While the 2016 Democratic convention was occurring in the United States, Australian diplomat and Clinton admirer Alexander Downer requested an urgent meeting at the U.S. embassy in London. Downer was Australia’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom—in other words, the Aussie ambassador to the UK. He told a U.S. diplomat about a conversation he’d had two months earlier with a young man who had recently joined the Trump campaign as a volunteer adviser. Downer said that the new Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos, had suggested over drinks that Russia had damaging information about Hillary Clinton that it might release during the campaign.
Just days after the Downer report, on July 31, 2016, the FBI launched its “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump campaign investigation. The inspector general would report more than three years later that the launch of this historic investigation was based solely on the report from the friendly foreign government: “We did not find information in FBI or [Justice] Department [electronic communications], emails, or other documents, or through witness testimony, indicating that any information other than the FFG information was relied upon to predicate the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”49
Over and over again, the inspector general’s report would refer to the FFG, the friendly foreign government, as the source of the report that triggered the investigation, and FBI officials would cite the fact that it came from an FFG as their justification for doing what they did. Bill Priestap, who was then the assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, authorized the opening of Crossfire Hurricane. The inspector general reports of Priestap: “He told us that the FFG information was provided by a trusted source—the FFG—and he therefore felt it ‘wise to open an investigation to look into’ whether someone associated with the Trump campaign may have accepted the reported offer from the Russians.”50
But it wasn’t really a report from a friendly foreign government. More precisely, it was an unofficial claim from someone who worked at a friendly government. Remember, this was the only evidence used to start an unprecedented surveillance effort targeting participants in a U.S. presidential campaign. The details matter. And the detail of why George Papadopoulos was invited to a wine bar in London to meet Alexander Downer deserves attention. It will strike some people as odd that the issue of Russia’s damaging information about Hillary Clinton allegedly came up in this meeting between people who hardly knew each other.
Among the first to notice a problem with the details was Representative Nunes. While serving as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in April 2018, Nunes told Maria, “Now this is really important to us because counterintelligence investigation uses the tools of our intelligence services that are not supposed to be used on American citizens… So we’ve long wanted to know: Well, what intelligence did you have that actually led to this investigation?” Then Nunes answered the question: “We now know that there was no official intelligence that was used to start this investigation.”51
But how could this be? Less than four months earlier, in one of the New York Times stories for which the paper would be handed a Pulitzer prize, reporters had claimed that the information came from “one of America’s closest intelligence allies.”52
It did not come from Australian intelligence. Nunes described the “Five Eyes” agreement through which the intelligence allies Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States share intelligence. “We are not supposed to spy on each other’s citizens, and it’s worked well,” he said. “And it continues to work well. And we know it’s working well because there was no intelligence that passed through the Five Eyes channels to our government.”53
It turned out that Downer had already told his story to his own government in May 2016 and the Australian government had not passed it on to the United States. Two months later Downer broke protocol, ignored the trusted intelligence-sharing process among the five friendly governments, and told the story himself to American diplomatic staff.
In June 2018 our colleague Kimberley Strassel elaborated on the dangers of this approach: “The Five Eyes agreement provides that any intelligence goes through the intelligence system of the country that gathered it. This helps guarantee information is securely handled, subjected to quality control, and not made prey to political manipulation. Mr. Downer’s job was to report his meeting back to Canberra, and leave it to Australian intelligence.” Instead, noted Strassel, Downer’s story ended up with Elizabeth Dibble “who previously served as a principal deputy assistant secretary in Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.”54
In case anyone was still tempted to swallow the New York Times version of events, Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s prime minister in 2016, writes in his new memoir of Downer’s report: “He had no authority from Canberra to do this, and the first we heard of it in Australia was when the FBI turned up in London and wanted to interview Downer.
“We were very reluctant to get dragged into the middle of the US presidential election,” Turnbull continued, “but agreed to Downer being interviewed on the basis it was kept confidential and any information he provided was not circulated beyond the FBI.”55
With one glaring exception in Alexander Downer, it seems the Australian government was more protective of the rights of U.S. citizens than our own government was.
But wait, there’s more. Even though the officials at the top of the Obama FBI managed to persuade the inspector general to view the Downer claim as a report from a friendly foreign government, it’s clear that Downer did not characterize it that way—and the FBI knew it. In May of 2020, the government watchdog group Judicial Watch obtained via the Freedom of Information Act a redacted copy of the official July 31, 2016, FBI electronic communication that created the Crossfire Hurricane case targeting the Trump campaign. While most names are redacted, the document includes an email from a U.S. official in London
