With Paul Manafort’s explosive new book, Political Prisoner, we finally have a full and honest detailed account of how the U.S. government, the not-so-special Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and particularly the FBI treated anyone and everyone connected to Donald Trump. The plain truth is they were after him—and would stop at nothing in their quest of subversion.
I would know, because I, too,was in their sights.
Detained at Boston’s Logan Airport, the FBI grilled me about the 2016 campaign, specific persons involved, Wikileaks, Roger Stone, Nigel Farage, and Russia. It was evident that while they had a very thick file on me, and two warrants to confiscate my iPhone and laptop—which meant they had been surveilling me for some time—they knew I knew nothing of real value. This was an act of intimidation of a patriotic U.S. citizen, one with a former Top Secret and Codeword security clearance, who had held senior positions in the government and served informally and without payment on the Trump presidential election campaign. I was an advisor, policy wonk, and surrogate and appeared on British (BBC and ITV) news a lot. But my groundbreaking and explosive book, The Plot to Destroy Trump, which shattered the entire Russia hoax and the fabricated, DNC-Clinton funded Steele dossier, was about to be published and they did not want anyone to read it. It totally exposed them.
After getting very competent legal representation, one Bradley Bondi and his associates, the government flew me back to the United States from England where I was a professor at Oxford University, and we agreed to meet with Mueller’s gang at their secure SCIF in the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C. It is a metal box with padded walls, sealed completely off. It is a scary experience—something right out of a spy movie. We were picked up at my lawyer’s legal offices on K Street in a large black SUV by two armed FBI agents who escorted us. The car was full of electronic listening devices stacked in the back and the agent said he worked with Peter Stzrok and could park outside any building to listen to conversations inside.
On their side of the long table, inside the secret, secure interrogation unit, was a gang of lawyers and yet a few more FBI agents. The lead was Aaron Zelinsky, a Yalie who had worked for Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. The other inquisitor was Jeannie Rhee, also a double Yalie, who had been Hillary Clinton’s lawyer at the Clinton Foundation. They called in the notorious Andrew Weissmann whenever there was a serious question or to sign off on their doings. He appeared to be their real boss. Robert Mueller was nowhere to be found.
The interrogation went on for some three days from early morning until late afternoon. They wanted to wear me down and repeatedly asked the same questions in various versions, time and again, wanting to fool or coerce me. They had in their procession all my emails, texts, tweets, phone conversations, and social media. Since I had graduated from the U.S. Foreign Service Institute class on intelligence, negotiations, and countermeasures, I suppose I was a hard witness for them, and my lawyers were especially good at challenging and rephrasing some of their ramblings. I was not the target they said. And I had never visited Ecuador’s embassy in London and all the closed-circuit television cameras proved that. I didn’t know Julian Assange and had never met him. Besides that, they knew that Seth Rich, a DNC staffer (murdered in cold blood) had downloaded a thumb drive to steal John Podesta’s emails. I had met the Republican operative Roger Stone just twice and they knew that, too. I did email him some photos from Rhodes House and a pub in Oxford where, in an earlier era, Bill Clinton had been accused of raping a co-ed and left the Rhodes Scholars program months before his term was up, escorted by an official from the U.S. embassy. The FBI laid those photos on the table and asked if I had sent them. I said, yes, is it untrue?
They seemed particularly perturbed that, as a former Yale professor myself, and someone who had also served on two Yale boards for a total of 12 years, I could be involved and support someone like Trump. Zelinsky even confessed to me that he had called the Yale provost to “discuss” me. I told him, and this took him by total surprise, that his younger brother, Nathaniel, had been a student of mine while at Yale and a Buckley Society member, and that I was involved in writing a letter of recommendation for him to attend Cambridge University for graduate school. He was dead in his tracks and treated me totally differently after that exchange. In fact, he bent over backwards to try and resolve things, be nicer, and apologized the morning, months later, when I was brought back yet again, to testify before their flimsy grand jury.
Ironically, they couldn’t get a quorum and at around noon said they were calling people, substitutes, and I was free to go. Finally, at the last minute, they got the lucky number, and I was hauled in sans lawyers and asked to read a short, proffered statement my lawyers had concocted. Zelinsky asked if there were any questions, and the sleepy jurors had none——well, one was aired in the end by the chairperson: would I agree to come back, if needed? I said, yes, of course, and it was over.
