A clandestine note allegedly from President Donald Trump to the late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein surfaces in the very same week that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents showing that President Obama and senior intelligence agency heads allegedly conspired against Trump in 2016. Coincidence?
If you think so, I have a dossier to sell you.
Here’s a quick recap. Last week, Gabbard convened a meeting of top intelligence and Justice Department officials to discuss evidence that President Obama intervened in the IC’s assessment that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf. Obama himself ordered the Intelligence Community (IC) to reassess that finding.
The subsequent, presidentially-mandated review included the Steele Dossier, a compilation of baseless allegations about Trump personally and falsehoods about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The Dossier was excluded from the first IC assessment because neither the FBI nor the CIA credited its allegations. According to the newly declassified documents, then-CIA Director John Brennan insisted the Steele Dossier be included in the reassessment.
That reassessment asserted that there were grounds to believe the Kremlin had intervened to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, thereby validating the FBI’s Operation Crossfire Hurricane investigation. That ignominious affair involved spying on the Trump campaign, wire-tapping Trump campaign staffer Carter Page, and the subsequent Independent Counsel probe by Robert Mueller that came up largely empty. The Obama team’s reassessment cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump’s electoral victory, mired his first two years in office in controversy, and sowed lasting suspicion and discord among segments of the U.S. public. You can read some of the declassified materials here.
Based on this evidence, CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding former CIA Director John Brennan and ex-FBI Director James Comey. Both men are now under criminal investigation. Gabbard and Ratcliffe have essentially declared war not only on intelligence agency and FBI veterans but also on anyone still inside the IC who was or is part of the undemocratic resistance against Trump. These include powerful, well-financed people, including experts in the dark arts of espionage.
For Trump’s opponents, then, the timing of this disclosure of an alleged note to Epstein celebrating his fiftieth birthday could not be more auspicious. It took the spotlight off Gabbard’s bombshell disclosure, and put it back on Trump. Based on my professional experience, the timing could not be more suspicious.
Consider that the Wall Street Journal’s story reportedly came about after one or more sources disclosed the note’s existence to investigative reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo. The reporters claim to have seen the note, although it was not reproduced by the newspaper. The source or sources are anonymous. Safdar and Palazzolo are both Pulitzer prize-winners, the latter for breaking the Stormy Daniels story and the former for her reporting on Elon Musk.
Still, this tradecraft is familiar to me. In the 1984 presidential campaign, Art Teele and I were charged with carrying out investigations into Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. When we found links to organized crime figures involving both Ferraro and her husband, John Zaccaro, we turned to an editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters on the Philadelphia Inquirer to expose the mafia connections. Our agreement with the newspaper was that we would provide information and documentation, which the newspaper would then subject to due diligence and corroborate before publishing it. Anything the Inquirer published would be under its own reporting, and not attributed to us individually, the Reagan-Bush campaign, GOP officials, or the White House. Our involvement was to remain secret.
The Philadelphia Inquirer honored our terms and a steady stream of disclosures followed, right until Election Day. Geraldine Ferraro went from an asset to the Mondale campaign to a drag on the ticket, according to polling. Our collaboration remained secret until 2020 when, in response to Hillary Clinton’s campaign commissioning Christopher Steele to compile a phony dossier about Trump, I revealed our operation to illustrate how opposition research should be conducted.
Intelligence professionals are skilled at this game. In countries where spies and politicians can pay or cajole journalists to plant stories, the practice is commonplace. More finesse is required where journalists are better paid and have professional ethics. Still, given the number of FBI agents, US attorneys, Justice Department officials, and intelligence personnel who have been terminated by the Trump Administration, there are any number of people who may have sourced the Wall Street Journal article and could credibly claim to have seen the alleged Trump birthday note. They can do so because they had security clearance to access secret information, whereas the journalists have no clearances and must rely on their sources.
And their sources can credibly corroborate “evidence” as genuine that is in fact disinformation, or, as with Hunter Biden’s laptop, they can dismiss genuine evidence as disinformation. A cabal of these people can cross-corroborate each other’s disinformation, making a gullible journalist think they’ve hit the gold standard of triple-sourcing a story. That’s where AI, deepfakes, and expertise in forging documents come into play. The IC has plenty of experts in forgery, both in terms of creating and detecting them.
We must thus ask two questions. First, what exactly did the Journal reporters and their editor see? Second, what due diligence did they take to ensure that the document was not a fake? Did they employ experts to determine its validity, or did they simply trust their sources?
MEASURING WHAT AMERICANS THINK ABOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
The answers to these questions matter.
Trump’s vehement denial of the note and his subsequent lawsuit against the Journal, its publisher, editor and the two reporters incline me to believe that the so-called birthday note to Epstein belongs in the rubbish bin alongside the Steele Dossier. But these are only the opening salvos of an epic struggle between those who genuinely undermined our democracy and the President who wants to save it.
This will get uglier.
John B. Roberts II is a former Reagan White House aide and executive producer of The McLaughlin Group. His latest book is “Reagan’s Cowboys: Inside the 1984 Reelection Campaign’s Secret Operation Against Geraldine Ferraro.” His website is www.jbrobertsauthor.com