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Nov. 19, 2020 - Epoch Times
59:48
Was 'Russia Collusion' a Diversion From the Real Scandal?—John Solomon & Seamus Bruner Talk Spygate | American Thought Leaders
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For over two years, the Epoch Times has been reporting on the FBI's crossfire hurricane investigation into the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and related FISA abuse, what's now often known as Spygate.
According to investigative journalists John Solomon and Seamus Bruner, the seeds of this scandal go back well before President Trump came into the picture, as far back as 2009, and directly involved the highest offices of the country.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Yekelek.
John Solomon, Seamus Bruner, such a pleasure to have you both on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure.
So you have this incredible book, Fallout.
I've been reading it.
Man, is this a dense book.
Lots of facts, lots of information in there.
But you make a kind of incredible connection in here.
We'll talk about this.
We'll dig in.
But basically, you make the case that the Russia collusion hoax has its origins in, let's say, the Obama administration's mishandling of the Russia relationship.
That would be one way to put it.
Okay, tell me more.
You know, I think the seminal moment for me when I realized that these events going back to 2009 all the way to the president's impeachment 2019 were connected was I had a dinner with a senior Clinton campaign official about two springs ago.
And I started talking about everything I'd learned about Christopher Steele.
And he said, well, why do you think we did the project?
And I said, well, I assumed it was to dirty up Donald Trump.
And he said, well, it actually started much earlier than that.
What is it?
And he said, well, We came into the 2016 campaign worried that Peter Schweitzer's book, Clinton Cash, and the aura of the Clintons cashing in on the Russia policy was going to be one of our liabilities, and we wanted to scare Republicans away from it.
So we started researching people like Paul Manafort, all the figures that later came out in the scandal, and we were just looking for a way to scare Republicans off from not using Russia as an election issue.
I started to think, oh my gosh, this isn't what we thought it was.
It was a neutralization effort.
To kind of keep an issue off the table in the 2016 election.
And then Donald Trump kind of plays into it.
And then when Christopher Steele takes it to the FBI, it takes off in an entirely different direction.
I said, is that what happened?
And I remember the aide looked up and down about two or three times and finally said, yeah, that's what happened.
And so that gave us the inspiration to go back and say, well, what failed so badly that they felt like they needed to cover it up or have a neutralization or a stay away sign on it?
And we put that story together.
And in the process of my interview, Seamus doesn't even know I've had that interview, he digs up a document.
And this document's extraordinary.
It's a document of the polling data.
Why don't you tell them what you found?
Right, right.
It fits it.
Working with Peter Schweitzer on Clinton Cash, Became fully immersed in the Uranium One story and didn't find out until years later through the wonder of WikiLeaks that when Clinton Cash was coming out, the Clinton campaign was freaking out about it and sending emails back and forth, how do we get a copy of this book?
Should we put one of our guys good at getting books on it?
And also through WikiLeaks, I found in I believe it was late 2015, the Clinton campaign had hired a polling company to do some internal polling of voters.
So not the polls you see on TV. This is an actual accurate poll and a kind of focus tested poll.
And so they asked this group of respondents, you know, what is the number one issue that makes you uncomfortable casting your vote for Hillary Clinton?
And by far and away, I think it was 67% responded, like 17% said they were much less likely to vote for Hillary Clinton after hearing about the Uranium One story.
And 50% said they were somewhat less likely.
So, you know, a net 67% less likely to vote for her.
And I mean, the email scandal by comparison, I believe was 31%.
So it was twice as, it's interesting that the email scandal became the headline because it really distracted from the Uranium One story.
It's really fascinating.
I mean, there's kind of two vantage points here.
One is, you know, Uranium One is, of course, this is something we've covered as well.
We worked with you on this a little bit as well.
But a lot of people just keep saying the debunked Uranium One story.
I'm going to want you to talk about that.
The other thing is, I don't think it's generally in the American consciousness that the Obama administration did poorly with Russia, necessarily, right?
Or is it?
No, I think not.
I think that shows that the deflection strategy managed to keep that subject off the table for people to talk about.
But there was a study done and a report done, I think it was with the Brookings Institute, that went back and said as the Democrats were starting to escalate on Donald Trump and the Russia issue, they wrote this column saying, hey guys, you know, the Obama record on Russia really wasn't that good.
We got taken in and hoodwinked as Democrats and liberals.
What you find out when you do the research, and Seamus did a great job of personifying Putin and his tactics and how cunning and how thoughtful he is in terms of how he's going to approach the American relationship.
He's playing chess ten steps ahead of the rest of us.
He is looking to take a strategy that he calls geopolitical energy domination.
And he did it once.
He did it in Eastern Europe.
He made everyone in Eastern Europe reliant on Russian gas, and therefore he can control Eastern Europe now because he can shut off their gas or raise their prices if they don't do what he says.
And he wanted to replicate that strategy in the West, going after uranium.
And so that's his strategy.
We have documents that his own people wrote that lay it out.
And then separately you have the Obama administration, Obama, Biden, and Clinton, and they want to reboot the relationship.
The relationship went off the rails in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia and there was a military conflict there at the end of the Bush administration.
President Bush had planned at the end of the 2008 presidency to do a new nuclear deal where he would make new sales of nuclear energy from Russia to United States utilities, and he pulled that off the table because of the invasion.
And the Clinton administration, Hillary Clinton, I'm sorry, the Obama administration with Hillary Clinton at the lead, Joe Biden in the background, they made the decision, let's put that back on the table.
That's our carrot.
And he wants nuclear business.
We can give him nuclear business.
We want a better relationship, a more stable world.
They're thinking about Iran at that point, the Iran deal.
You can't do an Iran deal without Russia in the game.
And they start on this track of really giving away a lot of things in a Nerman policy.
Basically, we want to get in good graces.
We'll sell them a lot of uranium from our utilities.
We'll sell them some raw uranium under our ground.
We'll help them build their own Silicon Valley because they envied our Silicon Valley.
So they create a place called Skokovo.
The Clinton administration does all that, and they feel like, all right, we're getting on a great track.
And then all of a sudden, Vladimir Putin pulls the rug out and goes into Crimea in Ukraine.
The Clintons and the Bidens and the Obama folks have two things.
Their policy didn't work, and now there's a book about to come out by Peter Schweitzer that reveals how much money on the sidelines people were collecting in this, and they have to neutralize that story.
And that's where I think the Christopher Steele dossier gets its origins.
How is it that Uranium One, this whole scandal, is being described as debunked?
Just a little bit on that.
There's never been a full, thorough, complete investigation.
What John, Peter, what we have done is probably the closest to a full investigation of the Uranium One story that's ever been done.
When they say it's been debunked, I'm not quite sure what they're talking about.
The most recent coverage was just a couple months ago.
The Washington Post talked about the Huber investigation out in Utah and how Jeff Sessions had tasked John Huber to look into the Uranium One matter and Huber was supposed to do this investigation.
Well, the Washington Post said they used inside sources and unnamed sources to say it wasn't really an investigation so much as a review.
I mean, that's as close as an investigation as we've had.
There's never been a report...
So when they say debunked, they're declaring it.
There's nothing really debunked about it.
I'm not even quite sure what issue they're saying is debunked.
I mean, did Putin buy the uranium?
Yes.
Did several Obama figures...
Lobby on behalf of Uranium One.
And did the Clintons take money from shareholders in the deal?
Yes.
What they say is debunked is you can't prove the intent of the donations.
And of course, proving intent is always very difficult because they're never going to put that smoking gun email.
Quid pro quo will give you the uranium for the money.
Sure.
So there's this very interesting figure, and you guys dedicate a chapter to him in the book, Doug Campbell.
It was fascinating to read about him.
Of course, he was in the news at various points in the past.
But I just don't think a lot of people will know about Doug Campbell and what he did and his actual infiltration into You know, Russian uranium companies and so forth.
Give me a thumbnail here about him, and then I want to talk a little bit about some of these incredible documents that you guys found related to this.
Well, John found Doug Campbell, and he's known him for quite some time.
So Doug Campbell, to everyone who knew him in his Florida life, was a globetrotting businessman.
What they didn't know was that he was a CIA-FBI asset for more than 30 years, an operative.
When he would go on his business trips selling agricultural products in the 80s and 90s, he was helping the CIA figure out what countries in the world were paying briberies and violating Corrupt Practices Act and things like that.
And he would inform for the CIA on who the most corrupt regimes were, whether it was in Africa, Latin America, Europe.
And he built a lot of cases for the CIA for the Intelligence Committee.
And somewhere in the 06-07 timeframe, he's handed off for a period of time from the CIA to the FBI. Again, everybody who knew him at church just thought he was just an everyday businessman, globe-trotting, selling wheat and other things.
But he really was what we know as a confidential human source, an informer, an operative, whatever you want, the different words for different people.
But he was working under the control of the FBI. In 06 and 07, they gave him a mission.
We want you to get inside Vladimir Putin's nuclear empire.
I sell agriculture products.
You got to get in the nuclear empire.
And through his really garrulous, friendly, loving way, he won the graces of a guy that was in the trucking side of uranium business in America, who had close ties with the Russians, and he worked his way into the good graces of the top American figures for a company known as Rosatom.
Rosatom is the state-controlled, Russia's state-controlled nuclear empire of Vladimir Putin.
And he gets in and very early on he finds out Well, if you're going to be a consultant for the Russians, you have to pay kickbacks.
They're asking me to kickback money.
So he goes back to the FBI and says, they want kickbacks.
Go ahead, and you're authorized to make them.
And there's an amazing anecdote in the book where the first time he's about to deliver $50,000 in cash in a briefcase to the Russian head of Rosatom in the United States, he can't sleep the night before.
They have a pen camera in there, and they're going to record this transaction for the FBI. And he thinks he's going to get caught and killed.
And he can't sleep, and his hands are sweaty.
I remember them telling this story.
Well, he delivers the money, they take it gladly.
And now he's on the inside.
And for three, four years, he's informing the FBI that at the same time that the Obama administration is doing these deals, they're going to give billions of dollars of American utility contracts to Russia.
The government arranges that.
The American government arranges that.
They allow them to buy uranium under the ground, a transaction that's known as Uranium One.
Believe it or not, that was not the most valuable thing that Vladimir Putin got out.
He wanted those billions of dollars of nuclear fuel contracts because then American utilities It would be reliant on Russian fuel for years to come.
And he knew, documents show, if he got that deal in place, Americans would not mine their own uranium.
So all of America's uranium mines have shut down.
We couldn't produce uranium tomorrow if Vladimir Putin shut us off.
And so he gets into all of this and then he's reporting this in real time to the FBI and the FBI is telling him, Your information's made it to President Obama's desk.
It's made it to the desk of Robert Mueller.
And so he's sitting there, and all of a sudden, after delivering oodles of evidence, he comes out and he finds out they just approved the Uranium One deal.
The Obama administration just gave them 20% of America's...
After I just told you this is their strategy of global domination, they're paying kickbacks, and the agents tell them, And he asked the agents, why did they let this happen?
He said, you have to ask your politics.
It's about politics.
And he became very demoralized.
But that's the most important part of the story that's never been debunked.
I mean, people argue, do donations follow policy or do policy follow donations?
That debate's going to go on in Washington long after we're gone.
But it is irrefutable that at the moment, the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, President Obama authorized all of these transfers of contracts and uranium to the Russians.
They knew the recipient company, Rosatom, was engaged in conspiracy in the United States, racketeering, kickbacks, extortion, and bribery.
And that's what the ultimate indictment came about.
There were four men sitting in prison.
They convicted four people for this.
But before all that happened, we allowed all these assets to transfer into Russian control.
We facilitated Vladimir Putin's goal of getting to uranium domination of the market.
And then he pulled the carpet out from Undis, goes into Ukraine, and our relations go back to this Cold War setting.
That is not in dispute.
You can't find a member of Congress that can debunk one sentence of that story.
Now, there was one question when I left my reporting in 17 and 18 that was unanswered, which is, did the CFIUS group, that's the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, it's the body of 10 federal agencies that decide when something valuable of American strategic interests like uranium or a port if we're going to transfer it to a foreign entity to oppose a national security risk.
And so the one thing that the Obama defender said is we had maybe Doug Campbell had this whole criminal case we really didn't know about it and so you can't stick us for approving this.
Well, I began doing some reporting with Senator Barrasso of Wyoming a few years ago.
He began digging, and I had sources telling me, yes, the FBI did tell the entire Obama administration, but I only had sources.
And we're writing the book one day, and that's when Seamus, the extraordinary investigator he is, kicks in with another great discovery.
Tell them what you discovered.
Right, so after Clinton Cash came out, there were still some of these missing pieces where the money was there, the approval was there, but debunked is not the right word.
They would say there's no smoking gun, no quid pro quo, and that was what they hammered first.
Before they said it was debunked.
So I was always looking for the smoking gun.
So I went to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's FOIA Reading Room website one day and I just searched Uranium-1 and all of a sudden there's this new document that says it was You know, released a couple months back.
And so I look at him like, oh my gosh, this document proves that the NRC and the DOE and several other of the agencies that are on the CFIUS committee were informed of Doug Campbell's findings, the ones that had been in the presidential daily briefing.
So Obama knew, Robert Mueller knew.
And there's a lot of other familiar names that knew before the Uranium One deal was approved, like John Brennan at the CIA, and James Clapper was the DNI. If anything, with the Uranium One approval, the person it falls on most is the DNI. The DNI is supposed to prepare a threat assessment and say, does this deal pose any threats to the United States?
And of course it does.
You can see with Russia's oil and gas strategy in Ukraine that Russia controlling energy resources in the United States is Not a good idea.
So this document, I look at it and I send it to John.
John's like, oh yeah, I worked on the questions for that document with John Barrasso.
And so it kind of got quietly released.
And anyway, it's kind of one of the more smoking gun type documents.
There's a really important public interest issue in that document, too, because...
There are two ways to conduct government, really thoroughly or really on a cursory level.
And so what the NRC says when they say, okay, yeah, we did get brief.
We knew that Rosatom was involved in these activities and there was a target in the United States that they were focused on.
We didn't realize that Armzi, which is called one of the subsidiaries of Rosatom, that's the one that's buying Uranium One, had any connection to a company called Tenem where the bribery was going on.
Well, that's an amazing statement for two reasons.
One, if anyone who did five minutes of Google, you would find out they were sister entities and that RMZ would sell what Tenem would buy and produce.
So Tenem would get the raw materials and then ultimately RMZ. So they were connected.
Five minutes of Google search would have found that.
But more importantly, in the FBI's own files, there was evidence that the Tenem people, who Doug Campbell was working with, the American...
Nuclear officials for Vladimir Putin.
He was asking the Tenen people to help get Uranium One through.
Because if Uranium One didn't get through, there wouldn't be a lot of trucking business in the United States that Tenen could do.
And so, remarkably, the FBI has these documents.
And the people making the decision either didn't take the time to look at them, weren't curious enough, certainly weren't thorough enough, and we made a decision on less than the full amount of information that we should have made it on.
That's bad.
It doesn't matter whether Barack Obama or Donald Trump or anyone else isn't president.
You want those decisions to be made on the merits, and somehow they glossed over some really compelling evidence.
Right, right.
The timeline is actually fascinating because the year 2010 is a very busy year, particularly the month of May and June.
So the FBI has got the Campbell investigation going on, and so they're well aware of Russia, Rasatom, Tenem, all of the bribery, kickbacks, money laundering going on there.
Also, in May of 2010, there's an espionage operation that gets busted, and the infamous Anna Chapman, who was kind of like the Bond villain or Bond girl, you know, bombshell.
She was posing on the cover of Maxim, was a spy working for the Kremlin in the United States, and they called it the illegals program, and there's Roughly a dozen Russian spies, and some of them were getting close to former nuclear officials in the Clinton administration.
So there's nuclear elements to this spy operation.
So you've got bribery, kickbacks, money laundering, extortion, and also espionage related to nuclear matters.
I mean, what is the FBI thinking?
So that's May.
June is when you have the speech in Russia with Bill Clinton, getting $500,000 from a Kremlin-backed bank.
He actually asked the Clinton State Department to meet with several executives of Russian companies, Russian officials.
They never get back to him.
He ends up meeting with Vladimir Putin instead.
And at this meeting, Vladimir Putin kind of mocks U.S. law enforcement.
He's like, you know, better be careful.
Your law enforcement are every day locking up citizens talking about the spy ring.
And so they kind of have a laugh that Russian spies are getting busted in the United States Well, two months after that, August 2010, is when the NRC letter reveals that we were briefed on these Russian bribery operations.
That's August.
The CFIUS review gets triggered in September.
So within a six-month period, you've got multiple criminal corrupt Russian actors getting busted.
I mean, convictions were made for all of these crimes.
Basically, bottom line, there are so many red flags that this deal was an automatic no.
And one of the guys we quote in the book, he's a brilliant guy named James Rickards.
He worked for the CIA and was actually tasked with setting up a CFIUS support group where he would actually work with the CIA to investigate CFIUS deals.
Well, he says that this one was magically kept away from them.
They knew about all the other CFIUS deals.
This was, he said, being handled on an inside track.
Fascinating.
And he says there's zero question.
This deal falls into the category of absolutely just say no.
In the Anna Chapman story, one of the things I think a lot of Americans don't know, but the documents were declassified a few years, and I spent a few months going through them and I read everything about it, but the reason that the Anna Chapman ten-woman spy ring was rolled up in the United States was that one of the members was getting closer and closer to Hillary Clinton.
She was trying to embed herself in a job in the State Department.
She began working for one of Hillary Clinton's biggest Democratic donors, a lifelong friend.
And she embedded herself in there.
He didn't know that she was an illegal or Russian.
And her next step from that donor's office was, I'm going to get a job inside the Clinton State Department.
And at that point, the FBI decided, we need to roll this up because an American official is potentially in danger.
And they roll up that ring.
Years later, when we look back at this and we go to some of the experts, and one of the most important experts that I've talked to over the last few years is a guy named Daniel Hoffman.
Why is he important?
Most people have never heard his name.
He was the CIA station chief in Moscow when all this went on.
He is one of the preeminent American experts on Russia's spy tradecraft.
And in 2018, he wrote a column for me saying, when I was at the Hill, you have the Russia intentions all wrong.
They weren't trying to pick Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
They weren't trying to help Trump.
They weren't trying to hurt Trump.
They weren't trying to help Hillary Clinton.
They weren't trying to hurt him.
Their whole goal in life is to compromise politicians of all size so that Americans distrust their democracy.
They become less trustful of it.
And he goes back and he re-evaluates a lot of these episodes that were the original anecdotes of Russia collusion, which we've all, your publications done a great job, I've done some of it, Seamus done some of it, that now have been thoroughly debunked.
And he says, the Russians intended you to discover this.
There's a tactic in the Russian playbook, the spy playbook, called What are the Russians up to?
Why are they compromising Hillary Clinton?
Or why are they compromising Donald Trump?
They want us to think that.
They want us to discover it.
It's part of their playbook.
And when you go back through the 2009 to 2019 period and you look at that the way a professional CIA expert looks at it, the Russians wanted Anna Chapman's people to be found near Hillary Clinton.
Oh my God, Hillary Clinton's got a Russia problem.
They wanted that $500,000 check to Bill Clinton at that speech to come out because then it caused distrust.
They want the meeting at the Trump Tower to be discovered.
Why do we know that?
The Russian lawyer that went and did that meeting was here in the United States on one of the most rarest of visas.
It's called a parole visa.
It means the Justice Department went to a federal court and said, you must let this woman in the country because she's very important to one of our cases.
And while she's under the thumb of the Justice Department, what does she do?
She walks over and has a meeting with Donald Trump's team at Trump Tower.
If you were doing real spy work, that would be the most obvious thing you wouldn't want to be discovered, right?
You'd use someone that doesn't—you'd use someone that looked like a normal, everyday person.
They want these things to be discovered, so we go into a three-, four-year debate.
And the way the Russia scandal played out, we played Vladimir Putin's expectations to beyond anything he could imagine.
We got our country in a big tizzy.
We fought with each other.
We accused each other of being Russian spies.
And that's exactly what he wanted.
And none of it was true.
It was all smoke and mirrors.
And I think that's what the book really points out.
And this actually reminds me of a line that I highlighted for myself out of the book.
I'll read it and then I'll kind of link it to something that was very close in there.
You wrote, not even Putin in his wildest dreams could imagine how some computer server hacks and $150,000 spent on social ads in 2016 would be amplified by a bogus scandal propagated and sustained for three years by America's own institutions.
And this is kind of the case you're making.
But then you kind of go a little bit further, and I'll read another assertion that you make.
You said, "We are entering a new era of information warfare, and foreign adversaries are not the only perpetrators.
American institutions, long trusted to give us the truth neutrally, are now active participants in misinformation, deceit, or shading of the facts.
The consequences are far-reaching, and the solutions are not easily devised.
And this is one of the lessons, actually, of your book and of the fallout of the last decade, which you guys describe as the decade of deceit.
I wanted to talk a little bit about that.
First of all, there's this connection that we want to flesh out a little more.
How does this all translate to the Russia collusion hoax and Spygate?
What they were talking about when you were speaking to the officials earlier, was there an expectation there would be FISA warrants pulled on this information?
I think that it is pretty clear from my interview with the senior Clinton campaign official and others that when it started, it really never was envisioned to be that.
And when it started, they didn't think that Donald Trump was going to be president.
There was 18 guys and one woman on stage.
They didn't know which way that was going to shake out.
They were looking for any Republican dirt in Russia that could neutralize the issue.
But then President Trump in some ways plays into that, right?
Who does he pick of all the people that he could pick as his campaign chairman?
Paul Manafort.
That was the person that Hillary Clinton started looking at and the Democrats started looking back in the late 2015, early 2016.
He almost accidentally played into the trap.
And I think the seminal moment, the day that we'll live in infamy, when people step back 20 years ago and history's riding it from 30,000 feet, July 5th, 2016, because two amazing things happened that day.
That's the day that James Comey walks out on the stage and says, I'm dropping the Hillary Clinton email case.
I think she did terrible things, but we can't prove intent, and so we're closing it down.
It's that very same day that Christopher Steele walks into an FBI office in London and says, here's my dossier on Donald Trump.
And at that moment...
Whether by intent or by accident, the switching of the scandal begins.
It's no longer Hillary Clinton's email scandal or the Clinton cash scandal.
It's now Donald Trump has a Russia problem.
And when I talk about deceit, and I'll just use one example that just again this week was in the news, and so it's very important.
This past week, Christopher Steele lost a judgment in...
Great Britain, a judge, justice in Great Britain concluded that one of his memos in the dossier, because there's 16 or 17 memos that make up the dossier, was so false and he didn't do enough validation of it before he shared it with the FBI and other people that he's liable under British law.
What is that memo about?
Well, it's about a very debunked false story that more than 100 times the FBI said from the fall of 16 to today was never true.
It was never true.
But yet it was perpetrated time and again on major television networks, major news publications.
It's the story of the Alpha Bank server.
This idea, perpetrated in multiple news stories, at a time when the FBI had already concluded it wasn't true, yet there were leaks of this, that somehow there were these pings between a server at Alpha Bank in Moscow and Donald Trump's tower, and therefore they're secretly having communications.
And this is the place how they plotted the...
The FBI dismissed that in October of 2016.
And yet, dozens upon dozens of times, I watched colleagues in my industry continue to report this was true and accurate and the holy grail of the conspiracy.
And as recently as a few weeks before Bob Mueller testified in Congress at the end of his report, it came up again.
And finally, a congressman asked him in the hearing, what about this Alpha Bank thing I don't want to talk about?
Well, he finally got an answer.
I don't believe it was true ever.
How can the American media, how can the Democratic or liberal or intelligence or Republicans, whoever spread that story dozens of times, continue to perpetrate a story that was demonstrably proven to be false?
That is this new era of decade of deceit.
And what you learn when you unravel the Russia investigation is we had an FBI agent, if you believe the inspector general's conclusions, who took a document that said that Carter Page was an asset of the CIA and he changed it to hide the fact that he was working for the CIA.
If the FISA court ever knew Carter Page was working for the CIA, they wouldn't have been spying on him.
When could we imagine our country's history an FBI lawyer would change a document to change the meaning of someone who, by the way, was helping our country?
When would American news media continue to report a story that I know every time I call the FBI, they say, it's not true, don't go with that.
We debunked it.
Here's a statement.
We debunked it.
They must have been talking to the same reporters that wrote that story, yet they continued to report that story.
Institutions that we relied upon to tell us the truth, or at least admit what they knew and didn't know, and to stay out of politics, stay above it, are now in the swamp of politics, in the swamp of false information, misinformation.
And that is the underlying concern I have when I come out of this book.
It was sort of therapy for me, and I don't know about Seamus, but for me, I realized that these institutions that were key to democracy have now been dragged down into the era of politics where, you know, lying goes on in politics all the time.
I think one of the famous sayings I learned the first time I came to Washington, show me a politician, I'll find you a liar.
You know, it's a joke.
And so politics, yeah, there's always been deception and manipulation.
But there have been these institutions, the State Department, the FBI, the news media, where we've been above it.
And this is the decade, that 2009...
Where they were sucked into the vortex.
And I worry about the future of America as long as that dynamic goes on.
Seamus, you've been researching all of this for years now.
Was there some document which you found along the way, which was this, you know, oh my goodness, I found the Holy Grail here.
Or can you tell us of one kind of situation?
It's incredible how many end notes and how many documents you reference in this book.
There's several, actually.
It's almost like gaslighting, because they say there's no smoking gun, but we know the full story, whether it's with Spygate or whether it's the Uranium One story, and yet we still find more documents that prove that everything that Schweitzer and Solomon and others have reported is completely true.
One that just comes to mind right now, I was searching for who was representing the Russians in the purchase of Uranium-1, because you need financial advisors on both sides of the ocean, and they actually hired a firm here in Washington, and I just swung for the fences, like, well, who is this guy?
And I got a strategy where you search.gov websites, and I put the guy's name in, There's press release.
He represented arms specifically to advise on CFIUS matters.
He's a former Commerce Department executive from the Bush administration, now in private practice, who was the chairman of the State Department Advisory Committee for International Economic Policy.
And so you've got this guy working inside the State Department.
He meets with Hillary Clinton.
And kind of back on the timeline of 2010, in April of 2010, he, Hillary Clinton, Secretary Clinton, and her designated fall guy for the CFIUS decision, she says, I knew nothing about it.
And she kind of throws this guy and he jumps willingly in front of the bus and says, no, I handled that.
It never was raised to the Secretary's attention.
It's like, well, how on earth The Russians taking control of uranium, not raised to the Secretary's attention.
But this guy is working for the Russians on their payroll, advising them how to take over an American company with nuclear implications.
And he's also inside the State Department, advisering Hillary Clinton.
And it kind of gets into the weeds of what he advised Hillary Clinton, but one of the bottom line things he advised her is, we need to open up investments into the United States.
So, I mean, it just seems like a total conflict of interest.
And actually, on the State Department website, they have a picture of him.
So it's the CFIUS guy on the left, Hillary Clinton in the middle, and this lawyer who is— they have these advisory committees, so they bring in private sector guys, but he basically crafts State Department policy.
So that was a huge smoking gun to me.
I mean, it's six months or less before the deal.
And, you know, how do you work at the State Department and for the Russians?
And we actually lay out a few people who were on the Russians' payroll and then get hired by, I mean, directly the Kremlin's payroll.
Not, you know, this isn't Rosneft or something.
This is actual Kremlin state-owned agency payroll.
And then they get a job at the State Department.
And they work on energy issues.
It's like, why do we have, I mean, it just seems like a total conflict of interest.
Fascinating.
When you talk to intelligence experts, one of the greatest concerns that they've seen in the erosion of national security in the last 15 years is the ability of our enemies and our frenemies, the Russias, the Chinas, particularly because they're very savvy, Of being able to, through cash and influence and business arrangements, get inside government agencies for espionage, influence, intelligence gathering.
And our guard is so much lower down than it was during the era of the Cold War.
And they're not only talking about everyday Americans.
They're sure we can go watch the movie The Americans and get reacquainted with what it was like in the Cold War.
They're talking about business people.
They're talking about national security experts.
They're talking about intelligence analysts.
Our guard is so much lowered, according to these experts, that China, Russia, and people like that are able to facilitate so much more extraction, they call it exfiltration of information, than we would ever have given away 10 or 20 years ago.
And it makes our country an open book, which allows our enemies to manipulate and get a leg up on us in ways they wouldn't have gotten in the 60s, 70s, or 80s.
It's another part of the fallout of this culture we're living in.
We're blind to what our Our very determined enemies are doing with our own resources.
As I was reading and thinking essentially how incredibly successful the whole Russian strategy was, if the strategy was to gain energy dominance, there was success on the gas side and clearly there was success on the uranium side.
I don't think anyone would even debate that at this point.
And that's Russia, right?
And credibly, I think to myself, China has actually been much more effective by most standards and by most people that I've been able to speak with than Russia.
You guys actually mention in the book some of the tools that have been used by the current administration against Russia.
Here's my question.
Comparing the administrations in terms of dealing with Russia, how does it play out?
The Trump administration is portrayed as being very, very, very close to Russia, obviously, in quite extreme ways.
What's the reality?
Listen, the reality is the sanctions that are on Russia today are far more severe than anything Barack Obama ever did, including after Crimea.
Under the Obama administration, there was no lethal aid given from the United States to Ukraine.
President Trump gave that.
If you switch to China and you look at the court cases in the last few months, they're beginning to unravel a program called the Thousand Talents Program, where these academics in America take cash to work with the Chinese And it's portrayed, certainly, as an influence operation.
Well, if you look at when these contracts started, they all occurred under the Obama years.
They began then, and they're being uncovered and now reversed by President Trump.
I think if you talk to people on the front lines, and they set aside for a second whether they like President Trump or not, and say, who's doing a better job of tightening up this concern that I just mentioned, this security concern, I think the Trump administration has been credited by the intelligence professionals and law enforcement professionals as being more aggressive.
But we've taken three drops in a bucket that should be filled with gallons of water and problems, and so we're barely touching the surface with these prosecutions and these efforts.
Now, one place that has tightened up a lot, and it's not in dispute, you can talk to Democrats or Republicans, President Trump's team, particularly Secretary Mnuchin, has tightened up the CFIUS process.
When there's a strategic asset up now, it's going through a much more aggressive review process.
And there's no longer this, well, we didn't know that RMZ was related to TANM under Rosatom, and they're asking harder questions.
And if you look at the rejection rate, the number of foreign-owned transactions that are being rejected is going up by a large number.
So there are some signs of progress, but we lost so much ground from The early 2000s to 2020, that it's going to take years to catch back up.
The Chinese have gained enormous influence.
The Russians have gained enormous influence.
If everything got better today, there are still utility contracts that American utilities are going to be reliant on Russian uranium for years to come.
And that's a key source of cash for Russia.
So, you know, damage is done.
And the question is, we're slowing it.
We haven't stopped it.
And we certainly haven't reversed it.
And I think that that's the challenge that the next generation of American leaders are going to have in the security realm.
Just jumping on John's point about the CFIUS process and Treasury Department being much harsher, I found a pretty funny letter when I was looking into the guy who represented the Russians in the successful Uranium One takeover, the State Department advisor.
He was actually Got a new gig working for the Chinese representing in the Broadcom Qualcomm semiconductor deal.
Most people haven't heard of it, but it did not go through.
And the Treasury Department was like one of the signs that the Trump administration was taking CFIUS much more seriously was there's this letter that said, you know, dear Mr.
CFIUS expert, who's representing our adversaries, The deal's not going through.
It's in the book and it's just a great little anecdote about how the previous administration gave away the farm to our adversaries and this administration has been much The bellwether shift is even apparent on the campaign trail.
I mean, four, five, six, seven years ago, Joe Biden was a guy that said, China's no problem.
All the people are saying that are xenophobes.
And now you've got Joe Biden saying China's a problem.
And we've got to get back to buying America First's policy.
Yesterday, he sounds a lot more like Donald Trump of 2015 than Joe Biden of 2011.
So the Democrats have gotten wise to this.
I think everybody has stepped back.
But we have not fully assessed how much Ground we lost in the competition with the Russias and Chinas of the world.
And until we get that assessment and adjust to it, America is still very vulnerable on the national security front, on the economic supremacy front.
And I'm not sure, with all the discourse we have that seems to be focused on tiny, petty issues, that there's any strategic thinkers really stepping back saying, how are we going to fix this for the long term?
That concerns me for the next generation of Americans to come.
You spoke to this question that's on my mind.
How many people are there out there that can play both sides like this that are working essentially for, say, Russia or China and at the same time are working for the State Department?
Or some other agency.
Which time do we have?
I mean, we're laughing here, but this isn't funny.
It's scary even.
And I wonder, how do they justify it?
How do you take money directly from the foreign government?
I mean, you just go to the Department of Justice's website, DOJ, actually the FARA website of the DOJ, farra.gov.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of filings.
And it's American companies that have to, you know, issue these filings.
And then you look on the filings, like, how many individuals?
A dozen just on this one specific deal, this one client.
And it's like, who's the government client?
Qatar or, you know, Russia or China?
And there's supposed to be rigorous kind of disclosures for, like, well, who are you talking to on behalf of the Chinese or on behalf of the Russians?
I mean, Paul Manafort's FERA violations were a decade old, and they only got brought up for political reasons.
I'll just give one example of the FERA filings.
Uranium One, once it gets bought out by Russia, is now a Russian state-owned entity.
They hired American lobbyists.
They hired the Podesta Group, while John Podesta The brother of the Podesta Group is inside the Obama administration.
So, I mean, the Podesta Group is one of the most well-connected lobbying firms at the time.
That's just one example.
There's many, many more lobbying firms who represent foreign clients and sometimes they file the disclosures, sometimes they don't.
My favorite anecdote in the Doug Campbell episode, he's undercover for four or five years, this incredibly stressful job.
He's a James Clancy figure, except it's real.
It's right after Uranium One is approved and after some of the early nuclear fuel deals are cut with the Obama administration.
And the Russians now feel like they've got enough A ground in America now that they're going to open up an American office in tandem.
They opened up in Maryland.
Actually, it turns out that Rod Rosenstein, the eventual Trump deputy attorney general, becomes the U.S. attorney that brings this case, these criminality cases against the Russians.
They're sitting around, they open up their office, and they all go out to dinner with Doug because they credit Doug for making these extraordinary gains for them, unaware that he's working for the FBI and recording all this.
And they're bragging.
They could not believe how easy it was to get all of these gifts, all of these giveaways from the Obama administration.
They use a terrible term for President Trump, or President Obama, a racial epitaph.
But they're just bragging.
They're drinking vodka, and they're bragging.
I can't believe how easy it was to play the Americans and the FBI sitting listening and their informant goes back and tells them the story.
It's that moment, that level of embarrassment that I think ultimately is why Hillary Clinton, Obama, Biden and the team tried to change the subject in the 2016 election, put it on Donald Trump.
Because if all those things became public, Americans would really realize just how much the Russians played the fiddle on us.
We thought we were playing them.
We were going to bring democracy to them, and they were going to fold at our hands and suddenly become a Western-friendly country.
And there are two countries where we've made that calculation wrong.
Vladimir Putin's Russian, and without doubt, China.
I mean, the miscalculation.
I interviewed Newt Gingrich recently, who 20 years ago was a big advocate of opening up trade with China, and he said, I had it wrong.
I thought what happened in perestroika in the Soviet Union would happen in China, and I was wrong.
But the Russians saw it and they laughed at us.
They were laughing into an FBI microphone with Doug Campbell recording it.
That's the sort of anecdotes that I think hopefully wake up America to what ground we lost in the last decade of deceit.
So John, you've been one of the few people out there or organizations now—just the news is your new organization—that's been looking at this whole Russia collusion issue, Spygate.
There are many names—Crossfire Hurricane—that all feed into it.
How did you get into this in the first place?
You know, it's serendipity.
Early on when the Russia story broke at the end of the campaign, I did some checking in.
The news organization I was working for them said, hey, find out if this is real or not.
And I started calling intelligence and FBI experts.
And I got the same story that the New York Times report in October, which there's not a whole lot here.
There's a lot of smoke, but no fire.
And we're not sure this is true.
So don't sink down it.
Now, it's remarkable because a lot of the rest of the media clearly went in a different direction.
So I was ignoring the story.
It's in the spring of 2017.
But one of my favorite issues I've done as a reporter for 20 years is I've really focused on the civil liberty implications of the FBI's growing powers.
So FISA, national security letters.
When I was at the Washington Post, I did a lot of work on that.
And I've worked very closely with the ACLU over the years because The more we give these incredible spy powers to our agencies, for all the right reasons, to stop terrorism, stop counterintelligence threats, the more American liberties could be at risk if they're not properly exercised.
And if you told me in March of 2017 that the Russia story was really a story about civil liberties being violated, you've got to be kidding me.
I thought it was just a counterintelligence investigation that was spinning its wheels.
But it really began in the spring of 2017.
Sarah Carter, my good friend, and I, we wrote a story together that at the end of the Obama administration, the Justice Department belatedly disclosed a whole bunch of violations of its spy powers, some involving FISA, some involving what is known as 702 upstream telephone record searches, intercepts.
And they just dump them on the court, and it's a problem because the court's supposed to get them in real time.
You're not supposed to store them up and say, oh, surprise, we've been violating 500 times in the last five years.
But that's what happened at the very end of the Obama presidency.
Ironically, I think a week or ten days before The election occurred when Donald Trump takes over.
And so that's dropped on the court.
The court doesn't let anybody know for months because it takes a while to classify this information.
I jumped on that as a very important civil liberty story that there have been scores, if not hundreds, I can't remember the total number, of violations that were belatedly self-disclosed after the fact.
And I got on Sean Hannity's show, and I came back from Sean Hannity's show one night at about 10, 11 o'clock at night.
I pull into my home, and there was a blue sedan with U.S. government license plates with its parking lights on it right by my mailbox.
And I remember thinking, uh-oh, am I in trouble?
Are these guys coming to pick me up?
I didn't think I brought anything that terrible today.
And I get out of the car.
I remember this.
I'll bring my wife with this because it's such a funny moment.
She had peered out the window because she saw my headlights coming.
As soon as you saw the two guys from the government car come, she closed the windshield and went to bed and left me out there by myself.
But the two fellows come up.
They were clean-cut, looked like military officials.
And they said, are you John Solomon?
And I said, yes.
And they said, we just saw what you wrote today and what you talked about in Sean Hannity, and we want to let you know you're at the tip of a very large iceberg.
And I'm like, I am?
I thought I just did a story about, you know, bad violations of the national security laws.
It's much bigger than that.
You have to keep digging if you want to do that.
And I go, well, what is the iceberg?
What am I looking for?
If I'm at the tip, what am I sitting on?
And they said, well, we can't tell you much because it's classified, but this we will tell you.
The most awesome powers of the U.S. intelligence community were used to carry out a political dirty trick.
What do you mean, political dirty trick?
At this point, I'm not even registering it to Russia.
And I say, well, a political opposition research project.
And I think if you study the current headlines, you're smart enough to figure it out.
And I'm starting to think, Russia?
Wow, maybe this is about Russia.
And so I kept pressing.
They couldn't say a lot.
They said a few things that were helpful.
And then I said, I remember the last question I asked before they got back in their car.
And I said, why me?
Why are you coming forward?
Why here at the mailbox?
And they said, You ask us to use these tools to keep you safe from the next terrorism threat, the next counterintelligence threat.
And if these abuses are discovered, if they're found out, we will lose these tools and you will not sleep safe and I won't be able to do my job.
So go out and expose this.
Find out who misused these powers and make sure that we can still use these for the right reasons and we don't use them anymore.
And that led me down this path.
I remember I ran in the house that night.
I typed up everything I could remember because I didn't have a notebook with me.
I wasn't expected to be found there.
And I just started typing up everything I knew to Sarah Carter.
I sent an email at 2.20 in the morning.
2.25 in the morning, Sarah Carter responded back.
She was still up.
And that set us on this extraordinary path of we're going to find out.
What these guys are talking about.
And layer by layer, week by week, we began to realize that this was the use of the FBI, the NSA's database, and the NSA intercepts.
The U.S. Intelligence Committee's most awesome tools were being used to carry out a dirty trick to create a false picture that Donald Trump was in bed with Russia.
And as we prove or try to lay out in the fallout, it was a dirty trick to keep Hillary Clinton's baggage and the Obama administration's failures from being the subject of the day.
I look back at that moment, I remember how extraordinary it is now, and I think, wow, would I have done this if those guys didn't show up in the answer?
Probably not.
But I also look back, because one of the things I know those two gentlemen wanted that night, they wanted accountability for the people who had carried out and misused these tools, who had lied to the FISA court, who had Certified that information in the Steele dossier was verified when it was actually not true, who had altered a document to hide Carter Page's role as a CIA asset.
And I look back and after three and a half, almost four years of work, I sort of feel in some ways I failed.
Yes, we've gotten a lot of the information out, we've told the whole story, but we're now four years into the exposure of all these things and no one has been held accountable.
And if they don't, I won't sleep well for the guys who took the risk to come out and meet me.
Because the temptation to do this again in another administration, in another election, in another era, is too great until someone gets punished.
And that's what I worry about.
I feel like that's the unfinished chapter of Fallout, which is until there's accountability, everything that just happened could be repeated again.
This is an incredible story.
Let's talk solutions in a moment.
Before we do that, how did you two get connected into this book?
Peter Schweitzer introduced us, and Peter Schweitzer is really a hero in his own right.
Of all the investigative journalists in the country, I'm a little biased, but I think John Solomon and Peter Schweitzer and Sarah Carter are too many to list, but just incredible reporters.
I've worked with Peter Schweitzer since 2011.
I studied political science at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, which most people have never been to Tallahassee and wouldn't really recommend it for a visit, but it's a beautiful place to live.
I volunteered for Peter Schweitzer on his book, Throw Them All Out.
Because he moved there.
He moved there, yeah.
He's from Seattle by way of Washington, D.C., by way of Oxford.
I mean, he's lived all over, and he came down for an event in Tallahassee, Florida, and never left.
So there is something special about Tallahassee, but I actually thought I was going to move to Washington, D.C. after school and get a job here.
I found Peter Schweitzer and volunteered on his book and then when the Government Accountability Institute was founded in 2013, I got a job working there and I just haven't left because I love the work so much.
So Peter introduced me to John and I think we've got a great relationship going.
We put out the books at GAI, and now John and I have a book.
John just keeps banging the drum and keeps tugging on the yarn and unpeeling the onion.
It's funny how the stories are almost fully told, but like John said, we need justice.
We were so lucky because Peter wrote the foreword for the book, and I couldn't think of a more fitting person to do so because the story of fallout doesn't occur if Peter Schweitzer doesn't expose what he exposes in Clinton Cash.
Hillary Clinton wouldn't have gone into the 2016 election worried about her Russia baggage, if you want to call that.
And so he's an epic player, and you can see In the book, there are these emails where the Clinton people are scheming.
We've got to get rid of this Peter Schweitzer story.
It's killing us.
And that's the hallmark of an amazing journalist whose work is not an opinion.
It's, in fact, an overwhelming fact.
Every time you open up a Peter Schweitzer or Seamus Brunner book, the end notes are almost as big as the book.
And that's such a great credit because they document everything.
But fallout doesn't happen.
We would have never learned about the failures of the Russia reboot of the Obama era if it weren't for Peter and Seamus' great work.
So for me, it's sort of coming full circle.
I enjoyed the Clinton Cash book so much, and I remember how impactful it was.
And then to be reconnected through Peter to do this book and kind of take Clinton Cash to the next chapter, the next level, has been incredibly rewarding.
And we all in America owe a great debt of gratitude to Peter.
You look at the stories he broke over the last 12, 20 years.
They're epic stories.
They're not small stories.
They're epic stories about how our politics and policy are being hijacked by money and corruption and willful blindness.
And I feel lucky to have a little small piece of that and advance the story just a little bit with fallout.
But it's been a blessing to work with Seamus.
This is the greatest gumshoe man I've ever met in my life.
I learn things from him every day.
And every time he would send me a chapter and I go, and I despise text messaging.
I don't do OMGs.
I don't do I heart use.
I don't do any of that.
But three or four times he did an OMG on me because I would go and I'd say, where did you find that?
And I thought I knew that.
And he would redefine the book with these discoveries because he's persistent and he's honest and he just looks for facts.
He doesn't have an agenda.
And I just remember those moments thinking, wow, you just transformed the book with that discovery.
And so it's been a blast.
I feel really, really lucky to have done this.
And I hope Peter and Seamus and I can find more reasons to conspire together in the future.
Well, you know, and everything you describe in the book, the case you make in the book is that, you know, America's in a pretty dark place right now.
So the conspiring needs to be where to go from here, I think.
And I know you certainly must have thought a little bit about this, but I think there's a lot of people out there feeling a bit despondent, frankly, at this point.
Yeah, I'm despondent.
I've said many times on television, I look at my industry, the one I got in 30 years ago with bright eyes and a bushy tail, and I don't recognize the state of journalism.
I see people with agendas that aren't about facts but about conclusions, and will find the facts to meet that conclusion.
I see journalism that was blatantly and irrefutably wrong, or stories we debunk by facts, not by political tactics, by facts in the book that have never been retracted.
So one of the fixes is journalism has to get on its horse.
It has to do the type of journalism that goes on at the Epoch Times and at Peter Schweitzer, GIA, or Seamus.
We've got to get back to facts and stop worrying about winners and losers and outcomes.
And we need to start doing journalism with depth and context again.
Yeah, this is a very dense book.
I'm going to confess to that.
It's dense even for me to read because it's full of facts.
But I read newspapers that 20, 30 years ago, I couldn't wait to open up in the morning, and I see these 147-character-thin stories.
Twitter has become our object, and that's wrong.
That's not what journalism was about.
So journalism has to fix itself, and I think the second institution that has let us down is the intelligence law enforcement apparatus of America.
We can't let happen what happened in the FBI, CIA, the NSA in this story fall out, We can't let these things happen.
If we do, we become the banana republic that we always were designed to resist.
If we allow spying for fake reasons, if we mislead a FISA court, if we change documents to hide someone's CIA contribution to American security, if we smear people without the facts and then we don't correct the record afterwards, If people do not get prosecuted for what happened in 2016 and 2017,
America is one step farther away from the democracy we were and one step closer to the banana republic that Vladimir Putin and the Chinese and others would like us to become so that we would topple.
This story for me is not about one episode.
It's about what are we going to be in the country of the future.
And I haven't seen the accountability in the profession of journalism or the profession of intelligence yet that tells me that we've learned and we're going to turn away from this and that's what scares me most.
Yeah.
Just to echo what John said, the solution is accountability and justice.
An example of that is when they perplocked Paul Manafort and charged him and threw him in Rikers, Farrah filing skyrocketed.
30-year lows that, you know, people wouldn't file, you know, I got this new government-backed client from China.
They wouldn't file, oh, I met with these legislators, which they're supposed to.
The filings were just at, you know, abysmal levels.
Nobody was filing the documents.
Once, like, the minute Paul Manafort's indicted for fair violations, Through the roof, everybody starts filing again.
So, I mean, it's just a testament to if there's accountability, if there's justice, people will start following the rules again.
And that's what's missing.
Such a pleasure to have you both on.
Thanks, John.
This was great.
Really appreciate it.
Excellent.
The Crossfire Hurricane investigation scandal and its aftermath have disrupted many people's lives, from the marred reputations of Carter Page and General Michael Flynn to the loss of trust in the judicial process, rule of law, and America's intelligence community.
According to Solomon and Bruner, the Trump-Russia collusion narrative actually saw its beginnings long before Donald Trump entered the presidential race.
It originated as a sleight of hand to divert attention away from the Obama administration's failures with Russia, especially its imprudent decision to transfer considerable control of U.S. uranium to Moscow.
So, what are the implications for the future?
What do Solomon and Bruner see as the biggest challenges?
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