Impeachment proceedings against Trump

It seems significant that the Special Counsel’s report on Trump and the Russians in 2016 barely mentions Steele and his dossier. In its admittedly highly redacted version, the report never implies that the dossier had any impact on the Department of Justice’s investigation into the president. That assessment is starkly at odds with volumes of Trumpian mythology, tweeted regularly by the president himself, that Steele’s “phony and corrupt dossier” was the cause of Robert Mueller’s “witch hunt” (a term tweeted by the president 182 times) in the first place.

Of course, none of that is true. The prime mover of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into then-candidate Trump wasn’t the Steele dossier, rather highly classified signals intelligence from American and allied spy agencies back in late 2015, which portrayed Trump’s relationship with Moscow in a troubling light, as I reported nearly a year ago. Steele’s dossier wasn’t completed until the end of the following year.

At last, the mainstream media is waking up to the reality that the Steele dossier—which it has obsessed over nearly as much as Planet Trump has for more than two years—just isn’t that big of a story.

The dossier, being unfiltered intelligence, some of it derived from second-hand sources in Russia, is best considered lead information only, that is, a jumping-off point for additional investigation—not the final word on anything. As a stand-alone report, its uses are limited for any seasoned intelligence analyst.

Not to mention that there have always been good reasons to doubt some of Steele’s revelations. While the dossier’s depiction of Kremlin politics—what spies call “atmospherics”—are undeniably true, many of the specifics are unverifiable. When the dossier appeared in January, veteran Kremlin-watcher David Satter observed that the whole exercise reeked of a Russian provocation, making a case that’s plausible to those who understand Chekists.

Satter noted that the dossier nicely met Vladimir Putin’s overall objectives, in particular making American politics as bitter, divided, and unpleasant as possible, while not revealing very much substance.

The Steele dossier should be treated with caution. The Kremlin has long run complex spy stories together—creating “faction” by mixing bona fide information with disinformation—to confuse Western intelligence, and they may very well have done it again here. Those seeking the truth of Donald Trump’s relationship with Moscow should view the dossier as a jumping-off point for more investigation and no more.

Let me put my cards on the table: The counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump was kicked off by not one, not two, but multiple SIGINT reports which set off alarm bells inside our Intelligence Community. This has been publicly known, in a general way, for some time. A little over a year ago, the Guardian reported, based on multiple intelligence sources, that the lead was taken by Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ – Britain’s NSA), which “first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious ‘interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the U.S. as part of a routine exchange of information.”

NSA isn’t just the world’s most powerful intelligence agency, it’s the hub of the whole Western spy system. In late 2015, based on GCHQ reports, the word went out to NSA’s close friends and partners to be on the lookout for any intercepts touching on Russian efforts to infiltrate the Trump campaign. They found plenty. As the Guardian explained, in the first half of 2016, as Trump’s presidential bid gained unexpected steam, Australia, Germany, Estonia, and Poland all had SIGINT hits that indicated a troubling relationship between Trump and Moscow. So, too, did the French and the Dutch—the latter being an especially savvy SIGINT partner of NSA’s.

This means that top-secret Washington possessed a detailed understanding of Kremlin hacks of our country as they happened. Why the Obama administration did so little to counter these nefarious activities—a troubling question that has lingered as the extent of Russian espionage against our 2016 election has come into clearer focus—now must be answered if we hope to avert future Kremlin hacks of our democracy.

President Barack Obama’s lethargy about admitting—much less confronting—Russian espionage and propaganda is a matter of record. Why the Obama White House shut down the State Department’s tiny effort to counter weaponized Kremlin lies in late 2015 has never been properly explained. Now, Congress should ask why the previous administration did so little to defend our democracy from Russian espionage and subversion—an inaction that did grave damage to Obama’s own party.

That fateful failure lies exclusively with the executive branch and demands explanation. With each passing day, the Obama administration’s non-response to Vladimir Putin’s SpyWar against America looks increasingly like the run-up to the 9/11 attacks, when repeated intelligence warnings were ignored by policymakers who hewed to wishful thinking right until disaster struck. Congress needs to find out what went wrong here so it never happens again.

If Donald Trump weren’t president of the United States, he would have been charged with obstruction of justice, over 400 former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials said Monday in an extraordinary public letter.

The joint statement, which had 417 signers by early afternoon, rebuts Attorney General William Barr’s assertion that the evidence of potential obstruction uncovered by special counsel Robert Mueller was “not sufficient” to establish that Trump committed a crime.

“Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice,” the statement reads.

Let’s start at the end of this story. This weekend, I read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report twice, and realized that enough was enough—I needed to do something. I’ve worked on every Republican presidential transition team for the past 10 years and recently served as counsel to the Republican-led House Financial Services Committee. My permanent job is as a law professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, which is not political, but where my colleagues have held many prime spots in Republican administrations.

If you think calling for the impeachment of a sitting Republican president would constitute career suicide for someone like me, you may end up being right. But I did exactly that this weekend, tweeting that it’s time to begin impeachment proceedings.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

The big problem with getting to the bottom of President Donald Trump’s Kremlin ties isn’t just secrecy and classification—it’s that practically nobody in Washington wants to know the messy and complex truth.

From a counterintelligence viewpoint, the Mueller report portrays a Trump campaign that was guilty as hell of colluding with the Kremlin to damage Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in 2016, to the benefit of Donald Trump (and, let’s not forget, Vladimir Putin). While that may not meet prosecutorial threshold—the Espionage Act being devilishly difficult to apply in practice—it meets any intelligence standard of colluding with the enemy.

Of course, this is hardly the first time that a major Washington espionage scandal involving the White House stalled politically even though the Intelligence Community knew the full, unpleasant truth—which Congress failed to unmask despite making a lot of noise about doing so.