Volume V, Part 12 Wraps Up the Trump Campaign

 

The final part of the sub-part of the Senate Intelligence Committee Volume V labeled "Counter Intelligence Concerns" is a sort of a wrap-up of what the Committee apparently considers minor matters.

Like the overall report, this final wrap-up begins with the juiciest part -- attempts by Republican operative Peter Smith to locate the missing Clinton e-mails on the dark web.  Placing Smith's attempts in the final section and devoting a mere ten pages (pp. 777-787) suggests that the Committee considers this a minor matter and not important.  I disagree.  Granted, the Committee, like the Mueller Report, found that Smith was on a wild goose chase and never came close to any non-public documents.  All he ever found were a bunch of conmen who believed that a fool and his money were soon parted and tried to shake Smith down.

But it is significant in the sense of showing a clear criminal intent on the part of the campaign. Of course, criminal intent is not by itself a crime.  There has to be a criminal act, or at least a criminal conspiracy or attempt.  Smith is safe from prosecution, being dead, and the Mueller Report did not find grounds to charge anyone else.  The Committee appears to consider criminal intent without criminal capacity to be unimportant.  

Again, I disagree.  Volume V confirms the finding of the Mueller Report that Smith was not a lone wolf operator.  He was acting at the behest of Michael Flynn who, in turn, was responding to Trump's repeated demands to find Hillary's deleted e-mails.  There is no need to follow all the details of Smith's cruising the dark web, willing to obtain the e-mails from anyone, Russian spies included, so long as they were authentic. The one thing he wanted to avoid was presenting what purported to be Hillary's deleted e-mails and having them exposed as a fraud.  Also significant -- Smith discussed his activities with campaign officials Sam Clovis (senior policy advisor) and David Bossie (Deputy Campaign Manager).  

But the biggest bombshell probably comes from Smith's correspondence with Charles Johnson, a political operative who was not part of the Trump campaign, but was in contact with Wikileaks.  Smith revealed his attempts to get the e-mails to Johnson, who responded (p. 787):

I talked to Steve who will compel you to turn over to us all 30,000 emails you located and referred to Wikileaks.  BB wants to publish them first.  We do not give a rats ass what happens to you and will turn you over the the (sic) Feds for prosecution if you do not comply.

The Committee believes that "Steve" referred to Steve Bannon, then Trump's Campaign Manager.  (It does not speculate who BB is, probably Breitbart, Bannon's magazine).  It is possible, of course, that this was a bluff, or that Bannon was not in on it.  But it looks very much as though the Trump Campaign considered Smith's actions to be illegal and still wanted to benefit from them.*

Again, to me this looks serious.  It looks like the strongest proof that outreach between the Trump Campaign and Russia was not entirely on the Russian side, and seems like the strongest evidence of criminal intent, although it did not transmute into criminal activity.  My assessment was:

[Smith's activities are] less equivalent to Smith and Ledeen going to steal the cash from the drawer at the Corner Convenience Store than to Smith and Ledeen going to the Corner Convenience Store to steal the Maltese Falcon. No matter how often the (sic) cased the joint, poked around and tried to find the hiding place, they would never find the Maltese Falcon because it wasn't there. Is it a criminal conspiracy to try to steal the Maltese Falcon from the Corner Convenience Store? I must admit to not knowing. But it does seem to me that if some con man at the Corner Convenience Store thinks that a fool and his money are soon parted, claims that the Maltese Falcon is there, and offers to steal it and sell it to you, some sort of crime is being committed.

In this I was influenced by Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare, who said:

[E]ven as a real hacking operation was going on, Trump personally, his campaign and his campaign followers were actively attempting to collude with a fake hacking operation that wasn’t going on. It is not illegal to imagine stolen emails and try to retrieve them from imagined hackers. But it’s morally little different from being spoon-fed information by Russian intelligence. The Trump campaign was seeking exactly the spoon-feeding it was accused of taking; it just couldn’t manage to find the right spoon, and it kept missing . . . its mouth.

The report goes on the the Alfa Bank server story and finds nothing of significance.  Some computer scientist found an unusual pattern of communications between Trump Tower and Russia's Alfa Bank. Neither the Trump Organization IT department or the IT department at Alfa Bank knew what it was about.  The Committee appears to believe that it was a spam marketing scheme of some sort, but two paragraphs are blacked out, so it is not clear.

During the campaign, there was considerable speculation in the press about why the Republican Party removed a call for providing lethal aid to Ukraine from its platform and suspected something sinister.  The Intelligence Committee, like the Mueller Investigation, found this to be nothing but an innocent attempt to comply with Trump's public speeches, done in coordination with some low-level campaign staffers who had no insight into Trump's thinking beyond what he said in public.  Neither the Russians nor any high level of the Trump campaign had anything to do with it.

There is also some discussion of Russian support for the Green Party.  Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, said she gave interviews to Russia Today and appeared at a RT dinner in Moscow because she wanted to get her message out any way she could.  The Committee found nothing sinister in her motives, although, of course, the Russians presumably had motives of their own.

And that is the end of the sub-section on counterintelligence concerns. But we are still only on page 810 of a 952 page report.  Coming up next is the government response to all this, some of which is quite interesting.

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*I suppose it is also possible that Johnson thought it was somehow a crime for Smith to withhold the e-mails.  The Committee believes the threat to "compel" referred to a civil lawsuit.  But I really don't see how.