Schiff has been warmly welcomed for years to spin his collusion tales on television programs like NBC’s Meet the Press. Meanwhile, the man who had the collusion scam figured out by early 2018 has received mostly scorn from the anti-Trump media. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at the time, released a memo in February 2018 that noted the key facts: the FBI had misled the FISA court, had relied heavily on Steele’s biased and unverified gossip, and had not disclosed that the dossier was paid for by Trump’s Democratic opponent and her party.45
In March 2018, Nunes accurately summed up the scandal that has poisoned U.S. politics for years, reporting that the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign had paid people “to collude and interact with Russians to get dirt on President Trump.”46
“Devin Nunes should get the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and that may happen,” Trump tells us now. But the president was not thrilled with all his GOP colleagues during the long series of investigations. He says, “the Republicans don’t play a tough game like the Democrats do.” During our interview, Trump calls former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan “a disaster. Paul Ryan didn’t issue one subpoena on the Russian thing.” Trump argues that Ryan’s successor “Nancy Pelosi issued 387 subpoenas. She gives ’em out like cookies.” As he continued to discuss the issue, Trump downgraded Ryan to “a f—— disaster.” A former aide to Ryan tells us that the former Speaker figured the subpoena process would take too long and that Trump could just order the release of documents.
The only remaining question is when exactly collusion claims became fraudulent. The FBI continued to use its surveillance tools even after it was clear the evidence justifying their use had been debunked. But was this an FBI fraud right from the start, or did top Obama administration officials reasonably suspect at some point that there really could be some sort of Trump-Putin conspiracy? While Justice’s Inspector General Horowitz uncovered a range of abuses as FBI agents hunted for evidence, he concluded that his Obama administration colleagues at the FBI had still acted appropriately in deciding to launch the investigation in the summer of 2016. In the parlance of prosecutors, he was saying that the investigation was reasonably predicated, even if it later went off the rails.
As we write in the summer of 2020, the predication story is falling apart. According to the official history from FBI leadership, the bureau launched a full investigation with just a single piece of questionable evidence, and only because it allegedly came from the most trusted of sources: a friendly foreign government, or FFG.
Back in that summer of 2016, the website WikiLeaks had shocked U.S. politics on July 22 with the unauthorized release of thousands of emails exchanged by leading members of the Democratic Party. Among other embarrassing revelations, the emails showed that the leadership of the Democratic National Committee, which is supposed to be neutral, was favoring former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in her presidential nomination battle against Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
For Democrats, the timing could not have been worse. WikiLeaks published the emails on the Friday before the party’s nominating convention was scheduled to begin in Philadelphia on Monday. Over the weekend, Sanders supporters were taking to the streets to protest what many considered a rigged game to protect the party establishment. As for Hillary supporters, another Clinton scandal had exploded just as their candidate was scheduled for a political coronation.
Here was a legitimate case of collusion and it threatened a political catastrophe for Democrats and their nominee. The story could split the party if Sanders supporters refused to unify behind Team Clinton.
Maria arrived that weekend to host live Fox coverage inside the convention venue. As workers were completing the final decorations inside Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, party officials were in a state of panic, wondering if their week in the national spotlight would be dominated by the story of the Clinton machine appearing to fix the nomination.
On Sunday, Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who had been exposed in the emails with her thumb on the scale for Team Clinton, said that she was immediately resigning her post. Avoiding the polarizing embarrassment of Wasserman Schultz at the podium would be helpful, but Democrats would still be answering questions all week about how party bosses had sabotaged the Sanders campaign.
And then all of a sudden something changed. On the day that Wasserman Schultz announced that she would not be presiding at her own convention, Democrats were aggressively feeding media people a story of Russian hacking. Standing at the convention site, it seemed that in the blink of an eye every Democratic lawmaker or political operative was now brushing aside Wasserman Schultz’s comments in the emails and stoking speculation that their publication was the result of Donald Trump working with the Russians.
Something was wrong with this new picture, and not because the Russian government doesn’t try to interfere in our democratic process. Russian governments have been attempting to disrupt and discredit free societies for much longer than we’ve been alive. It was just rather convenient—a perfectly timed, smooth transition Democrats and their media allies made to the creation of a new narrative of Russian support for Trump.
It would take nearly four years for the public to learn many of the essential details of the story. In the spring of 2020 the Trump administration declassified a volume of documents related to the collusion investigation. The House Intelligence Committee subsequently released, among other items, its transcript of sworn 2017 testimony from the DNC’s cybersecurity contractor. Under oath he admitted that his firm did not have direct evidence that the Russians took the emails off the DNC server.48 And of course it had no evidence at all that the Republican presidential candidate had anything to do with it. But
