership transition.
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https://www.lawfareblog.com/i-hope-insta...ames-comey[/URL]
When President Trump fired James Comey as FBI director last May, the special agent in charge of the Detroit field office, David Gelios, wrote an email to his staff:
I just saw CNN reporting that Director Comey has been fired by President Trump. I have no notification from HQ of any such thing. If I receive any information from HQ, I will advise. I'd ask all to stand by for clarification of this reporting. I am only sending this because I want everyone to know I have received no HQ confirmation of the reporting. I hope this is an instance of fake news.
In the Knoxville field office, Special Agent in Charge Renae McDermott wrote to the staff she leads: "Unexpected news such as this is hard to understand but I know you all know our Director stood for what is right and what is true!!! . . . He truly made us better when we needed it the most."
The following day, in an email with the subject line "Follow up with your squads," she followed up: "I need for all of you to make sure our/your folks are doing OK. Check with them today, tomorrow ….you get the idea."
McDermott sent that latter email as the White House was launching its public broadside against Comey's performance. In a May 10 press conference, the same day McDermott was asking her staff to make sure one another were "doing OK," then-Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the president had "lost confidence in Director Comey" and that "the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director." She stated that the president had "had countless conversations with members from within the FBI" in the course of making his decision to fire Comey. The following day, Sanders stated that she personally had "heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the president's decision" and that the president believed "Director Comey was not up to the task...that he wasn't the right person in the job. [Trump] wanted somebody that could bring credibility back to the FBI."
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Over the next few days, a wealth of evidence emerged to suggest that Trump and Sanders were playing fast and loose with the truth. But we now have the documents to prove that decisively. Their disclosure was not a leak but an authorized action by the FBI, which released to us under the Freedom of Information Act more than 100 pages of leadership communications to staff dealing with the firing. This material tells a dramatic story about the FBI's reaction to the Comey firingbut it is neither a story of gratitude to the president nor a story of an organization in turmoil relieved by a much-needed leadership transition.
Within a few days of the firing, both current and former FBI officials began pushing back against the White House's claims. Then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Comey "enjoyed broad support within the FBI" and that "the vast majority of employees enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey."
Here at Lawfare, Nora Ellingsenwho served as a counterterrorism analyst at the FBI for several yearstalked with roughly 20 of her former colleagues. She characterizedthe opinion of Comey among the FBI's rank and file as almost universally positive. "Nearly everyone loved him," she wrote, and the "degree of consensus on this point ... has been incredible." She went on: "All of the people I talked to described having the same reaction when they heard that the director had been fired: complete shock, followed by deep sadness."
The president of the FBI Agents Association, Thomas O'Connor, called Comey's firing a "gut punch."
Resolving the inconsistency between the White House statements and accounts from within the bureau seemed like a good job for the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). When the head of an agency is abruptly fired, managers have to inform their teams, and those messages can speak volumes about the mood at the agency. As Benjamin Wittes wrote at the time he filed the FOIA requests:After reading Ellingsen's piece, a thought occurred to me: this is a factual dispute with a large body of objective evidence behind it. When you decapitate an organization like the FBI, managers have to tell their staffs, after all. They do this, I imagine, by writing an email to their staffs. In an organization "in turmoil," one run by a "nut job," in whom the rank and file have "lost confidence," one might expect such an email to have a celebratory flavor, to talk about how the long national nightmare is over, say, or how there's a great opportunity to restore sanity to the organization. On the other hand, when a beloved leader is removed by a President in what is seen as an attack on the institution, one might expect an email with a very different tone. The FBI has lots of managers who will have had to send emails to their staffs.
On June 22, 2017, Wittes made four FOIA requests. One of them sought communications to the workforce from the senior FBI leadership regarding Comey's firing. Another sought communications on the topic from all the assistant directors and special agents in charge at the FBI's many components and field offices to their respective teams. When the FBI did not respond in a timely manner, Wittes suedrepresented by the folks at Protect Democracystating that his purpose was "to show conclusively that President Trump and his White House staff are lying about career federal law enforcement officers, their actions, and their attitudes":Who knows? Perhaps these documents will reveal an agency in turmoil, one whose rank and file had lost confidence in their director, one brimming with gratitude to President Trump for his decisive action in removing the "nut job." But don't hold your breath for a lot of "Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead" subject lines. I believe these documents, when the Bureau is finally forced to release them, will show that the White House's claims have been bald-faced liesthat Ellingsen was right about the attitudes of her former colleagues towards Comey, that McCabe was courageously telling the truth on the subject in his congressional testimony, and that the Bureau was not in turmoil before Comey's removal but reacted with shock to it.
Over the weekend, we received 103 pages of records responsive to Wittes's first two requestsmessages from FBI leadership around the country and across the bureau regarding the firing of Director Comey. The bureau identified 116 pages of responsive material and withheld only 13 pages, so this material constitutes the overwhelming bulk of communications to staff on the subject of the firing.
What does it show? Simply put, it shows that Ellingsen nailed it when she described a reaction of "shock" and "profound sadness" at the removal of a beloved figure to whom the workforce was deeply attached. It also shows that no aspect of the White House's statements about the bureau were accurateand, indeed, that the White House engendered at least some resentment among the rank and file for whom it purported to speak. As Amy Hess, the special agent in charge in Louisville, put it: "On a personal note, I vehemently disagree with any negative assertions about the credibility of this institution or the people herein."
Before detailing the story these documents tell, let's pause a moment over the story they do not tell. They contain not a word that supports the notion that the FBI was in turmoil. They contain not a word that reflects gratitude to the president for removing a nut job. There is literally not a single sentence in any of these communications that reflects criticism of Comey's leadership of the FBI. Not one special agent in charge describes Comey's removal as some kind of opportunity for new leadership. And if any FBI official really got on the phone with Sanders to express gratitude or thanks "for the president's decision," nobody reported that to his or her staff.
Lest any of the following appear hagiographic on our part, here is a pdf of the entire FBI production we received. We urge people to read it for themselves and make their own judgments:
The first reaction the documents reflect is simple shock, confusion and disbelief. The words "unprecedented," "tumultuous," "shock" and "surprise" appear in a great many of the emails. Two days after the firing, the assistant director of the International Operations Division, almost certainly Carlos Cases (the author is identified in the documents only as "Carlos" but is identifiable from the division affiliated with the email address), described the period as "a whirlwind of shock at the suddenness of the departure of Director Comey and concern with what the future will hold."
Most people at the bureau seem to have learned about the firing from television news. News of Comey's firing broke in the 5 p.m. hour of May 9, and there had been no communication to the bureau before then. So an initial spree of emails involved office leadership simply letting their people know that they were seeking to find out what was going on. In Boston, Special Agent in Charge Harold Shaw wrote at 6:18 p.m.:As you've likely heard within the media, President Trump has removed FBI Director Comey this afternoon. I'm actively working to get any additional information, and will immediately pass to keep you updated.
Our mission continues and we'll deal with the unexpected change and eventual transition.
Wish I had more to share at this point. Once I get anything new, will update accordingly.
In Charlotte, Shaw's counterpart, John Strong, wrote simply: "According the the news, Director Comey has resigned. That's all I know." In Dallas, Erik Jackson notified his staff at 5:21 p.m. that "The media is reporting that Director Comey has been fired. I have not received any confirmation of such from FBI Headquarters. As more information becomes available, I will advise Dallas of such."
At 7:30 p.m., the suddenly new acting director, Andrew McCabe, held a conference call for FBI management in which he provided guidance and instructions. The mood, according to an email from Douglas Lindquist, assistant director for the Criminal Justice Information Services Division, was "somber." McCabe first gave a chronology of what had taken place: At 5:30 p.m., he was called into a meeting at the Justice Department in which he was informed that Trump had chosen to remove Comey and was asked if he would stay on as acting director. Presumably, McCabe agreed. (The bulk of the emails describe McCabe as having met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but one, from Special Agent Hess in Louisville, says that McCabe met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.) McCabe then received a phone call from Trump confirming his appointment.
McCabe then asked FBI management on the conference call to emphasize the continuity and strength of the bureau's identity to their subordinates: The FBI mission remains the same, he said, and neither has the bureau's responsibility to "protect the American people and uphold the Constitution." (Several of the special agents in charge write out this phrase verbatim.) According to multiple emails, McCabe also seems to have emphasized the FBI's role as a stable, calming force in turbulent timeseven when that turbulence involves the bureau itself. He made clear that all FBI employees should refrain from public statements on Comey's dismissal.
The FBI special agents in charge proved quite disciplined in following McCabe's instructions and communicating the message to their staffs. The overwhelming bulk of the emails sent out are consistent with the acting director's message. But even in carrying out McCabe's instructions, FBI management allowed a certain amount of emotional expression to creep in. In a fashion fully consistent with Ellingsen's reporting at the time, that expression quite consistently reflects deep sadness and affection for Comey.
Even McCabe allowed himself some emotional expression in a communication, dated May 12, which was made public earlier. "Thank you for continuing to do the great work of this organization. Thank you for doing it professionally, competently, and independently, despite the fact that we are still trying to adjust to an FBI without Director Comey. We all miss him. And I know that he misses us," he wrote. "So pleasehang in there. As men and women of the FBI, we are at our best when times are tough. Please stay focused on the mission, keep doing great work, be good to each other and we will get through this together."
David Schlendorf, the assistant director for the Human Resources Division, wrote on May 12 in circulating Comey's farewell message to the workforce, "You will not be surprised by the eloquence and grace of Director Comey, or by the genuineness of his message. He will be missed." Schlendorf went on to say that the division should go on with its work "[i]n homage to Director Comey" and carry out "his vision of getting the FBI fully staffed, increasing the diversity of our workforce and leadership team, turning the FBI into a world-class leadership factory, and truly taking care of all members of the FBI family." He concluded: "If we do all of those things as Director Comey intended, then I know he would be proud of us. As you know, no one ever leaves the FBI family, and that will be very true of Director Comey."
Kathryn Turman, assistant director for the Office for Victim Assistance, wrote to her staff, "Our hearts may be heavy but we must continue to do what we do best, which is to protect and serve the American people." John Bennett, the special agent in charge in San Francisco, stated: "These events are hard to hear and harder to comprehend." In St. Louis, Special Agent in Charge William Woods said that "I'm sure we are all feeling a wide range of emotions regarding the firing of Director Comey by President Trump." And in Phoenix, Special Agent in Charge Michael DeLeon acknowledged that "everyone is surprised and we are certainly disappointed with the events surrounding this matter." In an earlier email, he wrote: "We all felt the pain associated with the loss of a leader who was fully engaged and took great pride in the FBI organization and our employees. Simply stated, Director Comey will be missed."
Comey had been at the Los Angeles field office when news of his firing brokehe reportedly learned of it from television news while giving a speechand the emails from L.A. are particularly emotional. On May 15, Assistant Director in Charge Deirdre Fike wrote to her staff, "I will tell you that [Comey] truly felt the warmth from the employees as he walked out of that room. He will never forget that, nor the professionalism of the team who accompanied him back to the airport for his return to" Washington.
Many members of the L.A. office had apparently asked Fike how they could get messages to Comey, so Fike was planning to collect a book of letters to be delivered to the former director. The New Haven field office was apparently planning a similar gift. Fike ends her message: "Take care of yourselves and each other."
The morning of the day he was fired, Comey had visited the bureau's office in Jacksonville, Fla., before traveling to Los Angeles. Jacksonville Special Agent in Charge Charles Spencer noted the visit when he wrote to his staff the morning after the firing: "Director Comey … commented on what great work the Jacksonville Division was doing. Director Comey was a man of integrity and vision, he made a lasting impact on FBI leadership, diversity and our embracing of new technology."
In Minneapolis, Special Agent in Charge Richard Thornton shared with his staff a small observation about the television coverage of Comey's arrival at Los Angeles International Airport after his dismissal, "[b]ecause I think it truly speaks to the type of person Director Comey is." While traveling, he wrote, Comey would often receive an escort provided by state and local law enforcement. "At the end of a visit to a city, prior to boarding his plane, Director Comey made it a practice to greet and thank each officer personally who was part of his police escort." From television coverage of Comey's arrival to LAX, "you could see him take the time to greet and speak to the motorcade escort police … In spite of him just finding out he had been fired as the Director, he demonstrated his appreciation and respect for the FBI's law enforcement partners."
After the president fired Comey there was some uncertainty about whether Comey, as a former FBI employee, would have to pay his way home from LAX or would be able to use the director's plane. NBC recently reported that an irate Trump called McCabe a day after the firing asking why Comey had been permitted to return to Washington on an FBI plane. McCabe indicated that he hadn't been consulted about the use of the plane but, had anyone asked, he would have approved the request. Thanks to one of these emails, we now have a small window into what went on at the FBI at the time.
On May 11, Gregory Cox, assistant director of the Critical Incident Response Group, emailed all of the Critical Incident Response Group thanking "all who were involved in efforts to bring home former Director Comey from Los Angeles on Tuesday evening." The apparent defiance may be subtle, but it is unmistakable. Cox may not have known that his email dealt with a point the president had personally raised with the acting director, but he thanked his people for doing the right thing by Comey irrespective of politics he was surely aware of in a generic sense.
These emails are not the usual fare from special agents in charge and assistant directors. They are, to be sure, fairly measured in tone. Each assistant director and special agent in charge diligently communicates McCabe's talking points to his or her employees. The messages about resilience are predictable enough, and there's some tough love tooreminders that this is not the first transition the bureau has weathered and that everyone still has a job to do.
But the amount of warmth in the emails, both about Comey and for their people, is atypical of all-staff communications. These leaders operate at the highest level of the FBI; in a chain-of-command organization, they aren't particularly accessible figures. But these emails, which were sent to entire divisions or field offices, are personal and intimate. Without overstating the matter or getting maudlin about it, it's safe to say that these messages show leaders who are shaken and concerned. There is emotion in their voices and a deep concern for their people. One special agent in charge, who was out of state at a training, even offered to come back to the office if any of her people needed to talk to her.
The bottom line is that the documents tell a remarkably consistent story about the reaction inside the FBI to Comey's firing, and it is not the story the White House has told about an agency in turmoil. It's very much the story, rather, that McCabe told the Senate a few days after Comey's dismissal. Someone, the documents show, stood before the American people the week of the firing and told the truth about the FBI. It just wasn't Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Donald Trump.
When President Trump fired James Comey as FBI director last May, the special agent in charge of the Detroit field office, David Gelios, wrote an email to his staff:I just saw CNN reporting that Director Comey has been fired by President Trump. I have no notification from HQ of any such thing. If I receive any information from HQ, I will advise. I'd ask all to stand by for clarification of this reporting. I am only sending this because I want everyone to know I have received no HQ confirmation of the reporting. I hope this is an instance of fake news.
In the Knoxville field office, Special Agent in Charge Renae McDermott wrote to the staff she leads: "Unexpected news such as this is hard to understand but I know you all know our Director stood for what is right and what is true!!! . . . He truly made us better when we needed it the most."
The following day, in an email with the subject line "Follow up with your squads," she followed up: "I need for all of you to make sure our/your folks are doing OK. Check with them today, tomorrow ….you get the idea."
McDermott sent that latter email as the White House was launching its public broadside against Comey's performance. In a May 10 press conference, the same day McDermott was asking her staff to make sure one another were "doing OK," then-Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the president had "lost confidence in Director Comey" and that "the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director." She stated that the president had "had countless conversations with members from within the FBI" in the course of making his decision to fire Comey. The following day, Sanders stated that she personally had "heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the president's decision" and that the president believed "Director Comey was not up to the task...that he wasn't the right person in the job. [Trump] wanted somebody that could bring credibility back to the FBI."
Over the next few days, a wealth of evidence emerged to suggest that Trump and Sanders were playing fast and loose with the truth. But we now have the documents to prove that decisively. Their disclosure was not a leak but an authorized action by the FBI, which released to us under the Freedom of Information Act more than 100 pages of leadership communications to staff dealing with the firing. This material tells a dramatic story about the FBI's reaction to the Comey firingbut it is neither a story of gratitude to the president nor a story of an organization in turmoil relieved by a much-needed leadership transition.
Within a few days of the firing, both current and former FBI officials began pushing back against the White House's claims. Then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Comey "enjoyed broad support within the FBI" and that "the vast majority of employees enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey."
Here at Lawfare, Nora Ellingsenwho served as a counterterrorism analyst at the FBI for several yearstalked with roughly 20 of her former colleagues. She characterizedthe opinion of Comey among the FBI's rank and file as almost universally positive. "Nearly everyone loved him," she wrote, and the "degree of consensus on this point ... has been incredible." She went on: "All of the people I talked to described having the same reaction when they heard that the director had been fired: complete shock, followed by deep sadness."
The president of the FBI Agents Association, Thomas O'Connor, called Comey's firing a "gut punch."
Resolving the inconsistency between the White House statements and accounts from within the bureau seemed like a good job for the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). When the head of an agency is abruptly fired, managers have to inform their teams, and those messages can speak volumes about the mood at the agency. As Benjamin Wittes wrote at the time he filed the FOIA requests:After reading Ellingsen's piece, a thought occurred to me: this is a factual dispute with a large body of objective evidence behind it. When you decapitate an organization like the FBI, managers have to tell their staffs, after all. They do this, I imagine, by writing an email to their staffs. In an organization "in turmoil," one run by a "nut job," in whom the rank and file have "lost confidence," one might expect such an email to have a celebratory flavor, to talk about how the long national nightmare is over, say, or how there's a great opportunity to restore sanity to the organization. On the other hand, when a beloved leader is removed by a President in what is seen as an attack on the institution, one might expect an email with a very different tone. The FBI has lots of managers who will have had to send emails to their staffs.
On June 22, 2017, Wittes made four FOIA requests. One of them sought communications to the workforce from the senior FBI leadership regarding Comey's firing. Another sought communications on the topic from all the assistant directors and special agents in charge at the FBI's many components and field offices to their respective teams. When the FBI did not respond in a timely manner, Wittes suedrepresented by the folks at Protect Democracystating that his purpose was "to show conclusively that President Trump and his White House staff are lying about career federal law enforcement officers, their actions, and their attitudes":Who knows? Perhaps these documents will reveal an agency in turmoil, one whose rank and file had lost confidence in their director, one brimming with gratitude to President Trump for his decisive action in removing the "nut job." But don't hold your breath for a lot of "Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead" subject lines. I believe these documents, when the Bureau is finally forced to release them, will show that the White House's claims have been bald-faced liesthat Ellingsen was right about the attitudes of her former colleagues towards Comey, that McCabe was courageously telling the truth on the subject in his congressional testimony, and that the Bureau was not in turmoil before Comey's removal but reacted with shock to it.
Over the weekend, we received 103 pages of records responsive to Wittes's first two requestsmessages from FBI leadership around the country and across the bureau regarding the firing of Director Comey. The bureau identified 116 pages of responsive material and withheld only 13 pages, so this material constitutes the overwhelming bulk of communications to staff on the subject of the firing.
What does it show? Simply put, it shows that Ellingsen nailed it when she described a reaction of "shock" and "profound sadness" at the removal of a beloved figure to whom the workforce was deeply attached. It also shows that no aspect of the White House's statements about the bureau were accurateand, indeed, that the White House engendered at least some resentment among the rank and file for whom it purported to speak. As Amy Hess, the special agent in charge in Louisville, put it: "On a personal note, I vehemently disagree with any negative assertions about the credibility of this institution or the people herein."
Before detailing the story these documents tell, let's pause a moment over the story they do not tell. They contain not a word that supports the notion that the FBI was in turmoil. They contain not a word that reflects gratitude to the president for removing a nut job. There is literally not a single sentence in any of these communications that reflects criticism of Comey's leadership of the FBI. Not one special agent in charge describes Comey's removal as some kind of opportunity for new leadership. And if any FBI official really got on the phone with Sanders to express gratitude or thanks "for the president's decision," nobody reported that to his or her staff.
Lest any of the following appear hagiographic on our part, here is a pdf of the entire FBI production we received. We urge people to read it for themselves and make their own judgments:
The first reaction the documents reflect is simple shock, confusion and disbelief. The words "unprecedented," "tumultuous," "shock" and "surprise" appear in a great many of the emails. Two days after the firing, the assistant director of the International Operations Division, almost certainly Carlos Cases (the author is identified in the documents only as "Carlos" but is identifiable from the division affiliated with the email address), described the period as "a whirlwind of shock at the suddenness of the departure of Director Comey and concern with what the future will hold."
Most people at the bureau seem to have learned about the firing from television news. News of Comey's firing broke in the 5 p.m. hour of May 9, and there had been no communication to the bureau before then. So an initial spree of emails involved office leadership simply letting their people know that they were seeking to find out what was going on. In Boston, Special Agent in Charge Harold Shaw wrote at 6:18 p.m.:As you've likely heard within the media, President Trump has removed FBI Director Comey this afternoon. I'm actively working to get any additional information, and will immediately pass to keep you updated.
Our mission continues and we'll deal with the unexpected change and eventual transition.
Wish I had more to share at this point. Once I get anything new, will update accordingly.
In Charlotte, Shaw's counterpart, John Strong, wrote simply: "According the the news, Director Comey has resigned. That's all I know." In Dallas, Erik Jackson notified his staff at 5:21 p.m. that "The media is reporting that Director Comey has been fired. I have not received any confirmation of such from FBI Headquarters. As more information becomes available, I will advise Dallas of such."
At 7:30 p.m., the suddenly new acting director, Andrew McCabe, held a conference call for FBI management in which he provided guidance and instructions. The mood, according to an email from Douglas Lindquist, assistant director for the Criminal Justice Information Services Division, was "somber." McCabe first gave a chronology of what had taken place: At 5:30 p.m., he was called into a meeting at the Justice Department in which he was informed that Trump had chosen to remove Comey and was asked if he would stay on as acting director. Presumably, McCabe agreed. (The bulk of the emails describe McCabe as having met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but one, from Special Agent Hess in Louisville, says that McCabe met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.) McCabe then received a phone call from Trump confirming his appointment.
McCabe then asked FBI management on the conference call to emphasize the continuity and strength of the bureau's identity to their subordinates: The FBI mission remains the same, he said, and neither has the bureau's responsibility to "protect the American people and uphold the Constitution." (Several of the special agents in charge write out this phrase verbatim.) According to multiple emails, McCabe also seems to have emphasized the FBI's role as a stable, calming force in turbulent timeseven when that turbulence involves the bureau itself. He made clear that all FBI employees should refrain from public statements on Comey's dismissal.
The FBI special agents in charge proved quite disciplined in following McCabe's instructions and communicating the message to their staffs. The overwhelming bulk of the emails sent out are consistent with the acting director's message. But even in carrying out McCabe's instructions, FBI management allowed a certain amount of emotional expression to creep in. In a fashion fully consistent with Ellingsen's reporting at the time, that expression quite consistently reflects deep sadness and affection for Comey.
Even McCabe allowed himself some emotional expression in a communication, dated May 12, which was made public earlier. "Thank you for continuing to do the great work of this organization. Thank you for doing it professionally, competently, and independently, despite the fact that we are still trying to adjust to an FBI without Director Comey. We all miss him. And I know that he misses us," he wrote. "So pleasehang in there. As men and women of the FBI, we are at our best when times are tough. Please stay focused on the mission, keep doing great work, be good to each other and we will get through this together."
David Schlendorf, the assistant director for the Human Resources Division, wrote on May 12 in circulating Comey's farewell message to the workforce, "You will not be surprised by the eloquence and grace of Director Comey, or by the genuineness of his message. He will be missed." Schlendorf went on to say that the division should go on with its work "[i]n homage to Director Comey" and carry out "his vision of getting the FBI fully staffed, increasing the diversity of our workforce and leadership team, turning the FBI into a world-class leadership factory, and truly taking care of all members of the FBI family." He concluded: "If we do all of those things as Director Comey intended, then I know he would be proud of us. As you know, no one ever leaves the FBI family, and that will be very true of Director Comey."
Kathryn Turman, assistant director for the Office for Victim Assistance, wrote to her staff, "Our hearts may be heavy but we must continue to do what we do best, which is to protect and serve the American people." John Bennett, the special agent in charge in San Francisco, stated: "These events are hard to hear and harder to comprehend." In St. Louis, Special Agent in Charge William Woods said that "I'm sure we are all feeling a wide range of emotions regarding the firing of Director Comey by President Trump." And in Phoenix, Special Agent in Charge Michael DeLeon acknowledged that "everyone is surprised and we are certainly disappointed with the events surrounding this matter." In an earlier email, he wrote: "We all felt the pain associated with the loss of a leader who was fully engaged and took great pride in the FBI organization and our employees. Simply stated, Director Comey will be missed."
Comey had been at the Los Angeles field office when news of his firing brokehe reportedly learned of it from television news while giving a speechand the emails from L.A. are particularly emotional. On May 15, Assistant Director in Charge Deirdre Fike wrote to her staff, "I will tell you that [Comey] truly felt the warmth from the employees as he walked out of that room. He will never forget that, nor the professionalism of the team who accompanied him back to the airport for his return to" Washington.
Many members of the L.A. office had apparently asked Fike how they could get messages to Comey, so Fike was planning to collect a book of letters to be delivered to the former director. The New Haven field office was apparently planning a similar gift. Fike ends her message: "Take care of yourselves and each other."
The morning of the day he was fired, Comey had visited the bureau's office in Jacksonville, Fla., before traveling to Los Angeles. Jacksonville Special Agent in Charge Charles Spencer noted the visit when he wrote to his staff the morning after the firing: "Director Comey … commented on what great work the Jacksonville Division was doing. Director Comey was a man of integrity and vision, he made a lasting impact on FBI leadership, diversity and our embracing of new technology."
In Minneapolis, Special Agent in Charge Richard Thornton shared with his staff a small observation about the television coverage of Comey's arrival at Los Angeles International Airport after his dismissal, "[b]ecause I think it truly speaks to the type of person Director Comey is." While traveling, he wrote, Comey would often receive an escort provided by state and local law enforcement. "At the end of a visit to a city, prior to boarding his plane, Director Comey made it a practice to greet and thank each officer personally who was part of his police escort." From television coverage of Comey's arrival to LAX, "you could see him take the time to greet and speak to the motorcade escort police … In spite of him just finding out he had been fired as the Director, he demonstrated his appreciation and respect for the FBI's law enforcement partners."
After the president fired Comey there was some uncertainty about whether Comey, as a former FBI employee, would have to pay his way home from LAX or would be able to use the director's plane. NBC recently reported that an irate Trump called McCabe a day after the firing asking why Comey had been permitted to return to Washington on an FBI plane. McCabe indicated that he hadn't been consulted about the use of the plane but, had anyone asked, he would have approved the request. Thanks to one of these emails, we now have a small window into what went on at the FBI at the time.
On May 11, Gregory Cox, assistant director of the Critical Incident Response Group, emailed all of the Critical Incident Response Group thanking "all who were involved in efforts to bring home former Director Comey from Los Angeles on Tuesday evening." The apparent defiance may be subtle, but it is unmistakable. Cox may not have known that his email dealt with a point the president had personally raised with the acting director, but he thanked his people for doing the right thing by Comey irrespective of politics he was surely aware of in a generic sense.
These emails are not the usual fare from special agents in charge and assistant directors. They are, to be sure, fairly measured in tone. Each assistant director and special agent in charge diligently communicates McCabe's talking points to his or her employees. The messages about resilience are predictable enough, and there's some tough love tooreminders that this is not the first transition the bureau has weathered and that everyone still has a job to do.
But the amount of warmth in the emails, both about Comey and for their people, is atypical of all-staff communications. These leaders operate at the highest level of the FBI; in a chain-of-command organization, they aren't particularly accessible figures. But these emails, which were sent to entire divisions or field offices, are personal and intimate. Without overstating the matter or getting maudlin about it, it's safe to say that these messages show leaders who are shaken and concerned. There is emotion in their voices and a deep concern for their people. One special agent in charge, who was out of state at a training, even offered to come back to the office if any of her people needed to talk to her.
The bottom line is that the documents tell a remarkably consistent story about the reaction inside the FBI to Comey's firing, and it is not the story the White House has told about an agency in turmoil. It's very much the story, rather, that McCabe told the Senate a few days after Comey's dismissal. Someone, the documents show, stood before the American people the week of the firing and told the truth about the FBI. It just wasn't Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Donald Trump.
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https://www.justsecurity.org/50806/steel...te-weapon/
The so-called Steele dossier has become a political and cultural weapon. For many of us, it is either a salacious outline of heinous presidential crimes or a complete fabrication "garbage." Like the issue of Russian collusion in general, the details in the new book "Fire and Fury" or most anything that angers the President, he and his supporters don't attempt to address specific allegations. Instead, they label whatever they don't like a lie, pure fiction, a hoax or fake news. At the same time, White House opponents look for more ways to expose what they believe is the President's lack of fitness for office.
Needless to say, professional investigators approach the dossier very differently. They don't have the luxury of accepting it as gospel or blowing it off completely. They would not assume it to be all true, or all false. Instead, investigators have to take the allegations seriously, apply professional rigor and employ tradecraft in an effort to run down leads and seek corroborating evidence if warranted. They must ask whether the dossier's narrative aligns with evidence gathered from other intelligence sources. If the answer to this question had been "no," investigators would not waste any more time with it. Professional investigators are busy and are judged on results. Regardless of their personal views, they have no interest in promoting opinions and hearsay. Rather, they seek evidence that is rock-solid and verifiable, or they will be embarrassed in court and out of a job. Following these criteria, if the dossier had not proven useful in the broader context of other intelligence leads, it would have remained sidelined as merely one of many sources of information meriting follow-up.
Since I first wrote about the so-called dossier for Just Security in early September, it has been in the news almost constantly. The dossier, a compilation of raw reports produced by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele from June to December 2016, alleged that the Kremlin had collected compromising information on then-candidate Donald Trump. It asserted Russia's efforts to damage his opponent, Hillary Clinton, including sharing derogatory information on Clinton with the Trump campaign. However, almost no recent reporting has focused on the substance of the dossier, or has sought to validate or dismiss specific allegations in it. Instead the dossier is more often used as a cudgel by one side or the other in partisan bickering.
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Playing Politics[/FONT]
Over the past few weeks, the political pissing match has ramped up significantly. Republican Congressmen and Administration supporters have been attacking the credibility of the FBI, suggesting it has used the dossier to smear the Trump team. The President himself called FBI officers disgraceful and has previously commented that the Bureau is "in tatters." Republican senators Charles Grassley of Iowa and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina even sent a criminal referral on Mr. Steele to the Justice Department, dispensing with the customary courtesy of informing their Democratic colleagues. They allege a conspiracy by the "deep state," something they apparently had failed to notice over their prior decades in Washington.
In turn, the New York Times published an op-ed by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch of Fusion GPS, the firm that originally hired Orbis and Mr. Steele. The authors describe a campaign by the Trump Administration and some Republican Congressmen to attack Fusion GPS, Mr. Steele and the dossier. According to Simpson and Fritsch, these are merely efforts to slander the messenger, thereby deflecting attention from any credible evidence the FBI might uncover. They claim that the dossier was not used as the basis for the FBI investigation, but instead was taken seriously because it corroborated reports that the FBI had received from other sources. As the authors wrote, "Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?"
Just as the Republican attacks on the FBI were coming to a boil, the New York Times published an article that further derailed the Republican insistence that the dossier triggered the original FBI counterintelligence investigation. Instead, according the Times article, FBI interest was piqued by a referral from the Australian government. According to the report, Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos bragged at a London bar to the Australian High Commissioner, Alexander Downer, that the Trump campaign was aware the Russian government had dirt on Hillary Clinton and court papers show he was, indeed, told by a Russian agent that the Kremlin had derogatory information in the form of "thousands of e-mails." Downer conveyed the information to his government, which in turn informed the FBI, as had Steele before them both showing more concern for US interests than anyone in the Trump campaign.
Nonetheless, attacks against the dossier and the circumstances surrounding its sponsorship continue. However, as far as I can tell, all of the efforts appear little more than an attempt to deflect attention, distract and threaten anyone associated with the investigation. Indeed, the Grassley-Graham criminal referral on Mr. Steele appears to be designed to besmirch Steele's credibility and suggest that the dossier is the product of bias against the Trump campaign. At the same time, I'm not aware of any serious effort to refute the specific allegations in the dossier. Claiming the entire product as "garbage" may be personally satisfying for some, but it in no way helps address the main issue the search for evidence by the FBI counterintelligence and Mueller criminal investigators. If Administration supporters believe the dossier is a critical component of a witch hunt against the President, they would be wise to take a serious look at the dossier and address the details, rather than continue to engage in patently partisan gamesmanship.
Accordingly, is there anything to be learned by re-examining the Dossier at this time?
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The Dossier Is Re-examined[/FONT]
When it was first published, the dossier had a whiff of authenticity for those of us who have lived and experienced the Russian intelligence services up close and personally. Aggressive Russian intelligence collection, use of compromising material and Vladimir Putin's visceral desire to damage Hillary Clinton were well known and lent some credibility to the report. Likewise, the reputation of Mr. Steele and Orbis Business Intelligence was considered solid. Without knowing the sources or how the information was collected, however, it was almost impossible to ascribe a specific level of confidence to the reporting. In order to establish the reliability of the information contained in the dossier, we had to look closely at the allegations, and seek to verify or refute each one. Initial effort to do so provided confidence that there was something to the narrative. At least it was safe to say it certainly wasn't "garbage."
At first glance, there is not a lot of new information since I last wrote to help us come to a definitive conclusion. However, continued patterns of behavior by the Trump team and leaks of information over the past few months have added a bit more credibility to the dossier, particularly with respect to the overarching narrative of collusion. Mr. Steele himself was quoted in a book by Guardian journalist Luke Harding, offering his assessment that 70-90% of the dossier is accurate.
At the same time and this point deserves special emphasis [FONT=&]there is nothing new to disprove the allegations. As far as I'm aware, nobody has produced any serious evidence besmirching Mr. Steele or Orbis. Aside from instances such as personal protestations by Carter Page and Michael Cohen and comments that Mr. Steele had made spelling mistakes in his reports, there has yet to be any proof that the events described in the dossier did not happen. Efforts to ascribe personal bias to Mr. Steele are undercut by an understanding of the basics tenets of clandestine intelligence collection. Raw intelligence reports, like those produced by Mr. Steele, are not finished analytical products or a means to share commentary or personal views. The reports are merely efforts to accurately pass on information from sources with direct access to the information.[/FONT]
A few have suggested that the material might be part and parcel of a Russian disinformation and deception campaign. I personally find it plausible that at some point in 2016 the Russians could have become aware Mr. Steele was fishing for information and, concerned with what he was finding, successfully seeded some material to his sources. However, I find it highly unlikely that they could have controlled the entire effort from the start. The Russians are very good at these "wilderness of mirrors" games but they are not ten feet tall. A more robust discussion of that issue will have to be left for another time. At the very least we need to ask ourselves why would the Russians attempt to mislead Steele unless they thought he was onto something?
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More Recent Revelations[/FONT]
So, what new information do we have to evaluate the dossier?
On the side of adding credibility to the Orbis reporting, the Papadopoulos revelations, the Harding book, and Fusion GPS op-ed provide additional context that bolsters Mr. Steele's reporting. We learned that Mr. Steele's sources were not paid, and that he felt so strongly about the information he uncovered, that he chose to go directly to the FBI.
As I mentioned in my previous piece, I take seriously the fact that Mr. Steele chose to share his work with the British and U.S. intelligence community. The Harding book and the Simpson and Fritsch op-ed confirmed that it was Steele who approached the FBI in an effort to report his concerns and validate his reporting. From my experience, there are a lot of groups providing some form of business intelligence. However, very little of their information would stand up to serious scrutiny by professional intelligence services with access to legal collection tools and worldwide scope. Most would probably only stand behind their material to a limited extent. However, the fact that Mr. Steele was more than willing to expose his reporting to scrutiny and accountability by the best in the world, suggests that he was confident in his sources. If there was nothing there, the FBI would gladly send him packing.
Jared Kushner's failure to turn over to Senate investigators an e-mail exchange with the subject line "Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite" also hinted at possible efforts by the campaign to collude with Russia. Although Kushner initially told campaign staff to turn down a request from Putin crony and alleged criminal Alexander Torshin to meet with then-candidate Trump, Donald Trump Jr. ultimately met the Russian at a May 2016 NRA dinner event. Again, we only learned this only after Kushner was confronted with previously withheld material.
What's more, Harding's book reports that Mr. Steele utilized several of the same sources that he had relied on for previous work in support of clients in Ukraine and the FBI's FIFA investigation, which led to high-profile indictments. The fact that these sources had demonstrated reliability in significant prior cases is important. Orbis' record of success with clients depended on accurate reporting, and a proven track record is part of the process involved in validating and vetting sources. Of course, we still don't have enough information on Steele's sources to have confidence in their reliability and their access to information on the Kremlin, but their having reported accurately over time provides us greater confidence than we had previously. Steele's faith in his sources is probably why he himself attributes a high level of confidence to the dossier.
While the new information is only a sliver of what we would need to reach any conclusive assessments, it nonetheless helps to refute those partisan critics who claim that Mr. Steele's work is essentially contrived. If he invented information from his sources, or his sources invented information, it follows that he also likely did so in his previous work with the FBI on the 2015 FIFA investigation. Since that relationship led to the successful indictment of 14 leaders of the world soccer governing body for money laundering and collusion, it is hard to conclude that he is a swindler.
The Steele information first proved useful as a means to understand the now well-known June 2016 meeting between senior members of the Trump campaign and the Russian team including the lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. It provided some context to Russian intelligence efforts to seek a quid-pro-quo with the Trump team. While we do not have many more details about the meeting since my earlier piece, we have more input from key players who ascribe a level of concern to the meeting. The offer of stolen or comprising material on Ms. Clinton that was downplayed by the Trump team, was nonetheless seen in a wholly different light by some associates. Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has called the meeting "treasonous," and, in terms of demonstrated loyalties, both Mr. Steele and the Australian government approached the FBI when they became aware of Russia's possession of derogatory information. Again, it is not proof, but it bolsters the possibility that Mr. Steele got wind of a possible "conspiracy of cooperation" before it was public knowledge.
The revelation that Donald Trump Jr. was engaged in communication with Wikileaks also supports this thesis. As I noted in a separate article, Trump Jr.'s communication with Wikileaks can be read as yet another means to support a conspiratorial relationship with Russia. If the Russians had stolen material and the Trump team was interested in weaponizing it, Wikileaks was a ready vehicle to provide both sides with plausible deniability. At the very least, it is troubling that Donald Trump Jr. was willing to engage with WikiLeaks even though it had known ties to Russia, and the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security had only recently implicated the organization in aiding the dissemination of stolen material from U.S. persons and institutions in the election.
While there is less information arguing against the dossier, it is impossible to be confident in many of the allegations in the reports. We still don't have enough information on the sources, their level of access and reliability, and how Mr. Steele gathered the information. While he was trained in the tools of clandestine collection, he no longer had access to the powerful capabilities of the British or American intelligence agencies. He could not travel to Russia and meet sources without finding himself under heavy surveillance (even if he could get a visa). As a private citizen, he was unlikely to travel in alias. E-mail and electronic communication in and out of Russia is heavily monitored. I suspect that Mr. Steele used cut-outs to contact his sources, or met them when they traveled outside Russia. In any case, we just don't have nearly enough public information to validate his sources.
Instead, we have to do all we can to look at the allegations themselves. As noted in various reports, some of the allegations have proven to be true, or at least likely. At the same time, a large portion of the information is yet unverified. Of course, this is not surprising because we do not have the tools of professional investigators that can help run the leads to ground (travel and phone records, access to foreign partners, eavesdropping or means to compel cooperation). More importantly perhaps, we cannot uncover the information because it was part of a secret effort by a hostile foreign intelligence service in the first place.
In any event, at this point it's less about using public information to validate the dossier, than it is the complete inability of Trump supporters to provide an alternate narrative. Not being able to adduce evidence to refute its points, they have attacked its pedigree. Calling it complete fantasy, or a pile of trash reeks of desperation and highlights that they have no real defense. Indeed, most people who call it a hoax probably haven't ever read it. While that may suffice for scoring a talking point on a panel at Fox or CNN, it is meaningless to those trying to determine guilt or innocence. In this sense, Trump's defenders are not doing him a service. They would do better by attempting to surface information that would be of actual interest to investigators the people who matter. Those investigating crimes are professionals. They are not swayed by name calling, or the suggestion that it is wholly false (or true). They look at the allegations and closely scrutinize them. It goes without saying that if the President's defenders believe the dossier is garbage, why all the drama, worry and attacks? Criminal investigators cannot make a case based on garbage.
Certainly, the Steele dossier is only one plausible narrative. Subsequent events have shown that it is not out of the realm of reality. We've been able to see with our own eyes behavior that aligns with some of what the dossier presents. On the other hand, given what we've learned to date, the Trump team has never been able to provide a counter-narrative. What does the story of innocence look like? Why all the engagement with Russians? Why the highly organized cover-up and lies? Why the attacks on the FBI and Mr. Steele? As Ruth Marcus recently commented in Washington Post, "The lengths to which Trump seems willing to go to shut down this probe and to hide his tracks suggest that something more than his fragile ego is at stake here."
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I think it's becoming apparent what a fraud Julian Assange is: the now-documented plotting between Assange and Don Trump Jr and Roger Stone, the refusal to leak hacked Russian secrets. People who've made this guy a "transparency" hero need to take a second look.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wiki...-campaign/
WikiLeaks Turned Down Leaks on Russian Government During U.S. Presidential Campaign
The leak organization ignored damaging information on the Kremlin to focus on Hillary Clinton and election-related hacks.
BY JENNA MCLAUGHLIN | AUGUST 17, 2017, 3:09 PM
In the summer of 2016, as WikiLeaks was publishing documents from Democratic operatives allegedly obtained by Kremlin-directed hackers, Julian Assange turned down a large cache of documents related to the Russian government, according to chat messages and a source who provided the records. WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents at least 68 gigabytes of data that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.
The logs, which were provided to FP, only included WikiLeaks's side of the conversation.
"As far as we recall these are already public," WikiLeaks wrote at the time.
"WikiLeaks rejects all submissions that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere or which are likely to be considered insignificant. WikiLeaks has never rejected a submission due to its country of origin," the organization wrote in a Twitter direct message when contacted by FP about the Russian cache.
(The account is widely believed to be operated solely by Assange, the group's founder, but in a Twitter message to FP, the organization said it is maintained by "staff.")
In 2014, the BBC and other news outlets reported on the cache, which revealed details about Russian military and intelligence involvement in Ukraine. However, the information from that hack was less than half the data that later became available in 2016, when Assange turned it down.
"We had several leaks sent to Wikileaks, including the Russian hack. It would have exposed Russian activities and shown WikiLeaks was not controlled by Russian security services," the source who provided the messages wrote to FP. "Many Wikileaks staff and volunteers or their families suffered at the hands of Russian corruption and cruelty, we were sure Wikileaks would release it. Assange gave excuse after excuse."
The Russian cache was eventually quietly published online elsewhere, to almost no attention or scrutiny.
In the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of potentially damaging emails about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign, information the U.S. intelligence community believes was hacked as part of a Kremlin-directed campaign. Assange's role in publishing the leaks sparked allegations that he was advancing a Russian-backed agenda.
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Back in 2010, Assange vowed to publish documents on any institution that resisted oversight.
WikiLeaks in its early years published a broad scope of information, including emails belonging to Sarah Palin and Scientologists, phone records of Peruvian politicians, and inside information from surveillance companies. "We don't have targets," Assange said at the time.
But by 2016, WikiLeaks had switched course, focusing almost exclusively on Clinton and her campaign.
Approached later that year by the same source about data from an American security company, WikiLeaks again turned down the leak. "Is there an election angle? We're not doing anything until after the election unless its [sic] fast or election related," WikiLeaks wrote. "We don't have the resources."
Anything not connected to the election would be "diversionary," WikiLeaks wrote.
"WikiLeaks schedules publications to maximize readership and reader engagement," WikiLeaks wrote in a Twitter message to FP. "During distracting media events such as the Olympics or a high profile election, unrelated publications are sometimes delayed until the distraction passes but never are rejected for this reason."
WikiLeaks's relationship with Russia started out as adversarial. In October 2010, Assange and WikiLeaksteased a massive dump of documents that would expose wrongdoing in the Kremlin, teaming up with a Russian news site for the rollout. "We have [compromising materials] about Russia, about your government and businessmen," Assange told a Russian newspaper.
"We will publish these materials soon," he promised.
"Russians are going to find out a lot of interesting facts about their country," WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said at the time.
In November 2010, WikiLeaks began to release documents from its cache provided by Chelsea Manning, which included cables from U.S. diplomats around the world, including Russia.
WikiLeaks partnered with the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, but only a handful of stories were published out of almost a quarter of a million files from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Novoya Gazeta paidfor exclusive access to the documents, according to John Helmer, a foreign correspondent in Moscow writing for Business Insider.
WikiLeaks says there was no financial aspect to the publishing partnership with Novaya Gazeta, which did not respond to a request for comment. "We do not have insight into the publication decisions of [Novaya Gazeta]," WikiLeaks told FP.
Meanwhile, Assange's position on Russia was evolving. Assange in 2012 had his own show on the Kremlin-funded news network RT, and that same year, he produced episodes for the network where he interviewed opposition thinkers like Noam Chomsky and so-called "cypherpunks."
Questions about Assange's links to Russia were raised last year, when the Daily Dot reported that WikiLeaks failed to publish documents that revealed a 2 billion euro transaction between the Syrian regime and a government-owned Russian bank in 2012. Details about the documents appear in leaked court records obtained by the Daily Dot, which were placed under seal by a Manhattan federal court.
A WikiLeaks spokesperson told the Daily Dot that no emails were removed from what the organization published. The spokesperson also suggested the Daily Dot was "pushing the Hillary Clinton campaign's neo-McCarthyist conspiracy theories about critical media."
Assange believes that U.S. officials hoping to damage his reputation leaked the court records, according to the messages provided to FP.
"There's a passing claim that the 500 pages' comes from the US government's investigation into Wikileaks," one message from WikiLeaks reads. "If true, the US government appears to be leaking data on the Wikileaks investigation, which fabricated or angled to help HRC. Huge story that everyone missed."
WikiLeaks again told FP that "the story is false" but did not elaborate.
When Novaya Gazeta reported in April 2016 on the 11.5 million documents known as the Panama Papers, which exposed how powerful figures worldwide hide their money overseas, Assange publicly criticized the work. He suggested that reporters had "cherry-picked" the documents to publish for optimal "Putin bashing, North Korea bashing, sanctions bashing, etc." while giving Western figures a pass.
In fact, news outlets involved in publishing leaks reported on a number of Western figures, including then-British Prime Minister David Cameron.
"For me it was a surprise that Mr. Assange was repeating the same excuse that our officials, even back in Soviet days, used to say that it's all some conspiracy from abroad," Roman Shleynov, a Russian investigative reporter, said in an interview with the New York Times.
WikiLeaks says Assange "didn't" specifically challenge Novaya Gazeta or the other news outlets that worked on the Panama Papers, despite Assange's public statements to the contrary.
"There should be more leaks from Russia," Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former German spokesman for WikiLeaks, said in an interview with France 24 in March. He suggested that since WikiLeaks's readers were mostly English-speaking, there wasn't enough demand.
By June 2016, Assange had threatened to dump files on Clinton that would be damaging to her campaign prospects. A month later, on July 22, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails out of the Democratic National Committee preceding the massive dumps in October of emails belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
In late August 2016, when WikiLeaks's Clinton disclosures were in full swing, Assange said he had information on Trump but that it wasn't worth publishing. (In a message to FP, WikiLeaks now says the organization "received no original documents on the campaign that did not turn out to be already public.")
"The problem with the Trump campaign," Assange said at the time, "is it's actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth every second day."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...ks/545738/
[FONT=&]The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks
The transparency organization asked the president's son for his cooperationin sharing its work, in contesting the results of the election, and in arranging for Julian Assange to be Australia's ambassador to the United States.
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[/FONT][FONT=&]This story was updated on November 13 at 10:28 pm
Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the height of last year's presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee's oldest son and campaign surrogate. "A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch," WikiLeaks wrote. "The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is putintrump.' See About' for who is behind it. Any comments?" (The site, which has since become a joint project with Mother Jones, was founded by Rob Glaser, a tech entrepreneur, and was funded by Progress for USA Political Action Committee.)
The next morning, about 12 hours later, Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks. "Off the record I don't know who that is, but I'll ask around," he wrote on September 21, 2016. "Thanks."
The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.'s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a longand largely one-sidedcorrespondence between WikiLeaks and the president's son that continued until at least July 2017. The messages show WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.'s cooperation. WikiLeaks made a series of increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump's tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States.
"Over the last several months, we have worked cooperatively with each of the committees and have voluntarily turned over thousands of documents in response to their requests," said Alan Futerfas, an attorney for Donald Trump Jr. "Putting aside the question as to why or by whom such documents, provided to Congress under promises of confidentiality, have been selectively leaked, we can say with confidence that we have no concerns about these documents and any questions raised about them have been easily answered in the appropriate forum." WikiLeaks did not respond to requests for comment.
The messages were turned over to Congress as part of that body's various ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. American intelligence services have accused the Kremlin of engaging in a deliberate effort to boost President Donald Trump's chances while bringing down his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. That effortand the president's response to ithas spawned multiple congressional investigations, and a special counsel inquiry that has led to the indictment of Trump's former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, for financial crimes.
It's not clear what investigators will make of the correspondence, which represents a small portion of the thousands of documents Donald Trump Jr.'s lawyer says he turned over to them. The stakes for the Trump family, however, are high. Trump Jr.'s June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to Russia's powerful prosecutor general, is already reportedly a subject of interest in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, as is the White House statement defending him. (Trump Jr. was emailed an offerof "information that would incriminate Hillary," and responded in part, "If it's what you say I love it.") The messages exchanged with WikiLeaks add a second instance in which Trump Jr. appears eager to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton, despite its provenance.
Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from WikiLeaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests. When WikiLeaks first reached out to Trump Jr. about putintrump.org, for instance, Trump Jr. followed up on his promise to "ask around." According to a source familiar with the congressional investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks. At no point during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks, which had published stolen documents and was already observed to be releasing information that benefited Russian interests.
WikiLeaks played a pivotal role in the presidential campaign. In July 2016, on the first day of the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks released emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee's servers that spring. The emails showed DNC officials denigrating Bernie Sanders, renewing tensions on the eve of Clinton's acceptance of the nomination. On October 7, less than an hour after the Washington Post released the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, Wikileaks released emails that hackers had pilfered from the personal email account of Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta.
On October 3, 2016, WikiLeaks wrote again. "Hiya, it'd be great if you guys could comment on/push this story," WikiLeaks suggested, attaching a quote from then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton about wanting to "just drone" WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.
"Already did that earlier today," Trump Jr. responded an hour-and-a-half later. "It's amazing what she can get away with."
Two minutes later, Trump Jr. wrote again, asking, "What's behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?" The day before, Roger Stone, an informal advisor to Donald Trump, had tweeted, "Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #WikiLeaks."
WikiLeaks didn't respond to that message, but on October 12, 2016, the account again messaged Trump Jr. "Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications," WikiLeaks wrote. (At a rally on October 10, Donald Trump had proclaimed, "I love WikiLeaks!")
"Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us," WikiLeaks went on, pointing Trump Jr. to the link wlsearch.tk, which it said would help Trump's followers dig through the trove of stolen documents and find stories. "There's many great stories the press are missing and we're sure some of your follows [sic] will find it," WikiLeaks went on. "Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4."
Trump Jr. did not respond to this message. But just 15 minutes after it was sent, as The Wall Street Journal's Byron Tau pointed out, Donald Trump himself tweeted, "Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!"
Two days later, on October 14, 2016, Trump Jr. tweeted out the link WikiLeaks had provided him. "For those who have the time to read about all the corruption and hypocrisy all the @wikileaks emails are right here: http://wlsearch.tk/," he wrote.
After this point, Trump Jr. ceased to respond to WikiLeaks's direct messages, but WikiLeaks escalated its requests.
"Hey Don. We have an unusual idea," WikiLeaks wrote on October 21, 2016. "Leak us one or more of your father's tax returns." WikiLeaks then laid out three reasons why this would benefit both the Trumps and WikiLeaks. One, The New York Times had already published a fragment of Trump's tax returns on October 1; two, the rest could come out any time "through the most biased source (e.g. NYT/MSNBC)."
It is the third reason, though, WikiLeaks wrote, that "is the real kicker." "If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality," WikiLeaks explained. "That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won't be perceived as coming from a pro-Trump' pro-Russia' source." It then provided an email address and link where the Trump campaign could send the tax returns, and adds, "The same for any other negative stuff (documents, recordings) that you think has a decent chance of coming out. Let us put it out."
Trump Jr. did not respond to this message.
WikiLeaks didn't write again until Election Day, November 8, 2016. "Hi Don if your father loses' we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurredas he has implied that he might do," WikiLeaks wrote at 6:35pm, when the idea that Clinton would win was still the prevailing conventional wisdom. (As late as 7:00pm that night, FiveThirtyEight, a trusted prognosticator of the election, gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning the presidency.) WikiLeaks insisted that contesting the election results would be good for Trump's rumored plans to start a media network should he lose the presidency. "The discussion can be transformative as it exposes media corruption, primary corruption, PAC corruption, etc.," WikiLeaks wrote.
Shortly after midnight that day, when it was clear that Trump had beaten all expectations and won the presidency, WikiLeaks sent him a simple message: "Wow."
Trump Jr. did not respond to these messages either, but WikiLeaks was undeterred. "Hi Don. Hope you're doing well!" WikiLeaks wrote on December 16 to Trump Jr., who was by then the son of the president-elect. "In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to [Washington,] DC."
WikiLeaks even imagined how Trump might put it: "That's a real smart tough guy and the most famous australian [sic] you have!' or something similar," WikiLeaks wrote. "They won't do it but it will send the right signals to Australia, UK + Sweden to start following the law and stop bending it to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons." (On December 7, Assange, proclaiming his innocence, had released his testimony in front of London investigators looking into accusations that he had committed alleged sexual assault.)
In the winter and spring, WikiLeaks went largely silent, only occasionally sending Trump Jr. links. But on July 11, 2017, three days after The New York Times broke the story about Trump Jr.'s June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to Russia's powerful prosecutor general, WikiLeaks got in touch again.
"Hi Don. Sorry to hear about your problems," WikiLeaks wrote. "We have an idea that may help a little. We are VERY interested in confidentially obtaining and publishing a copy of the email(s) cited in the New York Times today," citing a reference in the paper to emails Trump Jr had exchanged with Rob Goldstone, a publicist who had helped set up the meeting. "We think this is strongly in your interest," WikiLeaks went on. It then reprised many of the same arguments it made in trying to convince Trump Jr. to turn over his father's tax returns, including the argument that Trump's enemies in the press were using the emails to spin an unfavorable narrative of the meeting. "Us publishing not only deprives them of this ability but is beautifully confounding."
The message was sent at 9:29 am on July 11. Trump Jr. did not respond, but just hours later, he posted the emails himself, on his own Twitter feed.
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"Alexei Navalny, a fierce critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, posted a video on Thursday claiming to prove ties between onetime Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the Kremlin, the Moscow Times reports. In the video, Navalny traces Manafort's link to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, whom the opposition leader alleged acted as an intermediary between the former Trump associate and associates of Putin. Deripaska is the Russian metal tycoon who was offered " private briefings" by Manafort two weeks before then-candidate Trump secured the Republican nomination. Manafort had a $10 million annual contract with Deripaska before he was indicted on charges of money laundering and conspiracy as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
According to Navalny, there's a trail through a "self-described sex huntress'" that places Deripaska and Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko together in August 2016, a month after Manafort offered the Russian oligarch briefings on the campaign. "[It's] because these briefings were actually for Putin, the Kremlin, the Federal Security Service," Navalny charges in the video."
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/02/watch-p...s-kremlin/
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A further sign of just how "transparent" Julian Assange is - we have his cozy relationship with unofficial Trump adviser Sean Hannity.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/julian-ass...ia=desktop
Julian Assange Offered Hannity Impersonator News' About Top Democrat
The head of Wikileaks told @SeanHannity__ to seek other channels' for information on Sen. Mark Warner of the Trump-Russia investigation. @SeanHannity__' was a woman in Texas.
BEN COLLINS
01.29.18 8:16 PM ET
At about 4 a.m. on Saturday morning, a couple hours after she started pretending to be Sean Hannity, Dell Gilliam says she got a direct message back from the head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. That's when she said she "kind of panicked."
"I felt bad. He really thought he was talking to Sean Hannity," said Gilliam.
Gilliam, a technical writer from Texas, was bored with the flu when she created @SeanHannity__ early Saturday morning. The Fox News host's real account was temporarily deleted after cryptically tweeting the phrase "Form Submission 1649 | #Hannity" on Friday night. Twitter said the account had been "briefly compromised," according to a statement provided to The Daily Beast, and was back up on Sunday morning.
When Gilliam made the account, she did not expect to be setting up a meeting over "other channels" for Assange to send "some news about Warner," an apparent reference to Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.
During the election, WikiLeaks' dumped Democratic emails stolen by Kremlin hackers, even leading President Donald Trump's CIA director to brand Assange's organization a "hostile intelligence service" last year.
Just minutes after @SeanHannity disappeared, several accounts quickly sprung up posing as the real Hannity, shouting from Twitter exile. None were as successful as Gilliam's @SeanHannity__ account, which has since amassed over 24,000 followers.
Gilliam then used her newfound prominence to direct message Assange as Hannity within hours.
"I can't believe this is happening. I mean… I can. It's crazy. Nothing can be put past people," Gilliam, posing as Hannity, wrote to Assange. "I'm exhausted from the whole night. What about you, though? You doing ok?"
"I'm happy as long as there is a fight!" Assange responded.
Gilliam reassured Assange that she, or Hannity, was also "definitely up for a fight" and set up a call for 9:30 a.m. Eastern, about six hours later.
"You can send me messages on other channels," said Assange, the second reference to "other channels" he made since their conversation began.
"Have some news about Warner."
Less than 48 hours later, Warner made headlines claiming that the Senate intelligence committee received "end-of-the-year document dumps" that "opened a lot of new questions" about Trump and Russia.
When reached by The Daily Beast about the messages, Warner's spokesperson pointed to WikiLeaks' ties to the release of recent document drops performed by Russian entities, like Kremlin cutout Guccifer 2.0.
"Give me a break. WikiLeaks is a non-state hostile intelligence service with longstanding ties to the Russian government and Russian intelligence."
While Assange was not the only high-profile person duped by the account, his interactions with it were likely the most significant.
Citing mysterious sources and to-be-revealed bombshells, Hannity has been alleging he will unveil "the biggest scandal in American history" for weeks on his primetime Fox News show that has devolved into mostly a recitation of conspiracy theories about a "secret society" and the "deep state."
Both Hannity and Assange's WikiLeaks have pushed similar document drops and hashtag campaigns since before the 2016 election, most recently the push to release a confidential memo about government spying under the hashtag "#releasethememo." Last year, Hannity even invited Assange to guest host his radio program. Both participated in baseless speculation about the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich, which Hannity later dropped after advertisers dropped his program.
Leaked Twitter correspondences between Donald Trump Jr. and the official WikiLeaks account made headlines in November of 2017. Trump Jr. had not disclosed the direct messages until after the November report by The Atlantic.
Hannity, Assange and Fox News public relations did not respond to a request for comment.
"You can send me messages on other channels. Have some news about Warner."
Julian Assange
This was not Gilliam's plan when she created the account on Saturday morning. In fact, she said she didn't really know much about Sean Hannity when it all started. Gilliam said she watches Fox News, NPR, and CNN in equal parts, had "intentionally ignored [Hannity] because he seems to have no respect from anybody on either side except for Trump."
She said she simply wanted to play a joke on another Sean Hannity account, @SeanHannity_, with one underscore and not two.
"It kind of started on a whim. I was going to tweet at one of the fake Sean Hannity accounts that was up to tell them not to be me," she said.
Then, in part because Gilliam seemed to have picked up on Hannity's conspiratorial and frenzied voice, things picked up fast.
"I don't even really know how [Hannity] sounds, so I started by copying the tone of the first fake one," she said.
It worked.
"To all the lib haters, know that I am back and here to stay. You can't silence the truth and you have no idea what's coming," her first tweet read. "To all my loyal supporters - follow me on my new account to stay updated. Twitter can try to knock us down but we will keep rising up! #SeanHannity"
That tweet, which had 1,800 retweets and 3,500 likes, was retweeted by dozens of verified journalists and Twitter personalities.
Chrissy Teigen took a shot at Gilliam's version of Hannity in front of her 9.67 million followers.
"Settle down, braveheart," she wrote. Over 8,000 people retweeted it.
Gilliam's experience as a bureaucrat, whose interest in fine print is "interesting to me, but nobody else," helped her monopolize the fake Hannity space.
"I realized that in the Twitter rules it says you can't make a fake account unless you say you're not affiliated with that person," she said.
Under @SeanHannity__'s bio, it reads "(Above not affiliated with) New Account!" She remained live while SeanHannity_ with one underscore and several others were booted off the service.
"People don't read parentheticals," she said.
Gilliam said she plans on keeping the account going, or donating her 24,000 followers to an environmental nonprofit she works with. She's already tweeted out a YouTube video from a band she likes from Nashville to try to get them more followers.
Recovering from the flu, she didn't sleep all of Saturday, reading through tweets by duped celebrities and mountains of messages.
"I'd say it's one-third hate mail, one-third hero worship, one-third people saying they figured it out. His followers are disturbingly angry," she said.
"Reading the messages, I can see how believing in this false reality would be really easy to do. I was starting to get really nervous about what was reallyhappening. It all sucks you into a level of paranoia I'd never seen before."
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