The Plot Against the President by Lee Smith

Author:Lee Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2019-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

Patel says the money that Page was supposed to have collected from the deal with Sechin was another aspect of the dossier that could be found to be true or false. “It’s hundreds of millions of dollars,” he says. “You could find out if Page has that kind of money. We called him in and spoke with him. He obviously didn’t have that kind of money. It was clear the story in the dossier was nonsense.”

The purpose of HPSCI’s Russia collusion investigation was to find out if anyone in the Trump campaign had really made deals with the Russians. But if the supposed linchpin of the Trump-Russia collusion scheme was innocent, what was the evidence?

Patel’s next step was to collect all the investigative documents surrounding Crossfire Hurricane. “I knew I had to get the documents leading to the production of the FISA,” he says. “I wanted to know what the government knew, when they knew it, and if there were any material omissions in the FISA application.”

Once they secured the documents from the FBI, Patel and the Intelligence Committee moved to interviews to get people on the record. Did anyone have proof that the Trump team had colluded with Russia?

“I had to tell a lot of people that collusion isn’t a crime,” says Patel. “It sounds bad, but it doesn’t exist, it’s a legal fiction. But I was like, okay, we’ve got to use that because it’s in the media and everybody’s already using it.”

The important thing was to determine if there had been any criminal activity. Patel, along with HPSCI members Trey Gowdy, Tom Rooney, and Mike Conaway, and their staff came up with the “three Cs”: collude, conspire, coordinate.

“Conspiracy is a real crime,” says Jim. “Coordination isn’t a crime, but it was a way to explain in layman’s terms a predicate for conspiracy. So did anyone see any coordination between the Trump team and Russia?”

Nunes’s committee interviewed officials from the Obama administration, the law enforcement and intelligence communities, and the Trump campaign. It was the same line of questioning for all of them.

“We asked them the three Cs straight up,” says Patel.

He runs down a partial list:

“‘Do you, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, have evidence of the three Cs?’

“‘No, I don’t.’

“‘Do you, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates?’

“‘No.’

“‘Do you, Jim Comey?’

“‘No.’

“‘Do you, Andy McCabe?’

“‘No.’

“‘Do you, John Podesta?’

“‘No.’

“‘Do you, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS?’

“‘No.’”

A number of witnesses tried to sidestep Patel’s line of questioning.

“And I said, ‘Hang on. I’m not asking if you thought it happened or if you heard it happened,’” Patel says. “I said, ‘Do you have information that exactly addresses this issue? If you tell me it exists, we’ll go get the documents, we’ll go get the people, we’ll use subpoenas.’ We weren’t hired to clear Donald Trump. We were charged with figuring out what happened.”

The investigation, he says, was going to reveal whether there was collusion or not. “It’s a finite question. We weren’t trying to solve an unsolvable murder. Donald Trump got elected. We knew the Russians definitely did some squirrely stuff, hacked some things and whatnot.

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