Also by Dan Bongino Protecting the President: An Inside Account of the Troubled Secret Service in an Era of Evolving Threats The Fight: A Secret Service Agent’s Inside Account of Security Failings and the Political Machine Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away from It All A POST HILL PRESS BOOK Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump © 2018 by Dan Bongino All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-1-64293-098-6 ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-099-3 Cover design by Cody Corcoran No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher. Post Hill Press New York • Nashville posthillpress.com Published in the United States of America Dedication This book is dedicated to all of the police-state Liberals, swamp-rat Republicans, and delusional Never-Trumpers who showed us what can happen when your claim on power is challenged. Without you, this book exposing your grotesque abuses of power wouldn’t have been possible. Introduction PART 1: Making of the Trump-Russia Collusion Narrative PAUL MANAFORT Alexandra Chalupa Serhiy Leshchenko Victor Pinchuk GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS Joseph Mifsud Alexander Downer TRUMP TOWER MEETING The Backstory Natalia Veselnitskaya Glenn Simpson Rinat Akhmetshin THE STEELE DOSSIER DNC Servers and CrowdStrike Perkins Coie Christopher Steele The “Dossier” First Contact State Department and the FBI John Brennan and GCHQ Robby Mook and the Media PART 2: The Investigations COUNTERINTELLIGENCE Stages of the Investigation No Warnings, No Prevention No Facts on “Collusion” CIA Contributions Stefan Halper Carter Page “Least Intrusive Methods” Halper’s History Crossfire Hurricane Michael Flynn NSA Surveillance Expands SPECIAL COUNSEL PROBE Where’s the Crime? A Flood of Leaks What Hath the Investigation Wrought? PART 3: The Real Story RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE HILLARY CLINTON AND BARACK OBAMA Clinton’s Private Server Russia and Iran BRITISH INTELLIGENCE UKRAINE AND MANAFORT A FAILED SCHEME KEEPS GOING Appendix I: Timeline Appendix II: Media Leaks Appendix III: Charts of Connections Endnotes About the Authors Imagine if every night a group of suited men in shades came to your door, asking you to join them in a spectacular new business venture. Maybe some other people stopped by later, selling products and dropping hints that they’re part of the business plan as well. The men in shades return, asking you again to sign up. If they pressed you enough, you might agree to join them so they’d leave you alone. But once you accept, they reveal they’re undercover FBI agents, and you’ve just conspired to take part in a Ponzi scheme, not a business venture. Unethical, right? A so-called crime was orchestrated out of nothing. While police officers and federal agents approaching suspects in an undercover capacity is a tried-and-true investigative technique for gathering information, the order of events is critical. Typically, we would expect some basic evidence of a crime or a pressing intelligence need before asking officers, agents, and intelligence operators to approach a subject in an undercover or clandestine manner, not the other way around. When the same officers and agents contact innocent persons—with no factual information or evidence of a predicate crime to justify the allocation of resources—it’s an abuse of power, a violation of the trust given to law enforcement by the American people. It’s a setup. We believe this is what happened to the Trump team during the presidential campaign. As reported by investigative journalist Sara Carter, “Senior Obama officials used unsubstantiated evidence to launch allegations in the media that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, according to newly discovered documents and communications obtained by Congress.”1 Representative Mark Meadows, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told Carter, “It appears there was a coordination between the White House, CIA, and FBI at the onset of this investigation and it’s troubling... What we’re finding is the more we dig the more we realize that there appeared to be a willful coordination between multiple groups outside the Department of Justice and FBI.”2 This scandal is complicated and messy, involving intersections among the Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, intelligence agencies, and foreign operatives. The streams twist across the political landscape, but each flows into the same river. There’s no simple story here, no conspiracy theory—that’s something we’re not interested in pursuing. We don’t think all the actors in this scandal gathered in a smoke-filled room and hatched a plot. There’s no Doctor Evil at the helm. We do believe, however, that each entity, driven by its own motivation, played a role in creating a false narrative that almost caused Donald Trump to lose the election and continues to hound him in his presidency. It’s a narrative that has disrupted the US democratic system, lessened the credibility of American law-enforcement agencies, and sown contention in civil society. For the sake of truth, justice, and, yes, the American way, we need to expose what really happened in the 2016 presidential election—and beyond.