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Augment to Chapter A

Fascinating piece by the New Yorker’s Olivia Nuzzi-who to be honest I’ve always personally mixed up with Olivia Palmero from the MTV hit show from a few years ago, The City.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivia_Palermo

A show I really miss by the way.

I was always wondering if Olivia Nuzzi was the Olivia on The City. When I discovered that this very talented and popular journalist is actually only 25 I thought maybe they were one in the same-particularly as Nuzzi lives in NY-and writes for the New Yorker after all. The City in question was NYC.

But turns out they are not one in the same-it turns out Palmero is actually seven years her senior.

In any case, Nuzzi has written a piece that has done the one thing most precious these days-it actually furthers my knowledge of TrumpWorld-with some very interesting implications for the Trump-Russia investigation besides.

Besides the revelations about Hicks and the culture of the WH-‘people may be fired or resign but no one is ever gone’-it also has some clues that suggest Lewandowski could have been who took Rob Porter down-which perhaps at least hastened Hick’s own resignation.

“On February 5, four days after the Daily Mail disclosed the “red-hot” relationship between Hicks and Porter, two reporters contacted Willoughby after receiving tips about her blog. Willoughby told Porter about the calls, she said, and agreed to negotiate a joint statement. But there were two phrases Porter pushed for that Willoughby told me she couldn’t stomach: “didn’t accurately depict my marriage,” and “it was a therapeutic post in which I took many liberties.” Willoughby had already talked to the Mail, and she and Porter stopped negotiating; they never put out a joint statement.

The following day, the Mail published interviews with Porter’s former wives, in which they claimed they’d been physically, verbally, and emotionally abused (Porter responded to the story by saying, “Many of these allegations are slanderous and simply false”), and that they’d informed the FBI — to apparently little effect.

The report prompted Hicks and Porter to break up, but the feeling around Washington was that the saga was the product of some political spycraft. “This had been planned and choreographed and coordinated and known long in advance by a group of people who were trying to play political games,” a source with direct knowledge of the events said, “knowing that this would be part of a larger story related to security clearances and John Kelly and others, seeking to sow chaos and dissension. They saw this as a useful catalyst, which it turned out to be.”

Political spycraft? How about ProbeMedia?

“From the time Hicks arrived in Washington, her existence had been an insular one, confined to a radius of only a few blocks past the White House, where she worked 15-hour shifts punctuated by crises and presidential decrees-by-tweet.

“She woke at 4 a.m.; responded to emails from the night before; read the bookmarked articles she’d been meaning to get to; met her trainer in the 3,200-square-foot gym on the first floor of her building; and arrived early at the northern gate, usually by 7:30 a.m.”

But on a Saturday night in late January, Hicks left her apartment and went to Hogan Gidley’s home. Gidley, who lived nearby, was a deputy press secretary brought on to the White House staff in October by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose father, Mike Huckabee, was Gidley’s former boss. Gidley and Hicks shared a love of Tommy Boy and mint candies, and they became fast friends. They were joined at Gidley’s house by Josh Raffel, who was considered the White House spokesman for Jared and Ivanka; Hicks had worked with him at Hiltzik Strategies and considered him her best friend. They were also joined by Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary Hicks had been dating since the fall. At the last minute, the group decided to meet Raj Shah, another deputy press secretary, to get dinner at Rosa Mexicano.

They were unaware that they were not alone. Throughout the course of the evening, their every movement was being watched: Outside Hicks’s apartment, at Gidley’s home, outside the restaurant, walking into the lobby of her apartment building. Each moment was documented in photos and video, even through the window in the back of the cab home. Hicks was being tailed by a group called Probe-Media, “an elite agency” that “deals in exclusive material and provides images and video footage and reconnaissance in a service uniquely tailored to meet our clients’ needs,” according to the company’s sparse website.

Probe-Media offers what it refers to as “a bespoke service” to “international news outlets, intelligence agencies and corporate and individual clients.” Perhaps by design, basic information about Probe-Media is difficult to locate. The o in its logo is a lens, and above the company’s name is an outline of a skyline in which the Statue of Liberty sprouts from the middle of a block of suburban houses and urban buildings. When I reached out through a form on the website, I received a response sent from an iPhone. “Yes it was us that got the pictures and yes they did lead to further events but the process how the shots were taken cannot be discussed as that’s why we get commissioned for our deep surveillance approach and discretion,” read another response. “Thank you for reaching out though, Kind regards, The team at Probe-media.”

“Five days after the dinner, on February 1, grainy images of Hicks and Porter taken by Probe-Media were published by the Daily Mail, a tabloid based in the U.K. At first, the story seemed unimportant, even if it was a sign of the times to see it show up in the Mail. Trump was a creation of the Daily News and the New York Post, but not since the Lewinsky scandal had there been so much tabloid interest in Washington, where the Mail now has a robust presence, including a respected investigative reporter, a White House correspondent, and a string of freelance photographers who, since the inauguration, have staked out the Kalorama home of Jared and Ivanka for a near-daily report on Ivanka’s outfits.”

The American Neo-Nazi Chuck Johnson sounds like he knows something about it:

“During the campaign, Charles “Chuck” Johnson, an early supporter of Ted Cruz, said Lewandowski tried to hire him to do opposition research. Johnson said he declined the offer but that he and Lewandowski remained friends. Periodically, Johnson would use his website GotNews to prop Lewandowski up, once announcing, when there were murmurs he might work in the White House, “HE’S BACK!”

Johnson liked to call himself a journalist and “debunker of frauds,” but he was known primarily as a pervasive far-right menace, an oddity with few personal boundaries who’d once raised $150,000 for a neo-Nazi’s legal defense fund. In 2012, he had promoted unfounded accusations involving underage prostitutes and Bob Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, on the conservative website the Daily Caller. At the time, the publication’s executive editor overseeing the Menendez coverage was David Martosko. Today, Martosko is the political editor of the Daily Mail. About the Daily Mail’s Porter scoop, “I don’t know what I’m allowed to say,” Johnson told me. “Probe-Media, from my understanding, is going to be doing a lot more work with private eyes.”

So what does Chuck Johnson know and did he know it before most others?

“Johnson was always taking credit for things he didn’t seem to have any connection to. He was usually wrong, but he did seem to know things, sometimes, that turned out to be true, and, sometimes, he seemed to know them before anyone else. He also seemed to benefit from the fact that the new administration was populated by people who hadn’t been following politics very closely in recent years. He claimed he knew about Porter months in advance of the stories, and that some mysterious “we” was pleased with how things unfurled, even if he was surprised it took so long. Johnson said Lewandowski had nothing to do with the stories and that he wasn’t among the people he’d told about Porter. (Reached repeatedly for comment, Lewandowski did not answer questions.)

Nuzzi gives this fascinating profile of Corey Lewandowski the man: