Election 2020

Who could have predicted?

It seems there's now a real witch hunt going on in the West Wing, with President Trump eager to determine who did — and didn't — talk to Woodward. Our new story: https://t.co/pCSHv2hlOX

— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) September 5, 2018

From CNN:

President Donald Trump, showing his outrage over Bob Woodward’s explosive new book, is ordering a real witch hunt in the West Wing and throughout his administration, asking loyal aides to help determine who cooperated with the book.

“The book is fiction,” Trump said Wednesday in the Oval Office alongside the Emir of Kuwait.

But even as the President publicly fumes, he’s privately on a mission to determine who did — and didn’t — talk to Woodward, CNN has learned. Two officials who have spoken directly to the President say he is pleased with the denials offered by chief of staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis.

Trump himself highlighted the denials of Mattis and Kelly, saying that both men were “insulted” by the comments Woodward attributed to them.

In Trump’s eyes, what makes or breaks aides who are reported to have made disparaging comments about him is how strongly they push back on the accusations.

Unlike Kelly and Mattis, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson never denied calling Trump a “moron” and a former senior White House official said Trump “never forgave him for it.”

But he is also taking note of the silence from several other former administration officials.

“He wants to know who talked to Woodward,” one of the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity amid the highly tense atmosphere in the West Wing in the wake of the book.

The search for leakers inside the administration contrasts with the White House’s defense that the book was fueled by “disgruntled employees,” offered by press secretary Sarah Sanders and others.

One source close to the White House said people inside the administration are “frustrated because they know it’s true.”

The President is directing the response strategy personally, officials say, in consultation with top communications official Bill Shine and other aides. At this point, it seems unlikely that anyone is immediately fired because of the book, one official says, because that would “lend credence to a book he is trying to discredit.”

More broadly, the White House’s emerging strategy to push back against Woodward’s reporting seems to be going after those former officials suspected of sharing documents and stories, according to several people familiar with the game plan.

“You don’t discredit Bob Woodward. You discredit the motives of the people” who provided the information, one person said.

Open thread.

The Mid-Afternoon of the Average Sized Sporks Has BegunPost + Comments (108)

I’m often asked in comments when the Intelligence Community (IC) will leak. My answer is always that the intelligence community, both the US’s and that of our allies and partners, will leak when it is in their strategic interest to do so. The targeted leaks in early 2017 about Attorney General Sessions phone calls and meetings with Ambassador Kislyak during the 2016 election, as well as about his problems with filling out his SF86 truthfully under penalty of perjury as it says on the form right before you sign it, were both these types of strategic leaks. They were intended to put Attorney General Sessions and his people on notice that if he messed up the counterintelligence investigation into the Russian active measures and cyberwarfare campaign against the United States, both of which – the investigation and the Russian active measures and cyberwarfare campaign – are still on going, then the Intelligence Community would leak additional damaging information about him.

NEW: BRUCE OHR worked w/ @FBI on a secret program to flip Russian oligarchs, including OLEG DERIPASKA.
Ohr once wrote that Deripaska was "almost ready to talk to US re: $ MANAFORT stole.” He also urged an intermediary to get Deripaska "to give up Manafort" https://t.co/68lvGfhVlh

— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) September 1, 2018

Yesterday The NY Times reported about what Bruce Ohr was really doing at the FBI and why he was really in contact with Christopher Steele. This reporting is built around anonymous officials providing the information to counter the narrative being leaked from the GOP House Caucus’s side of the Intelligence and Oversight Committees, as well as pushed by the President and his supporters on social media.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an initiative that remains classified. Most expressed deep discomfort, saying they feared that in revealing the attempts to cultivate Mr. Deripaska and other oligarchs they were undermining American national security and strengthening the grip that Mr. Putin holds over those who surround him.

But they also said they did not want Mr. Trump and his allies to use the program’s secrecy as a screen with which they could cherry-pick facts and present them, sheared of context, to undermine the special counsel’s investigation. That, too, they said they feared, would damage American security.

In short, the Intelligence Community strategically leaked because it was in its interests to do so.

The NY Times reports, based on these anonymous officials, that Ohr was working with Steele to try to flip Oleg Deripaska, known as Putin’s Oligarch (emphasis mine).

Between 2014 and 2016, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unsuccessfully tried to turn Mr. Deripaska into an informant. They signaled that they might provide help with his trouble in getting visas for the United States or even explore other steps to address his legal problems. In exchange, they were hoping for information on Russian organized crime and, later, on possible Russian aid to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to current and former officials and associates of Mr. Deripaska.

In one dramatic encounter, F.B.I. agents appeared unannounced and uninvited at a home Mr. Deripaska maintains in New York and pressed him on whether Paul Manafort, a former business partner of his who went on to become chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign, had served as a link between the campaign and the Kremlin.

The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader, clandestine American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining cooperation from roughly a half-dozen of Russia’s richest men, nearly all of whom, like Mr. Deripaska, depend on President Vladimir V. Putin to maintain their wealth, the officials said.

Two of the players in the effort were Bruce G. Ohr, the Justice Department official who has recently become a target of attacks by Mr. Trump, and Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled a dossier of purported links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Mr. Steele sought to aid the effort to engage Mr. Deripaska, and he noted in an email to Mr. Ohr in February 2016 that the Russian had received a visa to travel to the United States. In the email, Mr. Steele said his company had compiled and circulated “sensitive” research suggesting that Mr. Deripaska and other oligarchs were under pressure from the Kremlin to toe the Russian government line, leading Mr. Steele to conclude that Mr. Deripaska was not the “tool” of Mr. Putin alleged by the United States government.

The timeline sketched out by Mr. Ohr shows contacts stretching back to when Mr. Ohr first met Mr. Steele in 2007. It also shows what officials said was the first date on which the two discussed cultivating Mr. Deripaska: a meeting in Washington on Nov. 21, 2014, roughly seven months before Mr. Trump announced that he was running for president.

Bruce Ohr is One Answer to the Question of When the Intelligence Community Will LeakPost + Comments (44)