The Bulwark Podcast - Charlie Savage: The Real Witch Hunt?

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Trump has longed complained about a deep state plot to smear him with the Russia investigation, but the Durham probe of that investigation comes off as highly partisan, unethical, and loony. Charlie Savage joins Charlie Sykes today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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you subscribe to Bulwark Plus, you not only become part of an important and I think pretty special community, but you also have access to many of the products on the Bulwark Plus. You not only become part of an important and I think pretty special community, but you also have access to many of the products on the Bulwark website, including our daily suite of newsletters, My Morning Shots newsletter, JVL's Triad. Also, Sarah Longwell is back with the Focus Group podcast. Yesterday, as you know, we released the Bulwark's first ever poll of Republican primary voters. We're just trying to figure out how big the always Trump, maybe Trump, never Trump buckets are among those voters. This was conducted by Republican pollster Whit Ayers, who joins Sarah on a new edition

of the Focus Group podcast. If you remember a Bulwark Plus, you also have access to the weekly podcast that I do with my colleague Mona Charron called Just Between Us. We're all in this fight together. We are waging a lonely war for sanity, and we'd really appreciate if you could join us, and I don't think you'll regret it. Just sign up at Bulwark Plus on the website today. Obviously, this is a very busy news day. Nikki Haley is apparently officially running for president, which should be exciting news to the 6% or 7% of Republican voters who might support her. Tom Brady is retiring again.

George Santos is stepping down from his House committee assignments to devote himself full-time to his NFL career. Donald Trump, the leader of the Law and Order Party, apparently pled the Fifth Amendment more than 400 times during a recent deposition. And we're finding out today that the FBI is searching Joe Biden's home, even as we speak. So happy Wednesday. On today's podcast, we want to take a deep dive into the real witch hunt. We talked a little bit yesterday about Bill Barr and the role that he played in the special prosecutor. As you know, Donald Trump has been complaining about a witch

hunt for years about the investigation into his 2016 campaign, implying that the deep state was out to smear him, not implying, saying it over and over and over again. But as Charlie Savage and his colleagues at the New York Times reported, the investigation of the investigation, the Durham probe was, he writes, marred by the same flaws Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation. Or as Jonathan Chait put it in New York Magazine, it sure looks like Durham's counter investigation was just as abusive, partisan and unhinged as Trump's defenders made Mueller out to be. So the piece in the New York Times revealed an array of previously unreported episodes, one of which attracted a lot of attention, that there was a credible tip from Italian officials linking Donald Trump allegedly to suspected financial crimes and the way the billboard handled that. So joining me

on today's Bulwark podcast, Charlie Savage, the national security and legal reporter for the New York Times. Charlie, welcome to the Bulwark podcast. Thanks for having me on. So I want to mention that as a sign of the impact of the reporting in the Times, Senate Democrats are saying they're going to take a hard look at Durham's abuses as revealed in the story. So, I mean, that's a bit of news that they are reacting to this. Just your thoughts. I worked with my colleagues, Adam Goldman and Katie Benner on this for months. It was a really tough nut to crack to sort of get inside this investigation, this four years and counting investigation, not an easy thing to penetrate.

And so I really appreciate various attention that this piece has received. I think you're referring to the fact that Senator Durbin, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has indicated they're going to do some kind of oversight. It's a little vague what he's referring to at this point. But even this podcast, I appreciate you giving broader attention to this. Well, the Durham investigation, for people to understand, played a just massive role in the Trump world imagination that this was going to be the vindication, this was going to expose the deep state. And we have to go back to 2019, right? You know, egged on by Donald Trump. Bill Barr, the attorney general, decides to look into this theory that the Russia investigation stemmed from this vast conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies.

So let's start from the beginning. Why Bill Barr decided to launch this investigation in the first place? I think a lot of the focus here is on the Russia investigation before Mueller comes in as special counsel in 2017. The real focus has been, why did the Russia investigation begin? Why did the FBI launch the counterintelligence inquiry in July 2016 that was known by the codename Crossfire Hurricane? And how did it get going in the first instance? And so that's almost a year before Mueller comes in. Bill Barr had been retired, had been sitting around watching Fox News and so forth, and had become immersed in this mindset that there must be more than meets the eye here, that there was some kind of intelligence

operation targeting Trump. This was a conspiracy by FBI and intelligence officials to sabotage Trump, which was, of course, the Trump pushback against the fact that his campaign's links to Russia were coming under scrutiny. And so when Bill Barr had told a New York Times reporter in 2017, he saw greater reason to investigate Hillary Clinton than what Trump's relationship to Russia might be. He had drafted as a private citizen, at the time, secret memo to the Trump legal team suggesting a way they could shield Trump from scrutiny for obstruction of justice in the Mueller probe. That was kind of his job application, right? And effectively auditioning for the role. Yeah, auditioning for the role.

So after Trump gets rid of Jeff Sessions, who he regretted making attorney general because Sessions then recused himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, leaving Rod Rosenstein in charge, Trump nominates and appoints Bill Barr in early 2019 to become the attorney general. And at the time that he takes office, one of the things we learned is he tells the people he's working with that he already believes that the Russia investigation was the result of some kind of intelligence operation and that unearthing that would be a priority. And this is before he's received any information that he didn't see on Fox News. This is before he has any classified briefings about what's going on, what led to this. Soon after that, he does get a briefing about the actual origin of the FBI's decision to open that investigation in late July 2016, which is to say a senior Australian diplomat told the United States that a Trump campaign aid had seemed to drunkenly betray that they had advanced knowledge that Russia was going to put out the hacked Democratic emails.

That was the basis on which the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane. And Barr tells people at that point he doesn't buy it. So he has come in with this hunch that there's something more there. And as soon as Mueller is done and turns in his report, Barr launches this counter investigation. Okay, so let's just fast forward, because this investigation that he launched, the Durham investigation, is still technically ongoing, right? I mean, it's actually been going on longer, twice as long as the Mueller investigation did. And they haven't come up with any evidence of a deep state plot. They had spectacular failures in the courtroom. You found

that it was roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes. But who was Durham? My understanding is that he was a respected prosecutor, that he wasn't some MAGA figure just plucked out of the air by Bill Barr. There were reasons to believe that he might actually be a serious actor, correct? So John Durham is at the end of his career. He has spent more than three decades as a federal prosecutor in Connecticut. He's gained fame prosecuting public corruption cases. Administrations of both parties had given him special assignments to look into allegations of official wrongdoing, including allegations of corrupt relations between mafia informants and FBI agents in Boston. And then Attorney General Casey put him in charge of a CIA investigation

into the CIA's destruction of videotapes of its torture of terrorism detainees. And then Eric Holder, Democratic Attorney General, expanded that mandate to look into the CIA's torture program generally. He is a longtime career federal prosecutor. Donald Trump then appointed him to a political position, which was the U.S. attorney for Connecticut. But he's not someone who had a political reputation. He had been a career guy and someone who was taken seriously by administrations of both parties. Okay. And so there were expectations this thing wouldn't be the disaster that it turned out to be. Is disaster too strong a word? I mean, how would you describe it? It's been a complete failure and really an embarrassing one,

you know, particularly given Durham's performance in the courtroom, how quickly juries came back and rejected his charges. Objectively, it's been a rather embarrassing failure, hasn't it? Well, I don't want to characterize it like that. I think that's for someone like you to do. I'm just describing going to ask. The fact is, he was assigned to find the evidence that Bill Barr and Donald Trump convinced themselves was there, that there was an intelligence abuse scandal lurking at the origins of the Russia investigation. He spent a year trying to find it and did not. And Bill Barr himself later after the election conceded publicly that there was nothing there. But rather than just writing a report saying you assigned me to to look into this, and I did not find evidence for it, my assignment is done, he and Barr come up with a different rationale to keep going, and to what is now four years and counting, although we think that his grand jury has

expired. And so there's going to be no more, it's just a report. And, you know, so they pivot to this theory that the Hillary Clinton campaign conspired to frame Trump for Russia collusion, that basically the real origin of the Russia investigation, if it wasn't intelligence abuses, was that, you know, Hillary did it. They never found evidence to charge a conspiracy to defraud the government by the Hillary campaign either, but they did develop two cases, very narrow cases, false statement cases, one against a Democratic lawyer with ties to the Hillary campaign and one against a researcher for the notorious Steele dossier, just charging them with making false statements to the FBI, and used those narrow

charges to insinuate this theory he couldn't prove, that all of Trump's Russia collusion woes were Hillary's fault. Both of those cases collapsed in the courtroom. Both resulted in swift acquittals. On the Russia researcher one, the Steele dossier researcher one, part of it, the judge was so unconvinced that he wouldn't let one of the main charges even go to the jury, saying that the prosecution had failed to present enough evidence even to let a jury look at it. And then the jury acquitted on the remaining charges. So absolutely a collapse in the courtroom of the cases that he developed.

So I found the most dazzling details of your reporting having to do with Bill Barr's own relationship to all of this. I mean, attorney generals are typically supposed to keep some armed links from these kinds of politically sensitive investigations, but your reporting shows that Durham was really working very, very closely with Barr, and Barr was involved in this. You write that Durham visited Barr in his office for, at times, weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work. They also sometimes dined and sipped scotch together, people familiar with their work said. And then they also, you know, got on airplanes and flew around the world looking for evidence.

I mean, Bill Barr was really deeply engaged, far more deeply engaged than I think most people had realized, wasn't he? Of course, Bill Barr leaves halfway through this investigation and Durham keeps going. But yes, for that first period, Barr is closely consulting with Durham because Durham has not yet been named a special counsel. Nevertheless, it is very unusual how closely, you know, attorneys general do not run investigations at all. They are at the top of the hierarchy and there are people beneath them and beneath them and beneath them before you get to the case teams. But Barr was paying extremely close attention to the day-to-day minutiae of this investigation and consulting with Durham. And it really does appear for our time, sort of the co-leader of it. Certainly he

was going to Italy, Rome, and London with Durham, trying to help him get the evidence they were sure were there from foreign allied intelligence officials about what they had supposedly told the United States to set this Russia investigation in motion, only to be told that there was no such thing. In late 2019, you report the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz, came out with his own report on the Russia investigation. He found errors and omissions, but his broader findings contradicted Trump's claims. He found no evidence the FBI was politically motivated.

But according to your reporting, Durham pressured Horowitz to drop his findings about the sufficiency of that tip from the Australian diplomat. Horowitz wouldn't back down. Barr was unhappy with all of that. So talk to me a little bit about that, because that was a first indication that perhaps this wasn't playing out the way Trump and Barr were hoping it was going to play out. So Michael Horowitz is the inspector general for the Justice Department, and that role makes him independent. He is not a subordinate of Bill Barr. And he conducted his own exhaustive investigation into the origins and early stages of the Russia investigation, delivering a report in December of 2019. And he did find some problems, some serious problems, especially with a set of wiretap applications targeting a former

Trump campaign aide with links to Russia named Carter Page. Those wiretap applications were riddled with errors and omissions, and he had really quite scathing findings on that. And he discovered that a FBI lawyer had doctored an email used in the final renewal application that kept one of those omissions from coming to internal light when someone had asked a question. That guy was later prosecuted and pled guilty in a plea deal that Durham's team arranged, though it was Horowitz who developed that case. So that gave the Trump side something to point to. But his larger filings were an exoneration of the FBI. In scouring documents, questioning witnesses, he found no evidence that any FBI actions had been motivated by politics,

and he concluded that they had a lawful basis to open a full counterintelligence investigation. So that called into question the whole purpose of why Durham was conducting this parallel investigation and was going to establish a potentially definitive finding. Remains at this point the best look at that investigation we have. So Barr and Durham were upset about this. You're correct that Horowitz and his team came over to Barr's office the week before he was going to release that report to go over their findings. And Durham lobbied him to change his finding that there was a lawful predicate to open a full investigation. And Horowitz saying, well, maybe this tip was only enough for a preliminary investigation. Therefore, it was illegal for them to open this full investigation, different levels of investigations. Horowitz did not change his mind that that was within the realm of reasonable. And so Barr and Durham confer over the weekend and decide that

they're going to put out public statements disputing Horowitz's findings. Barr issues his statement about nine minutes before the public sees Horowitz's report, before anyone has had a chance to see it yet. That sounds familiar. Yes, it does, right? It's an echo of the Mueller report. Praising Horowitz and yet saying, in his view, that it was opened on the thinnest of suspicion is not adequate for this. And then about 30 minutes into it, after the report has gone live, they issue an extraordinary statement from Durham. Durham is known for being taciturn, press-averse, not saying anything in public.

And the Justice Department has a principle. You don't talk about ongoing investigations in public. And yet Durham's statement says he, based on his investigation, doesn't agree with Horowitz about the predication of Crossfire Hurricane being adequate based on his supposed access to greater information and quote-unquote evidence he's gathered to date. And so that really steps on Horowitz's finding and complicates it. I remember covering it at the time. It wasn't the Inspector General has found this. It was, here's a dispute. But years have now passed, and he has never presented any of this evidence he supposedly had gathered to contradict Horowitz's factual findings about the basis on which the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane.

Okay, so now we're getting to my favorite part of your story, the Italian tip. As you pointed out, on one of Barr's and Durham's trips to Europe, some Italian officials unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes. And they determined that this was credible enough. It was too credible and too serious to ignore. But instead of assigning it to somebody else, Barr gave it. I mean, it could have been outside of Durham's assignment. Barr had Durham investigated it himself. So let's talk about that, because Durham never filed any charges, not clear what the investigation was or what he learned or how aggressive he was. But as you reported, the extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included Mr. Trump really was kept a secret. So let's talk about that because, you know, it's fascinating to learn that they actually had evidence that Trump had

committed a crime, that they were investigating that. But they put out statements that, I don't know what word you would use, but I would use disingenuous, duplicitous, implying they were investigating someone's criminal activity, but never letting anybody know that it was Donald Trump's potential criminal activity. Well, I'll say several things here. And first, to just correct something, they didn't put out statements. In this period, mid-October 2019, it leaks that, and it first leaks through my newspaper. I wasn't on the story, but my two other colleagues who co-wrote this project were the authors of that story that this administrative review that Durham was conducting at Barr's request had evolved to encompass a criminal investigation. So my newspaper reported that we don't know what the suspected crime is and then

all the other major outlets citing their own sources confirmed that this has happened. But everyone misunderstands what this is, because everyone assumes that it must have something to do with Durham's assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia investigation. Therefore, this means Durham has found some potential criminal wrongdoing among the officials who opened the investigation into Trump. And that's how that story was reported in many different outlets, but it must be said, starting with ours, in October of 2019. And they did not correct that. Now, it is a Justice Department principle that you don't talk about ongoing investigations. It's just that's the principle that Bill Barr violated over and over and over again when it came to Durham's investigation, except in this instance. And in

this instance, they let that misimpression linger. And as you point out, you know, by the spring of 2020, you know, Trump himself was actively stoking the belief among his supporters that Durham was going to charge Obama, maybe Joe Biden. And Bill Barr actually ends up going on Fox News and saying that our concern of potential criminality is focused on others. So he did confirm that it was potential criminality. The others sort of left that implication hanging there. Nobody could have imagined that the criminal investigation might have involved Trump himself, right? And Trump, you know, kept up, this misinformation. In fairness to Barr, in that statement, when he's correcting or at least trying to slightly temper expectations that, you know, Trump is creating out of thin air that

Obama and Biden are going to go to jail because Durham's going to put him in there over the Russia case. I don't think he was necessarily referring to, you know, whatever this hazily understood even now financial investigation linked to Trump was. I think he was still trying to talk about the Russia stuff in context there because no one knew that this other thing was there. And by 2020, they have opened a criminal investigation into the notion that maybe the Hillary Clinton campaign had framed Trump. And so they start using tools of criminal process by the time he's making that statement on the main focus. But just to emphasize one other thing earlier about this Italian tip, absolutely, as we understand it, we don't understand it perfectly well. It's still through a glass darkly, but it had nothing to do, whatever this financial crime thing was that had

links to Trump, this tip, this allegation that the Italian officials unexpectedly dropped into their lap when they were in Rome. It didn't have anything to do with the Russian investigation. It was unrelated to that. And so it had nothing to do with Durham's mandate to scrutinize that investigation. The normal thing to do at that point would be to refer it to someone else because he's doing this. He's not doing that. But Barr decides to keep it in Durham's control. And so we do not know what level of investigation that was.

We don't know what steps he took to pursue it. We just know he brought no charges. So as the investigation moves on, you described this internal strife. Durham's all of this, you know, prosecutorial misconduct that's going on, the weaponization of the Justice Department. But the Durham investigation had some really serious knock-down, drag-out arguments about legal ethics that resulted in some of the key people quitting Durham's team. So talk to me about that. Norden, he is a longtime federal prosecutor in Connecticut, had worked with Durham for decades, was not just a sidekick, but was a serious top tier prosecutor in her own right.

She was the acting U.S. attorney in Connecticut for a time. Michael Mukasey put her in charge of an investigation into whether Bush administration officials should be charged with crimes over the scandal about their firing of U.S. attorneys. And she ultimately concluded they should not be, but the fact that she was assigned to that role shows that she has independent stature. But she had been definitely his number two for many, many years and was his number two on this investigation. We are told that over the course of really 2020, as the initial effort to see whether there were intelligence abuses lurking in the origins of the Russia investigation was

hitting a dead end, and it started to evolve toward this more political idea that you could scapegoat Hillary Clinton for the fact that Trump came under suspicion for his ties to Russia in 2016, strains began to emerge between them. The first thing that they argued in front of others about was that Bill Barr kept saying things in public about their investigation, darkly hinting that there was something they had found, that know, the focus on criminality and people might be charged, even if it's not Biden or Obama, as Trump was hinting. And Danahy is said to have urged Durham to tell Bill Barr to be quiet, to adhere to Justice Department policy and not talk about their investigation in public. But Durham was unwilling to challenge Barr about that. And then there was another sort

of major finding in our project that we haven't talked about yet, was that as they shifted to looking for a basis to blame the Clinton campaign for Trump's Russia collusion problems. They came to focus on an aid to George Soros, the liberal financier and philanthropist whose open society foundation, civil society groups have made him a target for dictators around the world. They were kicked out of Russia in 2016 by Putin, who called them a security threat. And they're also sort of a punching bag for far right elements in the United States, often which has anti-Semitic overtones. An aid to George Soros, and it's going to take me a minute to explain this to people, was mentioned in Russian intelligence memos that were dubious. And this had a connection to Clinton, which I'll get to in a second. What are these memos that were dubious. And this had a connection to Clinton, which I'll get to in a second. What are these memos? The Dutch intelligence agency hacked the GRU. This has been known publicly

since 2017. So this itself is not a revelation, but the Dutch intelligence agency had hacked Russia's intelligence agency and extracted from its servers a set of memos in which Russian intelligence analysts were discussing things that were happening in the United States based on purported intercepted emails from American victims of Russian hacking. And in one of these memos, so it's not the actual raw emails, it's, you know, Ivan, the analyst saying, here's something we learned. They discussed how this guy, Leonard Bernardo, a aide to Soros, had supposedly talked to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, prominent Democratic Congresswoman, in 2016, about various things, and that one of those things had been supposedly that they discussed how they had heard that Hillary had approved a plan

in late July 2016 to stir up a scandal by tying Trump to Russia's hacking of Democratic emails. Now, this tranche of Russian memos was seen by the U.S. intelligence community as unreliable. They made demonstrably false, exaggerated, internally inconsistent claims. And some thought that the Russians may have been aware that that server was hacked and had deliberately seeded it with disinformation as part of their efforts to sow confusion and so forth. And the memos discussing Bernardo and Debbie Wasserman Schultz had come to light for a different reason in 2017. And the two of them had said at the time, we don't even know each other. We have never communicated about anything, which is part of the sign that these things. Maybe, you know,

pick a source aid and inject it into the area. You know, that'll get people stirred up. Durham wanted to use that memo as evidence that claimed that these two people had discussed a Clinton plan to attack Trump for his ties to Russia or to try to link him to Russia as part of his pivot. And so he wanted to prove that those memos were describing real conversations and weren't fabricated. and asked for what's called a D order, a judicial order that can allow you to go to a service provider and get transaction information about emails. This would show were these two people communicating and if they were, when were they communicating based on this memo. And we are told first he sends an aid, the prosecutor working for him to ask for this, that Howell rejects that even though it's a pretty low standard just to get transaction

information, that this memo is not enough to invade an American's privacy. So the federal judge tells him, no, you can't get it. Now, you don't have enough foundation to intrude on this person's privacy. Durham goes back and personally appears before her and asks her to reconsider, and she again rejects him. And then instead of taking no for an answer, he shifts gears and he uses grand jury powers to go to Soros's organization and Bernardo directly and say, I want printouts of your emails. I want testimony. We don't know whether he served a subpoena or he threatened to serve a subpoena if they did not cooperate voluntarily. They could have fought that, but they did not.

It appears to me that they just wanted it to go away. The Soros folks could have fought it. Yeah. You imagine, what is Soros trying to hide? It came out that they were trying to resist this effort by Durham in 2020 amid, all kinds of toxic politics, anti-Semitism, whatever, they instead go along and cooperate, provide the documents, provide the testimony, appears to be there was no there there again. Certainly he doesn't cite anything in any subsequent case that he'd found. And so that happened. And that was the second thing that Norah Danahy and Durham quarreled about.

Because he was circumventing, trying to go around a federal judge. Yes. I mean, it's not illegal to do that. If you have a different tool, then the one tool doesn't work, but the other tool is still lawful, you can do it. But it's certainly extraordinary and unusual to have done that. So they got the information or the lack thereof that they were looking for. Danahy also objected to that. And they fought about that. She said to colleagues that he had done it without telling her, in fact. And then in September of 2020 was the straw that broke the camel's back, as we understand it. At this point, Barr is pressuring Durham to produce an interim report that could come out with some of his investigative findings. He's at this point not brought charges

against anyone that he himself had found, negotiating the no jail time plea with the guy that Horowitz had found, the lawyer, the doctor, the email. Trump is putting all kinds of pressure on them. Barr writes in his memoir how their relationship was deteriorating as the campaign heated up because he had failed to deliver scouts in time for the election. Barr pushes him, come up, write me a draft report sometime in the summer of 2020. Dana, he discovers this report, a draft of it in September, did not know it was being written and explodes. And part of it is that it takes some of this dubious information and presents it at face value. But also she tells people first in front of this big argument they have, and then she writes a memo and sends it to everyone on the team, I think, and then resigns the next day.

They shouldn't be putting out any information from a half-completed investigation until the investigation is done. They certainly shouldn't be doing it right before an election, and they shouldn't be taking dubious information and presenting it at face value. And we've talked to people who know about this from a variety of perspectives. And I think it's important to say that people who are close to Bill Barr acknowledge that this happened, but say that he had ordered up this draft report just to see what it would look like, to see what would have to be declassified if they were to put something out. And if they were to put something out, his intention was to put it out either in the summer of 2020 or after the November 2020 election, but not just before the election. That's the claim. So we'll see. In any case, she quits. And a couple weeks later, someone leaks to a Fox News personality that there will not be an interim report after all,

which disappoints Trump fans who had been expecting one and were hoping for a pre-election bombshell of some type. And then, of course, you had the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, declassifying nearly a thousand pages of intelligence materials for Durham to use, you know, and trying to keep the story alive. In the time we have left, though, Charlie, let's take a step back. Given everything we know, and we know what the conspiracy theories were, we know what Trump said, we know what Bill Barr was looking for, we know what he was hoping that Durham was going to dig up. But leaving all that aside, based on what we know now, why did this investigation into Trump, the Trump-Russia investigation begin in the first place? It wasn't the Steele dossier. It wasn't some intelligence plot. To the best of your understanding, why was this investigation begun?

What was it? The diplomat's tip? You know, the overall record of Donald Trump sucking up to Putin? So in July of 2016, Russia dumps out hacked Democratic emails on the eve of the democratic national convention disrupting Clinton's what was supposed to be her you know launch into the general campaign if you recall it's been years now stirring up anger among Bernie Sanders supporters instead of having a moment of unity and amid that extraordinary moment, a senior Australian diplomat reveals to the United States that he had earlier had a conversation with a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor who had gotten drunk, and it appears to reveal that the campaign had advanced knowledge that Russia was going to dump out Democratic emails. So in that context, that tip was what led Bill Priestap, senior counterintelligence official at the time in the FBI, to open a full counterintelligence investigation into what the nature of links between the Trump campaign and Russia was. You know, one of the complexities here surrounding that is also a public set of suspicions around Trump

and when this has happened. And so the public doesn't know for years about the Australian tip that led the FBI to open this. But in this period, people are talking about, boy, it's weird. Trump has hired all these people with ties to Russia, like Paul Manafort and Carter Page. He's publicly calling on Russia to hack Hillary. He's got financial ties to Russia, like Paul Manafort and Carter Page. He's publicly calling on Russia to hack Hillary. He's got financial ties to Russia. He keeps saying nice things about Vladimir Putin. What is going on here? And that's the atmosphere in which the public suspicions are mapped onto what the FBI is separately pursuing based on this Australian diplomat's tip.

And yet shortly before the election, your paper had a big front page story saying the FBI had found no ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Now, we know that there was an ongoing investigation at the time, but how did that come about? Do we know who it was who was leaking that there's nothing here when, in fact, there was enough to warrant a continued investigation and, of course, the full-blown Mueller investigation? You know, I was not involved in that period. There's been public reporting about it, but I don't feel like it's my place to go there. I will say, you know, that story said that the FBI was looking at Russia but had seen no clear ties in Mueller, in terms of the lens of collusion.

Right? And ultimately two years later, Mueller never found enough to charge anyone with conspiracy. And that was at the very beginning of the campaign. So I'm not... For all the fact that the left hates that story and that headline, it actually does capture the state of play in October of 2016. So let's take that other step back to what the Mueller investigation found, because of course,

in MAGA world, they accept that the Trump claim that the Mueller investigation was a complete exoneration, which it clearly was not. As you point out, Robert Mueller did not file any criminal charges, did not find any, quote unquote, collusion. But collusion is not a thing in the law. So what is your sense? Again, with the benefit of hindsight, looking back on what we found out, was the Russia hoax a hoax or was there something there? I mean, how much was there that was actually there? Or I mean, how much was there that was actually there? Obviously, the best thing we have of this is volume one of the Mueller report, and then the Senate Intelligence Committee report of 1000 pages that was came out about a year later.

The volume of the Mueller report, which is a couple hundred pages long, documents myriad links between Trump campaign associates in Russia. It establishes that Russia was specifically trying to help Trump win the election, and that members of the Trump campaign understood this interference was happening and expected that they would benefit from it. What it doesn't establish is that there was a criminal conspiracy, a meeting of the minds between the two and some affirmative act. It's more like people dancing together at a distance, I think. There were further episodes that came to light as a result of the investigation. Most importantly, that Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, was meeting with a Russian oligarch in the summer of 2016 and, well, Ukrainian oligarch, but really Soviet era, and sharing campaign polling data

and strategy material, which the Treasury Department has said, but we don't know what evidence it's based on, in fact, made its way back to the Russian Intelligence Agency. The Senate Intelligence Committee has said that person was a Russian agent. We don't know what evidence that's based on because it's just an assertion. So there it is. And then at that conversation in which the information was going the one way, they also discussed whether if Trump, if elected, would bless a peace plan to carve up Ukraine, that would allow a sort of Moscow puppet government to control eastern Ukraine. So that was extraordinary, but that still doesn't necessarily rise to,

apparently, you know, a criminal conspiracy. So it is a murky area. I'm struggling to connect the dots how this story of the former FBI official Charles McGonigal plays into all of this, because now we're finding out that here is a high-ranking investigator for the FBI who was also apparently on the payroll of foreign nationals, including a sanctioned Russian oligarch. So do we know what impact that had on the investigation, or how relevant it is to what did happen and what didn't happen, or what we were told and what we weren't told about the investigation? Do we know yet? I'm not aware that it had a major impact on this investigation. There was a lot of, there was some sort of bad misinformation when he was arrested. Yeah. Floating around Twitter, people saying, oh, he ran the Russian investigation. No,

he did not run this investigation. Until October of 2016, he was in charge of a section of the FBI in DC that coordinated cybercrime stuff between counterintelligence and criminal. That section did not play a role in the Russian investigation, was not part of the organization chart. He was not a leader of the investigation. And then in October 2016, he is transferred to New York to take over counterintelligence operations in New York field office, which is not where that investigation was being run out of. So he plays a cameo role in the Inspector General report when that Australian diplomat's tip is winding its way through the bureaucracy

towards the eventual decision makers who will decide to open investigation. It transits through him at one stage. Someone forwards it to him and he forwards it on. That seems to be it. And in 2017, the Carter Page surveillance, the ones that Horowitz found were so riddled with errors and omissions. A couple of renewal application periods of that were devolved back to the New York field office. So someone working for him or someone working for someone who was working for him was, you know, overseeing that wire tapping. That's an important clarification because there are a lot of people who are going to be,

you know, DMing me and, you know, pounding in the comments. Well, what about this guy? Because didn't he play a major role in this investigation? And I think your description of him playing just a cameo role is an important clarification. It's an important corrective to that narrative. Charlie Savage, thank you so much for your time and thank you for your reporting. Charlie Savage is national security and legal reporter for The New York Times, who, along with his colleagues, has written really what I think has been the definitive to date account of the failed Durham investigation and Bill Barr's obsession with pursuing one of Donald Trump's pet conspiracy theories. Charlie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. Thanks for having me on.

And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.