Dense and difficult as the reading was, I always had the feeling that I had stepped into a spy movie or a mystery novel. I kept wondering how your could make this into a spy movie or mystery novel.
It had all the elements -- false leads, red herrings, a surprise twist in the outcome, even a love story.
And yes, I know that real life is not a mystery novel or spy movie. The most suspicious person usually really is guilty. The harmless looking person in the background usually is harmless and only tangentially involved. But on the other hand, real life investigators really do pursue false leads and stumble into blind alleys sometimes.
Operation Crossfire Hurricane, as the investigation was known, is an example of how such things play out in real life. The FBI suspected a regular channel of communications between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, after learning that a presumed Russian agent had approached George Papadopoulus. The FBI identified four suspects who might be conduits -- Papadopoulus, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn. While it investigated all four, the FBI quickly singled out Page as the most likely contact. It was a reasonable supposition. Page had had frequent contacts with Russian intelligence operatives, had been interviewed by the FBI for his contacts with Russian intelligence agents in 2013, and was under an unrelated counterintelligence investigation at the time Operation Crossfire Hurricane opened.* In fact, he was secretly working for the CIA as a sort of double agent trying to gain intelligence on these Russian agents. (In the murky world of espionage, it is not always clear who is spying on who).
In a spy movie or mystery novel, this fact would have been dramatically revealed just as the FBI thought it was closing in for the kill and cut off this promising line of investigation. In fact, the lower level agents appear to have found out and not bothered to pass this information on when applying for a warrant to wiretap Page. Their numerous failings in applying for the wiretap form the bulk of the report. The FBI failed to turn up anything damaging on Page, despite the warrant and three renewals.
In the end, of course, the FBI ended up dropping the investigation and the thread was taken up Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee. These further investigations would make clear that there was no regular channel of communications between the Trump campaign and Russian Intelligence -- except that there was. The Trump campaign was not receiving reports from the Russians or coordinating strategies with them.** However campaign manager Paul Manafort was running an apparently rogue operation in which he regularly passed polling data to presumed Russian intelligence operative. What use the operative made of the polling data is unknown.
Obviously, if this had been a spy movie/mystery novel the investigation would not have changed hands. The FBI agents who started the investigation would finish it. What about discovering that what was going on was much less involved and sinister than it appeared at first sight? This is a permissible gambit, going back at least to Jorge Luis Borges' 1942 short story Death and the Compass, in which a seeming pattern of murders pointing to some bizarre occult practice turns out to have been a ruse to lure in the detective for the kill. Umberto Ecco copies the technique in his novel Name of the Rose, in which a series of murders at a monastery appear to follow the signs from the Book of Revelations, but it turns out that the monks were merely reading from a poisoned book and the pattern was superimposed by the viewers.*** And Dan Brown is infamous for the technique.
Of course, in your classic spy or mystery story, an even more classic ploy would be to have the whole Russian hack turn out to be a red herring and the DNC e-mails were really stolen by Seth Rich. Except that is not what happened. The Russians really did hack the DNC. So a classic spy/mystery story would have to take some liberties with events to make Seth Rich a credible red herring. What actually happened (for anyone who has forgotten) is that the DNC realized they had been hacked and called a private security firm to investigate. The firm traced the hack to Russian Intelligence. The DNC notified the FBI and publicized the hack. The e-mails first appeared in Wikileaks over a month later.
In a mystery/spy story, no one would have been aware of the hack until the e-mails appeared in Wikileaks. The FBI would then begin an investigation that initially centered on Seth Rich and became especially intense when he was murdered. But further investigation would clear him and reveal that the true hacker was Russian Intelligence -- true in the finding, false in the sequence. After realizing they were dealing with the Russians, the FBI would then receive a tip suggesting that the Russians had approached the Trump campaign with this information (true) and begin the investigation.
The Steele Dossier would also figure in as another red herring. I am not sure how the mystery/spy story would handle the Peter Strozk/Lisa Page romance (both were married to someone else; the romance ultimately never went anywhere), but what would a novel be without a love story?
Next up: What the Inspector General's report actually said.
*It should go without saying, but it was not normal for a presidential candidate to employ such a person as a foreign advisor.
**Although Roger Stone, close to the campaign but not a member, was receiving information from Wikileaks and passing it on to the campaign.
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