The Symbiosis of Trump and Adversarial Intelligence Services
America First? Not so much
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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT!
In 2019, Trump tried to get Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce Ukraine was launching an investigation into Joe Biden because Biden was doing corrupt business in the country. Biden was not, in fact, doing anything corrupt in Ukraine. But Trump wanted to create this fake narrative to help him, Trump, win the 2020 election. Zelenskyy refused, because there was no evidence Biden had done anything wrong. Trump threatened to withhold weapons from Ukraine. The episode led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Zelenskyy might have refused, but other Ukrainian actors—these ones with ties to Russian intelligence—pushed the lie anyway and enlisted the help of people close to Trump, including Rudy Giuliani, to move the operation along.
The two elements—Trump pressuring Zelenskyy to announce an investigation in Biden’s (nonexistent) corruption and Russian proxies pushing the narrative that Biden was doing corrupt business in Ukraine—were not separate. They were part of the same effort to help Trump win in 2020 and then later to help Trump’s lie that he did win in 2020. The main network for this effort ran through a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch named Andriy Derkach. For background, read this👇
One of the proxies involved in this operation was Alexander Smirnov.
Smirnov was an FBI informant who went to prison for lying to the FBI. Among the things he lied about: at the direction of his Russian intelligence handler, he told the FBI that Joe and Hunter Biden had been paid millions of dollars by corrupt officials at the Ukrainian company Burisma in order to protect Burisma from a corruption investigation Joe Biden was overseeing. Again, this was not true, but it was part of the ongoing effort to help Trump win.
Smirnov’s lie became the basis for the GOP’s attempt to impeach Joe Biden.
I’ve written quite a bit about this case, so for background, see the story I linked to above and this one👇
Smirnov was prosecuted by the Department of Justice and sent to prison for lying to the FBI. But that was back when the Department of Justice was still independent.
Under the Trump administration, the DOJ has reversed itself and is now supporting Smirnov’s attempts to withdraw his guilty plea and get out of his sentence. David Corn has this very good write up. But the main point here is: Trump’s DOJ is working to get a known Russian intelligence asset out of prison because the thing that got him thrown in prison—telling the FBI, on behalf of Russian intelligence, that the Bidens were doing corrupt business in Ukraine—was done to help Trump.
The man in charge of this effort is Todd Blanche, current acting attorney general, former personal lawyer for Trump. The same lawyer who met with Ghislaine Maxwell (to tell her to stay quiet), after which she was moved to a nicer prison and got a puppy. Oh, he also represented Paul Manafort (implicated in Russia’s interference of US elections in 2016).
Quite literally, Trump is directing his DOJ to help an asset of Russian intelligence because that asset helped Trump. It demonstrates how Trump and Russia work together to achieve the same objectives. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
Trump is developing a symbiotic relationship with China, as well.
Last week came news that FBI Director Ka$h Patel plans to release documents related to the investigation into Christine Fang, a suspected Chinese intelligence operative. Between 2011 and 2015, Fang made inroads with California Rep. Eric Swalwell. She helped direct some donations to his campaign and inserted an intern in his office.
Fang also associated with numerous other state and national officials. That’s not surprising, considering her job as a Chinese spy was to needle her way into influential circles. We’ve seen this with Maria Butina, Nomma Zarubina, and countless others. See these stories👇
But Swalwell is a vocal Trump critic. So Trump needs to target him. And Ka$h, as we know, is a loyal lackey. Ka$h wants to create the narrative that Swalwell was in cahoots with Chinese intelligence, in an effort to damage Swalwell politically.
But here’s the incredible thing. When the FBI briefed Swalwell in 2015 and warned him they thought Fang was a Chinese intelligence operative, you won’t believe what he did.
He broke off contact with her and offered his help to the FBI.
Shortly after, Fang fled the US, likely because she knew the hammer was about to come down on her. Swalwell was never accused of any wrongdoing.
Compare Swalwell’s reaction to the reaction of Trump and his minions who were warned about Russian influence operations as far back as 2016. They all lied about their contacts with Russians. Trump campaign advisor Carter Page was warned by the FBI that Russian intelligence officers were trying to recruit him. He continued meeting with them anyway. So did many others in Trump’s circle. They also accepted help from Russian intelligence. As time went on, that relationship, as I just wrote, became symbiotic. The two are working together.
I highly recommend this piece from Asha Rangappa, which includes a much more detailed comparison of Swalwell’s actions and Trump’s actions once they each were told they were being targeted by an adversarial intelligence service.
The two accusations of corruption—against Biden and against Swalwell—show that Trump isn’t just targeting his political opponents. He is willing to work with Russian and Chinese intelligence services to target his political opponents.
In the China case, Patel is reportedly considering sending FBI agents to speak with Fang, the Chinese intelligence operative, to see if she has any information on Swalwell. That is, the director of the FBI is soliciting a Chinese intelligence operative to provide derogatory and false information on a sitting member of Congress. Patel is even considering providing Fang a visa to come to the US to give the FBI information on Swalwell.
Again: Swalwell has never been accused of any wrongdoing. On the contrary, when told he was being targeted, he did all the right things. Now, the director of the FBI is inviting a Chinese intelligence operative to smear him because he is a political opponent of Trump. This is inviting Chinese intelligence to run an information operation against a sitting member of Congress.
Destroying Institutions
Trump and Patel’s actions here are even more sinister. By using national security tools of government to target political opponents, they are actively destroying the institutions that were created to keep us safe. Anyone who worked the Russia investigation has been targeted, fired, or moved. The FBI has removed agents from counterintelligence to focus them on border protection. Programs put in place to counter foreign information operations have been defunded. The damage to the intelligence community is profound, not just now, but also in the longer term.
John Sipher wrote for The Bulwark about the long-term institutional damage Trump and his minions are causing to the intelligence community.
Sipher writes:
By the end of Trump’s second term, the intelligence community will still exist on paper, likely in exactly the same way it does now. But if current trends continue, it will be less trusted internally, less candid externally, more cautious in dissent, and less able to attract or retain the people who make it effective. The NSC will be thinner, the State Department weaker, FBI priorities more distorted, and intelligence analysis more vulnerable to political pressure. The United States will still possess immense capabilities. But it will be using them in a degraded decision-making system, one less able to judge what is meaningful and what is misleading and less willing to hear unwelcome truths. …
If Washington begins to operate as if expertise were treason and truth were whatever flatters the leader, then the United States will not only make worse decisions. It will become a less reliable ally, a less formidable adversary, and a less powerful country.
The gravest risk is not that Trump dislikes the intelligence community. It is that he is normalizing a presidency that treats independent expertise itself as illegitimate. A country can recover from a president who does not read enough briefing papers. It’s much harder to recover from a political culture that teaches officials to stop being honest in the first place.
The president of the United States is actively making the country more vulnerable to threats and is working with our adversaries, including their intelligence services.
THE WEEK’S LINKS
A roundup of things you should be reading
HUNGARY’S ELECTION
In Hungary, the First Post-Reality Political Campaign (The Atlantic)
Kremlin Hotline: How Hungary Coordinates With Russia Blocking Ukraine From the EU (VSquare)
Espionage Charges and the Kremlin’s Playbook: Why Hungary is Trying to Silence Szabolcs Panyi (The Baltic Flank)
Hungary and Russia struck 12-point plan for closer ties, documents show (Politico)
EXCELLENT RESOURCES!
Just Security has launched WHAT JUST HAPPENED? as well as a litigation tracker to help readers keep up with the chaos
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?
