Witch Hunt Read online

  On March 22, 2019, the Mueller Report was finally submitted to the Justice Department. As expected, there was no evidence of criminal “collusion” or, as the special counsel affirmed, “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”28 After a twenty-two-month investigation, hundreds of witnesses interviewed, thousands of subpoenas issued, and more than a million documents examined, the Russia hoax was exposed for what it was: a lie. Not a single person was ever charged with a “collusion” conspiracy offense.

  Though perfectly willing to render a legal judgment on “collusion,” Mueller then announced that he had “determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment” on obstruction.29 His rationale was unintelligible. It got worse. He stated, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”30 What? As any lawyer will tell you, it is never the job of a prosecutor anywhere to exonerate people. By this one act, Mueller managed to reverse the burden of proof and invert the presumption of innocence which are sacrosanct principles in American law. Instead, he spent 183 pages smearing Trump by implying that, under certain circumstances which did not actually exist, the facts might sustain an obstruction case.

  Attorney General William Barr was admittedly baffled by Mueller’s reasoning, describing it in Senate testimony as “strange” and “bizarre.”31 He and other top lawyers at the DOJ examined the report, analyzed the law and the facts, and concluded that the evidence was “not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”32 In a swipe at Mueller, Barr observed that the special counsel’s legal analysis “did not reflect the views of the department” but was the product of the personal views “of a particular lawyer or lawyers.”33 The attorney general insisted that Mueller could have rendered a decision on obstruction and that no Department of Justice rules prevented him from doing so.34

  The witch hunt ended precisely as I had argued it would in my book The Russia Hoax. Trump did not “collude” with Russia, but his opponent who funded and endorsed the lie did. The Clinton campaign paid for Russian disinformation in a phony “dossier.” Clinton’s surrogates then fed the elaborate fraud to the FBI so that it would launch a dilating investigation of Trump, and they peddled it to the media to influence the 2016 presidential election. Clinton herself incessantly advanced the false conspiracy theory that held the nation and presidency hostage for more than two years.

  As the fictive “collusion” narrative persisted, the media paid no attention to what Clinton did but devoted all of its scrutiny to what Trump did not do. Journalists were all too eager to accept as gospel the intelligence leaks that they assumed were accurate and truthful. Their lack of question or curiosity was animated by their antipathy toward the president. They embraced the “dossier” as scripture, teased by hope that it might somehow, inexplicably, be proven true. There has been no shortage of media malpractice in the age of Trump. It continues to this day, as reporters bang the drum of “collusion” and obstruction, the paucity of evidence notwithstanding. This has been a perplexing phenomenon, as Attorney General Barr noted in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the conclusion of the Mueller investigation:

  How did we get to the point where the evidence is now that the president was falsely accused of colluding with the Russians and accused of being treasonous and accused of being a Russian agent? And the evidence now is that it was without a basis.

  Two years of his administration have been dominated by the allegations that have now been proven false. And . . . to listen to some of the rhetoric, you would think that The Mueller Report had found the opposite.35

  Barr was deeply disturbed by the answers he was getting when he inquired about the reasons why the Trump-Russia investigation had been initiated and the actions by government officials in pursuing a case that had proven to be utterly without merit. The known facts belied the explanations he was hearing. With stunning candor, he stated that “these counter-intelligence activities directed at the Trump Campaign, were not done in the normal course and not through the normal procedures as far as I can tell.”36 That was an understatement. The attorney general decided to launch his own investigation into potential misconduct and lawlessness. More lies and corruption will likely be exposed.

  I decided to write this second book, Witch Hunt, because a wealth of evidence has emerged since the The Russia Hoax went to print in early June 2018. The inspector general at the DOJ issued a highly critical report on how the Clinton email case had been mishandled, if not rigged. More text messages between Strzok and Page surfaced, casting doubt on the legitimacy of the probe and emphasizing the bias that had contaminated the ensuing Trump investigation. The plot to overthrow the president came to light. So, too, did a myriad of details on how the Clinton campaign and Democrats, not Trump, were guilty of “collusion.” Prodigious lying and spying came into sharper focus with the release of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications and reports on the use of undercover agents. The doors were opened on heretofore closed-door testimony, as transcripts were belatedly made public. And, of course, Mueller eventually produced his magnum opus that managed to smear Trump while deflating the phony narrative that the president of the United States was a clandestine Russian agent who hijacked an election. It was folly at its best—or worst.

  Attorney General Barr posed the correct question: How could it have ever happened? Witch Hunt uncovers the truth about the invented lies and corrupt actions of high officials who abused the power of their positions for political gain. They sought to subvert our rules of law and undermine the democratic process. By their venal acts, they damaged the institutions of American government. And they squandered the nation’s trust.

  Chapter 1

  A Tale of Two Cases

  And damn this feels momentous. Because this matters. The other one did, too, but that was to ensure we didn’t F something up. This matters because this MATTERS.

  —TEXT MESSAGE FROM PETER STRZOK TO HIS LOVER LISA PAGE, COMPARING THE CLOSING OF THE CLINTON CASE TO THE OPENING OF THE TRUMP CASE, JULY 31, 2016

  That text tells me it was all rigged from the very beginning, and it tells me that it is the worst scandal to hit the FBI.

  —AUTHOR’S INTERVIEW WITH PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, OVAL OFFICE, WHITE HOUSE, JUNE 25, 2019

  The United States’ policy toward Russia has always been a contentious issue, often propelled by feverish electoral polemics. However, there has been a striking continuity from the Obama to the Trump administrations.1 Both verbalized outreach and reconciliation early on, only to retreat into an adversarial posture when reality set in. If anything, the current president has demonstrated greater antagonism toward Moscow than his predecessor, who during a 2012 presidential debate dismissed Russia as “the biggest geopolitical threat.”2

  In his first two years in office, Trump imposed a series of new sanctions against Russian government officials and oligarchs, approved punitive measures targeting Moscow’s defense and energy sectors, expelled dozens of diplomats, shuttered several ministerial properties, sent lethal weapons to Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression, authorized military force against Russian troops in Syria, and initiated withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty based on evidence that Moscow had repeatedly violated its terms.3 He also appointed well-known Russia hawks to top-level positions in his administration.4 These are hardly the actions of a US president who is a Kremlin sympathizer, much less a furtive Russian agent.

  How did the accusation that Trump was in league with the Kremlin transcend conspiracy theorists to become the common mantra of millions of Americans?

  We know it began with top officials at the FBI, in the intelligence community, and at the Department of Justice who had reason to damage or destroy Trump. As an outsider to the praetorian ways of Washington, he posed
an existential threat to their positions of power. Trump, the candidate, had vowed to “drain the swamp” of those who had wielded outsized influence in government operations with little or no accountability. But the “swamp” did not want to be drained. The prospect of Trump as president represented an ignominious end to their dominion.

  Power in the nation’s capital can be likened to crack cocaine: it is highly addictive. Those who exert power tend to become dependent on it and crave it. They are rarely inclined to give it up without a fight. The evidence suggests that people such as CIA director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, FBI director James Comey and his phalanx of loyal lieutenants, Andrew McCabe, James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and others imagined Trump as a menace to their ideas of who should control government. Clinton, by contrast, was their favored candidate. She represented the status quo—the equivalent of a third and, maybe, a fourth term of Barack Obama. The Democratic nominee signified continuity of authority and purpose. Those in the “deep state” would likely keep their jobs. The power of the entrenched would be inexorably extended under a President Clinton; it would be seriously jeopardized if her opponent prevailed.

  Something had to be done to stop Trump. Remarkably, the plan nearly worked.

  Clearing Clinton of Criminality

  To understand how the swamp normally deals with perjury, obstruction of justice, leaks, and other administrative crimes, we have to start with the mountain of compelling evidence that Hillary Clinton had committed crimes by mishandling classified documents during her four years as secretary of state. Her fate rested squarely in the hands of Director Comey’s FBI and Attorney General Lynch’s Justice Department. They knew that she had egregiously compromised national security and, in the process, committed a myriad of felonies under the Espionage Act and other criminal statutes.5

  The tricky dilemma they faced was devising a way to navigate around the facts and the law to clear her of crimes.

  Before she was sworn in as the nation’s top diplomat, Clinton set up a private email server in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, New York. She didn’t just use a personal email account; she had her emails travel through a personal server, hidden from public view by registration under a separate identity.6 She decided to use that clandestine server to handle all of her electronic communications as secretary of state, including the transfer and dissemination of thousands of classified and top secret documents.7

  State Department rules forbid this because foreign governments and cyberterrorists could readily access such materials using even rudimentary hacking techniques on an unauthorized and unprotected server. The nation’s secrets would be jeopardized. Clinton knew that. She had spent eight years as a US senator. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, she had been counseled on classified documents, how to recognize them, and all the ways she must employ government-instituted safeguards to maintain their secrecy. As secretary of state, she received even more extensive indoctrination: classified records were never to be taken home or otherwise stored there.8

  She absolutely knew that if all of her work-related emails were housed on the private server in her home, there would inevitably be innumerable classified documents contained therein. It would be impossible for the nation’s chief diplomat to conduct extensive communications without exchanging such classified information. Nevertheless, she intended to establish a nongovernmental server and intended that it be used exclusively for all of her business as secretary of state. She intended that classified records be stored on and transmitted to other people via her unauthorized and vulnerable system. Such willful acts violated 18 U.S.C. § 793(d) and (e) of the Espionage Act,9 but also a separate and more fundamental law that criminalizes the mishandling of classified documents, 18 U.S.C. § 1924:

  Whoever, being an officer of the United States . . . becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than five years or both.10

  The above language is explicit. She did it knowingly because, by her own admission, she read the classified emails she received and sent, and she intended that they be retained at the unauthorized location. How many crimes were committed? At the very least, there were 110 violations of the law, representing the number of emails that were classified when Clinton sent or received them on her home system. That was made clear when Director Comey announced his findings on July 5, 2016, as follows:

  From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.11

  Comey also found “about 2,000 additional emails [that] were ‘up-classified,’ ” meaning they were not classified at the time they were sent. Under a strict reading of the law, Clinton should have been charged for mishandling those documents, too. That was emphasized by the director when he stated, “even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.”

  Citing several email chains involving top secret communications, Comey further observed, “There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position . . . should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”12 Clinton should also have faced numerous conspiracy charges, as well, since she was acting in concert with others who, according to uncovered documents, knew she was using a private account for classified document exchanges and participated in them.13

  Let’s assume for the sake of argument (and in defiance of logic) that Clinton did not act willfully or intentionally but through unimaginable misfeasance or incompetence. She most certainly behaved with reckless disregard for the protection of classified documents. The law calls this “gross negligence,” a term that is interchangeable or synonymous with “extremely careless” conduct.14 At the very least, Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents violated the “gross negligence” provision of 18 U.S.C. § 793(f) of the Espionage Act:

  Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document . . . relating to national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody . . . or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody . . . shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.15

  There is no question that Clinton’s mishandling of classified materials was, at the very least, grossly negligent. Indeed, her actions are the definition of reckless or extremely careless conduct. Comey grudgingly conceded that she might have jeopardized national security when he stated, “We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.”16 That was not at all accurate. It wasn’t just possible; it was a fact that the FBI surely knew but tried to conceal from the public. Comey even watered down his findings when he deleted the words “reasonably likely” and substituted “possible” to describe how hostile actors might have breached the secretary’s system.17

  Sure enough, information from Clinton’s server turned up on the “dark web”—a collection of encrypted websites where both criminals and rogue nations operate. Since the secretary of state was violating regulations by using an unprotected system, it was easily accessed indirectly through a source who was communicating with her.18 That was what happened. Evidence showed that a Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer” infiltrated Clinton’s emails by utilizing a server in Russia.19 That meant that Russian intelligence likely benefited from the illegal penetration and obtained US classified material, thanks to Clinton’s contempt for rules and the law. Among
the hacked records was an Excel spreadsheet containing “targeting data” that would constitute top secret information. “It is inescapable that a security breach and a violation of basic server security occurred here,” according to an independent review contained in FBI documents that came to light three years after Clinton was cleared of wrongdoing.20 Yet when Comey absolved the secretary, he tried to minimize the significance of any national security breach, the very reason laws were passed criminalizing the kind of conduct engaged in by Clinton.

  Having presented at a national news conference an overwhelming case of how Clinton had committed more than a hundred crimes, the FBI director offered this bizarre and incomprehensible reason why she would not be prosecuted:

  Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.21

  Comey Twists the Facts

  Having found a plethora of evidence that laws were potentially broken, as he stated unambiguously in the first part of his sentence, Comey was duty bound to tender a criminal referral to the Justice Department that Clinton be prosecuted. The unambiguous facts, in combination with the law, demanded it. That was more than legally sufficient for presentment to a grand jury that would most certainly have rendered an expansive indictment.

  However, Comey’s qualifying phrase that no “reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case” amounted to pure speculation by him. It is not, and never has been, a valid legal basis for declining to levy charges. Comey invented a legal standard that does not exist. He was not the prosecutor. His job was to gather evidence through documents and witnesses. Yet he deigned to anoint himself the sole authority on whether criminal charges would be brought. In doing so, he flagrantly commandeered the power of the attorney general and violated FBI and Department of Justice regulations in the process.