Why Trump was
never investigated as a Russian agent
David Cay Johnston
In Trump v. The
United States, Michael S. Schmidt reports Special Counsel Robert S.
Mueller III's team was barred from investigating whether Trump, who has many
known connections to Russian criminals and who says he trusts Putin over
American intelligence agencies, was a Russian agent.
Mueller's team was allowed to look into obstruction of justice
by Trump, Schmidt writes in the e-book that went on sale today. Team Mueller
found numerous examples but was barred by Justice Department policy from
indicting the president.
The Mueller team tried, unsuccessfully, to get Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein to allow a counterintelligence investigation into
Trump's Kremlin dealings. Rosenstein refused, Schmidt reports.
A counterintelligence investigation into Trump as a possible
Russian agent was ordered in spring 2017 by Andrew G. McCabe when he was acting
FBI director.
McCabe told 60 Minutes that
he ordered an investigation in May 2017 into whether Trump "had been
working on behalf of Russia against American interests." He also said he
feared that without his written formal record in FBI files the case would be
made to disappear.
FBI shut down
The FBI counterintelligence investigation was shut down before
any substantial inquiry was made, Schmidt reports.
These and many more stunning revelations, along with new
evidence indicating that Trump is a continuing threat to American national
security, are based on extensive interviews with those involved and more than a
thousand pages of government documents that reporter Schmidt says no one else
outside of the government has read.
The book raises serious questions about how and why Rosenstein,
as deputy attorney general, shielded Trump. Why did Rosenstein not want law
enforcement and counterintelligence officials to know the full extent of
Trump's relationship with Russians, especially Russian President Vladimir
Putin?
It is a question Schmidt does not answer. If there is a
non-nefarious answer it may that human vulnerability was the cause. Rosenstein
had long experience as a federal prosecutor, little as a counterintelligence
lawyer.
Russian money
Moscow has courted Trump since at least 1987 and Trump has done
numerous deals with Russian oligarchs that make no sense in business terms but
make perfect sense when viewed as money laundering and payoffs.
Russian money is suspected to be behind the
massive loans which Deutsche Bank made to
Trump when no other major bank would do
business with him. Deutsche Bank has been
fined more than $622 million for laundering
money
for Russians.
Schmidt paints a portrait of a president with no understanding
of or regard for our Constitution, federal laws or limits on his authority, a
portrait consistent with my own Trump books. Schmidt shows that in the Oval
Office Trump often took the side of Russia against American interests.
Trump insensitivity
"Trump had a profound insensitivity to how his actions
would be perceived," Schmidt writes, "and was often indifferent to
law or precedent."
Candidate Trump said he didn't
trust American intelligence agencies.
As president, standing next to Putin in Helsinki in 2018, he
declared that he takes Putin at
his word.
One day later, in a formal White House statement, Trump
walked back his remarks, though I and many other Trump watchers took
that as only one of his many attempts to muddy clear waters so people would be
unsure about his conduct.
Trump has made clear he believes there is nothing wrong with
conspiring with a hostile foreign power if it helps keep him in office. In June
this year, Trump told ABC News,
in a lengthy interview, that he would accept help from foreign governments such
as the Kremlin in the current election.
Accepting election help of any kind from any foreign government
or person is a criminal offense.
Author's background
Reporter Schmidt has solid credentials. He has broken numerous
stories that relied on law enforcement, political and intelligence sources.
While Team Trump denounced many of those stories when they broke, the reporting
held up as future events unfolded.
In 2016, Schmidt broke the story that Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton used a personal email account for official business (as did several of
her predecessors).
He won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing that James Comey, the FBI
director Trump fired in 2017, created contemporaneous memos of his one-on-one
meetings with Trump. Comey's memos include the story of Trump demanding a
pledge of personal loyalty, which Comey refused.
Schmidt also shared in a Pulitzer Prize for exposing sexual
predator Harvey Weinstein and broke major stories about sexual harassment and
secret financial settlements with victims that resulted in Bill O'Reilly losing
his job as a Fox News host.
The revelations in Schmidt's book completely recast the 418-page
Mueller report and destroy Trump's already noxious claims that the Mueller
report vindicated him. It also helps explain the mendacious declaration by
Attorney General William P. Barr in March 2019 that the Mueller report cleared
Trump. Barr also wrote a four-page memo that
turned out to be highly misleading, guiding people away from understanding the
serious wrongdoing Mueller's team uncovered, especially in obstructing justice.
A question never asked
A significant theme of the Schmidt book is that investigators
were not only blocked from investigating whether Trump is disloyal to America,
but that at times the Mueller investigators didn't ask the right questions of
witnesses.
One example involves John Kelly, the retired general who became
Trump's second White House chief of staff.
The president asked Kelly to pledge personal loyalty to Trump,
Schmidt reveals. Kelly said he would be loyal to our Constitution, pretty much
what Comey also said, Schmidt writes.
Mueller's team never learned of this, Schmidt writes, because
they didn't ask.
That such an obvious question – were you asked to pledge
personal loyalty to Donald Trump the way FBI Director Comey was? – was not
posed raises questions about what else within the restricted purview of the
Mueller team also was missed.
Did Team Mueller ask Rosenstein, whose actions shielded Trump,
whether he was asked for a pledge of personal loyalty? Who else was asked to
pledge personal loyalty, something we expect of dictators but never in American
presidents? Who did pledge to Trump? Who refused? We don't know.
These are questions that should now be pursued by the House
Intelligence Committee, which you can be sure will inquire about many things in
the Schmidt book.
Kremlin interests
There was reason aplenty for the FBI to open a
counterintelligence investigation of Trump and those around him, extraordinary
as that would be.
One reason was the retention of Michael Flynn, another retired
general, after Trump was warned by Sally Yates, who briefly served as acting
attorney general, that he was subject to blackmail and unfit to know sensitive
secrets. Trump then fired Yates, a career federal prosecutor with a
distinguished record.
Another concern involved the Trump campaign enthusiastically
accepting a written offer of help from the Kremlin in June 2016. For the next
13 months, Trump's oldest son Don Jr., who received the emailed offer, lied and
denied. He said, falsely, that no help was ever offered or provided by Moscow.
Why did Don Jr. lie then and, when The New York Times got the emails forcing
his hand, did he mischaracterize their nature?
The emails resulted, just days later, in a Trump Tower
meeting of Kremlin agents, at least one with deep ties to
Russian intelligence agencies, and Don Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and
campaign manager Paul Manafort. The Mueller Team never was able to learn
exactly what happened in part because Don Jr.'s lawyers indicated that the
president's son would assert his Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying
because he might incriminate himself.
Just the fact that Manafort, now a convicted felon, was paid 10s
of millions of dollars by a Kremlin-friendly Ukraine leader and that Manafort
managed the Trump campaign for free at a time when he was in serious financial
trouble, would have justified a major FBI counterintelligence investigation
into Trump and his campaign.
McGahn role
Schmidt devotes a lot of words to Don McGahn, who as White House
counsel was there to serve the Office of the President, not the man himself.
McGahn, either directly or through intermediaries, appears to be a key Schmidt
source.
Schmidt writes that McGahn apparently knows a secret that could
"drive Trump from the White House." McGahn is trying to avoid
testifying before Congress about what went on behind closed doors at the White
House.
McGahn, Schmidt writes, was "one of the few Trump advisers…
who regularly stood up to the president, telling him when his ideas were
harebrained and screaming back at him when he unloaded nasty digs on senior
staff."
Schmidt says what was missing from the Mueller report about
Trump and Russia sparked his interest. He writes that people who have seen the
full report – the public version is heavily redacted – told him there is
nothing about Trump's possible allegiance to Russia or other improper
associations. That knowledge made Schmidt even more curious about the lack of a
counterintelligence investigation when there was abundant reason to undertake
one.
The Trump attacks on McCabe, Comey's deputy at the FBI, raise
questions about what the White House knew and when about McCabe initiating an
intelligence inquiry. That is an issue sure to be investigated by the House
Intelligence Committee led by Rep. Adam Schiff of California.
Before he himself was fired, Attorney General Jeff Sessions
fired McCabe two days short of eligibility for a full pension.
That was seen by many as a sign that anyone in government who crossed Trump was
fair game and crossing Trump could be costly. It came out later that McCabe
also had ordered a criminal investigation into whether Sessions
lied during his Senate confirmation hearing, which may also
have influenced Sessions in such a petty action of firing McCabe on a day that
would deny him his full pension.
Getting rid of McCabe and dirtying him up in public on specious
grounds takes on new significance with the publication of the Schmidt book.
Only by neutralizing McCabe, removing him and discrediting him could Trump
evade the greatest risk he faced — a counterintelligence investigation into his
Russian dealings.
The truncated FBI investigation needs to be resumed
unimpeded immediately.
No comments:
Post a Comment