Mysterious Misfits: The 2016 Trump Foreign Policy Team and the Russian Election Interference Campaign
This article covers the establishment of the 2016 Trump Campaign’s Foreign Policy Team and a little known effort to retrieve Hillary Clinton’s so-called “missing emails.”
It is the first installment of the series “Mysterious Misfits: the 2016 Trump Foreign Policy Team and the Russian Election Interference Campaign.”
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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On March 21st, 2016, eleven days after GRU Unit 26165 began targeting the Clinton Campaign with cyber intrusions, Donald Trump visited The Washington Post’s Editorial Board for a pre-planned interview. The paper’s opinion writers had been given a heads up by the campaign that if Trump were asked about his Foreign Policy Team, the candidate would provide them with a scoop.
In the lead up to the interview, foreign policy had proved to be a thorn in the Trump campaign’s side. At the beginning of the month, the neoconservative and Iraq War hawk Eliot C. Cohen had coordinated the circulation of an anti-Trump statement that was ultimately signed by 122 Republicans from the conservative foreign policy and national security establishment who became known as “Never Trumpers.”
“His admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin,” the statement read in reference to Trump, “is unacceptable for the leader for the world’s greatest democracy.”
When asked about the subject by The Post, Trump mechanically read off the names of five individuals from a document provided to him by his campaign. Not one member of Trump’s newly announced team of foreign policy advisors elicited any recognition among the gathered writers in the room. In fact, several present would claim that Trump himself seemed unfamiliar with the individuals he listed.
With perhaps the sole exception of Keith Kellogg, who had held a senior position in the Coalition Provisional Authority during the war in Iraq, the other advisors listed by Trump were notable only for controversies in their past or for their sheer obscurity.
Key to understanding the mentality of the many of the individuals in the orbit of the Trump campaign was the idea that Islamic fundamentalism and mass immigration, not Putin’s Russia, posed the gravest threat to the security of the United States.
In early 2016, the Syrian Civil War raged unabated and the terrorist organization the Islamic State was operating a brutal, mini-statelet in its wreckage. American journalists had been publicly beheaded and spectacular terrorist attacks had rocked France and other parts of Europe.
A vast migration of both Syrian refugees and economic migrants had destabilized European politics. These events energized right-wing, nativist movements on both sides of the Atlantic and Russian propagandists were keen to take advantage of the situation in every which way possible.
The team of foreign policy advisors was established under the umbrella of the Trump campaign National Security Advisory Committee.
Archconservative Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions was made the chairman of the Committee. Shortly before it was established, Sessions, attracted by Trump’s harsh anti-immigration rhetoric, had become the first member of the United States Senate to endorse his candidacy.
It was a key moment of legitimization for what had largely been seen as a public relations sideshow.
The director of the Committee was a Naval veteran and former Pentagon spokesman named J.D. Gordon.
The DC-based National Security Advisory Committee in fact had virtually no influence on the Trump campaign’s core foreign policy objectives, which were determined by a small group working out of Trump Tower in New York. The DC team liaised with New York primarily through then 30-year-old Stephen Miller.
Born in Santa Monica in 1985, Miller descends from a Jewish family that had fled persecution from a shtetl in Belarus. Despite growing up in liberal setting, he became a conservative at a young age.
After working with Tea Party figures such as Michele Bachman (whose former aide Tera Dahl also had a role on the Committee) and David Brat, Miller served as Jeff Sessions communications director before being hired by the campaign and quickly rising in Trump’s esteem after impressing him with his fiercely nativist stump speeches.
Between 2015 and 2016, Miller sent over 900 emails to Breitbart News that were later leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one, Miller requested that a Breitbart reporter aggregate stories from American Renaissance, a publication that has been accused of white supremacism, that highlighted crimes committed by immigrants and nonwhite people.
They also show he lamented the removal of products bearing the Confederate battle flag from Amazon and promoted a French novel reportedly popular amongst American White Nationalists called The Camp of the Saints, which depicts a dystopian world in which Western civilization is destroyed by mass immigration.
One individual listed by Trump was a Lebanese-born, American conservative and former advisor to the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign named Walid Phares.
Phares came recommended by his friends Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Known for his stridently anti-Islamist views, which were clearly in alignment with Trump’s well-publicized views on Islam and Muslim immigration to America, Phares had warned that Islamists in the United States were “here to spread Sharia.”
A Maronite Christian, former colleagues of Phares told the investigative outfit Mother Jones that in the 1980s, during the Lebanese Civil War, Phares had trained Christian militants who were then fighting against Muslim and Druze factions within the shattered country. Mother Jones further identified a photo which showed Phares conducting a 1986 press conference with the Lebanese Forces, a consortium Christian militant groups accused of committing atrocities.
Phares served as an advisor to the Lebanese warlord Samir Geagea, who at one point had commanded hit squads for the group. He was later investigated, though never charged, by the FBI and Special Counsel’s Office for potentially secretly representing the interests of the Egyptian government while on the campaign and immediately afterward.
Codename PATRIOT: Joseph E. Schmitz and Hillary’s “Missing” State Department Emails
Yet another member whose background raised eyebrows was Joseph E. Schmitz. Bizarrely, one of Schmitz siblings was the infamous school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, who was convicted of child rape after initiating a sexual relationship with one of her 13-year-old students.
After a stint in the Navy, Schmitz graduated from law school and at one point worked as a special assistant to Attorney General Edwin Meese during the latter part of the Reagan Administration. Like Phares, Schmitz held strong views on Islam and was a co-author of the book Sharia: The Threat to America.
In 2001, he was selected by President George W. Bush to serve as Inspector General of the Defense Department. Schmitz began his controversial tenure at the DoD watchdog agency by hiring L. Jean Lewis as his chief of staff, a Republican operative credited with launching the White Water investigation into President Bill Clinton.
Schmitz resigned as Inspector General under a cloud, having allegedly obstructed an FBI investigation into contractual improprieties relating to the Iraq War committed by Bush appointee Jack Shaw.
He courted further controversy by immediately taking up a position with the Prince Group, the holding company for Blackwater, the largest private security firm (i.e. mercenaries) operating in Iraq that was owned by the billionaire, former Navy-SEAL Erik Prince.
Prince later become a major backer of the Trump campaign and an alleged intermediary between the nascent Trump administration and Russia during the transition.
“The inspector general is a standard-bearer for ethics and integrity for the Pentagon,” Danielle Brian, the Executive Director of the Project of Government Oversight told The Washington Post following Schmitz’s move to Blackwater. “To see a person who has been holding that position cash in on his public service and go work for one of their contractors is tremendously disappointing.”
In a little known episode that took place during the summer of 2016, Schmitz was intimately involved in an effort to push various government agencies to review materials retrieved from the dark web that he believed to be deleted emails from Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department.
During the course of the campaign, Schmitz came to believe that one of his clients, a government contractor that he would only refer to under the code name “PATRIOT,” had come into possession of Clinton’s missing emails.
Using his extensive government contacts, Schmitz pushed the FBI, the State Department and the Intelligence Community Inspector General to look into the matter. While officials at State and the Intelligence IG interviewed Schmitz, they declined to take any further action.
A cyber security expert familiar with the dark web materials would later tell CNN that they looked fake. The identity of PATRIOT, and the content of the emails, remain unknown to this day.
Despite Phares’ and Schmitz’s colorful backgrounds, it would be two other of Trump’s foreign policy advisors who would become that center of a storm that in less than a year would engulf the entire country.
“Carter Page, PhD,” Trump told the gathered writers at The Post, listing yet another individual among his foreign policy advisors who was virtually unknown to the wider foreign policy world, while neglecting to mention that his experience consisted of being the sole member of an investment and consulting firm focused on oil and gas in former Soviet states.
“George Papadopoulos,” Trump continued, listing yet another unknown entity. “He’s an oil and energy consultant. Excellent guy.”
Both Page and Papadapoulos would become central figures in the 2016 Trump/Russia saga.
The next installment will cover how Trump Foreign Policy Advisor George Papadopoulos was informed that the Russians possessed Hillary Clinton’s emails.