How to Dig Up Dirt from the Russians

The fact that accusations of collusion with Russia have dogged the president and not Clinton isn’t just because it was Trump who won the election. Nor is it just a matter of the mainstream media focusing on Republican sins. It reflects the strategic advantages of the Clinton team’s professionalism, including the use of multiple cutouts and intermediaries. Trump’s improvisatory amateurism compares poorly with the Clinton team’s practiced tradecraft.

We know that at least some significant Trump team-members were enthusiastic about getting dirt on Hillary from Russians. Told by a British publicist that “the Crown prosecutor of Russia” could “provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary,” Donald Trump Jr. infamously replied that “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Don Jr. proceeded to arrange for a June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower. The participants: campaign boss Paul Manafort, Ivanka Trump’s husband Jared Kushner, Don Jr., and some Russians. It is a measure of the Trump team’s slapdash planning that not only had they failed to do any due diligence on their Russian guests, they hadn’t even been told their names. Even more amateurish was the fact that senior Trump aides were taking such a direct meeting in the first place.

The leader of the small group of Russians at Trump Tower that day was lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. And instead of delivering the dirt that had been promised, she wanted to talk about the sanctions on Russian nationals implicated in human rights abuses, sanctions imposed by a U.S. law known as the Magnitsky Act.

It wasn’t the first time that day Veselnitskaya had tangled over the Magnitsky Act. In the morning, she had been at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for a hearing involving Prevezon, a Russian-owned real estate firm she represented. She was there with her American legal team, from the firm BakerHostetler. Among the Baker crew was Glenn Simpson, honcho of Fusion GPS—the same firm retained through intermediaries by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to produce the anti-Trump “dossier.”

Simpson and Fusion GPS had been working at the direction of Veselnitskaya for two years, in an effort to dig up dirt on the Magnitsky Act’s driving force, financier William Browder. Except, as Simpson was quick to point out when questioned on Capitol Hill, he wasn’t hired by the Russian lawyer. He was hired, rather, by BakerHostetler, which Simpson described to House investigators as “a big Midwestern Republican-oriented law firm that is one of my oldest clients.”

As to the prime mover, Simpson was in the dark. “We didn’t know much about the client,” he said. Knowing about the client was Baker’s job: “Obviously, the lawyers have responsibility to evaluate whether the client is engaged in anything improper, and they certainly have to determine the source of their funds.”

There are notable advantages to having a law firm act as a cutout. In this case, it provides deniability should one ever be asked about one’s work for the Russians. House investigators asked Simpson if it gave him pause that his anti-Browder oppo-work was helpful to Vladimir Putin. Simpson’s response: “I prepared this research in connection with an American lawsuit for an American law firm.”

Which isn’t to say that Simpson didn’t eventually come to know the Russian who was writing the checks. Not only was he there in court with Veselnitskaya on the day she would go to Trump Tower, he was among a group who had dinner with her in New York the night before. And, oh yes, he also happened to be at dinner with Veselnitskaya the next evening at a Washington restaurant.

Someone with a suspicious mind might be inclined to look askance at the fact that the Russian who reached out to Don Jr. just happened to dine with the man behind the dossier, both before and after her meeting at Trump Tower. But Simpson told the House Intelligence Committee that it was pure coincidence. “To be clear, I didn’t know about this meeting before it happened, and I didn’t know about it after it happened.”

Simpson is no fool and, nudged by the ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, he allowed that the coincidence might raise eyebrows: “I would certainly agree with the observation that for these matters to have intersected in the way they did is, you know, remarkable.” You can judge for yourself how persuasive Simpson is in his further claim that Veselnitskaya’s trip to Trump Tower “caught me totally by surprise, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about what it means, if it means anything. And as best as I can figure,” Simpson said, “the Russians were up to a lot of stuff.”

The Russians were indeed up to a lot of stuff. And there’s every reason to believe that Russian efforts to enlist American collaborators (unwitting and otherwise) extended to both parties.

Consider the dossier prepared for Simpson and Fusion GPS by onetime British spy Christopher Steele. If the dossier is to be believed (admittedly a big if), Steele’s anonymous sources were almost entirely Russian. “Source A” was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure,” according to Steele; Source B, “a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin”; Source C, “a senior Russian financial official”; Source G, “a senior Kremlin official.” In other words, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was paying for dirt acquired from senior figures in Moscow.

Given the dossier’s impact—it spawned government surveillance of Trump associates during and after the election—why is it not a scandal that the document appears to have been prepared in—let’s go ahead and use the word—collusion with Russian sources? In no small part, this is because Clinton was careful to keep her fingerprints off the dossier. Between the Clinton campaign and the Russian officials dishing dirt on Trump were multiple intervening layers: Steele worked for Simpson and Fusion GPS; Fusion GPS worked for the Democratic law firm Perkins Coie; the law firm was paid by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary for America.

Just how useful it can be to have so many intermediaries can be discerned in the House question of Simpson: “Did the DNC or the Hillary Clinton campaign for presidency ever direct Christopher Steele to discuss the contents of his dossier with the media that you’re aware of?” House counsel asked Simpson last November. Simpson responded, “I was the one that directed him to do that.”

“Did you do that of your own volition,” the investigator pressed, “or did you do that at the direction of a client or another entity?”

“I want to be as helpful as I can without getting into client communications,” Simpson said. “So I guess I would like to say generally, I mean—generally when reporters—when we have to deal with the press, we would inform our clients that we were doing—you know, in any case if you’re dealing with the press, it’s incumbent on you to, you know, make sure your client knows that.”

Somewhere in that fog is an admission that, if not Hillary, or if not Hillary’s campaign, or if not the DNC—who knows which of his clients Simpson is talking about?—at least Perkins Coie was in on the effort to brief reporters on the dossier.

Simpson explained that he directed Steele to go to the press with the dossier because he “was angry” about James Comey’s announcement in late October, less than two weeks before the election, that the FBI was reopening its investigation into Hillary over her emails: “We tried to decide how to respond to that,” Simpson told investigators, but was then quick to add: “And when I say ‘we,’ I mean like me and my little, you know, company, and Chris [Steele] and, you know—I didn’t have any dealings with Mrs. Clinton or any of these other people.”

After fishing for who might have given the go-ahead to spread the dossier far and wide, the House investigator doubled back: “You said ‘We had to decide how to respond.’ Who is ‘we’ in that statement?”

“It’s mainly a reference to myself and to Chris,” Simpson replied. “You know, it was mainly between Chris and myself.” Note the repeated use of the word “mainly,” which means there might have been any number of other players in on the decision.

“Anyone else?” the House lawyer pressed.

“You know, I am not going to get into client communications, but, you know, I was still working for a client at that time.”

“Did you discuss with your client how to respond?” Simpson’s lawyer jumps in: “I think that is confidential.” Again, one sees here the advantage of campaigns’ outsourcing such work to a law firm.

In the indictment of the 13 Russian nationals last week, Mueller posited that they had been pursuing “a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system.” Wittingly or not, both campaigns seem to have played into their hands. The president’s partisans are wrong to think that the Clinton campaign’s solicitation of dirt from Russian informants somehow absolves them of blame for their own shenanigans. The same goes for the Clinton camp, which acts as if Trump’s hands being dirty must prove that its own are clean.

The Russians may well have offered dirt to both campaigns. The difference in how such entreaties played out could have everything to do with the relative rigor and discipline of the competing campaigns. Trump had the likes of George Papadopoulos, a blundering neophyte who bluffed his way onto the campaign’s foreign-policy advisory group and was soon drunkenly bragging in a London bar that he knew Russians had Hillary’s emails and had been mining them for compromising material. Hillary had the likes of tight-lipped professionals such as Simpson and the seasoning to keep layers of lawyers, with all the confidential privileges they bring, between herself and anyone who might be engaged in dirty tricks.

Eric Felten is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.