issue the same caveat with respect to Barbara Ledeen, with whom Smith coordinated and whose connection to Trump’s national security advisory corps, via her husband, is far more direct than Smith’s. The Guardian describes Ledeen as a “friend” of Flynn’s and her husband, Michael—a Trump national security adviser alongside Flynn during the transition, and like Flynn associate Bud McFarlane, an infamous figure from the Iran-Contra scandal—as a “confidant” of the retired general who also co-authored a book with him in 2016. These connections suggest that Flynn may have been aware of Barbara Ledeen’s outreach to foreign hackers (whether Russian state actors or, as Peter W. Smith would later discuss, non-Russian “private mercenaries”) as early as the beginning of her efforts in 2015—prior to Flynn and Flynn Jr.’s trip to see Sergey Kislyak in Washington and Flynn’s dinner in Moscow with Putin, and as Flynn was being recruited by the Israeli cyberespionage mercenaries of Psy-Group.117
As for Smith’s representations that he had contact with Clovis, Conway, and Bannon, Politico will report that Jonathan Safron, a former Smith assistant, said that Smith “spoke to him of knowing Clovis, who was a well-known conservative activist … before becoming co-chairman of Trump’s campaign, and that he had seen Smith email Clovis about matters unrelated to Clinton’s emails.”118 Smith’s connection to Bannon, if any, is unknown, though one of his key partners in searching for Clinton’s emails, Charles Johnson, was a former reporter for Breitbart, and Smith’s emails reveal that he had previously been in touch with Matt Boyle, the Washington bureau chief for the digital media outlet (for which Bannon was executive chairman until leaving to be CEO of the Trump campaign).119 Johnson’s statement to Politico on whether Smith knew Bannon, a man Johnson concedes Smith very much wanted to meet, is oddly equivocal: “I sort of demurred on some of that,” he says when asked if he facilitated contacts between the two men.120 Johnson does put out a call to a “hidden oppo network” of right-wing researchers to help Smith, and later notes that “the magnitude of what [Smith] was trying to do was kind of impressive. He had people running around Europe, people talking to Guccifer [2.0, a digital persona operated by Russian military intelligence].”121 As for Conway, Trump’s fall 2016 campaign manager will tell the Journal that she had indeed spoken to Smith at certain points in the past but did not do so during the presidential campaign.122 (In January 2017, Conway will infamously coin the phrase “alternative facts” in explaining the Trump administration’s statements on the size of the new president’s inaugural crowd; Dictionary defines “alternative facts” as “falsehoods, untruths, [or] delusions,” while USA Today explains Conway’s coinage as meaning “arguments used to support claims that do not conform to objective reality. Traditionally known as false or misleading claims; also, lies.”)123
In May 2017, Peter W. Smith dies under suspicious circumstances, just days after disclosing his clandestine, “coordinated” efforts to acquire Clinton’s emails to the Wall Street Journal.124 The note Smith leaves behind in a Minnesota hotel room, reading in part “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER,” will cause consternation to journalists because of statements made thereafter by retired Wall Street financier Charles Ortel, a friend of Smith’s who says “he spoke with Mr. Smith on the phone in the hours before his death about a new project to brief the Obama Foundation on and warn its leaders against the mistakes they believed were made by the Clinton Foundation. According to Mr. Ortel, Mr. Smith sounded excited, and he began brainstorming who to contact and how to proceed.”125 Hours later, Smith was dead by what was officially ruled a “suicide.”126 The ruling, which hinges in part on supposed evidence of Smith having long planned his own death—for instance, the fact that he “left a carefully prepared file of documents, including a statement … in which he said he was in ill health and a life insurance policy was expiring”—will be contradicted by Ortel’s insistence that just hours before his death Smith was “excited” about an upcoming project.127
In October 2018, the Wall Street Journal will report that not only was Smith excited and optimistic about a new venture mere hours before his “suicide,” but that he had also, just weeks earlier, according to statements he made to multiple friends, “finally obtained the missing [Clinton] emails”—an “all-consuming” mission, his friends said, which, by the time of his death in July 2017, he had been working on for over a year.128 Just ten days before his death