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  To Calvin, Alison, and Lincoln, may your success be on your terms

  FOREWORD BY CONGRESSMAN DEVIN NUNES OF CALIFORNIA

  Matt Whitaker’s story looks very familiar to me, though I saw it from a different perspective.

  In this book, Whitaker relates how he was suddenly thrust into the top position at the Department of Justice during the hysteria of the Russia collusion hoax. From there he had an insider’s view of the bizarre scheming of the Mueller team, Rod Rosenstein, and elements of the Intelligence Community (IC) who had essentially declared war on the government they were supposed to be serving.

  I witnessed all this from outside the executive branch, as Chairman and then Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee. Republicans on the Committee saw very soon after President Trump’s election that IC officials were gearing up for some kind of attack on the incoming Trump administration. The compilation of the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russia’s election meddling, ordered by President Obama in early December 2016, was the first tip-off. Intelligence agency leaders were reluctant to brief the Committee on their work on the report. Then in mid-December, they suddenly revised their work and assessed that Putin was trying to help Trump win the election. This was a major change to what was then a highly classified assessment, but they refused to inform my committee about it. Instead, they leaked the new assessment to the media in order to help spread to the public the narrative that Trump was a tool of Putin.

  What followed was the most egregious attempt to oust a President in American history. As Whitaker explains, when he took charge of the Department of Justice more than two years later, the Russia collusion hoax was still being perpetuated in full force. In Congress I witnessed all the main elements Whitaker describes:

  Unending leaks of classified information

  The mainstream media’s abandoning all pretense of objectivity, transforming into an arm of the Resistance, and becoming a leading perpetuator of the collusion hoax

  Demands from Democrats and the entire media that any official who appeared to be interfering with the hoax recuse or resign

  The outlandish conduct of the FBI’s Russia investigation, including its murky origins, the FBI’s reliance on the bogus Steele dossier, the inexplicable role played by Bruce Ohr, the chief investigators and lawyers showing a fanatical hatred of Trump, the appointment of the Special Counsel as a calculated result of a leak by Jim Comey, and conflicts of interest among the Mueller team

  The zealous prosecution of Trump associates for process crimes while Democrats, who actually were colluding with Russians to produce and spread the Steele dossier, faced no such repercussions

  I can only imagine the challenges facing Whitaker as the top official at the DOJ as he tried to lead that department while being surrounded by Resistance operatives trying to sabotage both his leadership and the President’s. I had my share of interactions with these types before Whitaker took over. As Committee Republicans were investigating the conduct of the Russia investigation, and in particular the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant used to spy on Trump associate Carter Page, we were blocked, stonewalled, and obstructed at every turn. Meanwhile, the DOJ and FBI were obviously planting all kinds of fake news stories warning that our oversight efforts were endangering national security and putting lives at risk.

  A good example is the memo Whitaker describes that Intelligence Committee Republicans published in February 2018. The memo explained some of the major problems we’d found with the FISA warrant on Carter Page—namely, that the FBI relied on unverified accusations from the Steele dossier. The memo was denounced by the entire mainstream media, fueled by the DOJ’s publication of a letter to me claiming they were “unaware” of any wrongdoing related to the Page FISA, that it would be “extraordinarily reckless” of us to publish the memo without letting the DOJ and FBI see it first, and warning me of the “damaging impact” the memo’s publication could have on our national security and our intelligence sharing with allies.

  Of course, the only thing damaged by these revelations was the reputation of the DOJ and FBI officials who exploited the ridiculous Steele dossier as an excuse to spy on an American citizen. As Whitaker notes, in late 2019 the DOJ Inspector General published a report on the Carter Page FISA that found a stunning degree of malfeasance, especially involving their use of the Steele dossier. One FBI lawyer even doctored an email to disguise the fact that Carter Page had cooperated with another U.S. intelligence agency. The FISA Court then banned numerous agents involved in the Page FISA from making any further submissions to the court.

  Remember, these agents’ work had been championed by the media for nearly three years while their innocent victim, Carter Page, was widely portrayed as a treasonous Russian asset. In fact, the collusion hoax birthed a whole strange, neo-McCarthyite atmosphere among the left where anyone who wouldn’t go along with the hoax was ritually denounced as a Russian puppet.

  I was not immune to the attacks. I had publicly advocated a stronger response to Russian aggression since 2014, and in April 2016 I argued on national television that our biggest intelligence failure since 9/11 was our failure to predict Putin’s plans and intentions. My hawkish position on Russia has never changed, yet when I began arguing that the Steele dossier was absurd and that there was no evidence of Trump officials’ colluding with Putin, I suddenly began getting attacked as a Russian asset by Democrats, left-wing groups, the media, and an army of Twitter bots.

  After we voted to publish our FISA abuse memo, NBC News and MSNBC analyst John Heilemann asked an Intelligence Committee Democrat on television, “Congressman Nunes, your chairman—it is suggested not by me but by people who follow these matters closely—could possibly be someone who’s been compromised by the Russians. Is that something you consider a possibility?” Being denounced as a Russian stooge for revealing abuses of the FISA process was one of the many surreal elements of this whole episode.

  The collusion hoax revealed the total corruption of the mainstream media. They were all-in on the hoax from the beginning, and they freely abandoned basic journalistic standards and ethics to perpetuate the collusion narrative. Whitaker experienced this firsthand. “I was well aware of the partisan politics and the ideological bias of the press,” he writes, “but I had no idea the extent to which they would go to damage this president, me, and anyone who supported him or was willing to serve in his administration. I still thought there were some fundamental rules of fairness that almost everyone in positions of power and responsibility followed. I freely confess now: I was wrong.”

  There is some irony that the collusion hoax ultimately imploded with the report and subsequent testimony of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The Democrats, the media, and the Deep State all counted on him to end the Trump presidency. And it’s clear that’s what his team aimed to do. But as Whitaker details, they couldn’t create Russian collusion out of nothing, and after a year-long FBI investigation followed by the two-year-long Mueller probe, nothing is exactly what they had.

  Despite the raft of leaks and “bombshell” media stories about Mueller’s team supposedly gathering all sorts of irrefutable collusion evidence, there were signs they had no such evidence even before they issued their report. For example, there was Mueller’s February 2018 indictments of the Russian troll farm that had meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Although the indictments—some of which have now been withdrawn—went into great detail about how the conspirators planned and executed their operation, the Mueller team did not allege that any Americans had conspired with them.

  Even before that, there was the Peter Strzok text message from May 19, 2017, two days after Mueller was appointed, in which Strzok texted Lisa Page about the current state of the co
llusion evidence and whether he should join the Mueller team: “You and I both know the odds are nothing,” said Strzok. “If I thought it was likely, I’d be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.”

  This means that when Mueller took over the investigation, he would’ve learned on his first day that the FBI, after investigating for nearly a year, had found no evidence of a collusion conspiracy. And yet he continued the investigation and the accompanying media circus for nearly another two years—and still found no evidence of collusion.

  Whitaker provides a valuable account of the machinations he saw surrounding the Mueller report, or as I call it, the Mueller dossier. He describes the long, inexplicable delay in the Mueller team’s filing of their dossier, and then his discovery of what they were doing: having found no collusion conspiracy, they were drafting a “Part II” to the dossier, hoping Congressional Democrats could use it to impeach Trump for obstruction.

  With the Mueller team’s knowing from the beginning that there was no evidence of a collusion conspiracy, I believe they structured their entire investigation as an obstruction of justice trap. Whitaker’s account of the team’s underhanded compilation and presentation of the Mueller dossier supports this view. So does the dossier itself, which is packed with groundless innuendos of wrongdoing and, as Whitaker notes, absurdly declares that even though it found no conspiracy, the report “does not exonerate” Trump—thus creating an entirely new legal standard of “not guilty but not exonerated.”

  The Democrats hoped the insinuations in the Mueller dossier would be enough to move forward with impeachment, which was the goal of the collusion hoax from the beginning. But their hopes were dashed by Mueller’s public testimony to the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, in which Mueller showed a stunning lack of familiarity with the most basic elements of his own report. He even claimed not to know what Fusion GPS was—the smear merchants paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to compile the Steele dossier.

  At that point, with their years-long plan for ousting Trump suddenly lying in tatters, the Democrats were sent scrambling for a Plan B. What they ended up impeaching the president for—his phone call with the Ukrainian President—may have been an even more ridiculous pretext than the collusion hoax was. Led by Adam Schiff, the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee held secret depositions in the basement of the Capitol. Committee Democrats opened the leak floodgates—a habit they perfected during previous interviews for our Russia collusion investigation—and like the obedient lapdogs they are, the media triumphantly blasted out every morsel of propaganda they were being fed. These depositions were used as an audition process, with the most useful witnesses paraded in front of TV cameras in open hearings. But Trump’s alleged offense was so convoluted and insulting to the intelligence of the American people that viewership fell as the hearings proceeded. As I said at the time, it’s not easy to make a coup attempt boring, but the Democrats found a way.

  In the end, despite Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, and Schiff all having declared that impeachment could not be partisan, that’s exactly what it was, with every House Republican voting against the impeachment bill. Senate Republicans too were unimpressed with the case, which was dismissed fairly quickly.

  At some point this tragic episode in American history will pass on to historians. With this book, Matt Whitaker has made a crucial contribution to an accurate accounting of the collusion hoax, especially with his firsthand details of the bizarre final months of the Mueller probe. It’s my hope that the creation of a full and truthful account of these deviant events will help prevent them from reoccurring in the future.

  INTRODUCTION JUSTICE TRIUMPHANT VS. JUSTICE DEFEATED

  Every American, regardless of personal politics, should be concerned by what I saw happen to President Donald Trump inside the U.S. Department of Justice between 2017 and 2019. No one—no private citizen, no political figure, not even an accused criminal (and I’ve prosecuted thousands)—should be subjected to such an arrogant abuse of power by federal law enforcement leaders and bureaucrats. The American people and all honest public servants deserve better.

  Top officials at the Department of Justice felt so strongly that Donald Trump’s election as President in 2016 was unacceptable that they decided—working with congressional Democrats—that they could put themselves above the law and above the Constitution. They overturned bedrock standards of American justice, flouted normal prosecutorial procedures, violated federal rules and policies, and even committed crimes.

  Department of Justice officials like former FBI Director James Comey appear to have openly meddled in the 2016 election. They spied on American citizens without proper justification and revealed investigative details about presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, as though the Justice Department was tasked with voter education instead of charging and prosecuting criminals. After the election, Comey and his colleagues at the Justice Department continued their extracurricular activities—this time to convince voters the man they elected President was “morally unfit” and ought to be removed from office. The appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team, whose behavior was totally above the law, was meant to ensure Trump’s impeachment.

  Prior to moving in 2017 to Washington, D.C., I had spent my entire professional career in the Midwest. I didn’t have the firsthand experience to know how to react to President Trump’s initial comments about Washington’s “unelected operatives” and “entrenched bureaucrats”—a so-called “Deep State.” I learned it existed by working alongside it and against it.

  I routinely encountered—both directly, and indirectly through their anonymous leaks to the media—powerful, ambitious individuals who held themselves above the law and treated Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and other Americans in their investigative crosshairs as though they were below the law. I am joined by others who also believed this culture existed.

  Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who was appointed by President Obama in 2012, found “the implication that senior FBI employees would be willing to take official action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral prospects to be deeply troubling and antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice.”1 He wrote this in his June 2018 report, issued while I was chief of staff to the Attorney General of the United States and managing some of these bad apples.

  Horowitz’s August 2019 report, described as “blistering” by the New York Times, blasted former FBI Director Comey for setting a “dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees—and the many thousands more former FBI employees” with access to classified information.2 The report concluded that “Comey’s retention, handling, and dissemination of certain memos violated [Justice] Department and FBI policies, and his FBI Employment Agreement.”3 These violations were made in order to bring direct political harm to the President of the United States.

  My aim in writing this book is not only to encourage greater transparency and accountability in the Department of Justice, but to use the platform I humbly accepted as Acting Attorney General to speak out for the overwhelming majority of law enforcement officers who are scrupulous rule followers and deserving of the public’s trust—who are offended by the elite Justice Department leaders who held themselves above the law.

  The Justice Department is the only cabinet office named after one of the four cardinal virtues of Greek philosophy and Christian theology (justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence). To my dismay, it singularly failed to represent that virtue. What I saw happen inside the Justice Department, and what is now documented record, should never happen to another President again.

  * * *

  As Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team was drafting their now infamous 448-page “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election,” I was working a fe
w blocks away, at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., on the fifth floor of the Justice Department’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. From September 2017 through November 2018, I was Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff. After President Trump requested Sessions’s resignation, I was Acting Attorney General from November 7, 2018, through February 14, 2019.

  From the moment I joined Sessions’s staff, it was no secret that President Trump was frustrated with him, but I was determined that I could work well with both men, and I liked and respected Sessions very much. He was devoted to the Constitution and the rule of law and was a strong supporter of law enforcement. Unfortunately, Sessions’s recusal from the ongoing Russia investigation that began in July 2016 would in many ways dominate his tenure.

  Sessions understood Washington’s bureaucratic ways much better than I did—he warned me that trying to reform the Justice Department was “like firing a bullet into Jello, the bullet never quite gets to the other side.” (“Jello” is ballistic gel.) What he meant was that even ideas supported by enthusiasm and senior attention are rarely fully implemented and get worn down by bureaucratic inertia. But I don’t know that any experience could have prepared me to navigate the politics of the Justice Department’s fourth floor, where Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had supervision of the Russia investigation. Rod had an unusual verbal maneuverability that helped him appease Republicans and Democrats alike, and he ran a massive office with over a hundred direct reports. Before I arrived, Rod was supervising the Acting Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe who made President Trump an investigative target, and Rod had also appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller a Special Counsel to investigate alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Attorney General Session’s recusal from the Russia investigation had the practical effect of disturbing the regular hierarchy of decision-making. My appointment as chief of staff was meant to restore regular order at the Department, which was a hotbed of plotting, back-channeling, and leaking.